Setting Goals for Unleash 2018

I don’t know about you, but I find myself a subscriber of herd-mentality thinking. I don’t mean the “I’ll just follow the leader” sheep-ish way of looking at the world, I mean the “when we come together, the net result of those ideas is greater than the sum of it’s parts”. So like penguins huddling together for warmth, or schools of fish evading the largest predators, when we bring our ideas together, we go much further than when we were alone.

Singapore. Home of chicken rice. Home of Unleash 2018.

Which is why I’m so excited to have been selected as an Innovator at Unleash 2018 in Singapore. What is Unleash? Unleash is an innovation lab, which brings together 1000 people together to incubate ideas for solving the world’s toughest problems. It’s a great opportunity for myself — as someone passionate about bringing technology and people together to improve lives, and it’s a great opportunity for my company Vessels Tech — as we decide where to next invest our efforts.

Moreover, I’m looking forward to meeting new people from around the world, learning about the challenges they see and face, and sharing ideas on how we might be able to solve them. I’m also really looking forward to the challenge (I do love challenges) of developing concrete business models for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in just a week (the business models that is, not the development goals).

What I’m bringing to the table

While I’ll be surrounded by many innovators from around the world — I’m not only going to be a taker. I hope to bring to the table my passion for achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6: Clean Water & Sanitation. Until recently, water hasn’t been particularly close to my heart. It all changed when I got involved with building technology solutions for a project called MARVI — which supports farmers in west India to use groundwater sustainably.

In my travels to villages in Gujarat and Rajasthan, I heard stories of crop failure. Stories of families being forced to drink unsafe water — for that was all they had to drink. And stories of farmers unable to provide water or food for their families. Groundwater scarcity is a thorny problem.

I was lucky enough to travel out to villages in rural Gujarat and Rajasthan, in the semi-arid areas of west India. We sat down with farmers and villagers whose livelihoods were at risk from groundwater scarcity. Some of these farmers told stories of crop failure. Stories of families being forced to drink unsafe water — for that was all they had to drink. And stories of farmers unable to provide water or food for their families.

You see, groundwater is a complex issue. It’s a shared resource, which anyone with a well (and a pump) can access, and use as much as they want with little oversight: a classic tragedy of the commons problem. While groundwater science is known to many well educated people in India, many of these farmers didn’t trust scientists. They didn’t know how much water they could use this year, because they hadn’t measured the rainfall over the last few years. For myself alone, this problem seemed insurmountable.

But hope was kindled when I saw my colleagues’ multidisciplinary approach to tackling groundwater scarcity. In our team, we had economists, agronomists, geologists, sociologists, and myself: a technologist. I saw that we could help these farmers and their families by giving them tools, by teaching sustainable groundwater management, and by fighting for systemic change.

So I’ll be bringing the failures, successes, learnings and everything in else from my experience over the last two years along with me to Unleash.

What I hope to achieve

I also want to set four goals for what I want to get out of my time in Singapore:

1. I want to come away with a new business idea for sustainable projects in our areas of interest, likely around Sustainable Development Goals 6 & 7. Ultimately, I’d love to start a new business, or project under my existing business out of this.
2. I hope to pick up new skills, and gain experience from the Innovation Lab, where I’m challenged to iterate on ideas and come up with solutions. Fast.
3. I look forward to meeting with like-minded individuals, experienced veterans of this space and investors. I’m sure I will be inspired by their journeys and insights.
4. I hope to eat lots of chicken rice. Lots. Of. Chicken. Rice.

I’ve got only a few weeks to go now until I fly out to Singapore. Wish me and my peers luck, and thanks to the amazing team at Unleash for having me along!

If you enjoyed this post, or have any suggestions or questions, let me know in the comments. If you liked this post, give it a ❤️ or a 👏, or whatever you crazy cats are calling it nowadays.

Cool photo of Singapore by Dan Freeman on Unsplash