Grassroots Innovations Assembly for Agroecology (GIA)

12 - 13 June 2024. - Grassroots Innovations Assembly for Agroecology (GIA) 

• Wednesday, June 12th 6 pm CEST Registration Link for June 12th
• Thursday, June 13th 11 am CEST / 12 pm (noon) Nairobi time / 3:30 pm New Delhi time / 4 pm Jakarta time Registration Link for June 13th

Resource:

GIA (2024) The Grassroot Innovation Assembly Visual Report, 2023. # 25 pp

• This report documents the first international gathering of the Grassroots Innovations Assembly from Oct 18-21 in Gallese, Italy. As food producers confront climate crises, corporate capture, and the new extractive technologies of AG 4.0, smallholders are organizing their own innovation networks for agroecological methods. The work of these networks demonstrates that peasant autonomy is possible through grassroots innovation, knowledge-sharing, research, and collaboration.
• Drawing from a foundation of food sovereignty, agroecology and the Rights of people to define their food systems, GIA has been created (2023) to defend technological autonomy as a powerful tool to strengthen small-scale food producers globally and improve resilience, autonomy and sovereignty
• The idea for an international grassroots innovations assembly was seeded in 2018 when the organizers of the gathering, a group of established innovation networks like Farm Hack, L’Atelier Paysan, and Schola Campesina, first crossed paths at the UN Food and Agriculture Association (FAO) summit on innovation.
• You will find the link to the report here. 

The group came up with a long list of practical methods, events, and systems to collaborate and
communicate on Agroecology. Here is an aggregated list: 

1. Innovation catalogs and magazines sharing alternative solutions 
2. Video documentation, including everyday techniques because what seems normal to one farmer may be an innovation to another 
3. 
   Knowledge-sharing databases and wikis - for instance the Grassroots Innovation Database [GRID] - created by UNDP India : contributions from Anamika Dey, Visiting Faculty at Indian
   Institute of Management Ahmedabad
4. Parties, big social gatherings, and festivals. Having fun together! 
5. Agroecology schools and summer school for farmers as an alternative to the corporate-controlled university extension system 
6. Finding a volunteer farmer for each local area who provides general support to answer neighboring farmers' questions 
7. In-person building workshops where everyone goes home with their own tool 
8. Hackathons and collabathons 
9. Mobile workshops and on-farm tool repair 
10. Makerspaces and shared workshops 
11. Trips to scout existing grassroots innovations 
12. Hub farms that help organize feedback on innovations 
13. Innovations fairs - social forum for innovators, opportunity to document innovations, opportunity for officials to recognize smallholders’ innovations, which helps push for policy change.