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Poverty P*rn: a reflection of deeper issues

October 3, 2013 by Linda Raftree

Last Friday I had the opportunity to share a panel discussion on “Designing New Narratives: from poverty porn to agency” with Leah Chung, Maharam Fellow and RISD student, and Victor Dzidzienyo, Associate Dean of the College of Engineering Architecture and Computer Sciences at Howard University. The panel was part of the “A Better World by Design” Conference planned and run by a committee of students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, here in Providence.

Photo from http://www.affenstunde.com article on One Laptop Per Child.

I was responsible for setting the stage and moderating, wearing my Regarding Humanity hat. I showed a number of images and narratives that I find questionable – from aid agency fundraising campaigns to children receiving free shoes to famous musicians visiting Ethiopia to models posing in front of poor children to photos of them with imported technological “solutions”. The theme of the conference was “Pause and Effect.” My point was that we should pause and think about the long-term effects of these kinds of images and narratives on people we say we are helping, supporting or partnering with. Beyond fundraising, advocacy and branding for our organizations, what is the impact of these narratives? What long-term effects do they have when there is no strong competing narrative or variety of narratives that enable a more complex, nuanced and varied story?

Some of the ways that we can help change the narrative include:

Leah followed, sharing highlights from research she conducted this summer in Uganda on what Ugandans think about how they and Africans in general are represented in the Western media. With support from Hive Co-Lab, Leah and her research partner, Joseph Wanda, researched how people working in local NGOs and living in rural communities and informal settlement areas view ads like these:

People were asked which of these images they would prefer in a fundraising campaign. (Image courtesy of Leah Chung)

Image courtesy of Leah Chung

Perhaps not surprisingly, a large percentage of the adults interviewed said they preferred the sad photo, because it would be more effective at showing a story of need and raising funds. Interestingly, however, 66% of the children and adolescents interviewed preferred the happy one. Leah said  that a good number of people used the opportunity of her presence to include a story of their own needs and a personal appeal for funding or help during the interview process. 

Adults selected the sad image more often, whereas children and adolescents selected the happy one. (Image courtesy of Leah Chung)

Which of these images would you prefer for a fund-raising campaign? Image courtesy of Leah Chung

Overall, 76% of people Leah and Joseph interviewed said that they were not happy with the way that Africa is represented in the Western world.

The majority of people who participated in the study were unhappy with how Africa is represented in the "Western" world. (Image courtesy of Leah Chung)

Image courtesy of Leah Chung

Leah noted that through her research, she grew to understand that images are only the symptom of deeper dysfunction within the aid industry and its colonial legacy. She also noted that people all over the world hold stereotypes about others. She was viewed as someone bringing in resources to help, and called “Chinese,” although she is actually Korean.

Victor continued the topic by sharing his own story of living in DC as a child, and being one of the people that others wanted to come in to help. “For you as the outsider who comes in to save me, I have some questions,” he said. “For the folks who want to go on a ‘free trip’ to help, my question is: you are going there for what? What are the skill sets that you have that can make a difference? If you don’t have a skill set to offer, you should just stay home.” He recommended hiring local people for the various jobs needed during reconstruction after a disaster rather than sending over students with limited understanding of the local context and limited skills to work in it.

Victor emphasized the similarities in architectural design and designing programs aimed at helping after a flood or an earthquake. For both, a good understanding of the environment, the cultural context, the complexity of social structures, and the local beliefs and norms is required. He questioned whether academic institutions are doing enough to prepare students for working in these environments.

The ensuing comments and discussions made their way across a variety of related topics, with active participation from the room:

  • What can media and development professionals do to support agency? How can we move beyond satire and critique? The bullet points above are a start but what else can be done? We need to change our language, for one thing, and stop using phrases like “we are empowering people, giving them a voice, giving them agency.” We also need to remember that using poverty porn takes away agency from those who donate. The entire cycle is disempowering.
  • Local people are not passive in this: Communities and individuals can be very adept at manipulating this system. Local NGOs also have their own agendas and the aid industry also ties them in knots and makes it difficult for them to function, to be effective and to have a real impact.
  • How issues are framed and by whom matters. There is a great deal of exposure to the Western world and its viewpoints, and often the issues and narrative are framed by outsiders. Local work does not get the spotlight and credit, it’s normally sexy graphic design and social media campaigns like Kony 2012.
  • Should we help locally or internationally? The issues and problems in the world are global problems and they are interlinked at the global level, so where a person helps is not the issue. Location matters less than the underlying motives and levels of respect for people’s own agency, and level of ownership that local people have in the process. Going in to help a community in your own neighborhood or country that you do not understand or that you view as ‘lesser’ is not much different than doing that in a community abroad.
  • Poverty porn is a symptom of much larger issues in the international aid and development industry. The causes go much deeper and require a major shift in a number of areas.
  • Is it possible to change things or do we need to start over? Do we need a new model? It’s likely that international aid and development organizations will be disrupted and disintermediated by a number of forces and changes happening right now, from social entrepreneurs to global economic and power changes to technology to changes in “developing” country economies and attitudes. The problems are not going to go away and the market is not working for everyone, but the nature of how we address these issues will most likely change.
  • Poverty porn is profitable, how can we change this? How can we make the idea of agency and elevating other voices as profitable as poverty porn? How can we take a more comprehensive look at the system and where it’s not working? How can we change what the general public responds to and switch the general consciousness of people who care to a new way of looking at things? How can we re:see, re:listen and re:frame the narrative and get people excited about stories from people who know and live these issues? As intermediaries, our job is to provide platforms and to work to make these voices visible, not to tell other people’s stories. Can we engage people better by showing impact and change rather than miserable situations that victimize and provoke feelings of guilt?
  • Sharing and dialogue is one way that people can learn from each other and build strength in numbers to change things. Supporting “south-south” discussion and learning is key, as is discussion and dialogue between policy makers and practitioners.
  • People (we) need to be aware of their (our) own privilege. People give out of guilt. Until they (we) understand their (our) own power and privilege and step out of it, we will never move forward. Educational institutions confirm and allow people to benefit from their privilege. Going on a semester abroad to “help” people ends up looking good on a student’s resume and helping them, in the end, get a job, not really helping those they went to “help.” So the volunteer ends up getting wealthy from these situations, in a way.
  • Empathy matters, but how do we take it a step further than sleeping outside for a night to understand homelessness? Do these small efforts towards empathy add up to a larger awareness and behavior change, or are they meager attempts to experience life as “the other” without a real examination of power and privilege? How do we take this conversation a step wider also and look at how the West perpetrates and causes poverty by our own policies and consumption patterns?

Posted in accountability, activism, communication for development, development, ICTs, mobile and technology, poverty porn, Re:Hum, smart aid, social justice, wait... what? | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments »

Surveying the landscape: mobiles and youth workforce development

September 16, 2013 by Linda Raftree

Screen Shot 2013-09-13 at 5.09.30 PMYouth make up 17 percent of the world’s population and 40 percent of the world’s unemployed, according to the International Labor Organization. A number of factors combine to make sustainable, decent employment an enormous challenge for youth the world over, including low levels of education and technical skills, slow job growth, lack of information about available jobs, and difficulties accessing financial capital to start small enterprises. Decent jobs are especially difficult to find for rural youth, girls and women, and youth with disabilities.

