Posted by Kyle Miller

Working as an Innovation Analyst for Brightidea I am consistently exposed to leading innovation strategies from Fortune 500 companies such as GE, Cisco, Adobe, and Kraft, to name a few. So in November 2010 I decided to mix things up a bit and expose myself to some alternate innovation strategies: those coming from impoverished rural communities in the developing world. Kampong Speu, Cambodia (about 2 hours south of Phnom Penh) is one of the poorest provinces in Cambodia, with nearly 70% of the population living below the poverty line (on a meager $0.45/day). Further compounding the troubles caused by extreme poverty, Cambodia also suffers from widespread government corruption (some estimates are as high as 90%), a vile human sex trafficking industry (girls are as young as 12 years old sold into prostitution), and the gruesome remnants of a war-torn past (over 5 million unexploded land-mines remain in rural areas).

But there is good news. In 2008, after living and volunteering in Eastern Africa for 17 months, I founded a nonprofit organization based here in San Francisco that would try to reinvent the concept of charity. Put simply, we guaranteed that: 100% of all personal donations go directly to the cause and not to costly administrative structures; full autonomy of all projects is given to our locally-based "partner" organizations who operate directly within the communities we are helping; and full transparency into all our projects is provided through photo, video, and voluntourism, showing exactly how project funds were spent. Furthermore, all of our projects are evaluated for sustainability and impact and empower communities from the ground up. Now, in 2011, Groundwork Opportunities operates 10 projects in 7 countries helping over 5,000 people per day, 250 of whom live in the village of Krain Rohong, Cambodia.

Before starting our project in Cambodia, villagers in Krain Rohong did not have access to clean water, carried hefty debts with local loan sharks (oftentimes with interest rates of over 20% a day) to provide themselves with food and shelter, and were frequently forced to traffic their own children when they could not repay their loans. Now, only 9 months later, the same villagers have a fish pond, a rice bank, and several vegetable gardens complete with produce brokers who travel from market to market in search of the best prices. These villagers sell baskets, clothing, even cupcakes, depositing all profits into a community savings account from which village members can borrow money interest-free. They have purchased 25 cows ($200/ea) as well as several chickens and ducks ($5/ea), and have still managed to save over $700 in less than a year. All because of a freshwater well. While it may not be obvious at first, that simple act of drilling a freshwater well in the village center meant women and children could travel shorter distances to get water (previously they were traveling up to 5km one way), leaving more time to plant gardens or take up crafts making, which could then be sold for a profit, which could then be saved, which could then help to lift them out of poverty.

Now you might be asking, "What does innovation have to do with all of this?" By offering small initial investments to communities (say $2,000 for a freshwater well), from which community members must plan, implement, and manage their own follow-on development projects, we are able to promote the ideas and projects with the highest probability of success, according to the community members themselves: a sort of rural crowd-sourcing, if you will. Furthermore, developing-world communities are designing projects in-line with their own cultural traditions and heritage, projects that the International NGO Community may have never thought of, such as seed banks, community produce brokers, and fish farms. Without the resources (and paradigms) of the developed world, emerging markets and developing-world communities are forced to get creative, to innovate ever more clever solutions to their problems, and to hope those innovations will someday lift them out of poverty. For the people of Krain Rohong, that day has come. Next is Cambodia.

Kyle Miller
Founder and Creative Director
Groundwork Opportunities
www.goworks.org