Hot, Humid, and Happening — How Paraguay is Crafting Innovative Policy
Sticky notes. White boards. Markers. If it wasn’t 107° F outside, one might think that they were in Stanford’s d.school.
Instead, I find myself in the middle of a community brainstorm session in Asunción, Paraguay, more than 9,000 miles away from Stanford. Nevertheless, the same energy, passion, and creative thinking from The Farm is most certainly present in this room.
Paraguay, a small country of roughly 7 million people, is located between Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia. Known for its tereré, chipa, and Guaraní — the local indigenous language — the country has grown on average 4.5% each year between 2004 and 2017 and has remained stable while political events rock neighboring countries in Latin America.
As a Fulbright Research Scholar, I am studying country development through innovation and entrepreneurship. During this time, I have been working with the innovation team in the President’s Delivery Unit to better understand public policy challenges and help develop new strategies for addressing local problems. More than ever, citizen inclusion and listening to the voices of people in the community has become increasingly important. As such, the government of Paraguay is innovating on a new form of policymaking — namely one that is participatory and inclusive.
Thus was the impetus for the enactment of the National Innovation Strategy, signed into law by the president in August 2019. Part of this decree also mandates that the country develop a new governance strategy that will formally incorporate innovation into the government.
To identify these challenges, the team has constructed a methodology to gather the insights, sentiments, and thoughts of people in the community. To do so, there will be a series of in-person and online workshops along with an online platform, which will allow everyone from the country to submit their ideas on what they view as the most pressing challenges that Paraguay faces. At the same time, participants are also asked to submit what they believe are the relevant national capabilities for addressing these issues.
And that is where the sticky notes come in — since my arrival at the end of October, I have had the opportunity to witness several workshops hosted around the country. During these sessions, participants are invited to dream — to think big about what they want their country, Paraguay, to achieve.
During these sessions, participants are organized into smaller groups, where they identify three challenges they face along with three corresponding capacities to address these issues. The input from these workshops and from online participation is currently being gathered and analyzed both manually and with AI to determine major themes. From these themes, the innovation team alongside national and international experts will select two challenges which the country will focus on, and then develop a roadmap to develop solutions for these two issues.
The intent of this new innovative process is to not just address the two selected problems by creating a solution roadmap. It is to also build the capacity of citizens to creatively solve challenges in their community through this process of identifying common challenges and harnessing the collective resources in the country to develop new, innovative solutions that could eventually be exported to other places around the world.
My time here has been rewarding and informative — not only have I had the chance to experience the famous asados and learn Guaraní, but I have also been able to see how Paraguay is committing itself to innovative and inclusive policymaking.
For more information on Paraguay’s National Innovation Strategy, see here.
About the Author: Isabelle Foster is a Fulbright Research Scholar in Paraguay. She graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in public policy in 2018 and received her M.A. from the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program in 2019. The focus of her Fulbright research is country development through entrepreneurship and innovation, and she is currently helping the Innovation Unit within the Presidential Delivery Unit.
