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Real lives, real choices: 142 girls and 8 MDGs

Posted in children, development, gender, girls, MDG, tagged Because I am a Girl, cohort, equity, marginalized, MDGs, not reaching, Plan, real choices, real lives, study on September 21, 2010| 1 Comment »

I have a daughter. She was born at home with a traditional midwife in a poor barrio in San Salvador. Her father had a 9th grade education when we got married. She had severe diarrhea at least 3 times as a baby and we worried that she might not make it. My mother-in-law took her to a traditional healer because the doctors didn’t seem to be getting it right. She had pneumonia twice as a baby, probably due to allergies, air pollution and the chickens my mother-in-law kept in the small house. She had dengue once. The water didn’t always run and people stored water in open barrels, so there were a lot of mosquitoes.

Luckily her father returned to school to finish his education. Luckily her mother and her mother’s mother were well educated. Luckily both of her parents worked, so there was enough money to feed and clothe her. Luckily we had a bit of savings that we invested in a small cement block house. Luckily we lived in a city, near a primary school. Luckily we were able to get a telephone installed around the time she was born. Luckily our barrio had electricity and we could afford to pay for it. Luckily we believed that she was just as worthy as her brother. Luckily today she is alive and thriving and in school, with a myriad of possibilities ahead of her.

Girls all over the world should be so lucky.

I’m reading the ‘Real Choices, Real Lives‘ cohort study that Plan just put out as part of the annual Because I am a Girl report (which launches Sept 22). It tells the stories of 142 girls in 9 countries (Brazil, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Benin, Togo, Uganda, Cambodia, Philippines and Vietnam) that researchers have been following since they were born. The girls will all turn 5 this year, except for the 5 girls whose lives have already been claimed by preventable diseases. 7 of the girls have dropped out of the study due to family migration or other reasons.

As powerful world leaders gather in New York this week to discuss accelerating progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, this report is a sobering and intimate reminder of the real inequalities girls, especially the poorest girls, face, and the struggles their family go through to keep them alive and help them to thrive. The cohort study tells us that primary school enrollment rates in Sub Saharan Africa are up from 58% in 1990 to 76% in 2008, but in the poorest 20% of households, 39% of girls don’t attend school. The cohort study shows us, through the stories of the 130 girls who are still part of the cohort group, the very real impact on very real lives that failure to reach the MDGs has. The reality is that the poorest girls do not have what they need to survive, develop and participate fully.

What will happen this week in New York to change that?

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11 concerns about ICTs and ‘social media for social good’

Posted in development, disaster and emergencies, ICT4D, ICTs, mobile and technology, m4D, MDG, participation, politics, protection, random, musing or confusing, smart aid, social media, tagged aid, bad, cause campaign, concerns, development, hinder, ICT, ICT4D, mashable, risk, slacktivism, social good, social media on September 18, 2010| 17 Comments »

Coming from the viewpoint that accountability and transparency, citizen engagement and public debate are critical for good development, I posted yesterday on 5 ways that ICTs can support the MDGs. I got to thinking I would be remiss not to also post something on ways that ICTs (information and communication technologies) and poor or questionable use of ICTs and social media can hinder development.

It’s not really the fault of the technology. ICTs are tools, and the real issues lie behind the tools — they lie with people who create, market and use the tools. People cannot be separated from cultures and societies and power and money and politics. And those are the things that tend to hinder development, not really the ICTs themselves. However the combination of human tendencies and the possibilities ICTs and social media offer can can sometimes lead us down a shaky path to development or actually cause harm to the people that we are working with.

When do I start getting nervous about ICTs and social media for social good?

1) When the hype wins out over the real benefits of the technology. Sometimes the very idea of a cool and innovative technology wins out over an actual and realistic analysis of its impact and success. Here I pose the cases of the so-called Iran Twitter Revolution and One Laptop per Child (and I’ll throw in Play Pumps for good measure, though it’s not an ICT project, it’s an acknowledged hype and failure case). There are certainly other excellent examples. So many examples in fact that there are events called Fail Faires being organized to discuss these failures openly and learn how to avoid them in the future.

2) When it’s about the technology, not the information and communications needs. When you hear someone say “We want to do an mHealth project” or “We need to have a Facebook page” or “We have a donor who wants to give us a bunch of mobile phones–do you know of something we can do with them?” you can be pretty sure that you have things backwards and are going to run into trouble down the road, wasting resources and energy on programs that are resting on weak foundations. Again, we can cite the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative, where you have a tool, but the context for using it isn’t there (connectivity, power, teacher training and content). There is debate whether OLPC was a total failure or whether it paved the way for netbooks, cheap computers and other technologies that we use today. I’ll still say that the grand plan of OLPC: a low-cost laptop for every child leading to development advances; had issues from the start because it was technology led.

3) When technology is designed from afar and parachuted in. If you don’t regularly involve people who will use your new technology, in the context where you’re planning for it to be used, you’re probably going to find yourself in a bind. True for ICTs and for a lot of other types of innovations out there. There’s a great conversation on Humanitarian Design vs. Design Imperialism that says it all. ICTs are no different. Designing information and communication systems in one place and imposing them on people in another place can hinder their uptake and/or waste time and money that could be spent in other ways that would better contribute to achieving development goals.

4) When the technology is part of a larger hidden agenda. I came across two very thought-provoking posts this week: one on the US Government’s Internet Freedom agenda and another from youth activists in the Middle East and North Africa region who criticize foundations and other donors for censoring their work when it doesn’t comply with US foreign policy messages. Clearly there are hidden political agendas at work which can derail the use of ICTs for human rights work and build mistrust instead of democracy. Another example of a potential hidden agenda is donation of proprietary hardware and software by large technology companies to NGOs and NGO consortia in order to lock in business (for example mHealth or eHealth) and prevent free and open source tools from being used, and which end up being costly to maintain, upgrade and license in the long-term.

5) When tech innovations put people and lives at risk. I’d encourage you to read this story about Haystack, a software hyped as a way to circumvent government censorship of social media tools that activists use to organize. After the US government fast-tracked it for use in Iran, huge security holes were found that could put activists in great danger. In our desire to see things as cool, cutting edge, and perhaps to be seen as cool and cutting edge ourselves, those of us suggesting and promoting ICTs for reporting human rights abuses or in other sensitive areas of work can cause more harm than we might imagine. It’s dangerous to push new technologies that haven’t been properly piloted and evaluated. It’s very easy to get caught up in coolness and forget the nuts and bolts and the time it takes to develop and test something new.

6) When technologists and humanitarians work in silos. A clear example of this might be the Crisis Camps that sprung up immediately after the Haiti Earthquakes in 2010. The outpouring of good will was phenomenal, and there were some positive results. The tech community got together to see how to help, which is a good thing. However the communication between the tech community and those working on the ground was not always conducive to developing tech solutions that were actually helpful. Here is an interesting overview by Ethan Zuckerman of some of the challenges the Crisis Commons faced. I remember attending a Crisis Camp and feeling confused about why one guy was building an iPhone application for local communities to gather data. Cool application for sure, but from what people I knew on the ground were saying, most people in local communities in Haiti don’t have iPhones. With better coordination among the sectors, people could put their talents and expertise to real use rather than busy work that makes them feel good.

7) When short attention spans give rise to vigilante development interventions. Because most of us in the West no longer have a full attention span (self included here), we want bite sized bits of information. But the reality of development is complicated, complex and deep. Social media has been heralded as a way to engage donors, supporters and youth; as a way to get people to help and to care. However the story being told has not gotten any deeper or more realistic in most cases than the 30 second television commercials or LiveAid concerts that shaped perceptions of the developing world 25 years ago. The myth of the simple story and simple solution propagates perhaps even further because of how quickly the message spreads. This gives rise to public perception that aid organizations are just giant bureaucracies (kind of true) and that a simple person with a simple idea could just go in and fix things without so much hullabaloo (not the case most of the time). The quick fix culture, supported and enhanced by social media, can be detrimental to the public’s patience with development, giving rise to apathy or what I might call vigilante development interventions — whereby people in the West (cough, cough, Sean Penn) parachute into a developing country or disaster scene to take development into their own hands because they can’t understand why it’s not happening as fast as the media tells them it should.

8 ) When DIY disregards proven practice. In line with the above, there are serious concerns in the aid and development community about the ‘amateurization’ of humanitarian and development work. The Internet allows people to link and communicate globally very easily. Anyone can throw up a website or a Facebook page and start a non-profit that way, regardless of their understanding of the local dynamics or good development practices built through years of experience in this line of work. Many see criticism from development workers as a form of elitism rather than a call for caution when messing around in other people’s lives or trying to do work that you may not be prepared for or have enough understanding about. The greater awareness and desire to use ‘social media for social good’ may be a positive thing, but it may also lead to good intentions gone awry and again, a waste of time and resources for people in communities, or even harm. There’s probably no better example of this phenomenon than #1millionshirts, originally promoted by Mashable, and really a terrible idea. See Good Intents for discussion around this phenomenon and tools to help donors educate themselves.