In addition to the growth in youth unemployment, access to and use of mobile technologies (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, eReaders, radio, portable media players, SD cards) among youth worldwide is also expanding. This has created excitement about the potential of mobile devices to catalyze new approaches that address some of the constraints keeping youth from finding and sustaining decent livelihoods. Documentation and evidence of impact in the broad field of mobile technology and youth workforce development (mYWD) is lacking, however, meaning that it has been difficult to identify where mobile technology and youth workforce development initiatives overlap and where mobile may have the greatest added value.

After a year of hard work, last week we launched the mEducation Alliance’s Mobiles for Youth Workforce Development (mYWD) Landscape Review, an effort of the mEducation Alliance, The MasterCard Foundation, and USAID. The review maps out who is doing what and where, and to the extent possible, discusses evidence of what is working. The body of the report answers questions such as:

  • What organizations and programs are using mobiles to help overcome the barriers to employment for youth?
  • What type of programming has been implemented and how?
  • Where do prime opportunities exist for integrating mobile devices into youth workforce development programs?
  • What are relevant considerations related to gender and disability in mYWD programming?
  • What factors facilitate or hinder mYWD in specific contexts?
  • Are there any research findings that show the impact of mobiles on youth workforce development?

In addition, the annexes provide information on 80 initiatives and over 275 publicly available documents describing efforts that use mobile technology to support youth workforce development programming in five key areas:

  • Workforce education and training, including basic education, technical and vocational education and training (TVET), job skills training, apprenticeships, and life skills training (in and out of the classroom).
  • Employment services, including on-going job referral services that bring employers and workers together through job postings, job fairs, job shadowing, job placement, resume preparation, and coaching.
  • Entrepreneurship and enterprise development, including support programs for self-employment and business development, such as entrepreneurship training, mentoring, and financial services for loans and capital.
  • Demand-side policies and programs, including broad-based economic growth programs like national youth employment policies, value chain development, public works programs, wage subsidies, minimum wages, and tax breaks for employers (JBS International, 2013).
  • Addressing social norms, including programs that support effective participation of excluded groups, non-traditional skills training, safe training and employment spaces for excluded youth, and broader awareness campaigns.

There is an enormous amount of activity in mYWD, from small-scale, market-based start-up applications to mobile innovation hubs for youth entrepreneurs. The landscape review offers a summary of how mobile devices are used in the above five areas, draws out relevant lessons from the available literature and existing evidence base, offers advice from practitioners working in the field of mYWD, discusses the issue of scale and sustainability of mYWD programs, and offers a number of recommendations for furthering the field, including:

  • Creating a mYWD framework to aid in advancing the field
  • Further developing the evidence base for mYWD
  • Improving our understanding of what scale means
  • Focusing on gender and youth with disability
  • Improving knowledge sharing and collaboration
  • Building the mYWD evidence base through research and impact evaluation

Download the mYWD landscape review at this link!

If the topic is of interest, you can also join the mYWD working group by signing up here.

Posted in development, economic empowerment, education, ICT4D, ICTs, mobile and technology, m4D, mobile, mywd, wait... what?, youth workforce development | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Cash Transfers: Old Roads to New Directions

September 11, 2013 by Linda Raftree

This is a cross post from Tessie San Martin, CEO of Plan International USA. It was originally posted on the Plan USA blog, titled Old Roads to New Directions. We’ll have Tessie, Chris Blattman and Paul Niehaus from Give Directly joining us in NYC for our November Technology Salon on Cash Transfers. More info on that soon!
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There has been a lot of chatter in the mainstream media about unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) lately. See, for example, recent pieces in The New York Times and The Atlantic; and a much discussed segment in NPR. Most media pieces also mentioned an organization called GiveDirectly that does just this. The idea, touted as an important innovation in development, is simplicity itself: give cash directly to poor people who need it, without strings.

GiveDirectly leverages the low costs of mobile money to deliver cash transfers to poor households in select African countries. Initial results are encouraging. The money is not being spent on “sin goods”. On the contrary, it is being – for the most part – directed into productive investment that helps these poor families get ahead.

It is worth noting differences between UCTs and CCTs (conditional cash transfers). CCT programs provide cash payments to poor households, but they impose conditions on recipients before they get the money, mostly related to children’s health care and education (e.g. enroll the kids in school). UCTs put no such conditions. This is why there is such enthusiasm about UCTs. “No conditions” means such programs tend to be cheaper to administer. At least that is the theory. Note that UCTs and CCTs are similar in that neither has any conditions on how the money (once obtained) is spent.

This posting is focused on UCTs because of the current buzz around them. Although they are showing impressive results, let’s be realistic about the potential and limitations of UCTs. There is a lot that we do not know about the conditions under which UCT schemes lead to sustainable poverty reduction. Nor are we clear about how such programs can be scaled effectively. To the credit of organizations like GiveDirectly, they have partnered with Innovations for Poverty Action to carefully evaluate the results of their actions through rigorous randomized control trials.

It is worth noting that GiveDirectly is doing more than just sending cash to the poor; they are also spending resources carefully identifying, evaluating and selecting beneficiaries, and on monitoring and evaluation. This leads me to one of three points I think are worth making about UCTs.

First, the idea behind UCTs may be simple, but the more successful UCT schemes are complex. The “U” in UCTs does not mean that all you are doing is giving poor people money and stepping back. Research done by ODI and funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) suggests that UCTs work best when accompanied by information, education and communication efforts, careful targeting and selection of participants, and constant feedback and interaction. In other words, you need to consider who will be selected, what complementary efforts/services will enable and facilitate a good response, and you need to constantly invest in citizen feedback channels that allow you to learn and adapt as better information about program impact comes in. This is not much different than what a good INGO needs to do in order to deliver effective programming (UCT or not).

Second, the media coverage ignores how much variation exists among UCTs schemes. As the World Bank’s Berk Ozler has highlighted, there is a world of difference between “waking up one morning and finding $500 in your M-PESA account” (GiveDirectly) and the interventions being carried out in Liberia for unemployed youth, or what the DfID-funded ODI studies describe. Again, it is too early to tell what kinds of effects on poverty reduction we can expect from such schemes and we are miles away from understanding how scheme design details are related to sustainable paths out of poverty.

This leads me to a third set of questions: for whom are UCTs working? How do program results compare in urban vs. rural areas, for different income levels? We have years of data on CCTs, particularly a lot of data from Mexico, Brazil and other middle income countries where these programs have been scaled up nationally. Yes CCTs have problems (what development and social safety net programs do not?). But there is plenty of research demonstrating the conditions under which CCTs work. UCTs are much less well studied.

But the importance of these innovations, as Chris Blattman has already said, is that it forces (or should force) development organizations and donors to think about “top and bottom lines.” In other words, is what we are doing working? And even if it is working, at what cost? More importantly, we should always ask: are there other options for delivering the same (or similar) results more cost effectively?

As the CEO of a child sponsorship organization, I am drawn to the idea of UCTs. In fact, our initial child sponsorship efforts decades ago bear important similarities to today’s UCT programs. But Plan (like most other child sponsorship organizations) stepped away from such direct transfers, as concerns with sustainability and dependency grew. It is perhaps time to take a new look at the evidence around cash transfers, invest in reviewing results of past sponsorship programs and the lessons learned from that experience that may be applicable to a new generation of UCTs.

