The Naive View of Impact

If you want to think seriously about impact, it is perhaps important to call out what a naive view of impact could look like.

For the books Bill Gates recommends and the work he oversees at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, I imagine he has a more sophisticated mental model of how smallholders adapt to climate change. This is perhaps an exception. Image Credits: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Social Feeds.

It embodies what Yuval Noah Harari calls “The Naive View of Information” in his latest book Nexus (It’s a lovely book!)

“The naive view argues that by gathering and processing much more information than individuals can, big networks achieve a better understanding of medicine, physics, economics, and numerous other fields, which makes the network not only powerful but also wise.” - Yuval Noah Harari

Sorry, Mr. Gates.!

We cannot help the world’s two billion smallholders (farmers) adapt to climate change quickly if everybody in the agriculture sector has access to quality information.

Lack of Information was never the bottleneck in the first place. From my field travels across the length of the country I can assure you that Whatsapp and YouTube have democratized quality information beyond our wildest imagination.

Smallholder Farmers are stuck in a hamster’s wheel because there is a convenient arrangement out there to absorb the principal risk of agriculture through incumbent mechanisms that incentivize their status quo.

If we want smallholder farmers to adapt towards climate-wise behaviours that are friendly to the planet, we would need to design contexts that rethink their relationship with risk and enable them with risk infrastructure (transition financing), physical infrastructure and digital public infrastructure (in that order of priority) that could help them better adapt to climate change.

We will talk more about designing contexts for adaptation in 2025!