9) When the goal is not development but brand building through social media. Cause campaigns have been all the rage for the past several years. They are seen as a way for for-profit companies and non-profits to join together for the greater good. Social media and new ICTs have helped this along by making cause campaigns cheap and easy to do. However many ‘social media for social good’ efforts are simply bad development and can end up actually doing ‘social harm’. Perhaps a main reason for some of the bad ideas is that most social media cause campaigns are not actually designed to do social good. As Mashable says, through this type of campaign, ‘small businesses can gain exposure without breaking the bank, and large companies can reach millions of consumers in a matter of hours.’ When ‘social good’ goals are secondary to the ‘exposure for my brand’ goals, I really question the benefits and contribution to development.

10) When new media increases voyeurism, sensationalism or risk. In their rush to be the most innovative or hard-hitting in the competition for scarce donor dollars, organizations sometimes expose communities to child protection risks or come up with cutesy or edgy social media ideas that invade and interrupt people’s lives; for example, ideas like putting a live web camera in a community so that donors can log on 24/7 and see what’s happening in a ‘real live community.’ (This reminds me a bit of the Procrastination Pit’s 8 Cutest and Weirdest Live Animal Cams). Or when opportunities for donors to chat with people in communities become gimmicks and interrupt people in communities from their daily lives and work. Even professional journalists sometimes engage in questionable new media practices that can endanger their sources or trivialize their stories. With the Internet, stories stick around a lot longer and travel a lot farther and reach their fingers back to where they started a lot more easily than they used to. Here I will suggest two cases: Nick Kristof’s naming and fully identifying a 9-year-old victim of rape in the DRC and @MacClelland’s ‘live tweeting’ for Mother Jones of a rape survivor’s visit to the doctor in Haiti.

Update: Feb 22, 2011 – adding a 10a!

10a) When new media and new technologies put human rights activists at risk of identification and persecution. New privacy and anonymity issues are coming up due to the increasing ubiquity of video for human rights documenting. This was clearly seen in the February 2011 uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain and elsewhere. From Sam Gregory’s excellent piece on privacy and anonymity in the digital age: “In the case of video (or photos), a largely unaddressed question arises. What about the rights to anonymity and privacy for those people who appear, intentionally or not, in visual recordings originating in sites of individual or mass human rights violations? Consider the persecution later faced by bystanders and people who stepped in to film or assist Neda Agha-Soltan as she lay dying during the election protests in Iran in 2009. People in video can be identified by old-fashioned investigative techniques, by crowd-sourcing (as with the Iran example noted above…) or by face detection/recognition software. The latter is now even built into consumer products like the Facebook Photos, thus exposing activists using Facebook to a layer of risk largely beyond their control.”

11) When ICTs and new media turn activism to slacktivism. Quoting from Evgeny Morozov, “slacktivism” is the ideal type of activism for a lazy generation: why bother with sit-ins and the risk of arrest, police brutality, or torture if one can be as loud campaigning in the virtual space? Given the media’s fixation on all things digital — from blogging to social networking to Twitter — every click of your mouse is almost guaranteed to receive immediate media attention, as long as it’s geared towards the noble causes. That media attention doesn’t always translate into campaign effectiveness is only of secondary importance.” Nuff said.

I’ll leave you with this kick-ass Le Tigre Video: Get off the Internet.… knowing full well that I’m probably the first one who needs to take that advice.

‘It feels so 80s… or early 90s… to be political… where are my friends? GET OFF THE INTERNET, I’ll meet you in the streets….’

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5 ways ICTs can support the MDGs

Posted in children, development, ICT4D, ICTs, mobile and technology, m4D, mapping, participation, politics, protection, smart aid, social media, youth, youth media, tagged accountability, achieve, computer, data, ICT4D, ICTs, information, mapping, MDGs, millennium development goals, mobile, transparency on September 17, 2010| 7 Comments »

I’ll be speaking on a panel called ICT4D, Innovations and the MDGs next week during UN Week in New York and another on Girls and Mobiles hosted by Mobile Active. So, I’ve been putting together my thoughts around girls, child rights, ICTs and the MDGs. The angle I’m taking is not from the large donor, top down, huge institutional program side, but instead, looking at examples from the work I’ve been closest to over the past few years at the community and district level, mostly focused on child and youth participation in the development process. Check my MDGs through a child rights lens post for more background.

My last post (3 ways to integrate ICTs into your development organization) uses Hannah Beardon’s framework to discuss how organizations can integrate ICTs into their work. Hannah suggests that ICTs can be integrated directly(providing access to ICTs), strategically (using ICTs as tools to support development processes) and indirectly (using ICTs to improve efficiency and communication within the organization).

To complete that post, I’m listing below 5 ways that ICTs can facilitate accountability and transparency, citizen engagement, and public debate, all of which are necessary to bring about development improvements and achieve the MDGs. Obviously these are not the only ways ICTs can support the MDGs, but this post would have been miles long if I’d listed all the initiatives that are out there.

1) Engaging children and youth in the development process

An engaged and active population is a key ingredient for good development programs. Children and youth have much to offer, are directly targeted in the MDGs and many other development initiatives, offer valuable ideas and energy, and make up around half the population in many of the countries that are lagging in reaching the MDGs. ICTs can help children and youth engage in the development process and bring their ideas, opinions and voices alive at the community, district, national and global level. ‘Using new technology, new media, children and youth can claim a space that they didn’t have before. They can influence certain things, advocate on particular issues that are important to them, take ownership in communities and in leadership. ICTs excite them and encourage them to be more involved and engaged.’ Anthony Njoroge, Plan Kenya Community ICT Manager.

ICTs empower young people with skills that make them more confident and more involved at the community level.‘Using ICTs, children and youth have become more responsible because they are not waiting for adults to come in with something. Now they are designing it themselves, they are creating space for themselves and bringing their agenda to adult meetings instead of waiting to be invited in or having to work within the agenda of the adults. It used to be that you’d start working with 20 youth, you’d invite them into a community meeting. You’d see the number go down to 10, to 4, to 3, because they didn’t see any relation to themselves in the topics and the goings on. With integration of technology and the arts however, youth have a high level of interest. It’s really bringing in their opinions, their thoughts and ideas to join their voices with parents. Now they use arts and media to promote communication, dialogue on their issues and look for ways to resolve them. Before they were totally missing from the discussion, but now they are here.’ Judith Nkie, Plan Cameroon Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media Project Coordinator.

Arts and ICTs were used in the above-mentioned project as tools for youth engagement, mapping and prioritizing, research and community dialog. The media produced with the ICT tools was shared first within the community and then outside at the district, national and global levels as a way of engaging decision makers and the public in the youths’ agenda. For more on how arts and ICTs are being used in the above-mentioned project, see this post. Watch 100 videos made by youth in 6 African countries on topics they are passionate about.

GPS work in Kwale, Kenya

2) Identifying resources and mapping patterns for better decision-making

Tracking and visualizing information is an excellent way to improve decision-making capacity. The advent of simpler and open source participatory digital mapping tools allows community members to map their communities digitally and to have more ownership of the information. Mapping helps identify patterns that may not have been visible before. Local maps shared on-line allow local people to provide their own information from their own perspective, and that information serves multiple purposes at the local level and beyond.

Digital mapping can be helpful when governments decentralize. Municipalities are mapping resources as well as projects and interventions. District authorities can track their own initiatives and those by local and international organizations to avoid duplication of efforts and wasted resources. When maps are public, the population can better demand answers about where resources are being allocated and why. Maps can help with disaster risk reduction and tools such as Ushahidi can help during emergency response. Mapping information is also useful for holding up a mirror to the population to ask them questions about themselves and their behaviors and for showing the direct consequences of actions; for example in a Community Total Led Sanitation mapping project, the community faces its realities about where their own waste is entering food and water sources.

Map Kibera is a good example of participatory digital mapping. mGEOS is a mobile mapping tool developed to help Plan Kenya staff to gather and share data needed for their daily work. Map Kibera and Plan Kenya are collaborating in Kwale on youth and governance work, and in Mathare to work on Community Total Led Sanitation using digital mapping tools (see July 27th entry). In this video, a district youth officer in Kenya talks about why digital mapping is useful for his community.

