How to Communicate Self-Sustainable Project. A Digital Platform to Make the Invisible Visible

Self-sustainability is the capacity of communities to identify and carry out solutions to local problems autonomously, generating their own resources. This allows them to democratize development processes and reduce dependence on external actors to ensure that their projects are consolidated and sustained.

Under this premise, Emilia Székely, a researcher at UNAM’s Humanities Coordination, has been conducting field studies for more than a decade in different regions of the world, mainly in Asian countries, intending to learn about practices and experiences of self-sustainable development in areas such as health, education, environment, and poverty alleviation.

The case studies, which cover more than 40 projects in 10 countries, are published on the website www.autonomy.viainteraxion.org, available in English and Spanish, with the institutional support of the UNESCO Chair in Hong Kong.

A debate on the concept of development
Dr. Székely asks Who decides which is the right answer to development? Who has the capacity, the duty, and the responsibility to decide what kind of development we should follow? She explains that there is a debate, both international and local, on how power structures determine the management of economic resources, set certain political positions, and tend to dictate to people what they should do, the type of development to follow, the way to do it and even the way to measure it. The groups that finance the projects usually have more power to make decisions, even though evidence shows that this scheme does not allow for sustainable development.

This problem gave rise to her interest in learning first-hand how self-development initiatives of different communities and civil organizations overcome this dependence situation and develop their autonomy so that their projects meet their own visions and local needs.

FROM HONG KONG TO INDIA
Through qualitative interviews with actors involved, field observation, and documentary research, the self-sustainability study probes how the strategies are materialized, with a view to their subsequent dissemination among agents who share similar experiences and challenges in different countries.

Since 2012, the UNAM researcher has dedicated herself to this work in collaboration with Mark Mason, professor in the Department of International Education at the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK). It was at that same institution where Székely obtained her PhD in Educational Policy and a master’s degree from Tsinghua University in the field of International Development, after completing her undergraduate studies at UNAM’s School of Political and Social Sciences. She thus describes the origin of the project:
This was achieved without depending on the agenda of the funders. From this contact during her doctoral stay at EdUHK, Székely was offered to carry out consultancy for that organization. She proposed that, instead of submitting a report with recommendations from her office, it would be better to visit these schools in Rajasthan to learn about the local situation and, based on this, explore the experiences of people and organizations in other countries, such as China, Mexico, or Brazil, and share them so that they could choose the solutions that best adapted to their context in the desert.

Case studies
With the support of the UNESCO Chair, Székely visited the communities working with Barefoot College. There she learned about the case of illiterate women, who learned to build and repair solar panels used to produce electricity in their region.

A large number of organizations go to communities in remote areas and install solar panels, but, when they break down, no one will fix them because it is expensive to get to the site, or the repair was not included in the original budget. Because of this situation, Barefoot College trained young people to repair them. But these young people began to migrate to the city to get jobs as technicians with what they had learned about repairing the panels. Knowledge did not stay in the community.

So they decided to train women in panel repair, especially older women because they have no intention of migrating. This ensured that the knowledge would remain in the communities and that the project would continue to function, without relying on external experts to provide electricity to the communities.

In addition to repairing panels, the women now make solar lamps for night schools so that children can study after helping their families. This model is an example of how to build greater self-sustainability and, because of its results, it has been taken to more than forty countries to train women in rural communities with similar characteristics.

The platform is born
After completing her research for Barefoot College, Székely had the idea to share more self-sustainability experiences she had detected in other countries and publish them on the Internet: The website www.autonomy.viainteraxion.org documents cases such as the “Alternative Market and Solidarity Economy in Veracruz”, a project that seeks to be self-managed, in which the people from the community of Espinal barter goods, services, and knowledge, using a kind of currency they call Tumin.

In China, there are cases such as “In Action”, a rural-migrants organization who voluntarily support other workers migrating to Beijing, to improve their living conditions and health, as they have no access to local social services.

Hong Kong is home to Greenprice, a social enterprise that recovers food that is about to be discarded by supermarkets due to marketing strategies. These foods are removed from the shelves because they are past their optimal consumption date, but not their expiration date. People are unaware of this difference and therefore do not buy them. This situation generates tons of wasted food daily. Greenprice takes back the food and makes it available for sale in its online stores at an affordable price while educating consumers about the differences in labeling.

In Indonesia, Székely studied, among other projects, the case of the Garbage Bank (Gemah Ripah), an organization that buys waste from its neighbors and helps them save the money they earn to invest, preferably in their children’s education. The waste is recycled to mitigate the problem of garbage on the streets and to promote environmental care.

The researcher considers that there are no good or bad self-sustainability practices. An experience that works in one place is not necessarily the best solution in other context. The objective of the platform is to share experiences that inspire others to increase the self-sustainability of their projects.

Reaching more people
As of mid-2022, the site has received more than 100 thousand visits. This is an organic reach, without any external promotion or advertisement, which illustrates the interest in the subject. There are not only practices reported, but there is also a catalog presented with the strategies employed in the projects to increase their level of self-sustainability. Székely points out that the site still has an academic language, so she is rewriting the contents to make the information accessible to more development actors of all types and from any part of the world. In addition to publishing in Spanish and English, the researcher seeks to translate the contents into other languages, starting with Chinese, a language in which she is also fluent.

The UNESCO Chair wanted to support the project in order to launch a new platform and fund more case studies. “This took me to Indonesia to see what is being done in Southeast Asia and learn about practices that seek to solve local problems,” Székely adds.
Anyone interested in learning about selfsustainable development practices and selfsustainability strategies employed in the case studies may visit www.autonomy.viainteraxion. org.

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