In a brand new, well-equipped lab on the College del Valle de Guatemala (UVG) in June 2024, members of two Mayan farmers’ cooperatives watched intently as Rodrigo Aragón, professor of mechanical engineering at UVG, demonstrated the operation of an industrial ultrasound machine. Then he invited every of them to check the system.
“For us, it’s a dream to have the ability to work together with know-how,” stated Francisca Elizabeth Saloj Saloj, a member of the Ija´tz girls’s collective, a gaggle from Guatemala’s highlands.
After a seven-hour bumpy bus trip, the farmers had arrived in Guatemala Metropolis with sacks stuffed with rosemary, chamomile, and thyme. Their goal: to discover processes for extracting important oils from their vegetation and to determine new merchandise to fabricate with these oils. At the moment, farmers promote their herbs in native markets for medicinal or culinary functions. With new know-how, says Aragón, they’ll add worth to their harvest, utilizing herb oils as the premise for perfumes, syrups, and tinctures that might attain broader markets. These items may present much-needed earnings to the farmers’ households.
A method for transformation
This collaboration is only one a part of a five-year, $15-million challenge funded by the U.S. Company for Worldwide Growth (USAID) and managed by MIT’s Division of Mechanical Engineering in collaboration with UVG and the Guatemalan Export Affiliation (AGEXPORT). Launched in 2021 and referred to as ASPIRE — Reaching Sustainable Partnerships for Innovation, Analysis, and Entrepreneurship — the challenge goals to collaboratively strengthen UVG, and ultimately different universities in Central America, as problem-solving powerhouses that analysis, design, and construct options with and for the individuals most in want.
“The imaginative and prescient of ASPIRE is that inside a decade, UVG researchers are collaborating with neighborhood members on analysis that generates outcomes which can be related to addressing native improvement challenges — outcomes which can be picked up and utilized by policymakers and actors within the personal sector,” says MIT Analysis Scientist Elizabeth Hoffecker, a co-principal investigator of ASPIRE at MIT, and chief of the Institute’s Native Innovation Group.
UVG, one in every of Guatemala’s prime universities, has embraced ASPIRE as a part of its long-term strategic plan, and is now pursuing wide-ranging modifications based mostly on a playbook developed at MIT — together with at MIT D-Lab, which deploys participatory design, co-creation, low-cost applied sciences, and capability constructing to satisfy the advanced challenges of poverty — and piloted at UVG. The ASPIRE workforce is working to increase the attain of its analysis innovation and entrepreneurship actions to its two regional campuses and to different regional universities. The general program is knowledgeable by MIT’s strategy to improvement of research-driven innovation ecosystems.
Though missing the assets (and PhD packages) of a typical U.S. college, UVG has huge ambitions for itself, and for Guatemala.
“We need to thrive and lead the nation in analysis and educating, and to perform this, we’re creating an innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, based mostly on greatest practices drawn from D-Lab and different MIT teams,” says Mónica Stein, vice-rector for analysis and outreach at UVG, who holds a doctorate from Stanford College in plant biology. “ASPIRE can actually change the best way that improvement work and native analysis is completed in order that it has extra affect,” says Stein. “And in concept, when you have extra affect, then you definately enhance environmental outcomes, well being outcomes, academic outcomes, and financial outcomes.”
Native innovation and entrepreneurship
Shifting gears at a college and launching novel improvement initiatives are advanced challenges, however with coaching and workshops carried out by D-Lab-trained collaborators and MIT-based ASPIRE employees, UVG school, employees, and college students are embracing the change. Applications underway ought to sound acquainted to anybody who has set foot not too long ago on the campus of a U.S. analysis college: hackathons, makerspaces, pitchapaloozas, entrepreneurship competitions, and spinouts. However at UVG, all of those serve a bigger goal: addressing sustainable improvement targets.
ASPIRE principal investigator Daniel Frey, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, believes a few of these packages are already paying off, notably a UVG enterprise mentoring service (UVG-EMS), modeled after and facilitated by MIT’s personal VMS program. “We’d prefer to see college students constructing corporations and enhancing their livelihoods and people of individuals from indigenous and marginalized communities,” says Frey.
The ASPIRE challenge intends to allow the lowest-income communities to share extra of Guatemala’s wealth, derived primarily from agricultural items. In collaborating with AGEXPORT, which allows networking with corporations throughout the nation, the workforce zeroed in on creating or enhancing the worth chain for a number of key crops.
“Snow peas provide an amazing goal for each analysis and innovation,” says Adilia Blandón, ASPIRE analysis challenge supervisor and professor of meals engineering at UVG. Many farming communities develop snow peas, which they ship alongside to corporations for export to the U.S. Until these peas are good in form and colour, Blandón explains, they don’t make it to market. Almost a 3rd of Guatemala’s crop is left at processing vegetation, changed into animal feed, or wasted.
An ASPIRE snow pea workforce positioned farmers from two cooperatives who needed to unravel this drawback. At a sequence of co-creation classes, these growers and mechanical engineers at UVG developed a prototype for a low-tech cart for gathering snow peas, constructed from simply acquired native supplies, which may navigate the steep and slim paths on the hills the place the vegetation develop. This technique avoids crushing snow peas in a traditional harvest bag. As well as, the snow pea challenge has engaged girls at a technical faculty to design a harvest apron for ladies snow pea farmers. “This may very well be a enterprise alternative for them,” Blandón says.