Mapping Violence against Children in Benin

3) Pulling in quick information to guide further investigation, response, or advocacy; pushing out information for targeted actions

ICTs can be used to gather quick information from a broad population. This can be useful in a variety of situations and themes, including those outlined in the MDGs. For example, SMS are being used to report on whether teachers are showing up at school, where violence against children and women is happening, where help is needed in the aftermath of a disaster, and for tracking endangered wildlife. Crowd sourced information can help governments and agencies get preliminary information so that further investigation and support can be provided in a particular area. Another example is the use of mobiles in different health initiatives, including: child-birth care; HIV and AIDS prevention and treatment programs; support for volunteer community healthcare workers; and bed net treatment reminders. Most of the ICT and development world is also already familiar with the work of two organizations: Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS who have been combining SMS with digital mapping.

A program that I’m closely involved with is SMS reporting of violence against children in Benin, where local communities, government agencies and NGOs are collaborating to improve the child protection system. This type of program shows promise if heed is paid to the pros and cons of collecting information by SMS, and if those implementing are clear about the type of information that will be gathered, privacy implications, and how the system will complement existing systems. (Here is one document that outlines some considerations). Increasing controls by governments and mobile phone companies, including SIM card registry and Mozambique’s recent government shut down of SMS services during the bread riots are good examples of how quickly the ICT landscape can change, and how flexible and agile those working in the area of ICTs need to be.

Checking info on constituency development fund

4) Supporting accountability and transparency

ICTs are useful to support accountability and transparency, necessary for attempts to track and ensure good use of funding for different efforts, including those related to the MDGs and other aid and development programs. Making information more available to the public by mobile is one such way. SODNET’s budget tracking tool, for example, informs Kenyans of how much funding is allocated by the Constituency Development Fund to different municipalities in different categories. Combined with mapping, as outlined in this post, the budget information can help constituents to track where their funds are actually being spent. Other interesting examples of how ICTs can be used for transparency and accountability can be found at TacticalTech’s Info Activism site and at Technology for Transparency.

Paper forms will soon be digitized….

5) Improving municipal services and information management

Civil registration documents, especially a birth certificate, are a precursor to demanding any number of rights or accessing a wide array of services. Without a birth certificate a child may not be able to sit for school exams, receive immunizations or free health care or claim rights to inheritance or legal protection in courts of law. Proof of age is critical in successfully prosecuting perpetrators of crimes against children such as child trafficking, sexual offenses, early recruitment into the armed forces, child marriage and child labor. ICTs are being used to digitize civil registry in Kenya, for example. Not only are records being digitized, but mobile phones are used to make it more convenient for the population to know when their documents are ready. This saves people time and money and means that more parents will register their children.

But wait, there’s more!

These are only a few examples of ways that ICTs are being used at the grassroots level to improve participation, transparency, accountability, debate and ownership of the development process. The MDGs are lofty, but informed local community participation and ownership is key in efforts to reach them and in ensuring that marginalized populations can also be included.

Please add your examples of ways that ICTs can support development and ICTs in the comments section!

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3 ways to integrate ICTs into development work

Posted in children, development, disaster and emergencies, ICT4D, ICTs, mobile and technology, m4D, MDG, participation, protection, youth, tagged direct, how to incorporate ICTs, ICT, ICT4D, indirect, integrate, MDG, NGO, right to information, strategic, UN Week on September 15, 2010| 2 Comments »

Continuing on with the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) related posts…. I’ll be on a panel on Sept 21st talking about how ICTs can contribute to the MDGs. My perspective is less from a top down, big business, giant project point of view. In my work, I look at ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) as tools that children and young people can use to create and access information and to advance their own agendas locally and beyond, and ICTs as tools that organizations (big and small, local or not) can incorporate into their work to improve their efforts to attain development goals (such as the MDGs).

ICTs can be helpful tools for enhancing accountability, transparency, citizen engagement, public debate, participation and local ownership of the development process — all of which help with achievement of the MDGs. (See my post on MDGs through a child rights lens for more reasons why). ICTs and social media can also help organizations do more efficient, effective, engaging and high quality work.

ICTs are not silver bullets or magical elements, however; and they will not solve anything on their own. They need to be well-integrated into programs, and well-contextualized.

One framework I especially like to use for thinking about how organizations can integrate ICTs into their work comes from Hannah Beardon. Hannah suggests that ICTs can be integrated directly, strategically and indirectly:

Directly (Providing Access to ICTs): Mobiles and other ICTs have an immediate and striking impact at the family and community level, connecting people for personal, business and community reasons. Mobile devices save individuals time and money and are indispensable in emergencies and for connecting people to the larger world, such as for remittances and commodity pricing. Mobiles and ICTs can help people access information, improve their education, maintain social networks, participate in governance and community, and generate income.

Providing equipment directly is one way to think about ICTs in development programs. This includes ICT tools such as computers, mobile phones, video cameras, digital cameras, radio equipment, electricity, and Internet access. Often direct ICT support is considered for education programs and efforts focused primarily on ICT training or media projects. Computer centers and classrooms are an example, as is supplying mobile phones to project participants or GPS units for mapping projects or equipment for health programs. If this equipment and the information it collects are managed at the community or local organization level, it can enable people to assess and respond to local development needs in a powerful way.

The availability of ICTs is obviously a pre-cursor to using them in different programs and projects. However I’m not much in favor of development organizations coming in and giving away mobile phones (unless it’s some type of extreme emergency or crisis, I suppose). I’m also wary of external NGOs setting up computer centers or giving large equipment donations because of sustainability and capacity concerns. Care needs to be taken that a non-profit organization is not assuming the role that local businesses or government institutions should be playing. Working in good partnerships with local and national government institutions and local businesses and keeping clear agreements on the roles of all actors, including the community, can help to reduce these risks and make programs more sustainable. Programs that directly provide equipment also need to think carefully about what other elements are required for success (purpose of the equipment, training to use it, ongoing maintenance and repair, electricity/power, a place to keep the equipment safe, local involvement in defining the type of equipment, etc). (See 10 Worst Practices in ICTs in Education).

In thinking about providing direct access to ICTs, one place for NGOs to focus energies is keeping an eye on government ICT policies and plans and strengthening civil society to pressure government to ensure that ICTs (including Internet) are accessible to the population now that more and more information is shared via ICTs. Article 17 in the Convention on the Rights of the Child outlines children’s right to information, including access to information and material from a diversity of national and international sources, especially those aimed at the promotion of a child’s social, spiritual and moral well-being and physical and mental health. States Parties are obliged to (a) Encourage the mass media to disseminate information and material of social and cultural benefit to the child and in accordance with the spirit of article 29; (b) Encourage international cooperation in the production, exchange and dissemination of such information and material from a diversity of cultural, national and international sources; (c) Encourage the production and dissemination of children’s books; (d) Encourage the mass media to have particular regard to the linguistic needs of the child who belongs to a minority group or who is indigenous; (e) Encourage the development of appropriate guidelines for the protection of the child from information and material injurious to his or her well-being, bearing in mind the provisions of articles 13 and 18. The 2005 World Summit on the Information Society’s Tunis Agenda also provides a useful platform for thinking about advocacy around rights to information and ICTs.

Making a film on birth registration, Cameroon

Strategically (Using ICTs as tools to support development processes): Beyond directly providing ICTs, new technologies can be used in a myriad of ways to support the broader development process. Starting from larger program goals, defining the roles that information and communication play, looking closely at the local context, and then researching existing tools that could be supportive is a good way to start when planning concrete initiatives. (Forthcoming is a second publication by Hannah outlining a good process for local contextualizing and ICT integration into specific programs). If there are no existing tools, a case can be made for developing or building onto a tool or an application.

Mobile phones, as tools for effective and timely dissemination of information, have real potential to strengthen the design and delivery of programs, for example in health, education, household economic security, disaster risk reduction and response, emergency and crisis management, HIV and AIDS prevention and treatment, child protection, youth-led advocacy, and water and sanitation. ICTs should be an integral part of local, country-level and broader strategic planning processes and they should be incorporated, where appropriate and relevant, into programs where they can add value, keeping a close eye during monitoring and evaluation on whether their purported benefits are real.

On-going capacity building and exchange at various levels is critical to help program staff become aware of advances in the field of ICTs and to help ICT advisors better understand programs, staff needs and community realities. Conversations across sector and silo boundaries are also critical to ensure that ICT integration is successful. ‘Bridge figures’ are helpful — those persons with good knowledge of both programs and ICTs — to help these processes along. In the absence of someone to serve as a bridge figure, well-structured teams with expertise in both areas should work closely together to take advantage of their specific expertise and to learn from one another. ICT tools should be selected based on local needs and contexts as well as program priorities, starting with information and communication needs, rather than starting with new ‘breakthrough’ technologies. (Though other sectors often start with the cool technology and see if/how it can be useful). During strategic planning processes, program staff should be analyzing program information and communication needs and working with ICT staff to incorporate technology that may add value and help reach program goals in a higher quality and more effective way. Again, ‘bridge figures’ can be helpful in that process. Monitoring and evaluation are important along the way to check whether adding ICTs is actually helping. Sometimes things work perfectly fine without new ICTs.

