It comes without saying that maybe not enough post-mortems (although this is more of a resource, as the inaglobe concept/vision lives on) are written about attempts of anything in particular. inaglobe has been an initiative looking to shift the paradigm in the way we build technologies. Inspired by initiatives such as that of Mpesa or how the mobile phone leapfrogged cable telephone in Africa, inaglobe was looking to educate a new type of engineers and innovators by building a capacity to collaborate productively with beneficiaries in resource-constrained contexts.
inaglobe saw its intervention point within technical universities, where engineers gained their first set of professional skills and tackled the big question: what will I be? what will I do? inaglobe provided students with collaborative, curricular, project-based learning. In practice, through a network of grassroots initiatives, we collected problems/technology voids that students could tackle in their project-based modules. We leveraged the motivation that students and academics had to do meaningful work, and the necessity that humanitarian agents had for technologies that were tailored to their contexts. inaglobe was founded by the same students experiencing this frustration.
After almost 7 years of iterations, we have decided to put the project in an operational pause. The reason for this is because despite having Product-Solution fit, inaglobe hasn’t managed to establish a form of financial sustainability that allows for it to operate. In short, we couldn’t find Product-Market fit. It sounds a little contradictory to say that we had a solution if we never found the market, but the point is that inaglobe could have continued to operate entirely bootstrapped (and there are countless systems, policies and projects that are more financially expensive than the money they return directly - eg. health care and educational systems – ultimately the societal benefit outweighs the cost of running them) because students will chose to work on an inaglobe project rather than on the original types of projects that they were presented. However, inaglobe has not been able to find a paying customer, or a funding body interested in keeping the programme alive.
The purpose behind this resource is to enable anyone to pick up the work that was done and make use of it for either the same set of problem statements or new ones. inaglobe was an ambitious platform project with an extremely difficult execution, and thus we see this as just our contribution to something that will eventually need to happen, and so the more we share the faster we can get there.