Grassroots Innovation Quotes

[The Barefoot College is] the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher.

Success is created in studio apartments and garages, at kitchen tables, and in classrooms across the nation, not in government conference rooms in Washington.

For countries such as Kenya to emerge as economic powerhouses, they need better infrastructure: roads, ports, smart grids and power plants. Infrastructure is expensive, and takes a long time to build. In the meantime, hackers are building 'grassroots infrastructure,' using the mobile-phone system to build solutions that are ready for market.

Innovative, bottom-up methods will solve problems that now seem intractable—from energy to poverty to disease. Science and technology, powered by the fuel of entrepreneurial energy, are the largest multipliers of resources we have to solve our many social problems.

People who are making decisions about the future often don't have access to some of the best ideas in the company, which may be at the periphery or at lower levels.

Lagos was the ultimate dysfunctional city - but actually, in terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilised an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency.

Empowerment of individuals is a key part of what makes open source work, since in the end, innovations tend to come from small groups, not from large, structured efforts.

I want to live in a world where human beings, not corporate entities, create the future.

People on the front lines have the best ideas for how to improve things.

Skateboarding, like graffiti, will never be tamed. No matter how much they monetize it, no matter how big it gets, no matter how many companies are putting millions and millions of dollars into marketing it, it's always going to be some Mexican kid on a corner in Echo Park that changes the rules of the game.