Indirectly (Using ICTs to improve efficiency and communication within the organization): The wealth of knowledge and information that a development organization generates and uses needs to be documented, shared and communicated effectively in order to improve impact. Advances in knowledge management and on-line collaboration, including blogs, wikis and other social media tools and feedback mechanisms can bring immediate access to information and real-time discussion. Lower cost technology, notably in the areas of digital mapping, GPS, mobile mapping, mobile internet can help staff to carry out their daily work and improve information sharing and decision-making across departments and to engage and inform the public. Engagement with donors can also be heightened through ICT tools and social media, always taking into consideration the additional burden 24/7 demands can add to staff’s workload, and the child protection and other risks posed by more direct access to communities.

ICTs and social media can help make aid and development organizations more participatory, more agile, and able to pull in information from variety of sources and process it faster. This in turn can help pull people out of their silos and force them to consider new ideas and ways of working and thinking about challenges. Mobiles especially are helpful for better communication with community members and local organizations. Forward thinking organizations should be taking advantage of these new tools to gather direct feedback from those that they are supporting, for better dialog to improve their work, and for devolving helpful information to community members. Mobile data collection, for example, in addition to being a strategic tool for program implementation, can also be a way of improving the quality of data collection and increasing ownership by community members of their own data which support them to take back management of their own development processes from external agents. Mobiles are also a great tool for gathering data quickly from a broad subset of the population; data which can shape rapid responses and emergency interventions.

Twitter and blogging and other web-based services can serve as a springboard for deeper discussions and coordination among different development actors, government agents, institutions and the private sector. Social media is a way to share and discuss lessons learned and challenges faced, and to diffuse information about new ICTs and how they are being used by different agencies and individuals. Global partnerships can easily be initiated, developed and nurtured on-line. Organizations can provide on-line training opportunities to staff and save time and money by using new technologies such as forums, blogs for sharing and reporting, Skype and chat tools, and social networking. These same tools can be used to improve relationships with donors and with partners and staff working in disperse offices. However, in order for any of the above to happen, command and control practices that are common in large institutions and organizations need to be abolished so the tools can be most useful. Here is an excellent post on use of social media tools in humanitarian work.

3-fold path

Using those three categories to think about ICT integration in an organization’s work can help clarify and strategize. Some initiatives may include all three categories and some may be more focused on one particular category.

In a follow-up post, I’ll share some examples of tools that I find interesting and helpful for organizations working at the grassroots level to achieve broader programmatic goals and to improve local community participation and ownership of the development process.

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MDG related posts on Wait… What?

MDGs through a child rights lens

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MDGs through a child rights lens

Posted in children, development, disaster and emergencies, gender, ICT4D, MDG, participation, protection, smart aid, social justice, youth, tagged child rights, children, MDGs, rights based approach on September 13, 2010| 9 Comments »

The latest UN report on the MDGs states that progress towards the Millennium Development Goals has been made, but it’s uneven. It looks like the Goals will be missed in most regions.

I’m blaming Madonna for launching her line of MDG sunglasses and not linking them to an MDG promotion campaign (kidding!)

To discuss all this (well, except for the sunglasses part), MDG week is happening in New York from September 20-24, 2010. I’ll be part of some of the activities, including 2 panels. The first panel is on ICTs, Innovation and the MDGs and the second is on Women/Girls and Mobiles. What better way to prepare than to write some blog posts to sort through some ideas?

This post looks at the link between child rights and the MDGs. I’ll write some additional posts and add links at the bottom of this post when they are ready. I would love feedback on which elements would be most important to highlight during the MDG panels next week.

Human rights and the MDGs

If you look at why some countries are more on track than others in achieving the MDGs, the answer often comes down to there being greater accountability and transparency at all levels, more citizen engagement, and more public debate. Human rights are instrumental in ensuring empowerment, access to social services, equality before the law, and poverty reduction. So the link between human rights and the MDGs is clear. There are a number of human rights concepts: shared responsibility, indivisibility, non-discrimination, equality, and accountability that are also necessary for achieving the MDGs.

Due to discrimination, the most marginalized are still not accessing their rights or being included in the MDGs. There are still massive inequalities between rich and poor, rural and urban, men and women, boys and girls, adults and children. Disability and ethnicity also prevent some groups from being included. Until these disparities are addressed, the achievement of the MDGs will be far off for many particular groups. The discussion around the MDGs needs to include and reflect the opinions and concerns of those who have been traditionally marginalized.

Girls and the MDGs

Children, especially girls, and especially girls in poor, rural areas and urban slums, are often the most marginalized in these processes and in general. The MDGs highlight some critical gender gaps, especially in education, but they do not reveal the power imbalances that are an underlying cause of these disparities. Girls are often subjected to harmful practices such as early marriage and sexual violence. In countries where literacy is lowest, girls’ chances of early marriage are highest. Girls spend more time working, shoulder the burden of household chores and are more often not in school. Organizations and entities working towards the MDGs need to do more to ensure that girls and other marginalized groups are not excluded.

MDGs through a child rights lens

Child rights are a set of specific rights for those under the age of 18. They are outlined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Much of the work that child rights organizations are doing is complementary to achieving the MDGs, and 6 of the 8 MDGs are directly related to children.

Working with children and young people to participate effectively in the development of their communities and the realization of their rights contributes directly and indirectly to the achievement of the MDGs. Ensuring that children, especially girls, and other marginalized groups are listened to and heard by decision makers at the local, district, national and global levels is critical in identifying and addressing the hidden power dynamics and the underlying issues that slow the achievement of the MDGs.

Applying a ‘child rights’ lens to the MDGs is helpful in identifying responsibilities for achievement of the different MDGs. A child rights lens can also help ensure the concepts of non-discrimination and the best interest of the child are incorporated into MDG work.

What is a child rights lens? How can it be applied to the MDGs? In a simplified way, it means:

Identifying and monitoring those persons and institutions responsible for ensuring children’s rights/achievement of the MDGs (the ‘duty bearers’).
Helping children and adolescents (the ‘rights holders’ in this case), to empower themselves by knowing their rights/knowing the MDGs, and together with supportive adults and institutions, to hold duty bearers accountable for ensuring children’s rights/achievement of the MDGs.
Supporting children to participate fully in the process. Children’s participation leads to better outcomes and policies, and involving children early in their lives helps them develop skills and attitudes that lead to a better society in the short and long-term. Not only do children have something to contribute to their societies now, but by engaging in community development and developing good leadership skills at a young age, they also become better leaders in the future.

A child rights approach should be central to all programs and funding that are addressing the MDGs, since the MDGs are interrelated with children’s rights to survival, development, participation and protection. In addition, the principles of non-discrimination and the best interest of the child should be paramount in all decisions taken related to the MDGs.

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Resources:

UNICEF’s Narrowing the Gaps to meet the Goals shows that paying attention to equity and the unreached can be a more cost-effective way of pursuing the MDGs in aggregate.

3 ways to integrate ICTs into development work

5 ways ICTs can support the MDGs

7 (or more) questions to ask before adding ICTs

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Social memory and ICT4D collaboration

Posted in development, disaster and emergencies, ICT4D, ICTs, mobile and technology, m4D, participation, smart aid, social media, youth media, tagged aid, collaboration, development, innovation, MIT on August 29, 2010| 1 Comment »

Angelica Valeria Ospina recently wrote about the role of social memory and ICTs in building climate change resilience. She refers to Carl Folke’s definition of social memory as “captured experience with change and successful adaptations embedded in a deeper level of values, and actualized through community debate and decision-making processes into appropriate strategies for dealing with ongoing change.”

Ospina suggests that social memory is “key for linking past experience with present and future adaptation actions, and in turn allows for novelty and innovation.” She comments that “Although the role of memory tends to be overshadowed by that of innovation, the two are in fact important foundations for change, and are equally relevant within contexts that are struggling to adapt to uncertainty….”

I really like this idea of balancing memory and innovation, and it’s not only valid within the framework of resilience and climate change. Social memory is also useful for those of us working in ICT4D and m4D because we find ourselves at the intersection of development and technology, where methodologies and mindsets can be in opposition at times and where change is happening at a rapid frequency.

A quick characterization of the mindsets

Development Organization Mindset: How can we work with our existing resources and work around our challenges to reach our goals? How can we build on experience?

Those who work with grassroots community development are schooled to look at assets, to help communities and local organizations look at what exists already, what is within their reach, and how to identify their existing resources before looking outside for support or help. This helps a program to be more locally owned and sustainable. Those in this field are trained to look for potential obstacles and limitations and see how to go around them or to work within them. There is a sense that lives and livelihoods are on the line, this is nothing to play around with and failure carries a high price both for community members and for organizations. This mindset can be really frustrating for for-profit or marketing consultants who come in to get people to do ‘blue sky thinking’ and to forget about limitations.

