Learning Launch Tool

Challenge

Sri Lanka is an agricultural country. Majority of the people in Central, North

Central, North Western and North provinces are farmers. They provide the rice,  vegetables, fruits and all other crops to the whole country and also some of the harvest  is imported too. But because of their low educational profiles and unawareness of using  chemical fertilizers and insecticides, they provide insecure food for consuming. That  creates long time health effects for consumers and also the farmers.

The stats show that most of the farmers around these agricultural areas are

suffering from kidney diseases.  Although they are informed about the doses they don’t  follow the instructions. So my challenge is to provide them the knowledge about using  fertilizers and insecticides in a safe manner and also to persuade them to make use of  organic fertilizers.

Selection

As a team, our university student researchers selected learning launch tool to

approach this problem. So we decided to have a two day workshop with farmers and  their families. As a start we selected 100 families from Nuwara Eliya for this project. So  as an experiment we decided to launch this workshop in an outdoor place few miles  away from their area. We visited some of the families and described about the value of  this project and to get attraction to this process we organized a competition on that  workshop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1A3yThBaiQ&t=11s

Application

We all planned not to give them advices as they usually had before, but to have

some interaction sessions with our fellows from the university and we had more visual  things than instructing them. We showed them the stats and seriousness of this  problem. On the first day we gave them some ideas about using organic fertilizers and  doses when using insecticides and other chemical stuff. We explained the precautions  they should take when crop dusting and showed videos and had a discussion session  with a doctor about the health matters they have to face if the instructions are not  followed. There were their family members too, so we explained their responsibility to  help them for their new way of farming.

At the end of the day we informed about the competition we are going to held in

the next day. We explained the laws of this competition and also with some sponsorship  we were able to give valuable prizes for the winners. At the meantime we interviewed  some farmers too. The competition was to grow crops with carbonic fertilizers with the  new techniques they came to know on the previous day. We were analyzing techniques  and whether they are following the instructions. They had an urge to use the new  learned techniques with low cost and more efficient.

Insight

So finally at the end of the sessions we got a feedbacks from the participants.

We analyzed those feedbacks and we realized that our approach was far more  successful than we thought. Their feedbacks showed us that they were very happy  during the time and they have gathered so many new things and technologies they  never used before. So our target was successful.

Approach

So, we decided to continue our project all around the country. We got

appreciations from agricultural and health ministries too. They agreed to give their  support for our future projects to hold them in a more successful and in a more  compelling way. So learning launch tool helped us to get more information about the  lives of the farmers and their thoughts. We were able to reach them and plant some  ideas in their brain. After some time we are going back to analyze the success of our  project. Design thinking helped us to approach this problem in a completely different  way.

