At Smart Villages Research Group, we truly believe in the importance of a community-led approach. We always start by asking the community to tell us about the challenges they’re facing, through focus groups and service value tests. This helps us ensure that any technology or system we develop will definitely provide value to the community, …
Challenging Assumptions through Community Engagement Read More »
The SVRG approach is grounded in community engagement and human centred design, to ensure the systems we install bring real, lasting benefit. Unfortunately, due to language barriers, we are unable to run focus groups ourselves, but rely on our in-country partners to assist with translation, or with running the entire group following training. Our translators …
Language and Education Barriers in Community Engagement Read More »
This post was written new SVRG team member Natasha, on her first day on site in the communities in Tanzania: We arrived at the Ormoti site, to scenes of Maasai men sat around, wrapped in their traditional cloth. The solar array installed by Bernie, Anna and Arran previously was way bigger than I’d imagined, with …
First impressions at Ormoti, and a Maasai welcome Read More »