This is the group that people would describe using that Henry Ford quote: ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.’ But this kind of thinking does have its place – local context, perceived limitations, and local experience, eg. social memory, are important in design and sustainability and impact. In addition, innovations don’t only happen in terms of ‘products’, there are process, position and paradigm innovations also which happen all the time in non-profit organizations and communities.

(Note: Certainly some will say that in aid work, no one does evaluations, and no one learns and it’s all a waste of time and resources, but that’s not been my personal experience at this point, and the work I’ve been involved in has been community development focused, not top down delivery of services and goods.)

Design Student/Technology Innovator Mindset: What can we make? What can we build that’s like nothing that’s come before? What solutions can we offer?

Innovation thinking pushes for a different kind of visioning. For throwing aside conventions and ignoring limitations so that the chains are completely off. It urges people to move quickly, to try and fail fast and often. A lot of innovation and tech thinking is product focused – What can we make? What can we build? What solution do we have that people might need? What tech can we invent and then let people figure out uses for? Those in this group are trained to move forward without thinking so much about the challenges and limitations, to move at a quick pace, and without engaging a thousand people in the process. This enables new ideas to flourish unfettered by endless rounds of consultations and participation by too many people bringing you to the fabled and unfortunate “a camel is a horse designed by a committee” result. It allows totally new ideas and processes as well as products to spring up. Lots of trying might equal lots of failing, but it also brings about those few amazing and game changing innovations that allow huge leaps forward. Many within this field are amazingly bright and creative. At this point few have long-term experience living in poor communities in developing countries, and there are few opportunities for gaining enough of that experience.

The middle ground

Both of these mindsets have advantages and limitations and seem to have a very hard time coming to a middle ground to work together effectively, though some initiatives are overcoming this challenge. Potential collaboration can be compromised when people address each other in snarky or accusatory ways, without sufficient knowledge of the other’s work and experience. For example, this series of blog posts around crowdsourcing and humanitarian aid between Patrick Meier (here, here and here) and Paul Currion (here and here). Unfortunately I don’t have a audio recording to post of the conversation where someone told me that Paul is quite well-known for innovations in the field of humanitarian aid and technology, and would be an excellent person to collaborate with on innovations in humanitarian aid — I really hope people like Patrick and Paul will work together, as the results could be fantastic.

Ken Banks has also raised this issue of m(obile) vs d(evelopment); most recently in his post Dissecting m4d: back to basics, where he asks: Do the majority of people working in “mobiles for development” work in mobile, or development? It may seem like an odd question, but how people approach “m4d” may have more of an impact on success or failure than we think.

An example of collaboration

There are some good examples of collaboration however. One I saw most recently is MIT’s Department of Play’s Summer Institute in early August, where a team of incredible innovators and students from MIT working on community youth engagement tools spent 2 days in discussions with folks with years of experience working on child participation and youth engagement, including UNICEF; CUNY Children’s Environments Research Group; Project Vision Design and Research Collective at Srishti School of Art Design and Technology Bangalore; and the Program in Education, Afterschool & Resiliency (and me :-D)

I think eventually these gaps will smooth out as the younger generation moves in and up the chain at development organizations and some of the newer technology becomes ubiquitous within organizations. It’s quite possible also that the current and new generations of design and tech students will spend more time ‘in the field’. And I am not only talking about ‘Western’ folks here, I’m also talking about young people and design students from the so-called ‘underdeveloped countries’, many of whom use technology at a dizzying pace and who are already re-shaping how development is viewed and carried out in their countries.

By lowering the fences that we are all working behind, and finding ways to combine our different skills, ICT4D and m4d can come up with even better solutions and achieve better impact in areas like accountability, health, education, livelihood, governance, emergency response and disaster preparedness. We can build teams that capitalize on the different kinds of knowledge, skills and mindsets. We can harness social memory and strive for a balance between experience and innovation.

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Nothing new under the sun: trends & development mash-ups

Posted in development, disaster and emergencies, ICTs, mobile and technology, smart aid, tagged aid, development, emergency, new, old, re-makes, trends on August 12, 2010| 5 Comments »

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9

In my last post (Orgasmatron Moments) I compared re-hashed development and aid work ideas to re-makes of songs, lamenting that often people don’t realize that their favorite new innovation is more like a cover of an old idea.

Dave Algoso at Find What Works commented:

So my question is: Linda, what’s next?! … What principles of good development are already being implemented by smart groups, but are still unnoticed by the academics and other commentators? To continue the music analogy, if you’re the fan who liked the hip new band before they were big — what are you listening to now?

Hmm. A tricky question if you ask me. There are a lot of people who write and blog about development trends and who know a lot more about this than I do, (Owen Barder, for example) but I’ll take a stab at some things that I’m hearing about, working on, discussing and/or seeing nowadays.

The fact that I can link to most of these ideas means that they are not going unnoticed. Or maybe the development blogosphere is akin to the underground music scene. In any case, none of these are totally new. There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don’t know. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).

Some mash-ups/re-mixes that together create a new, interesting and good sound to my ears:

Cynefin, aid, development. I first heard about Cynefin when reading @morealtitude’s post ‘Embracing the chaotic: Cynefin and humanitarian response‘. Cynefin draws the world’s systems into four paradigms: Simple, Complicated, Complex or Chaotic. Each paradigm has its own characteristics, and systems can shift from one paradigm to another. Not new, as the concept is at least 10 years old… but I love the connection between these paradigms, development/humanitarian aid work, and the way that organizations market themselves. A good resource on complexity theories in aid and development is Aid on the Edge.

Social media and ICTs to broaden participation. I’m digging the use of social media and ICT tools to bring marginalized voices into discussions about development, aid, governance, accountability, corporate abuses and other related areas, and to get broader input from ‘beneficiaries’ on approaches, ideas and initiatives. I’m liking how they are being used to simplify information and expand the number of people with access to information that was hidden or inaccessible before. (Update: This cool effort to geo-code aid data could make a lot of foreign aid project funding data more available.)

Not a new concept, as people have been ‘popularizing’ and sharing information for ages (think town criers, jesters, printing press, cartoons or ‘child friendly’ versions of legal documents) but social media and ICTs continue along this path. Issues of accessibility, language, gender, literacy, electricity, and disability need to be overcome, but things are moving forward, and organizations are more and more thinking about how to use ICTs for these purposes. This makes aid transparency, budget transparency come alive, and it becomes easier to see who is doing what where and who is spending what where and who is funding what. Kind of like that cool website Source Watch where you can type in a name (eg., the name of the guy who did that research saying that climate change doesn’t exist) and find out who he works for and who pays his salary is spreading to new areas and new levels.

Crowdsourcing/crowdfeeding in humanitarian and development work. Linked to the above, I’m increasingly interested in approaches that combine broad and quick information gathering with good quality information gathering, are based on experiences in past emergencies or development initiatives, that find ways to speed up information processing and response, and that improve on quality. Those efforts that consider proper management of expectations and privacy; child and witness protection, and that do not create parallel systems score extra points. Use of these technologies internally in organizations and among/across organizations, and with /by affected populations all fall into this category, which is closely linked with the one above. Check out this cool presentation on interaction design and crowdsourcing or this brilliant piece on Social Media and Humanitarian Response.

Online + offline combos. Not everyone is online, and not every context is the same. I’m really interested in approaches that use a variety of communication tools and methods to reach their goals and that are flexible and seamless across the initiative. Looking at how to better connect knowledge and information from the local level to the global level and back again, and to link horizontally is key. I’m a fan of initiatives that are goal, results, impact driven, but that also consider good process and take local context into great consideration. I like initiatives that are not technology driven, but where technology is incorporated strategically if and when and where it actually adds value. An example of this is where hand drawn maps and digital maps work together in participatory mapping to meet the needs of different groups.

Data and information collection and sharing by mobiles. Data collection – not new. But use of low cost mobile phones and data decentralization to district and community levels is a relatively new phenomenon. When data is owned more closely to the source, it seems more likely that people will care more about data validity and that the data will become information that they can use to manage their own processes and their own development. This is happening in many areas, from health to education to financial transactions a la mPesa and mKesho, to civil registration (eg, birth certificates) to government budgets to emergencies.

