Redefining Education


The fact that our world experiences persistent problems with poverty and sustainable development, despite abundant natural and informational resources, points to the fact that there is something wrong with our mainstream knowledge systems. There is something wrong with the way knowledge is generated, accessed, controlled and used in our societies.

GWIA counteracts the process of ignoring, expropriating and/or rendering invisible, knowledge generated outside of mainstream institutions. GWIA is created as a tool for grassroots groups to enhance their power by identifying, controlling and owning their own intellectual property. 

Frequently it is those who have the tools to label and disseminate experiences, rather than the innovators themselves, who become the owners of ideas. GWIA is a strategy to bring ownership back to the level of the ground, where many solutions are generated. GWIA is intended as a long term process of naming and claiming grassroots knowledge and setting up learning and transfer systems, in which grassroots women teach and disseminate their own expertise.

GWIA is an alternative to many mainstream approaches to education and capacity building It constitutes a grassroots approach to transformational knowledge and transformational education. What characterizes the grassroots approach, is that it refers to and builds on another body of knowledge and expertise than that certified in mainstream education systems. This body of knowledge is gained from everyday life, from practical experience and from a wealth of cultural and spiritual traditions It is knowledge that is often transferred in oral form and based on community relationships.

Education is seen in this perspective as connected to and benefiting the community, rather than as a commodity on the market to promote upward mobility and secure individual careers. Education is seen as a tool for empowerment, a method to understand systems that base their power on competition and exclusion, a tool to see through mystifications and intransparencies and to breach agreements based on ignorance and hidden agendas.

GWIA facilitates a process in which grassroots groups are the active shapers of their educational model. In this kind of education, knowledge building is rooted in understanding own experience and applying it to the enhancement of own priorities. Traditional supply-led approaches to education and capacity building tend to impose an outside framework on the “receivers” of information and educational programs. That the beneficiaries be aware of their own educational agenda and contribute their own knowledge is usually not foreseen. Examples of compiling and disseminating grassroots knowledge are very few in the institutional education system.

GWIA offers policy makers, doners and other partners, an opportunity to gain insight into what works on the ground and what the implications are for effective and efficient policy making. In a step by step process GWIA provides space for joint analysis of the innovations on the ground and the conditions and strategies for transfer and up-scaling.