Two billion hands are ready to make a difference in their own lives, says These Hands co-founder, Thabiso Mashaba.
‘Top-down’ strategies for local problems sideline the very people they aim to help, says Thabiso Mashaba, who wants leadership and development in Africa and abroad to take a more community-led approach. While studying economics and accounting at the University of Botswana, Mashaba learned how government officials would design solutions to local problems, without any real engagement with community members. “It’s a box-ticking type of solution,” he says, noting that this also occurs when international organisations carry out development projects in African communities.
Mashaba wanted to try a new approach – one that gives people agency over how local problems are addressed. In 2015, he co-founded These Hands, a social enterprise startup that trains people from under-resourced communities to address challenges such as food production in a hands-on, sustainable way.
Mashaba’s work with These Hands has since expanded from Botswana to communities in Zambia, Tanzania and South Africa, and as far afield as New Zealand, where he is working with Māori communities in Tolaga Bay, a town in the country’s North Island. The biggest impact of the organisation, says Mashaba, is “we remind [people] of the skills that they already have and … grow the confidence of those who are in the grassroots.”
From training to solutions
Mashaba met his co-founder, Sagar Mahapatra, at a 2013 International Development Design Summit in Lusaka, Zambia. The pair agreed on the guiding principle that, in order to empower local solutions, community members need to have access to high-quality, hands-on training programmes.
Soon after the summit, Mashaba and Mahapatra applied for and won a grant of US$500 from the International Development Innovation Network to develop their idea of community-focused training programmes into a sustainable business, with mentorship from Colorado State University’s MBA programme.
Just three years later, These Hands was up and running, and hosted the 2015 International Development Design Summit for the first time in D’Kar, Botswana, where they trained their first cohort of 30 participants. It was “a foundational start to our journey,” Mashaba says.
Early on, Mashaba and Mahapatra approached communities in Botswana to find participants in their training programme. Nowadays, people who have seen their work reach out to them, says Mashaba.
In a typical two-week training programme, Mashaba and his team will consult with community members (at least 20 participants are required) to identify the most pressing local problems, and chart out a plan for developing a solution. Figuring out a solution that can be designed and implemented quickly is crucial, says Mashaba.
Besides ideation, the programme also teaches practical skills in areas such as woodworking and metalworking, to help the participants enact their plan.
Sustainable futures
The impact of such programmes can be profound. Some communities in Botswana, for example, make a living by growing beans, which can be very difficult to scale up without the right equipment and expertise. This is because harvesting large quantities of beans from pods is physically taxing and the dust and other particles that are thrown up by threshing can cause breathing difficulties. Through training provided by These Hands in 2018, community members developed pedal- and hand-powered bean-threshers, which help them to separate the beans from the chaff far more efficiently.
Using business skills acquired through the training programme, such as how to price and pitch their products at exhibits and local markets, the owners of the bean-threshers have been able to rent them out to other members of the community. Other villages in Botswana have since built on and adapted this innovation using locally available materials, says Mashaba.
Another Botswana community worked with These Hands to develop artisan craft paper made from elephant dung, which is sold to tourists as a souvenir. Elephants often raze the peoples’ farms, says Mashaba, so this project has given them a way to recoup their losses without disturbing the elephants.
The biggest upside of These Hands’ workshops, says Mashaba, is that people are not only empowered to work on solving problems that directly affect them, but they also own their solutions. The community as a whole can become self-reliant.
Mashaba has been encouraged by the fact that workshop participants tend to skew 55% women and 75% young people. Indigenous knowledge and techniques that have been passed down through generations are brought to the table, particularly by elderly women, to help create better solutions.
“We see women become confident in [skills such as] welding and sawing,” says Mashaba. “They’re making things without needing to depend on their male counterparts.”
Learning from experience
This year, Mashaba is working with Māori communities in New Zealand demonstrating how transferrable the programmes are across borders and cultures. “We are able to deploy an African solution to a Western, developed country. It’s exciting,”says Mashaba.
In 2020, the New Zealand Government awarded Mashaba an Edmund Hillary Fellowship to support his work.
It’s a boost for Mashaba, who admits that the past seven years with These Hands have been challenging. A big problem, he says, is getting people to show up to the workshops consistently and encouraging them to continue working on the solution after the workshop is over. “People in these communities live to survive,” says Mashaba. Technological development usually reaps benefits over the long term, and people “don’t have the luxury of just waiting.”
With this in mind, These Hands has started awarding small grants to participants, which enables them to work on their solutions and attend or host exhibitions to sell their products. These grants also enable participants to visit each other and exchange project ideas.
Many hands
Over the years, Mashaba has seen policies change in response to grassroots innovations driven by organizations such as These Hands. “It has started a conversation in Botswana – and particularly in South Africa – around embracing grassroots solutions,” he says.
Recently, Mashaba’s work was recognized at the Falling Walls conference, where he was one of the 2022 winners in the science engagement category.
If there’s one lesson Mashaba has learnt since starting These Hands, it’s that immersion is key. Embedding oneself in a community and understanding its norms and cultural values has given him access to a diverse range of people and problems. Mashaba also emphasises the importance of leading with empathy. “These people are not a charity case. They are real people who just lack resources and access to certain things so that they can solve their own problems,” he says.
Above all, These Hands’ ethos of working with communities to create and own their solutions – instead of ‘parachuting in’ to help them – has driven them to such success, says Mashaba.
“At These Hands, we believe it’s not about the one billion mouths that we have to feed,” he says. “It’s about the two billion hands that are ready to engage and make a difference in their own lives.”
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Story by Pratik Pawar