June 27, 2025 at 15.06.15
Facilitated by Schola Campesina, OpenTEAM, and FarmHack, GIAA gathered for the first time in Italy from October 18 to 21, 2023. Over four days, 12 leading grassroots innovation organizations and networks from around the world (France, USA, Kenya, Greece, Indonesia, Belgium, India, and Quebec) came together to exchange ideas and collaborate on solutions, culminating in the creation of the Grassroots Innovations Assembly for Agroecology (GIAA). GIAA gathered for the second in Ahmedabad (India) in January 2025; the present document is reporting on this second gathering.
The idea for an international grassroots innovations emerged when Farmer-led innovation networks, such as Farm Hack, L’atelier Paysan, and Schola Campesina, convened at FAO’s Second International Symposium on Agroecology, “Scaling up Agroecology to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals,” in April 2018. This sparked a conversation about global collaboration for technological sovereignty, particularly for smallholder family farmers. This conversation led to the development of a vision for creating alternative technological pathways that could empower rural families and promote food sovereignty.
In 2023, this vision was furthered with the formation of an international coalition dedicated to advancing the goals of a global grassroots agricultural innovation network. The working paper ‘Technological autonomy not autonomous technology’ provided a call for collaboration for organizations and groups working in open source and grassroots agricultural technology and innovation.