Digital Pulse - Ch 3 - Sec 3 - NABUUR

Development Issues: Health, Children, Women, Agriculture, HIV/AIDS

Programme Summary

The NABUUR project is designed to stimulate and support sustainable solutions to particular problems in communities worldwide. A website facilitates access to "virtual neighbours" around the globe who help community members design tailor-made solutions, to the end of fostering a sense of resilience among local people. Associated aims include helping those in rural communities connect with others by making their needs explicit and by playing a role in tapping into intellectual, spiritual, and tangible resources. In short, the purpose of the project is to develop a "Nabuur community". NABUUR, the Dutch word for "neighbour", is a Dutch non-profit foundation. NABUUR aims to include 100 villages by the end of 2004 and 1000 by the end of 2006. After that, NABUUR hopes to be able to service an unlimited number of locations simultaneously.

Summary of ICT Initiatives

The project is, as of this writing, in its pilot phase. At the NABUUR site , visitors are invited to select a location on the map in order to gain information on issues affecting particular community. Nabuur has selected pilot locations where a local community has a clear need for guidance: Iquitos, Amazon, Peru; Kouroussaa, Guinea; Cairo, Egypt; Izmail, Ukraine; Dharwad, India; and Padampur, Nepal. The visitor may click on a map to access information in the form of a photobook, discussion groups involving villagers, news items, and detailed analysis of issues like education of indigenous children, female genital cutting, women in the community, improper chemical storage, dry farming, and HIV/AIDS. There is an option to "become a neighbour", which gives one the right to participate in the community. Local needs, which have been defined by the community, are communicated. The local communities gain access to these virtual neighbours, who then try to arrive at new solutions (in the form of information or social investment, perhaps) through Internet discussion groups that invite participation of experts, if needed. If the community accepts the solution, virtual neighbours will help to ensure that the solution is implemented.

Part of the Nabuur philosophy is to bring the elements of supply and demand in the knowledge fields together, to enhance market tendencies. Organizers believe that a “sick” form of short-term logic forces people all over the world towards non-sustainable solutions. Better options have been often developed elsewhere but these are not available to the people facing the problems now. They see that there is a huge local demand that has no access to the equally huge global supply of knowledge, contacts, experience, means, manpower and money.

Today's institutions are not designed to connect this supply and demand to peoples in remote parts of the world. The Internet, aided by phone, radio, etc, can create such a connection. Connection alone however is not sufficient. The Internet is too vast to generate useful solutions automatically. A structure is needed to enable the exchange between the demand in the real community and the supply of the virtual neighbours who live elsewhere in the global village. Nabuur will create that structure. Its ambition is to stimulate and support sustainable local solutions by providing people in real communities with access to their virtual neighbours from around the globe. Care for nature and natural resources often are at the core of such longer-term solutions.

The solutions must enhance the resilience of the place. Nabuur starts by studying 10-15 pilot locations where successful development projects are already underway. Local anthropologists and the communities will try to distill a methodology which will make it easier in the future for communities around the world to bring a credible local agenda to the attention of their virtual neighbours. In order to successfully address problems, Nabuur has identified the following three aspects as vital to its project:

• Community - Nabuur brings people together in a virtual community that mobilizes the knowledge, contacts, experience, etc of those present. The virtual community generates, judges, organizes whatever it takes until the problem is solved. Only then can the virtual neighbours sit back again.
• Story - Through the Nabuur website the developing story of each of the participating places can be followed. Neighbours, real and virtual, can see if and what difference their contribution has made. It allows them to follow as well as be part of the process.
• Self-Organisation - Nabuur wants to connect a very large number of places with an even greater number of people. The usual solution, a central office that organizes everything, cannot work at the scale required. Therefore, ways must be found to let as much as possible of Nabuur's work organize itself. Nabuur will create the necessary special conditions and demands on personnel, structures, processes, quality control, etc, for self-organization to take root. It will help to solve some of the complex problems that no single institution can successfully tackle on its own, by providing a service complementary to exiting organisations.

The HIV/AIDS oriented project in KwaNdengezi, an African township, involves the protection and care provision for 93 AIDS orphans into the homes of a group of 25 women. They now have secured a home to renovate and need additional funds to transform the dilapidated house into a foster home where several children would live. Most are extremely poor themselves and get no recompense for their charity. The Rotary club of Pinetown (near KwaNdengezi) is working to assist these women find the right homes to expand these orphanages and pay for their operating costs

Observations

The website has a link to an extensive and well-developed business plan, which among other things identifies the following challenges that the programme must address:

• Complexity of local situations must be reflected. Seemingly straightforward problems are often not easy, because of economic, environmental, social, and political factors. Solutions require comprehension of the local situation.
• Local needs must drive. Local people and leaders need to direct the agenda. How to best help organize and sustain participation is a key challenge.
• Not every local place is “connected”. The Internet may be spreading rapidly, but the rural majority of the world is still unconnected to the Networked World, both structurally and culturally.
• Floods of questions and unsought advice do not help local communities. Answering the concerns of how best to create helpful filters while providing easy access and assistance will be a key objective of the pilot Initiative.
• Misuse must be thwarted. Being a network for the exchange of valuable resources, Nabuur must guard against deliberate misuse.
• Short term needs vs. long term benefits. Where day–to–day survival is a real question for nearly one billion people, the seven generations sustainability perspective might appear as an unaffordable luxury, but today's short–term solutions often increase tomorrow's problems .
• Limitless. How does one avoid the implosion of Nabuur after hooking up several hundred places? By carefully designing a self–organizing model, so that an ever-growing number of people can fruitfully interact with any place of their choice.

Source:NABUUR site

For More Information Contact:

info@nabuur.nl