Creative Capacity Building (CCB) is hands-on training approach – whose students are community members with any educational level. CCB focuses on harnessing local creativity and indigenous knowledge in the technology design process, facilitating community-based innovation and invention, with specific attention to rural job creation and improved quality of life at community level. Students are required to fully participate in the entire design process. Using D-Lab’s village-level training, hands-on skills-building workshops were used to introduce design process to trainees. The trainees worked collaboratively to design and develop tools that meet their needs. CCB encourages and trains people to make technologies that generate income, improve health and safety, save labor and time and change perceptions about themselves (MIT, 2015). CCB is a unique intervention since it develops the capacity of participants to design and create their own tools and machines. The design process is made by distilling key elements into a hands-on curriculum that is accessible at any educational level. Therefore, CCB presents a framework through which anyone can become an active creator of technology and not just a recipient or user of technology (MIT, 2015). A key requirement of the CCB is that materials for making the tools must be available locally – including scrap metals and other post-consumer products, plants, wood, soil and other locally available natural resources. Awareness creation of local technologies and their adaptability was conducted and training was done on how to use/execute a given technology or process. Strategies for creating and making new technologies were discussed followed by challenging trainees to apply these skills to building and testing prototypes of their own design. Subsequent training focused on the created technology prototypes and these trainings and interactions were done by a lead trainer and two village-based facilitators. The village-based facilitators provided technical advisory services but let the trainees do design and building of technologies.
The purpose is assignment is to document and illustrate the impact of the CCB training to date on the project beneficiaries. The results of the study will complement the quantitative assessment, already undertaken, to demonstrate evidence of the project benefits and may serve as a basis for replication of the Creative Capacity Building training in other areas in future.
- Based on training teachers and community facilitators on the fast tracking of sweet potato project.
- Adressing gender issues in homes, household activities and involving children in these various activities.
- Training members on how to prepare chapatis, chips and porridge out of the orange flesh sweet potato.