Our Story/ Inspiration 

We the co-founders have extensive experience working in donor funded projects in low income settings. Although the work was rewarding because of the high social impact, funding became increasingly erratic and reduced significantly. Despite the dwindling of funds, the donor expectations remained the same and sometimes increased. The available funds did not match the expected outcomes. Further, alot of the donors’ priorities did not match the local needs. Some promising technologies, such as the electronic medical records (EMR), failed to be executed well; we developed new shiny products that seemed to be rejected by the end users. In essence, there was a mismatch of priorities and needs, increased expectations in the midst of a decline in funding, and failure to sustain new technologies and service delivery models. As a result,many non-governmental organizations were under pressure to transform their business models; many of them desired to transition to profitable enterprises with a social mission but had no clear roadmap for that change.

We drew on our previous experiences to push for a revolution in problem solving in communities that had little financial muscle. We conducted several creativity workshops to brainstorm new products and services that matched with the needs and resources of these communities. The communities were transformed from passive recipients of aid to agents of change. Our dream was to harness the often-implicit knowledge existing in communities to generate solutions that fit their situations and could be sustained with whatever resources were locally available. We registered Buni Banda, a not-for - profit organization to deliver this dream after a decade of applying human centered design in our work.