Expanding innovation. ALNAP (Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance) talks about the 4 Ps model (pages 3 and 4 of this really relevant .pdf file) of innovation in humanitarian aid, and expands on the typical thinking that ‘innovation’ means ‘creating a new thing/product’. ‘Innovations can be directed towards improvements or new developments of four aspects: (i) products, such as improved cooking stoves or food products to counter malnutrition; (ii) processes, such as methods for stockpiling goods, improved coordination, or improving learning and quality assurance; (iii) the position of an organisation and its work in relation to key stakeholders, for example by changing an organisation’s public profile or by changing attitudes to an area of work such as shelter; (iv) paradigms or combined attitudes and beliefs determining the fundamental approach to humanitarian work, such as the calls for paradigm shifts in humanitarian business models towards beneficiary participation, local ownership and capacity development. Exploring these ideas in the context of humanitarian work gives a new way of understanding and harnessing organisations’ creative potential.’ Yeah. I guess Marketers have their own 4Ps, (product, price, place, promotion) and marketing innovators have theirs (population, penetration, price, purchase frequency), so having 4 P’s is not new, just maybe it’s new when thinking about innovation in humanitarian aid.

Questioning capitalism’s influence on aid and development. By that I mean looking more closely at things like Corporate Social Responsibility (sometime I think that term is an oxymoron — check this animated video version of Slavoj Zizek’s Marxist reading of charity). Questioning capitalism is not new. (Hello Marx). But it’s still relevant to pick apart capitalism and to wonder if things will ever change if we keep pushing the same system with all its flaws and inherent inequities. Questioning CSR includes thinking critically about ‘philanthrocapitalism’ in the sense of 1) the application of business models/ approaches to aid and 2) doing things to benefit the poor at a profit.

Related to that, thinking critically about cause-based marketing and its link to consumerism and the destruction of the planet and having clear program-driven policies on if, when and how to engage volunteers, take gifts in kind, and work with corporations and other funding bodies; and having mechanisms in place to ensure before accepting them that the above are actually necessary and contribute to program goals and actually benefit communities in the long run. Then again, a lot of people are on the trade-not-aid kick (thanks to Dambisa Moyo) and the two sides are a bit at odds with each other. It’s a battle of the bands that I’m still not ready to vote on yet. Can someone please come up with a new political and economic system that is fair and works?

Along these lines is questioning models of social entrepreneurship, social innovations, innovation contests, and design for the BOP, design for the ‘third world’ and other similar initiatives. There is a great article that opens a lot of questions around that model and a cool initiative called “Design for the First World.” Not to mention the Bruce Nussbaum et al. debate around ‘Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?‘

Transmedia activism. I first heard about Transmedia Activism from Lina Srivastava (@lksriv) and I still don’t fully understand it, but then Lina is way smarter than I am, so that could be why. I quote: ‘Transmedia Activism is a framework that creates social impact by using storytelling by a number of decentralized authors who share assets and create content for distribution across multiple forms of media to raise awareness and influence action.’ Again, not new is the concept of transmedia storytelling, used in marketing and product sales for quite some time, but it’s only recently that it’s being applied and used in advocacy work and non-profit causes.

Organizing your workers with the times. Rather than top-down, super structured, cubicle-based working environments, some offices are (and IMHO, all should be) looking at management styles that encourage innovation, collaboration and global teamwork. Time Magazine, a mainstream news source, talks about “global teams that use social media and collaborative decision-making that might involve team members scattered around the world, from Beijing to Barcelona to Boston, whom the nominal leader of a given project may never have met in person…. By 2019, every leader will have to be culturally dexterous on a global scale.” If you ask me, not enough INGOs are paying attention to this and are still embracing old-fashioned structures and work environments. (Update: Google is known for stimulating innovation, and Netflix also seems to be doing this well.) (Update #2: Recommend subscribing to the Aid on the Edge of Chaos blog. Love this post – now, can I just get the organization where I work to see the light?)

Global warming and climate change. Whether because of the global meetings (COP15), because of the increase in disasters, because a younger generation is entering the workforce, or because we are finally realizing that it is for real, there are more programs dealing with climate change and its effects, especially looking at the differential impacts on women and children. Organizations are starting to think more about how they themselves contribute to climate change. Again, this is not a new thing, but it’s coming into vogue again. It makes us think about consumer based advocacy and cause based marketing, travel and carbon footprints, and starts asking why people are still coming up with ‘send your old crap to Africa’ schemes rather than working on changing consumer-based cultures in their own territories to stop buying so much stuff and producing so much waste.

Continuum between emergency and development. The gap between what is an emergency/humanitarian program and what is a development program continues to close up a bit more as organizations realize the importance of community ownership and engagement as soon as possible after a disaster. Again, not new. This was signaled as early as the 90s with the Red Cross Red Crescent Code of Conduct, but it’s taken awhile for it to hit home. The dangers of too much doing by external agencies and the damage it can cause to longer term development are coming more to the forefront and entering mainstream conversations a bit more. Here’s one blog post and related discussions that sort of gets at what I mean…. I’m sure there are many other discussions happening in the humanitarian world that I’m not currently participating in.

Some ideas I’ve been listening to a bit less/conversations I’m not very engaged in and (in keeping with our metaphor of music) where I’m trying to figure out if I want to buy the album:

RCTs: There is quite a lot of debate around RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials) and the importance of evaluation. This is one of AidWatch’s favorite topics, and there’s a lot of debate every time they do a post on it. Here’s one such post by Alanna Shaikh.

Cash transfers… conditional or un-conditional, universal or targeted. Not new. Lots of agencies have done cash transfers in the past. Sponsorship agencies for example used to do only that, but they moved over to community based development in the 1970 and 80s. I’m trying to find some information on why, but haven’t been successful yet. Also trying to figure out what exactly is new about the current cash transfer model, and what makes it work better than the old sponsorship line-up-to-collect-your-$20 models. There’s more information on cash transfers here. If anyone has concrete information from back in the day on why sponsorship organizations made this change in how they work, it would be much appreciated. I plan to do some more homework on this when I have time, as I do agree with giving people more control over the ‘aid’ and ‘development’ that is coming their way, but there must be a reason that organizations stopped giving out cash, and I’d hope some studies on that decision and its impact on ‘beneficiaries’ for better or worse.

Cash on Delivery aid is being discussed quite a bit. I don’t know enough about it to have an opinion one way or another, but you can check out the Center for Global Development’s site. As I was in the middle of composing this post, Amanda Makulec commented on my last post, saying: In some ways, CGD’s Cash on Delivery Aid idea isn’t entirely new either (and I’m not the first to call them out on this), though it’s gotten a lot of press from everyone from DfID to Nick Kristof who have heralded it as a “new” way of doing development. Programs in Haiti, Rwanda, and other countries have relied on the idea of making either financial incentives or even specific percentages of an annual budget contingent on meeting specific service delivery targets. I’d have to go back into old files from my grad school internship for specifics, but, for example, in a past program in Haiti funded by USAID, NGOs received funding to accomplish certain program outcomes (vaccinate X children, for example). By meeting their targets, the NGOs ensured they received continued funding.

The CGD proposal does, however, advocate for taking the principles behind performance-based financing (or results-based financing, if you work for Abt or the World Bank), and applying those ideas to how governments spend aid dollars. So perhaps it could be held up as a good example of a new way to apply an existing idea, elevating it from a program to a policy.”

So, time will tell which of the song categories each of these development trends will fall into…. and there are certainly many more trends. Feel free to add your own in the comments section or challenge the ones I mentioned above… But maybe more fun than that, what do you think? Which of the ideas above or the new ideas you’re seeing will fall into which of the categories below?

Instant Classic –good enough to get played on the Classic station even when it’s only been out for a year
Alternative – but eventually you’ll hear it at the dentist office, or feel obliged to comment when you see the next generation be-bopping to it at wedding receptions because it used to be so provocative
Underground – edgy and radical, still waiting for pop stars to water it down or to cover it when the time is right for it to go mainstream
One Hit Wonder – great idea, doesn’t last past evaluation stage or burns out
Child Star — forced to mature before its time by too much media attention and too much donor money
Pay to Play –not necessarily bad, but forced on everyone because it’s backed by big corporations/ donors and crowds out the other ideas that have less financial backing
We are the World – feel-good idea that most people buy into that is actually bad development / bad aid and a waste of everyone’s time
Next Bono – seemed pretty cool at first, but overrated

PS: thanks to everyone who contributed directly or indirectly to this post for constantly challenging my thinking and taking it to new levels.

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Orgasmatron Moments

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Orgasmatron moments

Posted in development, disaster and emergencies, ICTs, mobile and technology, participation, random, musing or confusing, smart aid, tagged aid, development, freire, innovation, liberation, oppressed, pedagogy, PRA, theology on August 7, 2010| 17 Comments »

I taught English in El Salvador when I was 24. A few of the students liked to talk with me about music. One day they wanted me to hear ‘this great song by Sepultura’, and I was like ‘Cool! That’s Orgasmatron!‘ and mentioned that I knew the Motorhead version. I don’t know what shocked them more: that I knew that particular song, or that their Sepultura version wasn’t the original.

