Cristobal Escalona - Rural Innovation and Sustainable Development in Chile

Rural Road to Health

Cristobal Escalona is the director at Balloon Lab at Ballon Latam, a social enterprise supporting rural innovation and sustainable development in rural areas of Chile.

Episode summary:

01.00 Cristobal tells us about his professional background and how he started working with rural communities.

07.45 What is Balloon Latam and where did the idea originate from?

14.00 Why are the activities of Balloon Latam needed in Chile?

19.40 How does social entrepreneurship build social capital and encourage social participation?

26.30 What are some of the big challenges that they are trying to tackle and how are they approaching them?

35.30 What is the index for community resilience?

44.55 What new initiatives is Balloon Latam working on?

49.10 How is health and wellbeing being addressed in rural areas of Chile?

Key messages:

Balloon Lab is the innovation and research department at Balloon Latam. Balloon Latam works with entrepreneurs in rural communities.

Nationally and at system level there are competing priorities. Not everybody thinks about rural communities and rural problems. It is important to create change in the communities that are at risk due to lack of investment.

Founder of Balloon Latam adapted the business model canvas to rural contexts. Working with rural entrepreneurs is just one program that the company works on.

Balloon Latam is a social enterprise and B-corp, they want to show that there can be a viable and sustainable business model and sustained impact in rural areas. They work with intangible assets such as networks and trust. As part of this work they have developed a community resilience index to make their work more tangible.

Chile has beautiful natural landscapes, the capital Santiago is very developed, this is not the case in rural areas, unfortunately Chile has a high GINI index and there are inequalities in access to wealth, health, education and transportation.

The Chilean government struggles to reach rural areas, because priorities shift, some communities are very remote or due to conflict areas. There is a need for a sustained approach to working with rural populations.

Chile is a very diverse country with different cultures, landscapes, and temperatures. It makes it difficult to create a policy that meets the needs of all those communities.

Balloon Latam brings together local entrepreneurs to help build capacity by teaching skills and it also gives them an opportunity to connect with other rural entrepreneurs. This activity in itself builds social capacity in the local community. They can then leverage these relationships and trust to build community projects and initiatives. Social capital and community engagement is built into the way that they work.

An overarching challenge in Chile are natural disasters such as flooding. These threats are happening more often and more severely. Soil is important and they are looking at how they can restore soil and promote resilience with the community sustainably.

Community based solutions that Ballon facilitates are necessary but they are not enough given the severity of the issues, however they can validate that addressing these issues are important and this can create system change.

They have been exploring ways to build community intelligence on disasters and environmental threats. It is interesting that usually the only people that participate in such exercises are qualified informats or scientists, no one has asked the community members who have lived there for a long time. It has been interesting to see what happens when they discuss the issues together and bring their different perspectives.

They do impact evaluations of their programmes to help collect evidence.

They noticed that there are no numbers on public infrastructure that is insured, how many people are trained in first aid, emergency vehicles in the ares, no quantitative measure of potential losses, no one knows how much is being spent on resilience. There was no way to calculate the impact of initiatives without this baseline. There is so much information that we need and we don’t have.

Trying to solve the gap between territorial knowledge and the GIS information that governments use to make decisions.

They created a resilience index and are now implementing it. They have just finished a pilot in one rural community which has a disaster unit. This is an outlier and positive example of community resilience.

Access to water, water sanitization and lack of water keeps coming up in their work. Chile has a desert and also lush forest areas. Water plays a vital role.

Distance, geography and access to healthcare remains a challenge in Chile for the health and wellbeing of rural people.

Balloon Lab: https://www.balloonlab.cl/

Ballon Latam: https://balloonlatam.com/en/inicio/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BalloonLatam/featured

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Rural Health Compass