Overview   Our Services

Solution Exchange, an initiative of the United Nations Agencies in India, is harnessing the power and passion of Communities of Practice to help attain India’s development objectives and the Millennium Development Goals by connecting the nation’s development professionals and enabling them to share, learn from each other, and collaborate.

While "expert" knowledge is often well documented, valuable tacit knowledge gained through practitioner experience is typically lost or ignored. Furthermore, practitioners can not always access knowledge they need, such as whether a particular idea was tried before or where to turn when facing a bottleneck. To harness this knowledge pool and help development practitioners avoid reinventing the wheel, the United Nations offices in India created Solution Exchange – a free, impartial space where professionals are welcome to share their knowledge and experience. Members represent a wide range of perspectives from government, NGOs, donors, private sector and academia. They are organized into Communities of Practice built around the framework of the Millennium Development Goals. Through moderated e-mail groups, members interact on an ongoing basis, building familiarity and trust, gaining in knowledge that helps them contribute more effectively – individually and collectively – to the nation’s development challenges.

Today eleven Communities are up and running: Maternal and Child Health, Water, Gender, Food & Nutrition Security, AIDS, Decentralization, Education, Work and Employment, Microfinance, ICT for Development, and Disaster Management. Since starting up in April 2005, membership has grown dramatically – between 80 to 90 a week – and currently stands at over 21,000 subscriptions (12,000 members subscribed to one or more Community) from across the country.

Our Services

Solution Exchange provides these Communities with four basic services: "Help" offers Community members solutions to questions they raise; "Comment" provides decision-makers with feedback on draft policies, programmes and projects; "Discuss" seeks insights on issues of major concern to the Community; "Collaborate" promotes small-group work to take forward members’ ideas or products. The first three services are primarily e-mail based, with a two-person team moderating each mailgroup and researching additional material. The "Collaborate" service relies on face-to-face interaction, and will soon be facilitated through collaboration software tools made available on the new Community websites.


Discussion threads from e-mail based services are synthesized into "Consolidated Replies" featuring the specific experiences and resources recommended by contributors or researched from published material, compiled into a brief but comprehensive composite of all available documented and tacit knowledge on the topic.

Solution Exchange members also can post questions to more than one Community. If a query or an e-discussion is relevant to other Communities it is "cross-posted" and the Consolidated Reply reflects the views of all contributors. The result is a unique, combined perspective from professionals that may not normally interact.

How it Works

Solution Exchange Community members are all part of a moderated mail group. A member will ask the Community for advice, experiences, examples or referrals on a topic of concern. Other members respond based on their experience and knowledge. The moderation team provides additional research. Within a fixed time period – normally 10-15 days from the Query posting – the Consolidated Reply is issued.

To illustrate how it works: In January 2006, a government official asked the then 600 members of the Maternal and Child Health Community how those working in rural communities got women to a hospital in obstetric emergencies. In three weeks, 34 members came back with 16 examples ranging from community-pooled funds for taxi services to state-subsidized transport, along with 19 supplementary references – documented case studies, research work, websites, and contacts – that was then synthesized and issued as a Consolidated Reply. Front-line health workers in villages without organized services now have a ready reference of initiatives to adapt, sources to refer to, and people to contact. So over time, one simple question on Solution Exchange could potentially lead to a drop in maternal mortality in India.

Active moderation of responses, research support, the "executive brief" format and the quick turnaround time are some of the special features of a Consolidated Reply.

As more Solution Exchanges are established in developing countries around the world, a global "knowledge repository" of indexed Consolidated Replies will provide practitioners everywhere with access to valuable contacts, knowledge and experiences, offering, as our tag line says, wider choices and smarter development.

Solution Exchange is, very simply, the only business model available today that combines three critical dimensions in a manner that adds value to the benefits of each:

• Communities of Practice, to build connections and expand the pool of available knowledge
• A Research Service, freely available to development practitioners, and not just to Fortune 500 companies
• UN Association, giving Solution Exchange its impartiality and global reach. The model is also easily replicable and scalable, taking advantage of the presence of UN Country Teams in over 130 developing countries globally.

Solution Exchange is one of a new generation of organizational concepts that works on the basis of collaborative, trust-based relationships, rather than traditional hierarchy-based relationships. It taps into the power of Communities of Practice – connecting people having common interests and goals, building trust and expanding their scope for working effectively, both individually and collectively as a group. It is a new, highly appropriate role for the agencies of the United Nations, drawing on the UN’s convening power, global reach, areas of specialized competence, and MDG mandate.