I learned many lessons about the complexities of implementing technical solutions on the ground in resource-scarce regions during my 7-month fellowship at SELCO Foundation. Perhaps the most key lessons were about the importance of the ecosystem around technology that actually makes “sustainable” technologies tangibly sustainable. On my site visits to rural villages where my interventions would actually be deployed I witnessed prior equipment prototypes rusting away time and time again – a component broke or the stakeholder most well-versed in using the device had left for one or another reason. Consistently, key sustainability processes like instituting maintenance cycles and regular trainings for new users were left to the wayside, leading to many wasted interventions. In an effort to understand the broader context that leads to true, long-term success of sustainable technologies, I pursued an MPhil degree in Engineering for Sustainable Development at the University of Cambridge.
Coursework in the MPhil program allowed me to understand more in depth how organizations themselves are part of creating sustainable change regardless of whether they are explicitly technology organizations or not. Having never engaged with more qualitative research focused on structures surrounding production rather than the technical methods of production themselves, I decided to challenge myself by studying how the structure of artisan-focused textile organizations in India led to economic, social and environmental sustainable development. I studied various frameworks for evaluating impact in similar organizations and developed my own comprehensive evaluation framework, covering weaknesses in specific frameworks by incorporating key strengths from many different existing frameworks. I then conducted interviews with key stakeholders in six different Indian textile organizations who were focused on artisan empowerment, using my evaluation framework as a reference to investigate how thoroughly these organizations evaluated their own interventions.
Comprehensive framework for evaluating impact across various stages of textile manufacturing and sale.
My results showed that while none of these organizations had formal, well-documented, comprehensive impact assessment protocols in place, informal impact assessment occurred simply through the very structure of the organization and the relationships between stakeholders within it. Local producers were regularly hired as permanent staff in these organizations and in many organizations, the board included multiple artisan-producers as key members. The structural integration of the intended beneficiaries (artisan-producers) meant these organizations often had significant positive impact on the communities they operated in despite a lack of more formal impact procedures. Certain environmental impacts were paid less attention to because of this lack but economically and socially, most organizations provided huge benefit to artisan-producers regardless. It was yet another reminder how important structure and relationships are, not just in materials and technology but also economic and social outcomes.