I find myself having my fair share of those moments these days. I’m happy when good ideas in development and aid work are taken up, and especially happy when they are improved on (though I have to say that I like Motorhead’s version better than Sepultura’s). But it kinda bugs me when people talk about those ideas as if they are brand spanking new when they’ve actually been around for awhile. It seems like people should do some research, to at least know what came before.

What are some examples of 2010 re-makes?

Bottom up development

I find it weird that we are still discussing ‘bottom up’ development as a new or innovative thing in the year 2010 when it’s clearly been around for a really long time.

I started in development in 1994 in El Salvador. Most of the work that local NGOs were doing at that time was focused on helping grassroots groups and communities organize and manage their own development. A lot of time was spent in communities with community organizations. But this concept wasn’t born in the 1990s. It was grounded in Liberation Theology and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Liberation Theology emerged in the 1960s ‘as a result of a systematic, disciplined reflection on Christian faith and its implications’ as the Catholic church in Latin America was reflecting on itself and its relationship with the poor. Those who formulated the concept worked closely in communities with the poor and saw the social and economic injustice begun by colonization and continued through those in power both in governments and within the church. Liberation theology re-interpreted the scripture in a way that affirmed the dignity and self worth of the poor and their right to struggle for a dignified life. ‘Liberation theology strove to be a bottom-up movement in practice, with Biblical interpretation and liturgical practice designed by lay practitioners themselves, rather than by the orthodox Church hierarchy.’ Check here and here for good links on Liberation Theology.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Brazilian Paolo Freire, based on his experiences working on literacy with poor communities developed his Pedagogy of the Oppressed all the way back in 1968, around the same time that Liberation Theology was emerging. Freire’s philosophy has been heavily drawn from and applied to development. Especially pertinent is the concept of dialogics ‘an instrument to free the colonized, through the use of cooperation, unity, organization and cultural synthesis (overcoming problems in society to liberate human beings). This is in contrast to antidialogics which use conquest, manipulation, cultural invasion, and the concept of divide and rule’. Freire’s ‘emphasis on dialogue struck a very strong chord with those concerned with popular and informal education…. However, Paulo Freire was able to take the discussion on several steps with his insistence that dialogue involves respect. It should not involve one person acting on another, but rather people working with each other. For more on Freire (I certainly did not do him justice) check here and here.

These 2 philosophies closely mirrored ideas that arose during the Civil Rights Movement in the US. There’s a brilliant book called “We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change” where Paulo Freire and Myles Horton (who started the Highlander Folk School in 1932 and influenced Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.) discuss the similarities between their philosophies.

Public policy and advocacy

Fast forward to 1996, where we get a new director at the organization where I’m working, a Brazilian. He simply won’t stop talking about ‘civil society’ and ‘public policies’. ‘There will be no sustainable changes if we don’t have an impact on the level of policies and their implementation. How does this program idea impact on public policies? How is civil society involved in holding the government accountable? Where is the budget for Peace Accords implementation going?’ Changing systems, transparency, political participation by those formerly excluded, and moving away from hand outs and emergency type programs were key in the vision of how the country would improve.

Working with local partners

To that aim, we funded different local organizations that raised awareness in rights holders on their rights and that advocated for the implementation of the 1992 Peace Accords. We worked with an association of women who were demanding that the alimony laws be operationalized, ex-combatants groups from both sides of the conflict who were not getting the benefits promised them in the Peace Accords, sex workers who were being harassed and abused by police, civic education, environmental organizations who worked with local communities on issues such as deforestation, water and land rights, etc. We also met and discussed a lot with other international organizations, and many of them were doing similar kinds of work.

Local management of the development process

I was pretty much ineligible for any advancement in the organization because the director’s mandate was to nationalize and hand over the program, now that the civil war and the ‘state of emergency’ were over. Local organizations now had more political space to work without the protection of international organizations. The idea was to strengthen capacities of all local staff, to move over to a national board of directors and to nationalize the organization. At the same time, the thought was to build the administrative capacity of local organizations so that they could function transparently with full accountability.

Participatory design/participatory development

I moved to a different organization in 1998, and one of my first tasks was to help write the organization’s strategic plan. The first step in developing that plan was community consultation. Staff (all of them local by the way) facilitated a consultation process with people in the 400+ communities where we worked. In addition, they met and consulted with community based organizations, local NGOs, local governments, national level ministries as well as other international organizations, to learn of their plans and to avoid duplication of efforts.

The community consultations were done using PRA (aka ‘participation, reflection, action’) methodologies. Many of the tools staff used were developed and written about by Robert Chambers. Check here for a great overview of PRA or these 2003 notes on PRA since 1998. PRA traces many of its roots back to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and looks to make communities the real owners of the development process. Any externals involved act as facilitators of a process (not drivers of the discussion) who ‘hand over the stick’ to local people as often as possible so that they fully manage their own processes. Chambers warns against ‘fascipulation’ – facilitation + manipulation, and surface PRA, saying the main ingredient in PRA is having real respect for local knowledge and local people. Some reading suggestions here.

(Side note to get an idea of how awesome Chambers is. I went to a workshop with him once and he walked in barefoot, pants rolled up, hair askew. He stood in front of us holding a map. It was upside down. Someone raised their hand to tell him it was upside down. He looked down at it and said ‘it looks fine from my perspective’. Then he went into a whole discussion about perspective. As part of that discussion, he started talking about computers and network thinking and how birds fly in flocks. This guy is some kind of genius.)

Community managed projects

Following the strategic consultations, staff worked with communities to design, plan and carry out their own projects, which were also administered by the community once they had gone through project administration training and had opened their community bank account to receive deposits.

Orgasmatron moments

Thinking about sustainability and working with local communities is really not a new concept, nor is the idea of working yourself out of a job if you work in development. The buzz words of transparency and accountability have also been around for awhile. Participatory design is not new either.

I don’t know. Maybe the organizations I’ve worked with in the 1990s and up to now are just amazingly progressive. Or maybe I’m missing something and when people use the terms above they are talking about something different and much more advanced and innovative than what I’m talking about. I mean, the White Stripes first album was a total Doors/Zeppelin rip off, but they did go on to develop their own sound as they matured, and their third album was brilliant. Snoop’s Upside Ya Head is obviously drawing on the Gap Band’s Ooops Upside Ya Head, but both versions are excellent. I do actually like a lot of the re-makes that are out there and there are also some really good new concepts and ideas and some great people and organizations that I learn from on a regular basis.

However, Green Day are not the ‘godfathers of punk rock’ (sign the petition here and help settle that issue once and for all) – How could they be if they came out in the late 80s and punk started in the early 70s? And I keep having Orgasmatron Moments when I see people gushing over an NGO that hires local staff (no brainer) or has a child protection policy (implementing ours since 2003) or consults with communities (why wouldn’t you consult with local communities?).

I suppose, like with my students in El Salvador, it kind of sucks when you realize your idea or your version isn’t the original. But you can be annoyed or bummed out or remain in denial, or you can go back and do some research, and see what you can learn from the original and try to improve on it. With music, knowing about the original song (even if it’s horrible and the new version is much much better), usually scores you some points for legitimacy.

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mGESA: mobile GEographical Services for Africa

Posted in development, ICTs, mobile and technology, Kenya, m4D, mapping, social media, tagged data, gathering, GPS, Kilifi, Kwale, mapping, mGeos, mGESA, mobile, Pajat, Plan, poimapper on August 6, 2010| 11 Comments »

mGESA mobile mapping application

I wrote about a mobile mapping tool called mGEOS a few months ago, mentioning that I’d probably get a chance to try it myself in late July. Well that is just what happened.

I was at a workshop on ICT4D, including digital mapping, in Kwale, Kenya, and Peter Njuguna from Plan Kilifi’s District office came to share mGESA (aka Mobile Geographical Services for Africa) with us.

As far as I can tell, the difference between mGEOS and mGESA is that mGESA is a tailored application of mGEOS, designed together with Plan’s community based front-line staff for their specific information collecting and geo-visualization needs in Kenya.

Update: mGESA was the name for the pilot project. The final application is called PoiMapper (see www.pajatman.com). You can give it a try by downloading it and installing it on your mobile!

According to Njuguna, “the application is designed to run on simple mobile phones that have GPS capability and on which you can run applications.” It’s installed on the phone in the picture (update: the phone is a Nokia 6700 classic).

Njuguna explained “In Kilifi, we diverted from the route of going for applications that are there on the shelf or buying an application over the counter. We went the route of developing an application from scratch. We are working with various partners. We have Plan in Finland, we have Plan in Kenya, we have the University of Nairobi and we have the company Pajat in Finland. Plan Kilifi is the implementing office. So that is where we are coming from.”

The project has been on-going for 7 months. The first thing to define, according to Njuguna, was “Why do we need mapping? Why do we need GIS in the first place? Well, we need GIS to enhance the work we are doing and to try to answer some of the questions we are asking on a day to day basis. So that’s why we wanted to incorporate GIS into our work. Everything we’ve developed is towards helping us answer questions and make decisions in our program and sponsorship work. We wanted to build something that would suit our needs.”

