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Harnessing collective wisdom to address social issues

Group of rural community members sitting and having a discussion

Anand Rajan's article takes aim at outdated community engagement methods that often isolate insights and fail to scale effectively. Traditional approaches are like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing—resulting in fragmented, contextless knowledge. Rajan proposes a savvy upgrade: building a "digital sense-making infrastructure" that turns communities into co-creators rather than just recipients of aid. He uses a Tamil Nadu case study, where farmers' collective wisdom improved agricultural policies, to illustrate the benefits of this approach. By connecting insights across languages and platforms, and shifting from top-down to peer-led systems, this model enhances engagement, trust, and sustainable change. In short, it’s like replacing a rusty old toolbox with a high-tech, versatile one that actually gets the job done. Click here to read!