I was chatting with a friend of mine yesterday evening on Facebook. She contacted me because she was very interested in participating in the TechChange courses that I wrote about in my last blog post.
Her first question – ‘Are the courses only available in English.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but TechChange is just getting started. It’s quite possible that in the future they could offer courses in other languages.’
‘OK,’ said my friend, ‘that’s great. We’ll be waiting for that.’
Now, my friend speaks enough English that she could get something out of these courses, but there are other factors that seemed to her even more difficult to surmount. And the sad thing is that these other factors are internal factors.
1) On-line purchasing
‘Our problem with registering for the courses,’ said my friend, ‘is that they cost $250/$350….’
Hm, I thought, ‘So the cost is too high?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘the cost is fine. But here [at our organization] we are not allowed to purchase anything online. Purchasing on-line is considered EXTREME POSSIBILITY FOR FRAUD.’ Then she laughed ‘jajajaja.’ I imagine it was a bitter and frustrated laugh.
So here my friend has a budget and great interest in being trained, but can’t sign up because at her organization, they are not allowed to make on-line purchases.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Do you want me to send an email or something to vet the organization?’
‘Nope,’ she said. ‘It’s just their policy. You can’t purchase on-line. Not even if it’s much cheaper, it’s exactly what you want and need, and it’s not available in your country.’
2) Management buy-in
‘Oh,’ I continued. ‘Can you use your own credit card and then get the organization to reimburse you?’
‘Ay,’ my friend said. ‘No one will support us with that, especially an on-line course of this type of thing that they have never heard about and they don’t understand. These courses would be just what we need for some of our staff who are very interested in getting trained up to use some of these new tools. But it’s so hard to get management to see the utility of this.’
Then my friend wrote in all capitals ‘LINDA, YOU KNOW THIS. PLEASE FIND A WAY TO COME AND HELP US WITH ICTS! We need to know this and no one in our management believes it’s useful to our work.’
She continued, ‘We’re only at the beginning of this. We (staff) know only the very basics. We have funds for training but we can’t get anyone to see that this [ICTs] is a priority. Ay, it’s all very complex.’
3) Blocking social media sites
We kept chatting. She said ‘oh, ja ja, and please write your blog in other languages so we can share it around. We need to be updated on these things. At least we are allowed to access blogs.’
‘I will try…’ I said.
‘Do you know,’ she said ‘We can’t access any social media sites from the office. They are all blocked. We have a YouTube channel but none of us can watch it at the office. Someone created a Twitter account but all staff are blocked from Twitter and Facebook at the office. Not even our managers can access it. If we want to see anything we have to go to an Internet cafe or to have Internet at home.’
Argh.
I understand that there are risks to purchasing on-line, and I understand that some staff might abuse social media if they are free to use at work, and I understand that there are bandwidth issues in some countries, but this conversation made me very sad.
My friend works at a decent-sized organization and I assume this must be the policy across the organization. I wonder if the organization has considered that its policies are cutting into its own ability to advance its own cause and its own development work in today’s world.
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Wait... What? 
Many things to comment in this post. Let me share with you (and your friend) one I have just discovered, in order to see if it could work for other people. My University has forbidden access for Facebook (I know, I know…). With a friend we discovered that if you write the url with an extra S, that is https , you can use it without problems. It will work fine if you set your account in face to use ALWAYS a secure connection (this is htpps), so you have to wonder about the extra S just one time.
Good luck!! and I will try to comment other things later…
Oh this is great – thanks for the tip Pablo. Feel free to post any other ones you have discovered!
[…] Read more: Organizational barriers to ICT4D […]
Linda,
Great post (as usual)!
It’s sad as you said. But I guess if your friend is dealing with “traditional minded” management, then she can try to make the case maybe with a written proposal, based on some well-evidenced papers on ICT4D and even social media policies from some big players in development. There are some cool examples here: http://www.researchtoaction.org/social-media-strategy-and-social-media-policy-for-nonprofits/
Hope this helps.
[…] Comments « Organizational barriers to ICT4D […]
After I read the post I tweeted Linda because of how the post had resonated with my experience of local government in the UK. It has taken a while but the value of these tools and ideas are starting to be acknowledged. I think there’s some mileage in finding ways to share what we have learnt; particularly with regards making the case for unblocking.
I wrote down some of these thoughts a couple of months ago in relation to something else (http://bm.wel.by/1x), hope there’s something in what follows that is of some interest.
Although focused on equipping local government I think http://localbysocial.net/the-guide/ and http://localbysocial.net/the-foundation-of-accountability-report-of-the-local-by-social-online-conference/ are useful in providing justification and supporting the argument.
No doubt those who are blocked from it find great frustration in people citing Twitter as useful for building relationships and highlighting resources. This has made it really important for people who are mindful of that to take the trouble to blog about these things and use their social bookmarks as a way of aggregating and syndicating to those barred from tweeting.
Two in particular spring to mind @davebriggs on http://davepress.net and @danslee on http://danslee.wordpress.com.
This has been enhanced by using collaborative spaces like the Communities of Practice (http://communities.idea.gov.uk) which anybody is able to register and join. The social media and online collaboration one is particularly useful. Increasingly there is a desire for such collaborative spaces to be available within organisations with Yammer (www.yammer.com) offering a free entry level service that can provide a good basis for discussing the value of similar tools.
Wiki-based resources like 23 things (http://23things.wetpaint.com/) have also given practical guidance on how to make use of web based resources without having to access costly training.
And sharing things for free is something else that has happened quite a lot because training or events is not something we’re in a position to pay for at the moment.
The barcamp approach has given people from across the country an opportunity to come together and scheme without the premium of conference fees. These have happened on a national ‘UKGovCamp’ basis but also with a regional, or subject specific, focus.
They’re very well ‘social reported’ for those who aren’t in attendance with sites like http://ukgc.wikispaces.com/ and http://buzz.ukgovcamp.com/ pulling that content together. This highlights the value of recognising not everybody who would like to be somewhere, can get there although it places a burden of responsibility on you to find ways to share anyway.
Something else that has been used to good effect have been webinars (either free or at a much lower cost) and perhaps that approach is one that has a greater relevance to the international context?
Learningpool are an excellent source of resources and their webinar archive might be worth considering (http://www.learningpool.com/events/index.php/webinars).It may also be that their MyLearningPool platform is a much more cost effective way of accessing some of this training – http://www.mylearningpool.com/.
And that’s just a breathless skim through some of the things that have first sprung to mind.
These are definitely the institutional challenges that we are trying to overcome. We are experimenting with a new kind of tech training that takes advantage of the affordability and access that online courses provide. As we work to innovate new methods of eLearning we want to focus on capacity building before we can scale. We are eager to offer support for multiple languages and will do so after we have experimented and tweeked with the course long enough to feel comfortable to do so.
In regards to management buy-in, we only hope that these classes can legitimize the growing movement of using ICT’s for international development and social change. If there is a group of individuals at an organization interested in getting trained on the subject then we would gladly have a discussion with the employer to help them understand the value of these tools. Luckily the use of technology in the developing world is practically on an exponential trajectory and it won’t take long before these tools are commonplace. At TechChange we want to help others leverage them effectively and take advantage of them in the best way possible.
Thanks for your response Tom – I’m really glad you’ll have courses in other languages soon and that you can support people whose managers need a bit of convincing!
[…] Raftree just put up an excellent post on her blog entitled ”Organizational Barriers to ICT4D“. In it she highlights a number of ways in which organizational rules and practices make it […]
Oh I was about to add the httpS tip but I see someone has beaten me to it!
httpS httpS httpS is woooooonderful.