GIA gathering in India

The Grassroots innovations assembly for Agroecology (GIA) gathered in Ahmedabad (India), end of January 2025 for a 3 days internal meeting, and 3 days of participation to the Fifth International Conference On Creativity And Innovation At/For/From/With Grassroots. The giant efforts of our host Honey Bee Network and @GIAN made possible to welcome 15 organisations, active at the grassroots’ level for developing local solutions to farmers’ real needs ; Schola Campesina Aps, (hosting GIA secretariat), is immensely grateful to their team: @Prof. Anil Gupta, @Anamika, Aneeta Salaria, @Deepika, @Kishore, @Sapna and others. Apart from the richness of the exchanges, these past days have been full of joy, kindness, care and humanity.
https://lnkd.in/dpKFjpaR

Some findings from our exchanges :

1. Horizontal learning processes, free of hierarchy are the learning environment where local solutions can trigger,
o  Our learning culture, methods and mechanisms that are peer-to-peer, poeple-centred, and grounded in ancestral knowledge, are the necessary ground for communities to develop their own solutions ; and gain autonomy.

2. The increasing concentration of data, technologies and power in the hand of few actors is working against grassroots solutions.
o  The Innovation concept is not neutral. Awareness is essential. Alternative tools too.
o  What kind of technologies are making us gaining autonomy ? Our collective intelligence (GIA and allies) should continue drawing a (context neutral) tech assessment framework for agroecology.

3. Our social processes for identifying needs, co-creating, documenting and sharing solutions are real knowledge to be further exchanged within this Assembly

4. The needed technical, legal and financial tools, mechanisms, infrastructure to safely share local innovations and guarantee the Rights of knowledge holders
o  Social agreements, Common licence, IP regulations, Prior consent for sharing, Commons Governance Organization (CGO), Ag Data Oath of Care and Ag Data Bill of rights, Glossary, appropriate languages used, databases and repositories ; Guidelines for documentation, Funds for grassroots R&D, etc. (OpenTeam, Farm Hack and Prolinnova longstanding experiences)
o  How to safely enable a sharing of our innovations, farmer to farmer, accross continents ? Through an Agricultural Knowledge Common ?

5. Our economical strategies for ensuring a grassroot-driven research and development processes of innovations.
o  Organisation internal capacities, Public funding and infrastructure, Strategic alliances, …

6. We work for society transformation, our alliance with social movement of Nyéléni and the networks of LVC Agroecology schools is essential.

7. We explored ideas for concrete common activities, and the needed adequate governance model of our assembly.

2025 will be a dynamic year of exchanges on the above topics. We are looking forward to it !
A proper report will be published on www.gia-agroecology.org

From 28th until 30th of January, 2025, GIA organisations attended the Fifth International Conference On Creativity And Innovation At/For/From/With Grassroots [ICCIG 5], organised in collaboration with Centre of Management in Agriculture, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Honey Bee Network institutions and several other international and national institutions.

“Giving voice, visibility, and velocity to creativity and innovative people at the grassroots has been the key goal of inclusive development. Honey Bee Network has emerged over the last thirty-five years as a committed new social movement in support of knowledge-rich, economically poor people. In order to enrich the ecosystem for inclusive and empathetic innovations, the Fifth ICCIG will pool the insights from the ground and global playfields of ideas, institutions, and initiatives by policymakers and also by local/global communities and networks. The conference invited contributions on inclusive innovations from the grassroots from scholars, activists, policymakers, and innovators themselves.

Honey Bee Network started more than three decades ago to raise the voice of collaboration between formal and informal sectors, respect for local/indigenous knowledge for the conservation of biodiversity and associated knowledge systems, sharing of benefits through ethical supply chains, and rewarding local communities and individual innovators and traditional knowledge holders. Today, the concern for inclusive innovation has become much more widespread but the voice of the knowledge-rich, economically poor people and the youth is still not heard adequately” . https://www.iccig.org/