2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Jugaad, the Indian subaltern practice of innovating, improvising, and hacking solutions under conditions of scarcity (Rai, 2015), embodies attributes that challenge Western-centric models of technological design (Radjou et al. 2012). While business studies often celebrate jugaad as “frugal innovation,” this paper employs it as an analytical framework grounded in its postcolonial dimensions, highlighting how innovation emerges under conditions of limited resources, absence of infrastructure, poverty, and through creative forces that exist outside the traditional laboratory.

Building on this framework, the paper examines an ongoing humanitarian engineering initiative in which students from US and Tanzanian universities collaborate annually on rural development projects in Kasisa Village, Tanzania. This paper followed a team within this initiative that worked to design a sustainable sanitation system for Kasisa Village.

The analysis shows that the project’s distinctive feature was the close collaboration between students and community members during prototyping and testing, which pushed innovation to occur within constraints of resource scarcity, low cost, reliance on local materials, and the need for long-term maintainability. The case also highlighted specific moments where students, working alongside community members, engaged in improvisation that moved beyond technical fixes toward everyday negotiations of locally available resources. Designs were adapted with what was at hand, and students learned directly from community practices. Community participation not only shaped the toilet prototypes but also drove jugaad methodologies of embracing frugality, maximizing available resources, and improvising under constraints.

There are two major contributions of the paper. First, it demonstrates how participatory practices acted as a catalyst for jugaad, pushing engineering students who are trained in conventional, resource-abundant, and standardized models of design to adopt approaches grounded in frugality, adaptability, and contextual responsiveness. Working closely with community members required students to move beyond the logics of efficiency that dominate modern engineering education and engage in locally attuned problem-solving. Second, the paper contributes to postcolonial STS by applying jugaad, a concept rooted in innovation under scarcity, to an African case study. While scholars have critiqued jugaad’s appropriation within capitalist discourses of “frugal innovation,” this analysis shows that it can travel across geographies without losing its critical and situated potential. Such a reorientation decolonizes engineering education by foregrounding community-driven practices and inviting engineers to rethink assumptions about expertise, durability, and design.