Changing the paradigm in education

An account of the ethics and the path we followed to build our vision – 5 years in the making.

As I have been racking my head, scribbling ideas, and exasperating about what next to write about, I realised there was a topic I have explained many times, but I have never really written it down fully. I prefer writing to presenting, so I thought it probably was worth writing the story of how the vision for inaglobe came to existence, especially as we approach it’s fifth anniversary (that’s right). This is mostly a story about ethics and iterations.

Igniting the drive

I am fortunate enough to have lived in several different places, this instilled a natural disregard for what borders are. It wasn’t long ago that I began understanding them as a means of organisation that the world had developed. I understand that that perception of borders was an absolute privilege that I held because of where I had been born. Nonetheless, within my privilege I understood the importance there was (and is) in breaking the silos that borders often create, such as to strive for the kind of globalisation we all so fondly believe in. During my time at Imperial College, I would spend my summers with la Fundación Barraquer (now la Fundación Elena Barraquer) supporting in cataract surgery expeditions. I would see how technology had the potential to change the lives of so many living with disabilities in low-resource settings. I also came to understand some of the barriers of why there is a lack of access to these life-changing technologies. I noticed it was systemic: technology does not get developed for these contexts, on the other hand it is developed for a privileged few and then is exported, sometimes adapted, to where there is a lucrative market. I would come back to Imperial College every autumn to continue my Biomedical Engineering degree hoping to pick up an engineering project that would cater for social innovation, the kind that would cater for the needs that I saw on the ground in Ghana, the Dominican Republic or Angola. Very quickly I realised two things: I didn’t have the information nor the access to stakeholders that I needed to engage seriously with any of the technological challenges I was hoping to tackle; neither did I have the education to seriously engage in social innovation that wasn’t presumptive and naïve. My higher-education experience at a world-leading institution did not equip me to tackle technological challenges that were common to millions of people across the globe. Amidst that disappointment, the energy that I still have in me to address this was born, funnily enough, it was shared almost in sync with my good friend, Xavi.

Nurturing at home

Xavi and I spent a lot of time deliberating about projects we could embark on to tackle this challenge we were facing. We brainstormed several different things, whether a service or a repository of documented projects, methodologies of documentation that could be used by volunteers or even students embarking on projects. Imperial College was, and still is, an incredibly fertile place for innovation. At Imperial you breathe an air of technological inspiration. It was the ideal place to build a practice around social innovation, and some people had already started. Yet, despite there being widespread interest in social innovation amongst both students and staff, only certain researchers (mostly post-docs and young academics) were working on small independent projects funded through special kinds of (small) grants that were more exploratory and targeting global challenges. What a fallacy! Small grants for global challenges! Why wasn’t there a concerted effort to tackle these global challenges? These early social innovators were the source of incredible inspiration for us at the start, they understood the difficulties of managing long distances, the difficulties one can encounter with language, the western bias, and the ethics of working with communities at risk and in low-resource environments. They explained the immense challenge that it was to even try to solve small technological voids, shedding light on how budget constraints and changing weather patterns, or alternative methods of learning and education could affect the design decisions that led these projects.

Every single conversation I had at Imperial that summer was invaluable, but I especially remember engaging with 3 of the most important people that kickstarted the systemic, human-centred and collaborative approach that still impregnates inaglobe today: Chris, Greg and Ian – on paper 3 names that could be part of any anecdote, but for me and for inaglobe, 3 voices that still inspire the project we started exactly 5 years ago. On the basis of their anecdotes, advice and experience we got deep into new fields we had never been exposed to during our degrees, with as much autodidactic learning we could do, we mostly learnt by doing, by designing, by having conversations and mapping systems we knew we would have to rip apart the moment we landed in Mozambique to have the right conversations and be voyeurs to lives and dynamics we probably would never be able to fully understand. We learnt very quickly that we had to be in it for the long run if it were to have any impact.

