The past few months have seen a radical shift in how the Global North and the Global South relate, with significant drying up of donor money: many organizations closed shop and many programs, a majority of which had thrived on the external support have since faced significant threat. However, this shift is not a thing of newness; it is the reality of the times when we are in, and a subtle expression of the expectation of new models of partnerships for development. Development financing has seen a new wave of shifts and it is exciting to witness these changes – bolder and more practical systems that call for action and shifting communities from perpetual beggar state to empowerment. A philosophy based on an anagram that says: “Equip and Empower”. Thus, being equipped is to be given the tools that lead to sustainability and lift them first by renewing their minds concerning their identities. Without doubt, this is the most significant element of all efforts of sustainability; the transformation of minds from victims of global and social catastrophes to actors remodeling new forms of life. Indeed, it is elevating the mind to the call of life itself and living to their very true nature where opportunity and abundance is to be found in connecting dots.

For this reason, we remain highly involved with the idea of labs – innovation labs as catalysts of sustainability, noting that civilization and wisdom is not to be brought from somewhere else, but to be tapped from within the very society. When we look at first communities or the indigenous people, their way of solving maladies, of cleaning and cooling water, of storing their produce against the conditions of entropy and decay, we realize that innovation has always been central to our civilizations. The methods may differ, and evolve, but their presence and abundance has always been there. The wisdom of production may not be in scale as may be in industrial models, but nevertheless efforts that sustain without depleting the ecosystem are used, with native philosophies such as Kaizen being used in season and out of season to keep the communities supplied: in winter with the produce that was planted in summer, and in summer with the ones that was incubated in winter. In such scenarios, the maladies of extractive economies being replaced with the tune of life itself and adaptation has been centrally ingrained in native practices.

In truth, our communities have evolved and this explains the shifts and new forms of innovation that adapt to new scenarios; as rural-urban migration has reduced the idea of society or community, the post industrial society has led to more isolation and disintegration of society or evolved them into new ones altogether, and population pressure challenges nomadism, while climate change tests the very stability of seasonality. It is this society that has for long been dependent on aid, as the way to cure or handle disease has evolved; while the means of production have disrupted that conscionable approach to cyclic economies, the modern economy being more complex and having increasing wants. In such a cosmos, many of the communities in Africa and in Global South found themselves either lagging or experiencing new forms of want. Want in social support, and therefore rise in mental illnesses, and want in agriculture which have led to more disillusionment and abandonment of agriculture and an increase in augury.

Initial responses to these challenges has been reactive, seeking to cure the disease; and the disillusionment of players is an ever increasing number of challenges in that front. Thus, the question is not how to find or fund the problems that abound but to establish forms of resilience and adaptation. This is where social innovation comes in. It is a way of thinking that identifies the community as an actor in the sustainability process and can begin by identifying the native resources inherent to the community. For the farming communities it may involve adaptation of permaculture as a way of cultivating resilience and doing more with less. For the urban poor bound by plastic pollution, it is changing the plastic to briquettes and working a corporate model where corporations pay for these efforts. In doing this, problems are turned to opportunities, new frontiers; and whole communities empowered. And day by day, people realize that they are not as hopeless or as destitute as they might think of themselves. They realize that they are players in the story of human civilization and their ideas and input matters too. For this reason, social innovation labs, like our Waka Power Lab, run by the people, for the people, not only act as nerve centers of organizational innovation, but as centers of power, they give power to the people.