Who is the Honey Bee Network?
Welcome to our new monthly series highlighting GIAA members and their innovations.
This primarily Indian network is made up of innovators, farmers, scholars, academicians, policy makers, entrepreneurs and NGOs. They collect knowledge from the grassroots and ensure that all knowledge holders have given consent and are rightly acknowledged.
Over the last twenty years, they have documented more than 100,000 ideas, innovations and traditional knowledge practices, contributing to what they call a “cross-pollination of ideas,” which is the very essence of their notion of a ‘knowledge network.’ Cross-pollination here means the transfer of traditional knowledge from one creative community, school, lab, studio, or house to another through volunteer intermediaries they call “bridge, broker or benevolent bania,” who, along with mentors, connect the nodes across the districts, schools, colleges and villages. Together, they celebrate inclusive innovations that address unmet social needs, often bridging the formal and informal sectors. This is how the Honey Bee Network members implement Gandhian values. In India, a country dominated linguistically by English and Hindi, they provide information in 7 state languages, thereby encouraging language justice.
Check out the Honey Bee Network Knowledge & Innovation Database (HBNKIND), based on farmers’ creativity and sustainable practices, and their database of collected practices, both in our list of open source databases here:Â https://www.gia-agroecology.org/index.php/inovation-databases/
Photo credit: HoneyBee Network