In the private sector, publicly quoted companies live and die by the share price, and the pressure to innovate and stay ahead is always present. For public charities like Plan, the rewards – and risks – of innovation are much less clear. But ignoring disruptive technologies and innovations, and failing to continuously push to experiment and learn will lead to irrelevancy. The jury may be out on UCTs, but they need to be taken seriously. GiveDirectly and others like it are pushing us all to do better.

Posted in development, mobile, wait... what? | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Scaling Mobile for Development (M4D)

August 14, 2013 by Linda Raftree

According to the latest GSMA statistics, nearly 50% of people own a mobile phone in the developing world and almost 70% have access to mobile phones. With mobile access increasing daily, opportunities to use mobiles in development initiatives continue to grow and expand. The area of Mobiles for Development (M4D) has attracted investment from all sides, including mobile operators, entrepreneurs, investors and international development agencies – all working to generate social impact and improve wellbeing at the base of the pyramid. However, efforts to scale M4D initiatives and make them sustainable have largely failed.

Our July 25th NYC Technology Salon examined the topic of Scaling M4D. Lead discussants Corina Gardner from the GSMA’s Mobile Development Intelligence (MDI) unit and Sean McDonald from FrontlineSMS joined us to kick off the conversation, which was hosted at the Rockefeller Foundation.

Screen Shot 2013-08-14 at 10.52.13 AMThe Salon started off with key points from the MDI report “Scaling Mobile for Development: A developing world opportunity,” which highlights the issue of sustainable and scaled impact as the central challenge (and opportunity) in M4D over the next five years. Because the GSMA is commercially focused (it is made up of telecommunication industry members), business models that can achieve both revenue goals and added value to customers are a core concern. GSMA is interested in finding M4D business models that convince industry to re-invest and replicate. However not many of these examples exist.

Business models at the base of the pyramid (BOP) tend to be different than what the industry is used to. If scale is defined as the number of people reached with a service, and the population being reached has little money, then the only clear business model is via a huge customer base. Given that international development agencies also want to achieve scale with development programs, there is a good potential overlap in M4D. In order to achieve good impact, it’s critical to think through what BOP users want and need, and what offers real value to them for their limited resources.

Innovative vehicles are needed for investing in M4D. Currently, M4D financing tends to take two distinct paths: International Development funding and Venture Capital (VC) funding. Hiccups occur because the two operate very differently and do not always work well together. International development funds and processes do not move as quickly as technology-based funds. There is low tolerance for uncertainty and a desire for initial proof of potential impact, adoption and uptake. On the VC side, there is the desire for a light overhead structure modeled after Silicon Valley; however in African countries, for example, there is little existing infrastructure, meaning a heavier structure and a slower process. In addition, the exit strategy may not be clear. A worst-case scenario is when one of the two types of financing bodies is interested in investing, yet both walk away when they see the other at the table.

Though very few examples of M4D at scale exist, some elements brought up during the Salon that need to be considered include:

User-centric design. It is critical to understand the community and the end user’s needs, demands, and payment capacity. Both the private sector and international development agencies have existing approaches to developing M4D initiatives that focus on understanding local context and consultation and engagement with users, but the two sectors use different language to describe these approaches and they often talk past each other without connecting on their commonalities. According to one discussant, the best and most user friendly design is that with the lowest barrier to access, the simplest technology, the cleanest interface and configurability, so that people can build in more complexity if needed. These types of design will also tend to be the most replicable, an important element of scale. Iterative design and getting prototypes in front of users is needed to get their feedback, and this can be a challenge in M4D programs if they are being done within typical international development cycles of planning and funding.

User data. Users at the base of the pyramid are both financially poor and “data poor” and companies cannot create products for users that they know nothing about. Mobile can help gather data on user behaviors. This data can be used to inform business models, create products and services of value for BOP users, and to create revenue streams. One key question is that of how the data can be better used to benefit the BOP more broadly.

Understanding what ‘scale’ means for different parties. For mobile operators, scale is important because it is linked to numbers, volume and revenue. However this is not the element that matters for those working in international development, where impact may be a more important measure of success. Uptake of an M4D service may be due to advertising, rather than because it has a measurable impact on the life of a user. The difference needs to be understood and better analyzed and documented before success, scale, or impact is claimed. One measure of success is improved and sustained functioning of broader systems — and mobile may only be one small piece of a well-functioning development program, information ecosystem, or service delivery effort. As one discussant noted, “I don’t care if someone uses mobile banking or branch banking, so long as they are banking.” The mobile device may not be the central piece; it may be an additional access point for people who were formerly left out of these systems. In addition, “reaching” people is different than “influencing” people, and the latter will likely have more of an impact. Trust is critical in these efforts to influence, and often that takes more than a mobile connection.

Infrastructure.  The case for improved networks, coverage, and other infrastructure (electricity, for example) needs to be made to operators and government. The urban-rural divide when it comes to infrastructure is a global issue, not just one in so-called ‘developing economies.’ For example, using 4G and a credit card, someone can order a product on Amazon from the DRC, however Amazon will not be able to deliver that product. Similarly, someone can report poor government services via a mobile phone, but until infrastructure and governance improves, there may be no response. Poor infrastructure in rural areas is an issue globally.

Payment. Operators incorrectly give away free SMS to NGOs, said one discussant. Instead, having to pay a small amount (either as an NGO or an end user) means that much more care is taken in terms of what is communicated. “If it costs 5 cents to send a message, you will not spam people.” This is also critical for building in sustainability, and where the best ROI tends to be found in technology influenced programming. More thought and research is needed regarding payment and sustainable, scalable models.

Due diligence. A challenge in the M4D space is the high incidence of people seeing a problem, thinking no one has addressed it, and jumping in to build their own solution. This wastes money and time and creates churn. It is important to do research, layer, and build from other people’s ideas and existing solutions. One problem with the idea of due diligence, according to a participant, is that it means different things to different people. In technology it means “you have a problem, what is the cheapest and most robust solution,” but in the field of international development, context discovery takes a very long time and requires multidisciplinary knowledge and awareness that goes far beyond technology. There is also a need to consider whether technology (as opposed to non-digital efforts) is the most viable solution for the information and communication situation. ‘Horizontal due diligence’ (looking at partnerships) and due diligence with regard to maximizing systems are also needed.

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E). M&E is currently sub-par on most M4D initiatives, said one participant. Organizations are often doing their own M&E rather than having a third party conduct external M&E.  There is a lack of comparative data on M4D programs also, and often M&E is attempted at the end of a project rather than built in from the start. A greater presence of academia is needed in M4D work, it was noted, and we also need more qualitative data, as currently the emphasis is on the quantitative data that are collected more easily via mobiles. One benefit in M4D programs is the ability to digitize and intelligently store data from the very start. This is the way to show scale and impact, said another participant. However data need to be well-used and refined, and available to the right person or people at the right time. Greater respect and understanding of privacy and ethical issues along with helping people to understand and steward their users’ data are also critically important and need more attention.

Salons function under Chatham House Rule, thus no attribution has been made. Sign up here to join the Technology Salon mailing list to receive invitations for future events in NYC, DC, San Francisco, London and Nairobi!

