Indigenous Science for Education and Development : A Boot-strapping Approach

Ron Eglash, Egondu Onyejekwe,Christian Sina Diatta and Nfally Badiane (ENDA) are working on an initiative that:

Fractal design for Kitwe community clinic

...suggests that pre- modern, non-state societies were neither utterly anarchic, nor frozen in static order, but rather utilized an adaptive flexibility that took advantage of the nonlinear aspects of ecological dynamics. How might this potent formulation of indigenous knowledge be applied to problems in education and development? One method is to encourage its dissemination in development agencies. But decades of research have shown that a top-down approach to development, even that making use of indigenous knowledge, is often less effective than a bottom-up, "grass roots" approach. This project will create a framework in which to test the possibility that indigenous knowledge can be used in a boot-strapping approach to development. The term boot-strapping is typically applied to computer systems ("boot up the disk"), where a small program is able to self-install a larger system (from the phrase "pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps"). Similarly , we view a boot-strapping approach to development as one which begins with indigenous knowledge under local control, and self-installs modern technological abilities.