On the occasion of a speech for a Global Happiness and Public Policy conference in Bangkok, I had a wonderful encounter with a development workers Jan Orsini, and I discovered a successfull peer to peer learning scheme, which functions without technology, but embeds all the p2p principles in its approach. Here is the description of the method, from a letter Jan just wrote to me:

Jan Orsini:

In the course of my 41 years of work with the American Peace Corps and the UN in rural development and rural employment promotion in Asia, I have developed and field tested the SUCCESS-CASE-REPLICATION (SCR) system of rural employment promotion. In this system, we locate the most successful rural enterprises or rural groups and then use these enterprises or groups to train the rural poor to replicate the successful enterprise or group activity. The training is done by the successful persons, not by government agents, and the training is conducted at the success case site, so costly training centers are not needed.

When I heard your presentation on P2P knowledge sharing, I realized that the SCR methodology is akin to P2P in that the successful rural person is passing his knowledge onto his poorer peers, often at no cost. This is certainly P2P sharing. Of course marketing limitations are the most obvious constraint in this SCR system, and we are careful to assure that the person employing SCR conduct a thorough “market capacity analysis” before undertaking training that might lead to a flooded market and falling prices for the SCR trainer as well as his trainees.

The Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) of Thailand, employs SCR throughout the country to enhance the productivity of its borrowers who have adequate financing and equipment but lack the “skills” to make the agricultural enterprise profitable enough to repay the BAAC loans. This has proven most valuable in enhancing the rate of return on their loans to their 5 million borrowers. Similarly, the Land Bank of the Philippines, making loans to cooperatives, uses SCR to replicate the successful system of “Members Savings and Loans” developed by one of their more innovative cooperatives. This has been so successful that the Land Bank almost found itself going “out of business” because the coops were able to raise their own capital for lending needs locally.”