The end users of mGESA are front-line staff in Plan Kilifi District office, and eventually in all of Plan Kenya’s district offices. “Kilifi front-line staff have all been involved in developing the application. The first step was developing a list of points of interest, for example, schools, hospitals and health centers, interest groups, water sources, trading centers, and the like; and outlining the kind of information that staff regularly collect about the points of interest for use in their work.

mGESA points of interest

“Developing the points of interest was a challenge,” said Njuguna. “It might look like we just sat down and listed them. But it has been a process. We had to go over and over it. We had to be sure the questions made sense, that the questions that we were asking were the right ones and made sense to people in the field.”

mGESA was tested in the field for the first time in mid-July. Njuguna and the team are hoping to kick off in another 3-4 weeks and start collecting the actual data. When the points are mapped out using the mobile application, then they are uploaded to a server that links with Google (or other) maps. The team is exploring the possibility of getting Kenya maps with administrative boundaries to use as the mapping platform. The data collected in mGESA can be exported into excel and .pdf files.

Peter let me try out mGESA while we were doing some GPS mapping in Kinango. He was using the opportunity to test accuracy, and whether mGESA was pulling in the same coordinates as the Garmin GPS units that we were using (it was). I found the data collection process to be quite simple. You basically arrive to your point of interest, take the point on the phone, and scroll through a menu to select pre-existing information (such as name of the district, type of point, etc.) or fill it in yourself. You can take a photo of the POI if your phone has photo capabilities (which most GPS enabled phones should have). I didn’t get a chance to upload data to the server or the web to see how easy that process is.

Peter Njuguna, ICT coordinator at Plan's Kilifi District Office

The group at the workshop had just been trained on several ICT different tools, so they had a lot of questions about mGESA for Njuguna:

What phones does it work on?
Any phone with GPS and capability to download an application will work.

Does it use up your airtime?

mGESA will work on the phone even without any airtime, but during testing, it seemed to work faster with about 10 shillings of credit (equivalent to about $.13).

Is mGESA free?

No. The application is in development and will eventually end up on the commercial market, via Pajat Management in Finland.

Can the application produce a base map or only points?

It can map points of interest only. Later on it should be able to map out lines (roads) and areas.

mGESA data points on the web interface

Where do the points of interest go?

The points of interest that are collected on the phone are downloaded via a USB cable onto a computer, in the same way that you would download photographs from a camera. Then the points are uploaded to the on-line platform, and also then they will be visible on top of a Google map or other kind of map.

Is mGESA compatible with Open Street Maps?

Now that we know about OSM, this is something we shall look into, as it could be quite useful.

Will the information that you collect be public or private?

At this point the information will be closed, because the application is still in development. Also for privacy reasons, some information will be shared and other information not shared. For example, if we are collecting personal information on individuals, or data that could put someone at risk, this will not be shared on the map.

What types of uses will the application be suitable for?

Plan can use mGESA when determining plans for phasing out of one area and moving into another area, for example. Instead of collecting data and indicators on paper, staff and managers can see this information on a map and the information that is collected can help us to know where to work. Having the points of interest mapped out and linked with development information, and being able to select out different information layers on the map (on the internet) should make these decisions easier and more sound.

Will communities be involved and able to use mGESA for their own purposes?

Yes, communities will be able to use the information collected to make their own decisions. Communities can also purchase mGESA for their own use. We might also say to them, come and bring your phone and we will install this application so that you can use it for your own purposes.

Why are you developing a software from scratch and that costs money to the end user if there are existing tools available?

We know that GPS gadgets are expensive and so we thought – why not look into a mobile option. We also had very specific ideas and needs, and we had people willing to develop the idea from scratch. It’s a customized application based on our existing information needs and systems, and we can collect it by mobile rather than trying to find and purchase GPS units here in Kenya.

Update: see this post on Mobile Active for more information on the continued piloting of PoiMapper.

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On trust and disempowerment

Posted in development, El Salvador, gender, random, musing or confusing, smart aid, tagged attitude, development, disempower, doctors, domestic, gender, trust, violence, women on August 5, 2010| 16 Comments »

I had a doctor’s appointment a couple months ago, and my doctor asked me if it was OK for a student to do the prep work, you know, the usual: height, weight, temperature, blood pressure, the like. I said sure.

What I didn’t expect though, was that the student intern was going to read through a list of health questions to try to find out if I was menopausal. Nothing against menopause – it’s a natural thing and I think some women even look forward to it. But I just turned 42, and no, I’m not having hot flashes quite yet.

I suppose it’s some kind of mandatory thing to ask a woman who is in her 40s a series of questions like that. And to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have minded if it had been my doctor asking me. I’ve been seeing her for years now, she knows me, and she knows how to ask questions in the right way. I trust her.

But sitting up on an examination table in a sterile room, clothes off save for an oversized paper gown that keeps falling off my shoulder, with a 20-something I’ve never met sitting in front of me asking if I’m incontinent, suffer from bouts of depression, and have loss of libido was a bit off putting.

It made me want to lie to her. To not reveal any sign of potential menopausal weakness. To tell her that I never feel fatigued. That I never, ever forget anything, and that I am never ever ever distracted or unfocused. I secretly shunned all her suggestions. Calcium? nope, not taking it. Multi vitamins, pah, I feel fine. Let’s get this interview over with STAT.

It felt disempowering to have this young woman, who I don’t know and haven’t developed any trust in, asking me very personal questions about myself and my life and offering scripted solutions to something she imagined I might have, and that she’d obviously never experienced herself. Since then, I’ve been thinking about it off and on, and related life stories come to mind.

—–

Julia*, someone I was very close to in my Barrio in El Salvador (where I lived for most of the 90s) had a long history of domestic abuse. She would talk to me about it all the time – she still lived with the man, who had tapered off a bit as he got older but who was still not entirely pleasant to her. She would get depressed sometimes and talk about leaving, but she never did. As I got to know her better, I realized my role in the relationship was not trying to find solutions, or criticizing the man, or feeling enraged. It was listening and not judging. An older woman, with a small pension. Where would she go? She believed that she would be seen by the neighbors as weak, and that people would lose respect for her. She really didn’t have a lot of options. So she’d tell me and I’d listen, and that was enough. I’d tell her my work troubles too, and she’d listen, and that was also enough for me. I realize as I write this how much I miss her.

About 15 years ago at work, while still in El Salvador, I was responsible for overseeing a study on gender violence that a partner organization was carrying out and that we were funding. It was going to be a door-to-door survey mixed with some focus group discussions. I immediately thought of Julia; of all the women in the Barrio. I thought ‘Julia would never tell anyone the truth if they came knocking on her door to interview her about domestic violence.’ She would say no, that doesn’t happen here, and close the door until they went away. I doubt any of the other women in the Barrio would have acted any differently.

I felt pretty sure that the information that was produced in that study on domestic violence was not going to be valid, even though it was being managed by a group of well-known, well-educated Salvadoran feminists. But I felt like I couldn’t say anything, because I wasn’t a well known local feminist. And after all, they’d often imply, what did I know about El Salvador? I was a foreigner. What I did feel certain about was that no one in the Barrios where they wanted to do their study was going to tell them the truth.

—–

And somehow related to that, I started thinking about the time I went to the doctor’s office with my mother-in-law, a brilliant, strong and upright woman from the Barrio, with a 6^th grade education, who would be considered ‘impoverished’ by most standards. I remember vividly a young male doctor who addressed her using the familiar form of ‘you’ (vos) instead of using the respectful form of ‘you’ (Usted). I remember being furious. I don’t even use vos with my mother-in-law, out of respect. What was this young, wealthy doctor doing using it? I hated seeing her stripped of her well-earned Barrio respect once she entered the doctor’s office, just because she was poor.

—–

What am I trying to say here? I’m not entirely sure, but I guess I’m thinking about respect and the hierarchies of information and education and offices, and the importance of developing a rapport with people before you go prying around in their personal lives and offering solutions.

I’m relating that to ‘aid’ and ‘development’ work, which in my world, is an intensely personal thing. I try to work from the heart, and I hope I’m never making people feel belittled, judged, or like they need to lie to me or conceal things from me because I haven’t taken the time to get to know them. I hope I’m not disrespecting anyone, knowingly or unknowingly, and that I’m not messing around in things that are none of my business or where I haven’t got an invitation. I hope I’m not always trying to offer solutions, but rather listening and supporting people to come to their own conclusions. I hope I don’t make people feel like they are sitting, half naked on an examination table, while someone who knows nothing about them or their life politely asks them some standard questions and comes up with some generic recommendations for how to prevent or cure something they may or may not have or may not think is an illness.

*Not her real name

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