In this module, you're going to learn more about how gender analytics can lead to inclusive innovation. I can think of no one better to help us understand this then professor Anita Mcgahan. Anita holds the rank of University professor, which is the highest academic rank at the University of Toronto. She is a professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and a professor of Strategic Management at the Rotman School, where she holds the George E Connell Chair in Organizations, and Society. She's crossed appointed to both U of T school of Medicine and the school of Public Health, and is Chief Economist at the Massachusetts General Hospital's Division of Global Health Innovation. Her research career has focused on industry change, sustainable competitive advantage, and the establishment of new fields. An area of particular interest to her is reaching the hardest to reach in our global society, with innovations that will improve health and well being. If I could summarize her insights in a metaphor, we might say that she's telling us that making a caterpillar walk faster is only incremental innovation. But turning a caterpillar into a butterfly is transformation. In this video I asked her about the importance of gender analysis and innovation. Listen in particular for the importance of using analysis to reframe the problem. >> If you try to innovate without analysis, you can make big mistakes. Let me give you an example, about 20 years ago I was involved in a project in Africa where the goal was to make neonatal incubators out of Toyota 4Runner parts. The idea was that car parts are abundant in Africa and they're technicians available to fix the incubators when they break. Lot of excitement about this idea, it eventually got a lot of funding and attention. But the project never came to fruition and it's interesting to think about why. The reason is that the best way to take care of premature babies is through something called kangaroo care, where the child is placed on the parents. It's usually the mother's chest and stomach to get warm. This is a lot cheaper. It's universally available and it's a lot safer for the child, because the parent can constantly monitor what's happening with the baby. Car parts have these radical changes in temperature that are shocking to a vulnerable baby because they're designed for cars. Kangaroo care is kinder, it's more engaging with the parent and the child. So it turns out that if you analyze this problem which is warming up neonatal children who are under temperature, you realize that the problem is the parents don't know what to do. The worked is abundant and the opportunity is to train the parents on how to make sure that their child's body temperature is in a safe range. What you need is education, not a complicated car parts incubator. So analysis that really thinks about what the problem is and doesn't try to jam a technical solution into the situation as a starting point, it can yield a much better, more sustainable, cheaper approach than throwing technology into the situation. One of the most important over the past 20 years in my field is a series of research papers that showed a strong statistical relationship between education for girls in low income settings and lower poverty for the entire community in which these girls live. So what we found in this analysis is that, and this analysis by the way was done by a lot of people, not just me. But we found that educated girls often pursue secondary education, high school and college. They get better jobs, they have healthier children. They don't put up with being exploited, they have resources to avoid that, and they're generally empowered to make better decisions about their futures. A key insight here is that these behaviors influence men and boys, just as much as they influence women and girls. They changed the way that people interact in these communities, so this idea is had an enormous impact in the way that development occurs, in the way that resources are spent on development. An they grew out of the gender analysis. Sure, so here's an example from again, my field of Global Health of the kind of thing that can happen when gender analysis doesn't occur. So several decades back, some very influential people, including it, UNICEF and the Clinton Foundation, were excited about something called a PlayPump. There was even like PBS coverage of this project, so a PlayPump was merry go round. That was also a water pump and the idea was that his children played on the merry go round, the rotation of the machine would drive a water pump. That would put water into a holding tank that could be accessed by the whole community. So the idea was that this would replace the collecting of water from polluted rivers and streams by women, who often had to walk long distances with heavy pots on their heads to get water out of these polluted rivers. So many PlayPumps were constructed about 2000 if I remember correctly, but the project fails, they broke easilly, people didn't use them, and it turns out the reason was that children first of all were unfamiliar with merry go rounds. They didn't have any experience with that idea. The amount of work that was required to turn the machine to get the pump to work was a lot greater than a conventional merry go rounds. So they were hard to operate. Women had to then do it by hand, so there are standing at these machines trying to pull them in circles as they were designed to do. And it turns out to be too hard to do that if you're pregnant or if you're ill or if you're older, but I think the most important thing that went wrong. Was that these merry go rounds eliminated a really important social process that happened when the women went to the river to collect water. See, it turns out that women from a community would meet at the river and talk at the river, on the way home about conflicts in the community. And they would resolve them together. They would work them out and all this was lost with the PlayPump. It was another idea that was tech push that didn't work because it wasn't integrated into the fabric of the community. If you had interviewed women in advance, and really listened and ask the right questions and really try to figure out what they understood, you would have known that these river conversations were important. If you had tested in the field and really look for the ways the pumps were going to be used, you would have been able to see that there would be problems. And avoid all this wasted effort.
