A Word with Devanshi Vaid

Posted 20 August 2024 in A Word With   |   Share

EMpower’s President and CEO, Cynthia Steele, recently spoke with Devanshi Vaid, Co-founder and Director of India Development Review (IDR) and member of EMpower's India Advisory Council. They discussed the importance of cross-sector learning and sharing, democratising knowledge creation and access, and more. 

The position that you hold in our universe is unusual because of your expertise in publishing and in the thought leadership space. I'd love to hear your thoughts about how India Development Review (IDR) shapes cross-learning in the social sector as you're at the forefront.

Absolutely. We set up IDR in 2017 with the belief that there isn’t always democratic access to the wealth of knowledge residing in the social space in India. In the years before we set up IDR, we observed that while a lot of work was happening at the grassroots level in cities outside of [the big metros], Bombay, Delhi, Bangalore, or in smaller organisations, or organisations that were not working in very, “popular areas”, you didn't hear about it much. That's because the organisations that were at conferences, or published in newspapers, or that funders would talk about on big stages were usually the ones with access to more resources—be it through better connections, larger budgets and more funding, or just through their geographic locations. We really believe that there should be a way in which we can enable organisations to learn, not just from each other, but from the rest of the sector as well, and get the sector to learn from them. In addition, we want people working in health to learn from people working in education and people working in climate to learn from gender, and so on.

So, cross-learning is at the root of what we do, and we do it in a few ways. Before we started IDR, we spoke to about 100 people and asked them, “Where do you go to learn?”. Almost all of them said, “Oh, we pick up the phone and we call somebody we know”. When we asked, “Okay, so if we do this, will you read it?” they said, “No, absolutely not. Even though I really think a platform like this should exist, personally, I would still call someone before I went online”. That's the universe we were trying to crack open for people working in the sector. Currently, we publish across all thematic areas, levels of expertise, and cross sections, featuring themes such as agriculture, water, sanitation, livelihoods, etc., and then expertise in communications, monitoring and evaluation, and scaling fundraising. And then cross-sections like philanthropy, social justice, and CSR. 

We try to hack the user experience in a couple of ways. One is that we tell people how much time it will take them to read the piece. This has meant that people read us on their way to work, sometimes during lunch break, and sometimes before they get up on a panel to quickly see what's going on. Thankfully, this has increased the number of people who engage with/spend time on the website and who read what we're putting out. 

Most of what we do is pay a lot of attention to the voices that we're platforming. I believe that knowledge is power and that democratising who can contribute to the knowledge and who accesses that knowledge can drive fundamental change. IDR ensures that we are showcasing voices from marginalised communities across geography, gender, sexuality, caste, class, religion, disability, etc., and then we try to amplify those voices in the corridors of power. We have heard from many donors who read us that the sections of the website they spend the most time on are the ones that directly have people from communities talking about their lived experiences. We often hear from people who are trying to build careers in the sector that the voices they end up reading more are of people whom they are trying to reach out to build connections with or learn from so that they can understand what kind of leader they want to be, or what kind of space they want to work in, in that sector.

We also try to spend substantial time publishing about intersections. We will talk about climate, but we will also talk about disability, and we will talk about health, but we'll talk about tribal health and by doing that, we also look for authors who haven't been published much before and give them access to our reach.

I think we are on the journey to where we want to be. In the last 7 years, we have covered a multitude of voices, lived experiences, and stories from people who have been historically marginalised. Dissemination is important because if we ask people to trust us as a platform that showcases their voices, we want to ensure that it reaches as many people as possible. Currently, our reach fluctuates between 18-20 million people a month across students, policymakers, donors, people who work in CSR, non-profit middle management, and leaders and people who work in academia. We keenly track if they are consuming content only from their peers or if they are going out and looking for things that they might not have heard about and people they might not have heard from. 

I would say this approach is working, as IDR articles have led to collaborations, decisions, and funding. Not only have they influenced policy at an organisational level but also on a much smaller scale of influence, government policy, too. The last thing I'll say about this is that everything we publish is under a Creative Commons License, so anyone can pick it up and use it as long as they give us and the authors credit. As a result, we spend some time pushing our articles out and pitching them to mainstream media platforms. We have a third of our articles in English that currently get republished and this can be from the Times of India to The Wire to Scroll. We're trying to say we don't own this, that we are just putting out expertise that already exists; we aren't the experts. We just really think you should know about it; the more people that know about it, the better. 

I love these approaches! Like IDR’s mission to expand knowledge sources and users, we too aim to catalyse more cross-learning amongst our grantee partners, knowing that they hold so much wisdom and how valuable it is for them to cross-share. I'd love to get your thoughts about what more EMpower could do in that area.

Well, honestly, this question always makes me a little happy and sums me up a little, too, because I want more funders to learn from EMpower. I am so thrilled to have a small role to play in this journey that you're on because I really do believe in the work that the organisation does, but I think more than the work that you do, or maybe equal to the work that you do, it's really about how you do it. The giving philosophies that EMpower follows and the intentionality and the self-reflexivity that EMpower seems to have, I don't see it a lot. I think the funder learning appetite is rather large right now, and I would love to figure out how EMpower can tap into this. This tapping in, for me, is less about the tangible ways in which EMpower shares its learnings (be it through a newsletter or conferences, etc.) but more about how, as an organisation, EMpower learns to centre its insights just as much as it centres the communities it works with. What would it look like to own the knowledge that you've built over all these years as a funder and to say that there is value in this and you could learn from us, and we're going to show you how? There's just so much there and I think there's something to be said about putting it out. Maybe brag a little. Definitely, brag a little.  

Speaking of humble bragging, one of my colleagues came across the word “humbition” in an article - the combination of humbleness and ambition. Love this concept – hold onto humility, an important part of our value system and our DNA, but also to use our voice and knowledge to create more change for and by young people. 

Devanshi, thank you for this time –  I am super excited to have you with us.