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Our grass-root experience of development work in poor African communities has revealed a disturbing trend: outside providers offer solutions to low-income households with the best of intentions, but then things often go wrong. There frequently appears to be a gap between the intentions and assumptions of these outside providers and the perceptions and social dynamics of low-income households themselves. In short, solutions often do not have the intended results and then create more problems than they solve. To bridge the gap between the intentions of outside providers and the application of solutions by low-income households the Nova team has developed a unique participatory action research and development (R&D) process to functionally integrate modern technology into the African household system, beginning with the household and not the technology.

Our R&D process has proved to be very successful in designing innovative solutions for low-income households to improve their quality of life and to ultimately promote the Nova vision of a healthy household culture in Southern Africa. We believe that the secret to our success is that we engage households from the outset when we commence on a R&D process to design a solution for a particular problem in a particular community.

CRITERIA FOR EXCELLENCE

Our point of departure is that 21st century solutions to promote a healthy household culture in Southern Africa go beyond the idea of charity or even social responsibility towards the implementation of smart solutions.

A smart solution is an innovative tried and tested solution with discernible value to all stakeholders concerned. It complies with the highest criteria for excellence. It should be:

Desirable
Beneficial
Affordable
Effective
Replicable
Sustainable
Quantifiable

FOCUS AREAS

Currently, Nova has four focus areas within the household as a microsystem:

Focus area integration:We believe that it is important to study both the whole as well as its constituent parts in order to gain an understanding of the functioning of a system. Therefore the integration of our focus areas forms an important part of our endeavour to understand the household as a micro system.

TYPES OF SERVICES AND PRODUCTS

Nova aims to design models of services and products that can be multiplied indefinitely in the target communities. These models include technologies, procedures, techniques and artefacts. Nova can also make its expertise available on a consultancy basis.

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Establishment

The Nova Institute was founded in 1994 as an independent, not-for-profit organisation. It grew from a multi-disciplinary research group that included an architect, engineer, medical doctor and theologian. The name “Nova” is an Afrikaans acronym for Research and Development for the Prevention of Poverty (In the Afrikaans language: Navorsing en Ontwikkeling vir die Voorkoming van Armoede).

Groundwork

The Nova founders were united by their quest to combine the insights of their diverse fields of interest to design practical solutions for the prevention and eradication of poverty in the South African context. Gradually a number of important insights emerged. The Nova founders realised that in order to design practical solutions to tackle poverty it is important to have:

A reliable problem definition of the root cause(s) of poverty in each particular case
A suitable strategic focus
An effective research and development approach
Relevant criteria to measure excellence

The insights are discussed shortly below:

Problem definition: What causes poverty?

Nova's proposition is that poverty and HIV, as well as the destruction of the ecology are the result of the dysfunctional interaction between complex systems. Like the global condition, of which it is a microcosm, the Southern African condition can be described as a multitude of complex, even chaotic and ever-changing combinations, often mismatches between:

Cultures (worldviews, value systems, lifestyles, practices, technologies, systems) - with the modern Western culture, now globalised, and the traditional African cultures as the dominant ones; and
The ecology (combining with both dominant cultures separately and in all their combinations)

Nova’s response is to engage in a participatory research and development process with low-income households in order to gain deeper insight into the real-life nature of the above interactions. A thorough understanding of these interactions is a prerequisite for developing and promoting innovative solutions that comply with the highest criteria of excellence. That is the contribution Nova wants to make to a healthy household culture in Southern Africa.

Strategic focus: The importance of the household

The institution in Africa that does the most to care and provide for vulnerable members of society such as orphans, jobless individuals, sick people, the elderly, and all those in need is not the state, neither the church, nor non-governmental organisations, but the family!

At Nova we believe that the family constitutes a strategically vital social system in the African context. One of the best ways to combat poverty is to focus on households in the local context. We consider the household as a micro-system consisting of a number of interdependent sub systems; it includes the household members as conscious human beings, the physical features of the site and dwelling and all products and artefacts used. We believe that the best chance to improve the quality of care of the large numbers of vulnerable people in Africa is to find ways to empower households to function more effectively.

Nova's phased approach

The phased approach, which can also be seen as a learning curve, could be explained as follows:

First phase: All the role players participating in the project must reach consensus on the aims and procedures to be followed.
Second phase: Researchers and experts from different backgrounds and a representative number of household members from a particular community put their heads together to reach consensus, firstly, on what the needs and problems are, and secondly, to decide together what the best possible solutions are to solve those problems, arranged in a priority list.
Phase Three: The most promising solutions are implemented on a small scale, evaluated, improved and iterated again, until one of them complies with all the set criteria.
Phase Four: The solution that complies with the criteria is implemented in one community and evaluated and improved again, if necessary.
Phase Five: The solution is implemented in the whole target community through the network of implementation partners.

ACHIEVEMENTS

The validity of our approach was first proved when Nova developed a successful method to reduce air pollution caused by domestic coal burning. This method was called Basa Magogo by the community of eMbalenhle near Secunda, South Africa. Nova has implemented the method widely, and succeeded in verifying the resultant reduction of greenhouse gasses. Nova is now trading significant quantities of carbon credits generated in our Basa Magogo projects.

Nova established the Functional Household Programme (FHP) jointly with the Faculty of Theology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. This FHP received the THRIP Excellence Award for work with a social significance from the South African Minister of Trade and Industry in 2005.

DIRECTORS

Executive

Dr Attie van Niekerk
Dr Christiaan Pauw

Dr Montagu Murray

Non-executive

Rev Sello Maboea

Mr Jan Coetzee
Mrs Gwendoline Mokoena