Posted in development, ICT4D, ICTs, mobile and technology, m4D, mobile, monitoring and evaluation, NYC, technology salon, TSNYC, wait... what? | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Punk’s not dead

August 5, 2013 by Linda Raftree

from chaos to haute couture...

from chaos to haute couture…

I took my 16-year-old (a huge music fan) to the Met on Saturday to see the Punk: Chaos to Couture exhibit. I was a little skeptical, having been pretty into punk rock as a teenager.

It was really bizarre to be at The Met, looking at how punk rock influenced high fashion. In fact, it was kind of ridiculous. (Hello, $100 designer “punk rock” shirts in the Museum Shop.) Everyone kept getting in trouble for photographing things (which of course only made me want to photograph them more). My daughter kept admonishing me to stop.

I would have preferred an exhibit about punk rock over one on high fashion, but it was cool that I kept overhearing mothers around my age explaining to their daughters “yes, back when I was a teenager….” or “I used to wear this kind of thing back when…” Of course they were not talking about high fashion, but about the real live stuff we used to get from the thrift shops and modify into something new. In my home town we were normally about 10 years behind the times, and we didn’t discover punk rock till the 80s, but oh well. Back then we didn’t have cable or the Internet, and punk rock was not available at the mall. We had to find inspiration wherever we could.

46909_10151752486462284_666195068_nThe background information about the Chaos to Couture exhibit explained that the difference between British punk and American punk was that Brit punk was a sociopolitical reaction of the working class and US punk was more an intellectual-artistic movement. I have to say, though, that in Indiana in the 1980s, we were rebelling against the boredom and status quo of life in general. We weren’t politically engaged, intellectual, or particularly artistic; we just felt like misfits and knew something was not quite right. We didn’t want to be like the people around us.

The Met exhibit credits the punk DIY attitude for spawning some of the current approaches in tech and social media today. (DIY is wonderfully chronicled, by the way, in the excellent book “Our Band Could Be Your Life” which covers the 80s DIY music movement in the US, including chapters on some of my favorites: The Butthole Surfers, Black Flag, The Minutemen, and Sonic Youth).

A good friend of mine and I semi-jokingly talk about wanting to do PunkICT4D. We’ve mused about starting the #ICT4Anarchy hashtag based on the definition below from Noam Chomsky. (We’ll be exploring some of this in December at ICTD2013 during a panel with a high brow, academic, not very punk sounding title: “Appropriating ICTs for Developing Critical Consciousness and Structural Social Change.”)

[Noam says] Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics.  Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy.  It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified.  It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them.  Their authority is not self-justifying.  They have to give a reason for it, a justification.  And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just.  And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency.  It takes different forms at different times….

In doing a little reading on the exhibit at the Met, I found this rather blind statement (my bold).

In the 1970s, Punk was so much more than a fashion statement. In Britain, it was a reaction to sky-high unemployment, to the Thatcher administration’s closing of the mines, and to the pervasive feeling of hopelessness. Andrew Bolton, the British curator of the show, talked about how that political tinderbox could never be recreated today, although the fashions could be referenced and reworked.

On the one hand, duh. We all know that punk became another watered down, mass-produced, corporate-sponsored commodity. On the other hand, no. Punk’s not dead. The best part of the exhibit was this, scrawled on one of the walls:

Courtesy of @umairh because I was being watched by a museum guard and couldn't get a photo.

Courtesy of @umairh’s Twitter feed because the museum guards were watching, and I couldn’t get any more photos.

Maybe I’m a throwback, but it seems punk’s still hugely relevant.
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PD: Chomsky on Celebrity and Punk Rock, via Christopher Neu.
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Posted in activism, development, ICT4D, politics, wait... what? | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Youth and ICTs in Sierra Leone, Sweden, Indonesia and Uganda

July 18, 2013 by Linda Raftree

Screen Shot 2013-07-14 at 2.40.51 PMLast week, 600 exceptional youth activists from 80 countries arrived to New York City for a UN Takeover, where they called for urgent action by member states to meet Millennium Development Goal 2 on education by 2015. The youth’s inputs will feed into setting the agenda for global education priorities post-2015. One of the highlights of the week was this inspiring talk by Malala Yousafzai, who made her first public address to the UN on June 12th, her 16th birthday.

Seven of the youth participating in the UN Takeover with the support of Plan joined us as lead discussants for our July 10th Technology Salon. Agung, Dina, and Nurul from Indonesia; Kamanda and Fatmata from Sierra Leone; Tova from Sweden; and Frank from Uganda told us about ICT access and use in their communities and countries. We also heard about their work as youth activists on issues of child marriage, school violence, good governance, and education, and whether ICTs are effective outreach tools for campaigning in their contexts.

The realities of access

In both Sierra Leone and Uganda Internet access is quite difficult. Traveling to Internet cafés in urban areas is too expensive for rural youth to do regularly, and it is unsafe for young women to travel in the evenings. There is not enough equipment in schools and universities, and youth have trouble affording and finding regular access. The majority of primary and secondary schools do not have ICTs, and non-governmental organizations are unable to reach everyone with their programs to supply equipment and training. Although there are often funds given to governments to build computer labs, these tend to benefit urban areas. In some cases projects and funds are used for political gain and personal favors. Even at university level, student access might be limited to 1-2 hours per week at a computer lab, meaning they end up doing almost everything on paper.

Lack of ICT access impacts on job prospects for youth, because jobs exist but employers are seeking people who know how to operate a computer. Many of these job applications have to be submitted online. This puts jobs out of reach of youth in rural areas. Basic infrastructure remains a problem in rural areas. Although telecommunication lines have been laid, electricity for charging mobile phones is still a problem and often electricity is dependent on a solar panel or a generator, making it difficult to run a computer lab or Telecenter.

ICTs are heightening the development divide, noted one Salon participant. In schools near urban areas, parents pay more in tuition and school fees and their children have better ICT access than rural children. This creates inequality. “Students going to these schools have access and they will even study computer science. But when you go to a rural village you might only see one small room where children can access a computer, if anything at all. Teachers themselves don’t know how to use computers.” In cities, parents know ICTs are important. In the rural villages, however, many people are skeptical of technologies. This inequality of access and education means that youth in rural areas and the poor are not able to meet requirements for jobs that use ICTs.

One discussant noted, “It is possible to access Internet through mobile phones. You can use some phones to access Internet, Facebook, etc. In the villages, however, you find that you can only receive calls and make calls. There is no Internet. When I went to Nairobi and saw everyone with smart phones, I wondered, ‘What is wrong with Uganda?’ We don’t have many smart phones.” Another discussant commented that her university has a wide area network, but it is only available to lecturers, not to students.

Most of the youth discussants considered that, among their peer groups, more girls than boys had mobile phones, and more girls were active on the Internet and Facebook.

Access brings concerns

In Indonesia, it was noted, Internet is very available, except for the more remote islands. In Java, commented one discussant, “every young person has a smart phone. They use Facebook and Twitter and can get all kinds of information, and those without smart phones can use Internet cafés.” Internet access, however, is creating new problems. “Parents are proud that their kids are going to the Internet shop to get information, but they also worry about increased access to pornography.” Internet is believed to contribute to an increase in child marriages. The youth discussants said they would like more guidance on how to filter information, know what is true and what is not, use Internet safely, and avoid exposure to offensive content. One discussant from Indonesia mentioned that parents in her community worried that if girls went to Internet cafes or browsed online, they would be exposed to inappropriate materials or prostitution through Facebook.