Reality checking, the true origin

Before arriving in Mozambique, we spoke to everyone and anyone we managed to reach out in our network and by referral. I sometimes wish my memory could hold a little more than it does because from each of those conversations the inaglobe vision was built upon, matured, it evolved, and yet today I cannot point to one of those conversations to have defined anything in particular, but to the collective. Whether they were from the humanitarian space, the business space, the education space, or any space we could interface with, with their advice and their patience to hear out the naive ideas a bunch of students had, we evolved. I think this was the birth of the kind of process we wanted to follow for building inaglobe – making it entirely collaborative, collective, inclusive and, most importantly, interdisciplinary. We prepared exhaustively to head out for over a month to Mozambique (and even within that preparation we underestimated the role language plays), with the help of M, our fixer on the ground and, by the end of it, a good friend.

Once on the ground, we were riddled with navigating a country we did not know, with as tight a schedule as we could pack in. We were ambitious in terms of the meetings we could have, field visits we could conduct, conversations, ad-hoc requests (such as running a workshop at one of the universities), and in addition to all this test out some of the hypotheses and proof-of-concepts we had defined prior to arrival. Every evening we made sense all the experiences we had over the course of the day, summarising these in the blog that we kept over that period. It was by identifying the most valuable stakeholders that we realised how inaglobe could become a reality, and how it could become more than a repository of projects. The value of invested humans, those in contact with the challenges we wanted to help tackle was incalculable, and so the conversation very quickly tipped towards how we could enable them, support them, give them ownership, and make them invested in trying out our new methods. Everyone at inaglobe, including myself, stands behind the importance of collective intelligence, collaborative design and ever improving our methodologies to be more inclusive and representative of stakeholders. Naturally, we grapple with the fact that we are but a side quest in anyone’s life and so finding frictionless processes and the right support structures was key.

In our first couple of years testing out the different methods and processes we needed to put in place, we hit a lot of existential questions. I remember being in Cambodia doing design research for orthotic and prosthetic devices debating with my manager, who I trusted deeply on this topic, if I should stop inaglobe and draw up a post-mortem that would allow anyone to pick up where we left off. There were massive ethical questions we were asking ourselves then, and we still are finding the solutions. One big concern for us was that we were almost too ambitious for how much we knew, we didn’t just want to provide an educational experience, we wanted to build a pipeline of humanitarian innovation on a massive scale and with massive impact. We had scaled our operations too quickly; we didn’t take care of our projects and our stakeholders as we needed to. Why should someone on the ground with the actual capacity of having impact invest any of their time into a project that had very (very) low probability of ever reaching the ground? The answer was that they shouldn’t, and we needed to up our side of the bargain, we needed to align more clearly on the objectives, on the expectations, and find better supporting structures and processes that would enable better outcomes. Since, we have scaled down, but we have taken deep care of our projects, naturally testing different things, and we continue to iterate on the process to make it scalable in the right way.

Continuing the story

I recently came across an article shared by someone I deeply admire, George Aye, Founder of the Greater Good Studio, and it inspired the whole piece I have published today. Courtney Martin ‘s “The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems” is a beautifully written article, full of clarity and insight about some of the biggest frustrations I had when volunteering with the Fundación Barraquer and cofounding inaglobe. For the founders, and for many of the people that have helped build inaglobe, there is a legacy component to our motivations – we see the work that we do now as the opportunity to improve and enrich the educational experience taking place at Imperial College, and enable it to contribute more to the world at large. At the end of the day the real impact of the work we are doing is the influence we have on the students that go through our projects, future leaders, future innovators. They need to be exposed to the complexity of social innovation, how humbling, how hairy and chaotic it can be to work with stakeholders in environments they have never been in. We believe this is our prerogative at building a more humane version of globalisation, one that is more inclusive and works collectively for everyone. I have no doubt that some of the most exciting, and pressing, global challenges will address democratising technology and innovation. Our goal is that inaglobe alumni will be in a better position than any young person (and certainly I) to tackle these challenges.