The Right to Knowledge

At a time when the future shape of international development and meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are completely up in the air, this book outlines a decade-tested, learning-systems approach for cost-effectively scaling the reach, engagement, and adoption of gold-standard basic research and innovations to support the SDGs to the widest possible demographics locally and globally. If you are researching, producing, or disseminating public-good e-extension solutions for problems at any scale, this book’s interventions at all points along the value chain – from basic research to solution development, distribution, uptake, and end-user feedback – afford reaching even the most difficult-to-reach groups in the global South, especially those who speak local rather than majority languages, may possess low or no print-literacy, are geographically isolated, or face barriers to inclusion and participation (including women, minorities, and marginalized groups). Describing accessible "menus" or "encyclopedias" of research-for-development (R4D) innovations in diverse local languages that help reach the SDGs requires coordinated global partnerships among content creators (SDG 17), delivery systems using formal and informal pathways to provide life-sustaining knowledge (SDG 4), and diverse communities of practice with the access necessary to locally exercise their right to that knowledge (SDG 16). Implementing such a learning-systems approach opens channels for advancing all the SDGs, especially prioritizing the eradication of poverty and hunger, improving health and well-being, providing safe shelter, and ensuring gender security. This empirically researched and grounded book presents a learning-systems approach for mass-scalable educational content ultimately intended for use across any language, literacy level, culture, or digital divide. The work here is based primarily on Purdue University's Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO) initiative. Addressing the crosscutting issues of resilience, genders, socioeconomic status, geographic isolation, age, and other important development parameters, it provides one answer to how we (as a global development community) should address these issues to meet the SDGs globally and the good life for people and communities locally. At its core, this is a matter of making timely information available (whether by deliberate searching, word-of-mouth/"viral" redistribution, or even "stumbling" across the information, with or without personalized user-targeting)—in other words, by reproducing how the Internet already socially "works" (while avoiding how it doesn’t work) to deliver information in a deliberate, reliable, and measurable way for outcomes, and especially for overcoming "wicked" development problems, attain or surpass the SDGs on-schedule, and open people’s access to the good life where they live.