In Sweden, access to Internet and smart phones is universal. However, parents may buy children a smart phone even if they cannot really afford it. Although many children learn English early because they can easily access Internet, many also do not learn how to write properly because they only use computers.

When phones are available but there is no capacity to purchase them, additional problems also arise. According to one discussant, “Some girls want to have big things before their time.” This can lead to young women offering sex to older men in return for money, fancy phones and airtime.

ICTs in formal education

Youth discussants all said that they are increasingly expected to have access to the Internet and computers in order to complete their school assignments, and they felt this was not a realistic expectation. In one of the youth’s schools in Indonesia, computer class is offered for 4 hours per week and a computer lab is available with 30 desktop computers. In another school in Jakarta, however, every child is expected to have their own laptop. “Our problem is different than in the remote areas. Every teacher in Jakarta thinks that a smart phone or computer is ‘the world in our hands.’ They think we don’t need education about the computer itself. They think we can learn from the Internet how to use computers, and so we have to search and learn this all by ourselves with little guidance.” In Sweden, “if you don’t have Internet access, it will be very difficult to pass a course.”

Effective ways to reach and engage youth in campaigns

Discussants were asked about the communication channels that are most effective for campaigning or engaging youth and communities. In rural Sierra Leone and Uganda, face-to-face was considered the most effective outreach channel for reaching youth and communities, given low levels of access to computers, radios and mobile phones. “Most times our campaigns are face-to-face. We move to communities, we use local language to be sure everyone gets the message,” said one youth discussant. In Jakarta, however, “it’s easy to use online means, it never sleeps. Young people in Jakarta are too lazy to attend workshops. They don’t like to listen to speakers. So we share by social media, like Facebook and Twitter.”

Digital media is only useful in urban areas, said one youth discussant from Sierra Leone. “We mostly use radio to do advocacy and sensitization campaigns. We also do it face-to-face. For secondary schools, we do talks. We tell them about documents signed by government or NGOs, what is in place, what is not in place. We give advice. We talk straight about health, about sex education. You just wait for the light in their eyeball to see if they are understanding. We also do dramas, and we paste up wall bills. We do all of this in our local languages.” Youth groups and youth networks are also useful channels for passing along messages and building support.

Radio is effective in theory, but one discussant noted that in his district, there are only two radio stations. “You take your information or announcement there, and they say they will pass it, but you stay waiting… it’s a challenge.”

Campaigns must also involve engaging local decision makers, a participant noted. Often chiefs do not understand, and they may be the very ones who violate the rights of girls. Youth noted the need to be diplomatic however, or they risk being seen as impolite or trouble-makers. “You have to really risk yourself to do rights work in the community,” noted one discussant. Another commented that having support and buy-in from local leaders is critical in order to be taken seriously. “You need a ‘big voice’ to back you and to convince people to listen to you.”

INGO staff can help legitimize youth work in some cases, but there are also issues. “Local leaders always ask for money,” noted one discussant. “When they hear Plan, UNICEF, Care, Save the Children, they think these organizations gave us money and we’ve taken it for ourselves.” Youth often resort to using external INGO staff as their legitimizing force because “we don’t have other role models, everybody wants money. The politicians say they will help us but then they are always too busy. We have to take the lead ourselves.”

Conflicting information and messages can also be a problem, commented a Salon participant. “One year, it’s the ABC Campaign for HIV prevention, the next it’s condoms, and then it’s prevention. Sometimes youth don’t know who to believe. The NGO says something, the government says something, and local leaders say something else. We need consistency.” In addition, he noted, “INGOs come in with their big range rovers, so of course local leaders and communities think that there is money involved. INGOs need to think more carefully and avoid these conflicting messages.”

What would youth like to see?

Going forward, the youth would like more access, more ICT education, more transparency and accountability in terms of how governments spend funds directed to ICT programs, and more guidance on filtering information and ensuring it’s veracity so that children will not be taken advantage of.

*****

Thanks to the Population Council for hosting us for the Salon! Join us for our next Salon on July 25th: How can we scale Mobiles for Development initiatives? 

The Technology Salon methodology was used for the session, including Chatham House Rule, therefore no attribution has been made in this summary post. Sign up here to receive notifications about upcoming Salons in New York, Nairobi, San Francisco, London and Washington, DC. 

Posted in C4D, children, communication for development, development, education, ICTs, mobile and technology, mobile, participation, protection, social media, technology salon, TSNYC, wait... what?, youth, youth media | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

Digital job creation for African youth

July 1, 2013 by Linda Raftree

Image from http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/our-work/current-work/digital-jobs-africa/digital-jobs-defined.

Our June 20 Salon in New York City tackled the topic of digital jobs for African youth. Lead discussants were Lauren Dawes, who leads the GSMA’s Mobiles for Employment team, and Lillian Chege from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Digital Jobs Africa program. The GSMA will release a study on Mobiles for Work in July, and Rockefeller has recently announced a 7-year, multi-million dollar commitment to creating digital jobs in six African countries.

The wealth of experience in the room led to lively discussions and debates around roles and responsibilities in this area. The stagnant global economy is a major underlying problem when it comes to youth employment, and jobs cannot be created out of thin air. Salon participants shared how they are trying to work around this by identifying areas with potential for youth, preparing youth for these opportunities, and seeking to match youth skills with private sector demand. Alternatively, some Salon participants focus on helping youth enter into different forms of entrepreneurship.

What do youth want?

When surveyed for a previous GSMA study on Mobile Learning, young people indicated more interest in using mobile devices for finding a job than for learning math or English. Most youth prioritized work skills to get jobs. So the GSMA conducted a second study (forthcoming) with youth in Spain, Ghana, Indonesia and Bangladesh to identify where mobile devices could help with youth employment. The study’s preliminary findings indicate that youth want support for learning and training; finding a job (connecting to employers, knowing what to say to them, understanding the process of getting a job); and obtaining skills and capital to start their own businesses. Surveyed youth identified interest in manufacturing, catering, teaching, and the ICT and mobile sectors, including sales, selling mobile phones and mobile accessories, and jobs in the mobile industry.

Do youth have a sense of what is possible?

Listening to youth is very valuable, but some Salon participants felt that youth might only be aware of what they see around them. How can we help youth discover new areas and expand their horizons, they asked. Might there be jobs and possibilities that youth are well suited for but do not know about? The fall back position of “start my own business” is another example of what  youth see around them in poor economies where there are no formal jobs. Youth’s ideas will likely be very experience-based. One Salon participant told of an innovation contest, where youth in Kenya submitted new and creative ideas, whereas those from some other countries submitted ideas that closely mirrored NGO programs commonly seen in their communities. Stimulating youth to think bigger and exposing them to new opportunities and ideas is an important part of youth development and youth employment programs.

Soft skills for formal jobs

As the GSMA study noted, a big challenge for youth is understanding the job seeking process and gaining the skills needed to find a job, communicate with employers, and then keep a job. Many youth do not know how to manage an interview, or how to retain connections. Placing someone who has never experienced a formal setting into a formal job, even at an entry-level, creates a whole set of issues. In some cases these may be more basic, like personal hygiene, arriving to work on time, or simply knowing how to navigate a formal work environment. New kinds of hierarchies may need to be learned. For example, in some contexts males have never had to work with or report to females. On top of these situations, there may be additional, deeper challenges. In one employment program, a Salon participant noted, 8 of the 10 girls recruited were survivors of rape. Once youth land a job, an entire family is relying on them and their income, and this generates a great deal of stress. The traditional education system does a very poor job of helping youth gain soft skills, As one participate noted, it still aims to prepare youth for an industrial economy yet today’s world requires completely different skills to succeed.

