On 24th of March, we discussed Technology assessment for agroecology, confronting diverse attempts to assess the positive and negative effective or possible impacts of a technology on our communities. Listen to the recording on EcoAgTube.
Over 50 participants joined the Grassroots Innovations Assembly for Agroecology webinar exploring community technology assessment. Civil society organizations, FAO colleagues, grassroots organisations and training centres came together for a peer-to-peer discussion. The session benefited from the perspective of Tzoumakers, an open lab in Greece where communities cooperatively design and manufacture tools for small-scale agricultural production, and of L’Atelier Paysan, the French cooperative that works with farmers to design and build tools and farm infrastructure adapted to peasant agroecology, as well as from AfriTAP facilitation of community tech assessment in Kenya and Zambia.
The exchange, facilitated by Schola Campesina, opened a shared space to reflect on a simple but powerful starting point: knowledge is in the hands of the people — food producers are also knowledge and innovation producers. From this perspective, digital tools should not extract knowledge and power from communities, but support them in organising, sharing and strengthening their food systems.
The exchange highlighted that gaining sovereignty and power at grassroots level is central to agroecology. Food sovereignty is also tech sovereignty. This means building our own digital literacy, critically assessing the tools proposed to our communities, and asking whether they help protect data, preserve knowledge, deepen collaboration and support autonomy.
This was an associated webinar to the Praxis course on Digital Sovereignty which is itself part of a wider collective process to build a Digital Sovereignty curriculum for the agroecology movement.
These GIAA Encounters are spaces for peer-to-peer discussion, where different experiences are brought into conversation and where practical questions can be explored collectively: what digital sovereignty can look like, how technology assessment can be done from below, how data and knowledge can be protected, and how communities can build an informed digital toolbox grounded in their own realities. Check more.
