Exploring strategies for sustainable change in rural communities

The emPOWER Collective is a group of organizations working together to identify and implement innovative and sustainable interventions to enhance access to energy. Over the past 12 months, the emPOWER collective has worked in tandem with rural hill communities outside of Kathmandu in a co-creative effort to define the challenges, identify and assess appropriate technologies to meet household needs. Our approach is to listen, support and engage with community members.

Embracing personal agency

We emphasize a personal agency-based empowerment approach as a basis for technological innovation.

When external researchers or implementers enter a village, it is all too common to fall into roles of all-knowing mentors and accepting mentees, discouraging residents’ participation or sense of ownership in a project, thus diminishing their contribution to the critical thinking process.

To rebalance the conversation, we begin by engaging together in a co-creative process to better understand how our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and values define each of us and influence our our motivations and actions. Through this shared learning and communication process, led in large part by the local community, we move toward the development of tangible change.

Before any substantive change can occur — in energy, sanitation, or personal economy — individuals must view themselves as instigators of change. Using interactive psychological and experiential techniques, we work together with community members to begin imagining the possibilities to enhance their home environment despite the many challenges that may exist. This personal agency centered approach to empowerment assists all stakeholders in the development process to gain a greater appreciation of the context and challenges that impede change.

Directed by the specific goals identified both within the group and individually, clear goals are put forth and a path towards movement for those goals are crystallized. External experts and resource persons are further identified to support the locally developed projects.

Our motivation

We aim to overcome some limitations observed in previous development projects by deeply integrating insights from behavioral and neurosciences, human centered design, systems thinking, and sound engineering practices.

Historically, designs of optimal technological solutions have been based on an engineer’s vision of the problem. This custom has led to failed projects as interventions do not fill needs and are eventually abandoned. Communities are complex and messy systems where acceptance and engagement with solutions are as important as the technical services provided. For more viable approaches, household needs and limitations must be integrated into solutions via equal co-creation of ideas by residents and local service experts.

EmPOWER’s agency-based, collaborative model of development is founded on social science and engineering principles that recognize that prerequisites for sustained action — and innovation — lead to high performance. Building upon the foundational agency-based empowerment process enables community members to recognize and act based on their own needs and aspirations — revealing community based improvements that are not obvious to outsiders. Context-specific solutions develop from combining residents’ vision for their future with information on technologies, business models, and outcomes from the experience of outside experts.

The Pilot Project

The emPOWER team is working with nearly 100 residents of a village — we’ll call it “Village A” — in the Kavre District of Nepal, to explore how personal agency affects aspirations for basic community services and to evaluate how these aspirations affect the long-term sustainability of development interventions.

After a preliminary visit to engage local leadership and benchmark household energy behaviors, emPOWER partners at the Center for Rural Technology in Nepal conducted a two-day personal agency training workshop for 30 village residents. During daily activities, participants reflected on their self-worth, developed a personal narrative, identified their core beliefs and personal strengths and weaknesses, and practiced active-listening and teamwork skills.

Following a busy agricultural season and then political elections, we revisited Village A in September to gauge how residents’ perspectives may have changed since the empowerment training. During this visit, we learned about an unanticipated delivery of new cookstoves to each house in village. This unexpected event led us to discuss energy needs in focus groups, as residents reacted to the cookstoves that they had not chosen.

Phase One of the emPOWER project will close out with 12 monthly visits to mentor residents in following up on their personal action plans and observe the effect of agency-based training.

What we’ve learned so far

Through our experiences engaging a rural community in a way that isn’t the norm for engineering interventions, we’ve learned a lot about ourselves, our methods, and the landscape we operate in. Over the course of this project we have developed:

• Materials for personal agency-based empowerment training. Using a curriculum first created by social scientists to foster entrepreneurship in rural women, emPOWER Collective partners adapted an agency-based empowerment training for village contexts, including those with low literacy. Using the format of a multi-day retreat, we invited each community member to spend some time with themselves, thinking about their history, their hopes, and their current and future needs. Introspection, when undertaken by both the visiting experts and the resident beneficiaries, sets the stage for a genuine, adaptive conversation and co-creation.
• Recognition of gender and social (in)equity. Village A was selected for the pilot project for its relative ease of transportation access and previous contact with CRT/N, among other reasons. Both formal and informal power structures determine which villages are identified for projects, which people within the village benefit most, and whose input is sought during design. During our time in and around Village A, we’ve expanded our understanding of the social and financial capital conduits researchers must move along to do our work. We intend to develop these observations into recommendations to our peers for greater equity in intervention design and implementation.
• Appraisal tools for physical needs. In addition to open minds and open ears, a basic understanding of physical needs is also needed for successful technical interventions. For the purpose of rapid assessment at the start of the project and the more detailed surveys after the training workshop, we developed appraisal tools for identifying the range of activities happening in a home that depend on energy services. Assessments are not meant to be used alone to determine the “problem” to be “fixed” in a village. Instead, they form a knowledge base experts can draw from during and after resident consultation.

Core Team Members

• Lachana Shresthacharya, Center for Rural Technology, Nepal
• Gyanendra Sharma, Center for Rural Technology, Nepal
• Shovana Maharajan, Center for Rural Technology, Nepal
• Anita Shankar, Johns Hopkins University, USA
• Tami Bond, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
• Mary Arends-Kuenning, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Research Partner Institutions