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Genesis of NIF
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Innovations, Incentives and Institutions: Honey Bee Network
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Section I. Accountability towards knowledge providers |
How would we feel, if in a meeting attended by various intellectuals, some body takes notes of the discussions and then becomes the author of the summary. She does not attribute any ideas to those who shared these in the first place and claims authorship over the ideas? Similarly, a corporation or any other outside institution or individual accesses the biodiversity conserved by a community along with associated knowledge about its uses, develops a value added product such as a plant variety or drug or dye, generates wealth and does not share any part with the resource conservers and knowledge generators and providers? If every person or institution, which collects knowledge of people, neither attributes nor shares the findings with the knowledge providers in their language and in the manner that they can understand, will we consider such an exchange ethical and fair? How would knowledge providers know whether we have used their knowledge in the right context? How will they learn form each other and thus enrich each other's repertoire? How will the creativity and innovative potential of people be recognised, respected and rewarded? |
It is questions like these, which brought many like-minded people more than fifteen years ago together and eventually triggered the evolution of Honey Bee network. This group found it totally unfair and unethical that the only resource in which poor people were rich, that is their knowledge, is taken away from them without any attribution, accountability or reciprocity. Honey Bee network also believed that if many of these knowledge rich people were economically poor, it was not because their knowledge was of lesser consequence or that they were incapable of generating creative and efficient solutions (though, in some cases, this well might be the reason). Their conditions could also be explained by various policy and institutional factors apart form the lack of supporting platforms for strengthening their problem solving capabilities. It is to develop a platform of this kind that Honey Bee network devoted its attention over all these years. A data base of thousands of innovations and traditional knowledge was built up, all with the name and addresses of the knowledge providers, some of it shared with knowledge providers and others through Honey Bee News letter and its local language versions. |
The concept of Honey Bee was a response to above questions and a quest for building up an ethical and accountable relationship with knowledge rich and economically poor people. Honey Bee philosophy was a metaphor reflecting what we are trying to achieve. Honey Bee does what we do not. It collects pollens from the flowers and flowers do not complain. It connects flower to flower through pollination. This newsletter started with discourse on knowledge, rights of knowledge providers, ethics of conservation, heuristics of innovations etc., and it became an important voice on the issue of IPR. When nobody was debating about GATT in the developing countries( and CBD was still to be signed), the Honey Bee network was raising the question, "Will you stand by IPRs of peasants?" In some sense, it was a drive to make us more accountable towards people whose knowledge we wanted to learn from. What we realized after a while was that the contribution that we are getting from all sectors of the society was far more from individuals than from NGOs. |
However, in addition to the publication of the newsletter, the Network tried to do many other things. To enumerate a few initiatives, way back in 1991, the first biodiversity contest was organized by our oldest partner, SEVA, among children as well as adults in a village in a drought prone region of Madurai. SEVA is a collaborating NGO for Tamil version of Honey Bee. Similar contests were organized in Kerala , Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat in India and in Vietnam and Bhutan. What was most remarkable about these contests was the fact that young children from very disadvantaged backgrounds showed an extraordinary ability to inventorize biodiversity and its local uses. Many of those who had dropped out from formal education system had not dropped out from, so to say, informal education systems. In fact, many of them had excelled in this system of survival knowledge. |
When the movement started expanding more, a need for setting up SRISTI, a development voluntary organization was felt in 1993 to provide backup support to Honey Bee network. Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad has provided extremely valuable support to Honey Bee network right from its inception, and this support has continued even after the setting up of SRISTI, GIAN and NIF. Five functions were identified as crucial to the core activities of Honey Bee network., (a) documentation and dissemination (through application of information technology and otherwise) of innovations and traditional knowledge, (b) validation and value addition in the knowledge, innovation and practices, (c) protection of intellectual property rights, (d) provision of monetary and non-monetary incentives for individual and collective creativity, conservation contribution, and innovations, and (e) policy advocacy for expanding institutional space for grassroots innovators and traditional knowledge holders. |
It is around these functions that the activities of Honey Bee network, SRISTI and its partners were organized. It is these functions, as we would notice became the basis for evolution of National Innovation Foundation (NIF).
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