Harnessing collective wisdom to address social issues

The article by Anand Rajan discusses the shortcomings of current community engagement methods in effectively integrating local community voices within the development sector. Traditional approaches often isolate insights and lack scalability, leading to fragmented and non-transferable knowledge that loses its context. To address this, the article advocates for building a "digital sense-making infrastructure" that empowers communities as co-creators rather than mere recipients of aid. Using a case study of a digital initiative in Tamil Nadu, where farmers’ collective wisdom was harnessed to enhance agricultural policies, the article illustrates the benefits of connecting insights, democratizing knowledge across languages and platforms, and transitioning from top-down to peer-led systems. By placing communities at the center, this model fosters deeper engagement, trust, and the ability to drive sustainable social change, suggesting a paradigm shift towards community-centric, scalable, and inclusive digital frameworks for broader application, including disaster management. Click here for details.