Case Study: Maharashtra Change Lab — Part 1
Introduction
The Maharashtra Change Lab Series
This is the first part of a series which examines a first generation social lab — Maharashtra Change Lab. The series will be five parts which cover learnings gained about the lab’s design & set up, collective intelligence, lab teams and the importance of context & culture.
The Maharashtra Lab forged the Bhavishya Alliance which was a multi-stakeholder commitment to combatting malnutrition in India.
What follows is an abridged version of the full chapter which explores each heading more deeply. Sign up below to get the full chapter and ebook when it is released.
The Impact Of The Lab
- Contributed to reduction in stunting among children under two in Maharastra, the main manifestation of under-nutrition — research showed a fall from 39% to 23% over the approximate time period of the partnership.
- Succeeded in scaling up innovations beyond pilot stage
- Created a unique, multi-stakeholder partnership
- Introduced a groundbreaking model for problem solving
- Shifted stakeholder engagement practices within partner organizations
You can delve deeper into these and read the full reports on Bhavishya Alliance’s website.
The Need For A Lab
In 2006, 47% of India’s 414 million children under the age of six had some form of malnutrition. That’s 194.6 million children who were malnourished.
Malnutrition is a complex problem. The sheer diversity of contexts meant that no blanket approach to malnutrition can be implemented. Or rather, that no single approach would succeed.
A Container For Impact
The Change Lab set out to create a vehicle for collaborative impact work, with main focuses including prototyping solutions, forming strong relationships and building capabilities for ongoing impact. The Change Lab Secretariat Team was led by Zaid Hassan.
The first generation Lab operated across approximately 50 weeks with 30 people from diverse organisations, skills and backgrounds, and looked a bit like this:
Lab Foundation Learning
Maharashtra Change Lab was a ground breaking multi-stakeholder partnership. Founding the Lab required better understanding the basis for collaboration between diverse sectors to achieve change. New innovations in multi-stakeholder partnerships and the continued nurturing of existing Labs require new thinking to reflect on the patterns and lessons from experience gained by everyone working in the Social Labs space.
“In the face of the technocratic systems of high modernism, the paradigm of the social lab lives and dies by an idea that perhaps seem quaint in this day and age — the idea that people working together can address our most profound challenges.” — Zaid Hassan
Get The Full Case Study
This is an extract from the first chapter of the upcoming case study series on this first generation lab. If you’d like the ebook of all the chapters, sign up here to find out when it is released.
Continuing The Case Study
You can follow the Maharashtra Lab case study as it unfolds in our Social Labs collection. You can also get a collection of insights on Social Labs by joining our email newsletter or following us on twitter.
The next part of the series will be about Designing & Setting up the Change Lab.
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