About the project
From a small village called Banjarapalya, we began responding to challenges in the day-to-day life of our families living in rural areas. Our farms face water scarcity, that birthed this initiative to irrigate crops by conserving water through distribution and recirculation between different cultivation areas.
About the approach
We first studied how farmers cultivate, what tools they are using, what kinds of solutions can be used in farms in resource scarce areas. We identified ideas that work for these fields and created collaborative groups which work in partnership with farmers to build distributed innovations in agriculture.
We faced many challenges in adapting this project to different farms around the world. For each region where we were designing responses, there was a new institutional partner bringing in a different dimension to the problem: we worked with IUCN.org to make wildlife friendly farms, Climate.com to make digitally inclusive marketplaces, Rabobank to enable trust building and credibility among farmers’ stakeholders, MasterCard to bring financial inclusion, SELCO foundation to make zero emissions machinery, GODAN to bring inclusive policies backed by open data, and IDDS to build capacity among farmers.
About the design collective
FreeDesign (inc. 2016) specializes in climate smart technology design, transfer and adoption, specifically for rural communities in India (Bharat).
We co-create livelihood solutions for startups, NGOs, financial institutions, and corporates using community-inspired venture building approaches.
We implement programs to develop, pilot and scale technologies via last mile operationalization service & strategy.