IAP Conference and Awards - Great Success!!
Thank you so much to all of our projects, guest speakers and other contributors to the IAP Conference and Awards that we held here in Stockholm on Monday of this week. Judging by the reactions we got from the paricipants - echoed in the team - this event was a great success!
The day started off with project promoters sharing their experience on two different subjects - Energy Solutions at the Base of the Pyramid, and the Distribution Channels that can be used to reach the BoP. Many interesting insights were shared and challenges put to the projects which we believe left all of the participants some food for thought. One such thought that I took away from the morning was that project promoters should not shy away from what is perceived as their competiors, because you all grapple with similar challenges and can learn from each other. The BoP market is also an emerging one in most cases and by sharing you can help each other refine your respective business models, speeding up the growth of this market.
In the afternoon we were given some insights into both the challenges involved in designing, and operating, funding for projects targetting the BoP, as well as in designing innovative projects that respect the ecological boundaries of Mother Earth. Lots of inspiration came from Mr Daudi Were, one of the founders of the Ushahidi network/platform, challenging us to replicate their feat in developing a transparency platform in only 3 days!
The conference was closed on a real high in the form of two awards that were presented with diplomas by the Director General of Sida, Mrs Charlotte Petri Gornitzka. The IAP Innovator of the Year award was awarded to Sanergy. Congratulations to the Sanergy team on a well deserved honour! I also want to thank Sanergy and the representatives from Finaccess and elimentaire sarl, who were the other two nominees to the award, for coming to the conference and for sharing tremendously inspiring presentations of the challenges they are dealing with and the solutions emerging. I was not the only one in the team feeling pride in the fact that projects like yours are in the IAP portfolio.
The IAP Student Innovator Award was won by a team made up of students from a number of different Swedish universities that were proposing to develop a project around acquaponic fish/vegetable farming tanks. This fit very well with the ideas in the Social Ecological Innovation theme presented by Per Olsson of the Stockholm Resilience Centre earlier in the afternoon - unknowingly to the judges of the student innovation competition.
We will publish clips from the afternoon of the conference shortly, but if you want to look at the recording of the event in full, you can find it here (no longer available).
Lena Eriksson Åshuvud
IAP Team Leader