Skills for entrepreneurship

The state of the economy is such that many youth will not find formal employment and are considering starting their own businesses. In the GSMA study, youth identified a desire for capital and support in this area. A Salon participant outlined 3 kinds of entrepreneurship: high impact/high growth (Silicon valley style); lifestyle entrepreneurship (small and medium enterprises, family businesses); survival entrepreneurship (low-skilled, informal businesses). Each of these is quite different, and adequate risk analysis and targeted support and skills training need to be developed for each according to the context. Most youth in developing countries will not work in Silicon Valley. They will instead need to develop skills for lifestyle and survival entrepreneurship. Soft skills as well as technical know-how are critical for entrepreneurship, and many investments are unsuccessful because these skills are not strong among youth. Generational gaps also make it difficult for older people to mentor younger people, because things are moving from print to digital and relationships are also changing. Innovation hubs are aiming to fill this gap and provide youth with a relevant space to learn the hard and soft skills required for high impact, high growth entrepreneurship in the tech sector.

What about young women?

It was noted that most of the existing innovation hubs are very male-focused. For example, only 16% of the iHub Nairobi’s users are female. More needs to be done to bring women into these spaces, yet it can be challenging in many contexts where girls do not complete secondary school. Female role models and mentors are scarce in these new fields and in leadership positions within companies. Mentorship is key for young women, who tend to doubt themselves, to be apologetic about their ideas, and who are often shy about speaking up. Some organizations are using Skype, Google hangouts, Facebook, and Twitter chats to reach and mentor young women. Girls from poorer communities, however, may not have access to these programs and may not see themselves and their personal experiences reflected in female role models from the upper classes. In addition, though mentoring is high touch and very powerful, in its current form it is time-consuming and not feasible for reaching everyone who needs it. The challenge is offering these kinds of support at scale.

The employment ecosystem

Some participants noted that creating one job at a large company can stimulate additional, related jobs (e.g., cleaners, nannies and cooks who serve employees at lunchtime). Others felt that the trickle-down effect is overestimated. An entire ecosystem conducive to youth employment is needed. This is not a simple thing to create, and it takes quite a long time. The role of government in creating the infrastructure for jobs and a digital economy cannot be underestimated. One participant pointed out that both “bottom up” development of the labor market and “top down” development of labor infrastructure and capital are needed. This will vary from country to country, and research should be conducted to understand the right entry points for each context. All these sectors need to work together to match the economic context, the demand, and the supply sides. The private sector cannot create jobs on its own, as one discussant commented. Jobs are created because of consumer demand and need. The private sector can, however, get better at identifying which jobs are on the horizon, and it can work with education, training, and non-profit partners to ensure that youth are prepared for these jobs.

Comprehensive programs are needed

When we train youth for non-existent jobs, we create expectations, said one Salon participant, citing an ILO study that reported 40% of job programs had negative impacts on youth. In addition, programs cannot only look at one side of the issue. Youth employment programs should not be just hard skills, just soft skills, or just mentorship. Rather they need to be comprehensive. The issue of supply-demand balance is rampant across development programs, noted another participant. We train women to go to a clinic, and they go, but there is no midwife. The need for a holistic perspective is something that has been learned the hard way, and this learning needs to transfer into youth employment programs. Impact sourcing is a newer concept where socially responsible businesses are encouraged to hire youth from less privileged communities for lower end jobs, for example, at call centers. The Rockefeller Foundation is working in partnership with the private sector and institutes such as Digital Divide Data to train and place youth in these types of jobs and will expand to sectors outside of the business process outsourcing (BPO) field in their new Digital Jobs Africa program. In some cases, 100% of participating youth have been placed into formal economy jobs. The program is also looking at other high growth sectors (such as agriculture, manufacturing, and the hospitality industry) where digital jobs are growing. The Foundation collaborates with governments to support creation of an enabling environment that will allow these efforts to achieve scale.

Scale and speed are imperative

While scale is one factor, time is the other, according to one participant. Hubs and ground-up entrepreneurship can move the ball down the field, but this will take time. A grand and widespread effort is needed. In part, this can be boosted by identifying and building on existing infrastructure. Libraries can serve as information hubs for job seekers, financial literacy, digital spaces and places to find support for job training and seeking. Telecenters are also playing a role in helping youth access information and build digital and life skills. More needs to be done with schools as well. The need is too great not to scale, said one discussant, it’s imperative! We need to unlock existing funding within government as well. Governments can  be a source of demand, as they also have digital needs and digital jobs. In Kenya, for example, the government is digitalizing the records for the country’s largest hospital, and this is work that youth are doing. As new hospitals are built in rural areas, now they will have access to patient records across the health system. Similar efforts can be found and youth can be trained for these kinds of jobs.

What about rural youth?

While the possibilities are exciting, much of the work is anchored in urban and semi-urban areas, including the digital jobs programs and the innovation hubs. Participants asked whether it is possible to extend services out to rural areas to cast a wider net. The latest “big thing” was also brought up – can Google’s new wifi balloons solve some of the issue with connectivity, and will that be enough to bring some of these benefits to rural populations?

—

Thanks to our great lead discussants, Lauren and Lillian, and to Melissa Beuoy at FHI-360’s New York City office for graciously hosting us and providing a fantastic breakfast spread!

Don’t miss our July 10 Salon on the realities of ICT access for youth in Indonesia, Sweden, Sierra Leone and Uganda. We’ll be joined by 6 youth who are visiting New York City for a UN Take Over to support girls’ education, in honor of of Malala Yousafzai.

Sign up to receive alerts on future events at Technology Salon.

Salons are in-person only events held in Washington DC, New York, San Francisco, Nairobi and London. We hold to Chatham House Rule, thus no attribution has been made in the above summary post.

Posted in development, economic empowerment, education, gender, ICT4D, ICTs, mobile and technology, m4D, technology salon, wait... what?, youth workforce development | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

When fundraising harms dignity

June 26, 2013 by Linda Raftree

Screen Shot 2013-06-26 at 8.34.52 AMThis is a summary by Daniel Ramirez-Raftree* of Kurante‘s June 18th Google Hangout Debate on Poverty Porn. Tom Murphy’s “storify” version of the discussion can be found here.

Most everyone has seen photographs of emaciated African children being consoled by one famous Hollywood movie star or other. Images like these are effective at moving people to donate. If success were measured solely on profits brought in, then “poverty porn” (the name for these sorts of images and stories that exploit the personal suffering caused by poverty) would indeed be a grand success.

Fundraising is not the end goal of non-profit organizations, however. With the use of these tactics, what organizations gain in funds, poor communities lose in dignity, empowerment and voice. When poverty porn saturates the media, these images become the single story told about the poor.