Blandón vividly recollects her first ASPIRE workshop, centered on participatory design. “It opened my eyes as a researcher in so some ways,” she says. “I discovered that as a substitute of taking info from individuals, I can study from them and create issues with them that they’re actually enthusiastic about.” It utterly modified how she approaches analysis, she says.
Working with Mayan communities that produce snow peas, the place malnourishment and sickness are rampant, Blandón and ASPIRE researchers discovered that households don’t eat the protein-packed vegetable as a result of they don’t discover it palatable — despite the fact that a lot of it’s left over from harvest. Participatory design classes with a gaggle of moms yielded an intriguing risk: grinding snow peas into flour, which might then be included into conventional bean- and corn-based dishes. The recipes born of this collaboration may land on WhatsApp or TikTok, cellular apps acquainted to those households.
Constructing worth chains
Further analysis initiatives are teasing out novel methods of including worth to the merchandise grown or made by Guatemalan fingers.
These embrace an academic toolkit developed with authorities farm extension employees to show avocado producers methods to enhance their practices. The long-term aim is to develop and export bigger and unblemished fruit for the profitable U.S. market, at the moment dominated by Mexico. The package, that includes easy graphics for growers who can’t learn or don’t have the time, provides classes on soil care, fertilizing, and defending the fruit post-harvest.
ASPIRE UVG Analysis Director Ana Lucia Solano is particularly happy with “an immersive, animated, Monopoly-like recreation that reveals farmers the affect of actions like shopping for fertilizer on their funds,” she says. “If small producers enhance their practices, they’ll have higher alternatives to promote their merchandise at a greater value, which can permit them to rent extra individuals, train others extra simply, and provide higher jobs and dealing circumstances — and perhaps this may assist stop farmworkers from having to go away the nation.”
Solano has simply begun an analogous program to coach cocoa producers. “The cocoa of Guatemala is fantastic, however the growers, who’ve nice native information, additionally must study new strategies to allow them to rework their chocolate into the type of high-quality product anticipated in European markets, with the assistance of AGEXPORT,” she says.
On the UVG Altiplano campus, Mayan teacher Jeremías Morales, who runs the maker area, educated with Amy Smith, an MIT senior lecturer and founding director of the D-Lab, to facilitate artistic capacity-building packages. He’s working with close by villages on an answer for the backbreaking labor of planting broccoli seedlings.
“Right here in Guatemala, small farm holders don’t have know-how to do that job,” says Solano. Via design and prototyping workshops, the village and UVG professors have developed a reasonable system that accomplishes this painful work. “After their subsequent iteration of this know-how, we are able to assist the individuals in beginning a enterprise,” says Solano.
Alternatives to invent options to commonplace however vexing issues hold popping up. A small village of 100 households has to share two mills to grind corn for his or her tortillas. It’s a serious family expense. With ASPIRE facilitators, a gaggle of ladies designed a prototype corn mill for house use. “They have been skeptical at first, particularly when their preliminary prototypes didn’t work,” reviews Solano, “however after they lastly succeeded, there was a lot pleasure concerning the outcomes, an vitality and happiness that you might really feel within the room.”
Adopting an MIT mindset
This sense of empowerment, a pillar of sustainable improvement, has nice which means for UVG Professor Victor Hugo Ayerdi, an ASPIRE challenge supervisor and director of UVG’s Division of Mechanical Engineering.
“In school and after I graduated, I assumed since every little thing got here from developed international locations, and I used to be in a growing nation, I couldn’t invent merchandise.” With that mindset, he says, he went to work in manufacturing and gross sales for a global tire manufacturing firm.
However when he arrived at UVG in 2009, Ayerdi heard from mechanical engineering college students who craved sensible expertise designing and constructing issues. Decided to create maker areas for the three UVG campuses, he took a discipline journey to MIT, whose motto is “mens et manus” or “thoughts and hand.”
“The journey modified my life,” he says. “The MIT mindset is to imagine in your self, attempt issues, and fail, however assume there needs to be a strategy to do it.” Because of this, he says, he realized UVG school and college students may additionally use scientific and engineering information to invent merchandise, grow to be entrepreneurs, spark financial development; that they had the capability. He and different UVG colleagues have been primed for change when the ASPIRE alternative emerged.
As some ASPIRE analysis initiatives wind down their preliminary phases, others are simply gearing up, together with an effort to vogue a water purification system from the shells of farmed shrimp. “We’re solely simply beginning to get outcomes from our analysis,” says Stein. “However we’re completely betting on the ASPIRE mannequin as a result of it really works at MIT and different locations.”
The ASPIRE researchers acknowledge they’re taking a look at lengthy timelines to make important inroads towards environmental, well being, academic, and financial challenges.
“My biggest hope is that ASPIRE can have planted the seed of this innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem mannequin, and that in a decade, UVG can have optimized the totally different packages, whether or not in coaching, entrepreneurship, or analysis, sufficient to actively switch them to different Central American universities,” says Stein.
“We want to be the hub of this community and we need to keep related, as a result of, in concept, we are able to work collectively on issues that now we have in widespread in our area. That may be actually cool.”
