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project
Sustainable tourism
Nature conservation need not be at odds with poverty alleviation, as sustainable tourism can benefit both. Europe, too, can learn from this.
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project
Responsible Vietnamese craft
Incremental innovations in small producers’ clusters in Vietnamese villages can reduce poverty, but also have adverse effects such as pollution. This project led to instruments and recommendations to support local policy makers.
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project
Fair plant variety rights in Africa
How an Intellectual Property approach can advance fair plant variety rights in Sub-Saharan Africa – without the threat of a prohibition on exchanging seeds.
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project
Frugal and responsible innovations in Africa
New design and business model approaches will enable Dutch companies to develop successful frugal water and health innovations in Africa, both from a commercial and a socio-ethical perspective. By collaborating with local entrepreneurs in Africa, Dutch companies can develop frugal innovations in a profitable manner.
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project
Designing for a better life
Toilets that are used as a shed, hydraulic pumps that rust away, unused … A ‘toolbox’ helps design products that really do improve the well-being of people in developing countries.
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project
Drip irrigation: Not a Perfect Solution
Policy makers welcome drip irrigation as an ideal way to reduce water scarcity and poverty. This project, focusing on Burkina Faso and Morocco, found a gap between these high expectations and reality and focused on understanding why this is not made known. Only few smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa continued using the low-cost version of the technology after external support ended. Besides, only some farmers who adopt and use the technology realise water savings, whereas increases in productivity often come at high social and environmental costs.
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project
Smart grids in India
Successfully developing and implementing smart grids in rural India requires paying careful attention to socio-ethical factors.
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project
Biofuels: an irresponsible innovation?
Biofuels were once introduced as a sustainable energy source, but became heavily criticised for their negative effects on the global poor and their food security.
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project
Responsible innovation by learning together
To realise responsible system innovations in agriculture, diverse private partners need to collaborate. Social learning is a key to success.
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project
Palliative care at home with the iPad
Palliative care at home is only possible in more complex cases if GPs are supported by palliative specialists. This project showed that this can be done in the Netherlands by using video consultation. Elderly patients had no trouble using the technology, and the contact was experienced as positive. One condition, however, is that there must be a clear distribution of responsibilities between care providers. In Nigeria, however, problems were encountered with this technology.
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project
Responsible water governance
Water governance requires dealing with conflicting interests and functions. A new toolkit will facilitate joint decision making by putting emphasis on the shared values underlying conflicts.
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project
Responsible production of biogas in India
Using rice straw and other biomass for the production of biogas raises technical and economic challenges, but also fundamental ethical and social questions. This project investigates how industrial interests and farmers’ needs in India can be integrated in the design of a system for sustainable biogas production on the basis of rice straw.