As part of an effort to generate discussion around (and alternatives to) the use of poverty porn as a marketing and media strategy, Kurante organized a Google Hangout on June 18. This livestream discussion touched on the problematic questions that surround the ethics and practicality of changing marketing and media approaches. Moderated by Lindsay Poirier, panelists Lina Srivastava, Ethan Zuckerman, Teddy Ruge, Linda Raftree and Charlie Beckett discussed why and how we should be moving away from poverty porn to a more dignified portrayal of the poor.

Poverty Porn’s Effects and Drawbacks: Poverty porn is effective as a means for raising funds because it elicits strong emotional responses. This can be a problem, however, because people are not necessarily driven to help or donate because of a comprehensive understanding of the actual work that’s being done, but rather by feelings of pity, sympathy, and guilt. Education systems in “the global North” don’t always teach students about the world as it exists in its entirety, they tend to rely on stereotypes that uniformly categorize “developing” countries around the world as poor, miserable, and disastrous. This sets the general public up to respond to marketing and advocacy campaigns that utilize poverty porn, and, in turn, the marketing strategy further reinforces the stereotype. Ultimately, this technique is a shortcut to getting necessary funds. It works to that end, but it does not encourage a deeper and more egalitarian human connection among different cultures, people and societies.

Power Dynamics. Power relationships are inherently at play when those with more resources help those with less. The wealthy and more powerful are generally accustomed to (and feel entitled to) making decisions about what needs to be done in the community they are helping, and, conversely, individuals or groups on the receiving end of this help may feel as if they cannot (or should not) raise their voice to speak up for what they wants to see done or what type of help they need. This is the result of a “beggars can’t be choosers” mentality, where “beneficiaries” and “recipients” are expected to feel grateful for any support given. As media outlets and ideas about what it means to be involved in aid and development work change, this mentality is being subverted by development workers and outspoken community members. For example, when the documentary Prostitutes of God was released, sex workers portrayed in the documentary were offended by how they were represented. They banded together to create a response video that quickly spread through social media channels. This type of response does not happen all the time, but as access to social media increases, there are more and more opportunities for the poor to speak up about how they are being represented.

Community Voice: One step towards improving how “the poor” are represented is trusting communities to speak for themselves. External agents need to stop dictating what community members should talk about or say or what the boundaries of their stories should be. A full story can only be conveyed through multiple points of view, but the perspective of the poor has historically been missing. Social media is playing a role in opening up some of these channels for expression and platforms for more voices. In this way, media and development agency audiences can begin getting the “full story” behind development work and life in developing countries. If stereotypes and clichés are replaced by this more ethnographic method, the wider social goals of non-profit work can be better served.

Perceptions: To bring about change, emphasis must be placed on the way development agencies look at themselves, at the individuals and communities they work with, and at the way that relationships are portrayed in marketing and media materials. The narratives of the western hero and the benevolent savior that are implicit in many poverty porn images are the immediate result of power dynamics. This notion of what it means to “help the poor” lingers in the minds of the general public, those doing aid work, and even in many communities on the receiving end of aid and development funding and projects. If the aim is to empower communities to help themselves in a sustainable way, paternalistic attitudes must be replaced by actively egalitarian partnerships. Transforming media can help to achieve this.

Metrics: An important question that panelists and the Twitter audience raised was the issue of metrics. How will we measure whether or not changes in non-profit marketing and media are having their intended effect? A current problem with metrics is that the various departments within an organization are overly specialized and siloed. Each comes up with its own way of measuring success and these are often only a part of the picture. Fundraising is only a tool to help an organization achieve its larger mission, not the end goal.

Public Involvement: The general public is very difficult to change. People may “hunger” for a certain type of story (the starving child story) and not be satisfied by images of self-sufficient communities that they imagine should be struggling and helpless. However, in most cases, their money is ultimately going towards creating longer-term structural change, not to feeding the hungry child they saw on a poster. Organizations need to find ways to help people better understand what their donation is actually doing. One way to do this may be through participatory media that involves on-the-ground communities making their own media and telling their own stories.

Realigning the public’s sentiment will be the result of widespread pedagogic and cultural change. It will be a process wider in scope than a campaign against poverty porn can accomplish alone. The public is an ever-transforming entity that is affected by history and memory, thus we need to come up with engaging, creative and dynamic strategies to involve people in our work. Contending with public perceptions is a challenge, but no meaningful change can be accomplished without a widespread effort at various levels.

Poverty porn does not only have to do with the way the West views Africa, it is an expression of classism that appears wherever those with more are helping those with less. By changing the way we manage media, we can affect the way stereotypes proliferate. Here’s a taste of a debate that will surely continue as conservative thinkers react skeptically or defensively to the prospect of progress and equality of voice from those who are viewed historically as less.

*Disclosure – Daniel is my son and he is helping us out at Regarding Humanity and Kurante for the summer. I’m not sure if this is nepotism or a normal part of running a ‘family business!’

Posted in wait... what? | 12 Comments »

Fundraising: Is the tail wagging the dog?

June 21, 2013 by Linda Raftree

This is a cross-post from the always thoughtful and eloquent Ian Thorpe, who notes that fundraising is a means to help non-profit organizations fulfill their wider mission; it should not be mistaken as the end goal of non-profit organizations. Consistency in how we achieve our missions across all of our operations becomes ever more important in this age of growing transparency. Read the original post here.

by Ian Thorpe

I’ve been reflecting on a couple of interesting discussions lately on aid communication and fundraising.  In the first, Kurante organized a Google Hangout on “Poverty Porn” i.e. the use of negative, shocking images in aid campaigns (the recording and the twitter storify of the discussion can be found on Tom Murphy’s blog here). During the discussion @meowtree  shared a link to this rather discouraging blog post by a fundraising guru here that suggests that those who criticize the use of negative images are undermining the organizations they work for and should be fired!

A second twitter discussion concerned a new “buy one, give one” programme and whether or not it is harmful or helpful and on what basis this type of programme might be judged.

What comes out of both of these is the potential conflict between what makes good aid versus what makes good fundraising. It’s quite possible to raise money, a lot of money, if one is willing to do whatever it takes, use any kind of images and words and tactics in order to open their wallets. Marketers and fundraisers, to give them their due, make extensive use research and evidence in their work, perhaps more so than programme people, and much research backs up the claim that negative imagery is often more successful than positive imagery in evoking a response and getting out checkbooks.

If you were a private company then “maximizing shareholder value” by going where the money is might well be a great strategy. But aid agencies and civil society organizations are generally in place to serve a mission. The mission of the organization is a huge asset both in motivating staff and in generating support – but it’s also an important constraint in that in places limits around what you will be prepared to do to raise funds or attention. Essentially, if you exist to pursue a mission then all your activities need to be consistent with it. Generally an aid mission is not simply to raise as much money as possible, it’s to achieve a purpose such as reducing poverty or protecting children from harm. And it’s often more complicated to pursue this goal to maximize the amount of positive impact on your beneficiaries – you also need to do this in a principled way informed by your organization’s values such as in respecting the human dignity of the people of the people you aim to help and not exploiting them (even if with the aim of helping them).

