Practical Action
As part of the Institute’s Climate Change Policy, CIAT is practising to be carbon neutral, if it is unable to do so then the Institute will be offsetting its carbon emissions. For this, CIAT is working with an organisation called Practical Action, a UK-based registered development charity with offices worldwide.
CIAT has donated a sum of money towards a project in Peru, which safeguards parts of the Amazon rainforest around the settlements of the local people. Instead of having to cut down trees to make a living, CIAT and Practical Action are helping local farmers to create stable and sustainable farms.
Practical Action is an international development agency working with poor communities to help them choose and use technology to improve their lives for today and generations to come. Our work in Africa, Asia and Latin America is in partnership with poor people and their communities, building on their own knowledge and skills to come up with innovation, sustainable and practical solutions. Our work is people focused, locally relevant, environmentally sensitive and offers tangible ways out to poverty. Through our work we demonstrate alternatives, share knowledge and influence change.
Practical Action was founded in 1966 by the radical economist EF Schumacher, author of ‘Small is Beautiful’, and has built up a reputation as a respected organisation that leads the sector on issues of technology and poverty reduction.
Practical Action has locally-staffed offices and full-scale regional programmes in East and Southern Africa, Latin America and South Asia, and country programmes in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sudan.
Practical Action’s vision is of ‘a world free of poverty and injustice, in which technology is used to the benefit of all’. We believe poor people should be able to access, secure and use technologies that are vital to their livelihoods.
Practical Action aims to help eradicate poverty in developing countries by developing and using technologies, and by demonstrating results, sharing knowledge and influencing others. To achieve this, Practical Action focuses its efforts, skills and resources around four themes.
• Reducing vulnerability
To strengthen the ability of poor women and men to use technology to cope with threats to their livelihoods from natural disasters, environmental degradation and civil conflict.
• Making markets work for poor people
To enable poor women and men to use technologies effectively in systems of production, processing and marketing to build secure livelihoods.
• Improving access to infrastructure services
To improve the access of poor women and men to locally managed infrastructure services.
• Responding to new technologies
To enable poor women and men to assess and respond to the challenges of new technologies and to develop and adopt applications that improve their livelihoods.