INNOVATION
DEFINING “GAME CHANGER” Sharing incentives, assurances and risk are key to building confidence and securing success By Howard Hudson and Carlos Opitz, OPEC Fund
N ew approaches to climate and the term innovation. Microfinance, beginning in Bangladesh in the 1980s, proved itself a game changer by innovating processes – and shifted the needle enough to win a Nobel Prize (see development funding often invoke page 20). Others, like crowdfunding, mission innovation and base of the pyramid initiatives are promising but difficult to scale-up or align with the private sector, which is an increasingly important player in fundraising activities. Shuan Sadreghazi (right), co-author of the UNESCO Science Report 2021, warns: “We need to be careful with words like ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ because they’re sometimes used to airbrush reality and make projects sound more prestigious than they actually are. Rosy terms like ‘rural entrepreneur’
Ploughing back to the future Sadreghazi cites one sectoral example, “regenerative agriculture”, which aims to improve the health of soil ruined by pesticides, fertilizers and farm machinery: “It’s easy to give farmers loans to pilot new agricultural practices and label that ‘innovation’. But what does that mean? Regenerative agriculture typically needs around two years before there’s a tangible
may just refer to your average farmer who got a loan to pilot a new irrigation system or seed variety.” We should be careful because corporate jargon can turn multifaceted progress into superficial snapshots, obscuring the substantial work going on, such as how financial arrangements are evolving in the real world to ensure climate and development impact. Sadreghazi says we need to know: “What incentives are offered? How are local actors kept motivated against the odds to ensure new practices bear fruit (i.e. ensuring a decent return for farms as well as a positive impact for the environment)? How are these impacts measured against specific indicators, so we can be confident of any big claims made at the outset?”
benefit because reducing chemical fertilizers and pesticides
generally leads to less crops in the short term. What we need to identify and understand is
the bottleneck: the lag between
Shuan Sadreghazi
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