I recall a conversation from when I worked on communication in UNICEF with our fundraisers about a similar topic (from more than 10 years ago so I’m not spilling any secrets). At that stage the organization was looking to move more into “upstream policy work” and on scaling back on “service delivery”, especially in middle-income countries. Programmatically this made a lot of sense, but the fundraisers were naturally concerned about the impact on their ability to talk about this shift in fundraising campaigns. It’s much easier to fundraise using images of nicely branded supplies coming in on trucks being handed out by aid workers to poor people than it is to “show” work on, or the results of influencing government policy, improving data collection and building capacity of civil servants.  But at the end of the discussion we were ready to say that while it might be harder to raise money for upstream work, and we might be able to raise less money as a result – if this is the work that needs to be done, then the task was to fund better ways of fundraising about this work, rather than changing the nature of the work to make it easier to raise funds.

Of course aid organizations rely on external funding (whether government, corporate or individual) and they need professional fundraisers to be able to get the resources they need to do their work. Professional fundraisers and communicators know better than programme staff, from their experience and research, how to put together effective fundraising communications in terms of who to approach, what approaches to use and what information is needed from programme staff to support it. That can include coming up with novel approaches to raising funds for something that is already a priority, even if these appear gimmicky to aid workers on the ground (such as sending a quarter coin to people to get them to send in donations or getting them to buy something to give something).

But it’s important to ensure that the fundraising is in service of the organization’s goals rather than the reverse. It can be easy to be tempted to do something because it’s popular with donors even if it isn’t fully consistent with your mission and values, and hard to forswear potential opportunities when aid funding is tight. In particular it can be tempting to agree to programmes which are appealing to donors but for which there isn’t a demand, or worse that do unintended harm. But if the organization exists to serve a mission – then it’s important to keep that front and centre in decision-making on what opportunities to pursue or what tactics to use to pursue them – in fundraising just as much as in programmes.

In fact in an age of increasing aid transparency it becomes ever more important to focus on your mission and values since it’s much more obvious if your communications, partnerships and programmes are not consistent with each other or with your mission, and your reputation will suffer as a result –as will the cause you are pursuing.

Greater transparency is also an opportunity to bring donors and beneficiaries closer together so that donors can see and hear the results of aid work directly from those being helped rather than via a “story” whether positive or negative constructed by the aid agency for the benefit of donors. Similarly donors can also hear more from those they are helping about what they want and need, seeing them more as individuals with dignity, aspirations and agency to improve their lives aided by donors rather than as passive objects of pity and charity. This way instead of going where donors give most now, you can change the discussion to educate and encourage them to give money to where it is really needed, and to understand better what their support really does and can do.

Posted in accountability, children, communications, development, participation, smart aid, social media, transparency, wait... what? | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Designing mobile devices and ecosystems in Congo Brazzaville

June 19, 2013 by Linda Raftree

Verone Mankou of VMK with Senam Beheton of EtriLabs, who organized Verone's US trip.

Verone Mankou of VMK with Senam Beheton of EtriLabs, who organized Verone’s US trip.

We switched things up a little for our May 21 Technology Salon and had an evening event with Verone Mankou, the head of VMK, a company in Congo Brazzaville that designs and produces the Way-C Tablet and the Elikia smart phone. The event was graciously hosted by ThoughtWorks, and Verone’s US trip was organized by Senam Beheton of EtriLabs.

Verone told his story of starting the first African company to make mobile devices. In 2006, he said, the cheapest computer in Congo cost $1000 USD, and the cheapest Internet package was priced around $1000 per month. Verone worked in the tech industry and wondered why there was no computer or Internet that could be reasonably accessed by people in Congo. Everyone laughed and said he was young, fresh out of school, and that within 2 years he would understand the business and stop dreaming.

Verone persisted with his idea that computers and the Internet were not just for people in offices with suits. Everyone wanted to access Internet, he believed, but they just didn’t have the money. So in 2006, he started working on ideas for a laptop. After 6 months he concluded that it was impossible. To create a laptop you need a lot of money for research and development, and, unfortunately, his bank account only contained about $100 USD. He had no contacts with suppliers. Verone had a big dream but problems executing it, so he put the laptop project on hold.

In June 2007, a friend told him to hurry up and turn on the news. Steve Jobs was presenting the iPhone. “This is what I want to do,” Verone thought. “Make a big iPhone.” He felt keyboards were a deterrent for most people who were new to a computer, and that “a big iPhone” would be a solution. He started working on the idea of a tablet. It was difficult to find any suppliers on the African continent – no CPU factory, no battery factory. He could not find hardware engineers because in Congo there is no engineering high school. He realized he needed to go outside, to Asia. He made a first trip to China in 2007 and learned many things. By 2009 he had a plan, an Android system, and a finished project.

The next problem, however, was that he had no money for mass production. “In Congo we don’t have venture capitalists. Also as a youth, you cannot get any money. You will have a bad experience if you go to the bank to ask. People will tell you to start a hotel and not to waste your money on something different.” Verone did not go quiet when he could not find capital, however. He kept looking.

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs presented a new device: a big iPhone – otherwise known as the iPad. Verone was disappointed that Jobs had moved more quickly than he could with his tablet launch. On the other hand, everyone suddenly understood Verone’s project.

His miracle came a few months later when a minister from Congo was on a plane from Brazzaville to Singapore and came across a magazine article talking about a boy in Congo making a tablet. The minister could not believe someone in his country was doing this and he did not know about it. He contacted Verone and asked how he could help. Verone asked for $200k USD and gave the minister a prototype. Within 2 hours, the minister secured the funding and Verone was able to begin manufacturing.

He had enough funds to do a mass prototype of 1000 tablets and imagined that he could sell them in 3 months if they were marketed well. There was a buzz around the tablets, however, and they sold out in 1 week and he increased production to 10,000. Compared to the cost of an iPad in Congo (around $1500), Verone’s tablet was going for $200-300. He set his sights on making a good quality, low-cost smart phone.

Good quality is key for Verone. “Why do Samsung and Nokia come to Africa and think Africans need cheap, low quality devices?” As an African, Verone felt uniquely placed to create something for the continent – something cheap but good quality. He did this by eliminating unnecessary features and keeping only the necessary elements.

Next he needed to ensure that there was good content and an opportunity for monetization. Africans needed applications and content for their own purposes and context, he felt. Not maps of pharmacies in New York City. However most Africans do not have credit cards, so another way to pay for content and applications was needed. VMK created a marketplace for Africans that used scratch cards for payment, since everyone understands how scratch cards work.

VMK launched their smart phone in December of last year and  plans to sell 50K units in Congo Brazzaville. The company is also working on a cheaper phone with lower capacity that should run about $50 USD. In addition, they are working on identifying content partners and launching an “updateable school book” that would be accessible also at around $50 USD, so that students and teachers are not using outdated text books, which stunt the development of African children’s minds.  Verone’s vision is to give people access to good quality technology at a good price.

How will VMK compete with Chinese products as prices continue to go down over the next 10 years? “We will learn fast,” Verone says. “We will not sit while others advance.” He believes that expanding to African countries and developing the industry there will be good for the continent, good for developers and good for business. It’s not yet possible to do mass production in Africa because of poor education and lack of / high cost of Internet. People still cannot easily access relevant and updated information. But Internet is getting cheaper, access is improving and things are changing. People are starting to understand the importance of education. VMK currently has teams working in China and India, but they hope to move these functions to Africa as soon as possible. VMK plans to train staff up, offer internships and to get African youth skilled up in order to do this work.

The important thing is not to sit still, Verone says. “We can’t just keep waiting for things to change. We need to change them ourselves.”

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