On 5 March 2010 in Harare, the Southern Africa office of Practical Action ran a Manifesto roundtable. The aim was to discuss innovation, sustainability and development from their national perspective and to share their ideas with the world.

As well as forming an important part of the broader Manifesto project, the roundtable provided an opportunity for different voices to be heard and ideas to be shared in order to build a repository of information around innovation issues. The STEPS Centre was delighted to help to enable these activities.

The event was opened by Zimbabwe’s minister of Science and Technology Development Professor Henry Dzinotyiweyi. Prof Dzinotyiweyi’s opening address was widely covered in the local TV media, and stressed the importance of moving beyond goals (many of which had been identified in the Lagos Plan of Action, long before the Millennium Development Goals) to action. He saluted Practical Action as the ‘doers’ in the field.

The roundtable divided into groups discussing science and technology issues, water and sanitation, housing technologies, agricultural innovation. The results of these groups were fed back in a plenary session.

In general the STEPS Centre identified a lot of synergies with Practical Action’s five values ‘justice, democracy, empowerment, diversity and sustainability‘, many of which link to passages or ideas contained within the draft New Manifesto. Lawrence Gudza, a researcher at Practical Action Zimbabwe and the organiser of the event, produced a detailed report outlining the discussions and recommendations from the day. It is hoped that these can feed into the ongoing discussions around Zimbabwe’s science and technology strategy into the future.

>> Opening address by Prof Henry Dzinotyiweyi: transcript (PDF, 85KB) / video
>> Report by Practical Action (PDF, 500KB)
>> Video of the Roundtable: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7