A few weeks ago, Iulian Circo, who’s working at Population Services International (PSI) in Mozambique, asked if I’d look at some slides about an idea called ‘Movercado’. I checked it out and it seems pretty cool.
Movercado is described as “an interpersonal communication experiment” with the goal of supporting behavior change communication (BCC) in large countries with poor infrastructure.
The problem that Movercado would address?
‘Taking behavioral messages above the line (TV, Radio, Mass media) doesn’t really work beyond the all important effect of creating awareness. Organizations such as PSI know that very well and focus a lot on inter-personal communication. That means we need a critical mass of trained “agents” placed throughout the country that conduct standardized information, education and communication sessions in their communities. Obviously, supervising, training and deploying such an army of “agents” is difficult, slow and very costly. Additionally, efforts to ensure quality and keeping the training materials up to date adds to the costs. Finally, reaching the critical mass required to have an impact with this traditional model in a large country is very difficult.’
Enter Movercado, which aims to facilitate this process through a series of face-to-face training, SMS, calls, incentives, data collection and personalized messaging with agents and the target population.
There is a step-by-step detailed description on the Movercado blog, but since I don’t know the context well, it was confusing at first. So Iulian created a quick user scenario and had a friend draw up the visual below to help with understanding the process and flow of the application:
How would Movercado work?
‘Manuel lives in Beira, Sofala Province. He sells airtime and cigarettes nearby the port and is always looking for more business opportunities. He also goes to school at night. One day he sees an announcement in the papers about an inter-personal communication training offered by PSI, that will allow him to supplement his income. He registers for the training.
The training is about inter-personal communication in the area of Malaria Prevention. Upon successful completion of the training, he receives a training kit that contains training materials, training aids, information sheets as well as a stack of cards containing unique codes. He leaves his telephone number and some other personal details with the trainer and three days later he receives a SMS informing him that his registration with Movercado is completed and he can start delivering IPC sessions.
.
Now, Movercado links his details to the range of codes in his kits, which means that every code in that range represents a session in Malaria prevention conducted by Manuel.
.
Emelita works at the market nearby the port selling cashew nuts and tangerines. She often buys airtime from Manuel. One day Manuel asks her if she knows anything about malaria prevention and proceeds to go through the standardized session as learned in the training. Upon completion, he hands her a card and tells her that she should text the code on the card to such and such number – the message is free and she will receive an additional 5MTN in cash (6 cents US).
.
After arriving home, Emelita texts the code to the given number. A few minute later she receives a message congratulating her for having undergone a very important prevention session along with a voucher for 5 MTN in airtime.
.
Shortly after, Manuel receives an SMS informing him that the session with Emelita has bene validated and he receives an incentive in Airtime or M-Kesh, whichever he prefers.
.
A few months later, due to the rainy season, malaria becomes more prevalent in Beira. Manuel receives an SMS informing him that during this period his incentives for every session delivered will be higher.
.
A month later Emelita receives a call from a trained PSI quality control agent who goes through the session with her, reinforces the message and provides more specific information on Malaria, including health centers where nets are available for free.
.
Less than six months later, Manuel finishes all his cards. He calls PSI on a toll-free number and is informed that in order to receive new cards he needs to attend a refresher training – he is given specific details about the regular refresher trainings implemented by Nova, a partner in Beira.
.
In another scenario, Manuel works for Viva, a local community NGO. In this case Manuel’s incentives may be slightly different, as per the agreement between PSI and Viva. Viva themselves receive a payment for every session that Manuel conducts (or they receive points that are then converted in financing), and they may be trained and certified to deliver either the initial training and/ or the refreshers themselves.
I think the idea has merit. My main concern is the still low mobile phone penetration rate and skill levels in Mozambique. The ITU reports only 31 mobile phone subscriptions per 100 inhabitants (likely lower in rural areas), an adult literacy rate of 55%, and the country has low network coverage. It is currently ranked 141st out of 152 in terms of ICT access, 135th in terms of use and 147th in terms of ICT skills by the ITU. So the idea would need to be supplemented by other approaches to reach the majority of the population (something Movercado aware of too, of course).
Iulian has written up some other potential risks to the idea, such as quality assurance control and the possibility that people would try to game the system.
I think it’s a really interesting model. What do others think?
I spent a few days in Nairobi early last week with our education and our ICT staff from Ghana, Uganda, Senegal, Mozambique, Kenya, Egypt and a few other folks, including the brilliant Mika Valitalo from our Finnish office and people from regional and headquarters levels. We were looking at goals and challenges in our education programs and thinking about where ICTs might play a role.
The process was really interesting. Starting a few months back, each country shared their education context analysis onto a wiki. In a second round they narrowed down to a specific area in education, looked at the information and communication flow and gaps, and identified areas where there might be an ICT solution. They focused mostly on mobiles, but in many cases mobiles were supported by computers, servers and laptops as well as non-digital information and communication tools and also solar technologies. Each country team met by Skype with Mika and an external consultant to discuss the concepts and get ICT advice and support. Then they updated their concepts and got additional feedback. For the third round, they added rich pictures to show what the specific ICT solutions might look like. Everyone had an opportunity to give input into everyone else’s ideas via the wiki.
At the meeting in Nairobi, we spent a day sharing the concepts with each other for clarification and focused input. Colleagues shared the broader education context in their countries and specifically in the communities where they are working. Then they illustrated the specific education issues and the ICT solutions that they were suggesting and/or the places they felt ICTs could help. Some of the ICT solutions focused on a very specific technology or device. Others showed how different types of ICTs could be integrated at different points in the process. Others required development of a totally new ‘solution’.
Some of the areas where colleagues thought ICTs could support education included: teacher training for those working in remote communities, adult literacy (especially literacy retention post literacy training), improving exam scores, livening up and improving in-class curriculum, and transparency and accountability in education. We spent 2 days then working in different small groups on the concepts, cross-pollinating ideas and deciding which of the concepts were most relevant to all 6 countries (in order to make it more possible to scale them) and which were most feasible and do-able.
The ideas were all a good fit with our global education strategy (see page 9) which focuses on service delivery (in partnership with local governments and communities); organizing and empowering rights holders; and grassroots participatory advocacy to influence education policies, financing and practice. The strategy prioritizes actions around equal access to education, quality of education, and education governance (see page 10).
Accountability and transparency in education
One of the concepts that captured the most interest from the whole group was that of using ICTs to improve accountability and transparency in education. Education is one of the areas where “Quiet Corruption” is often found. ‘Quiet corruption, which can take the form of absenteeism among teachers or doctors, the distribution of fake drugs, or the sale of diluted fertilizers to poor farmers, is having a damaging effect on people in Africa, according to the African Development Indicators report released by the World Bank….’ (March 18, 2010 article)
It's time for class.... where is the teacher to be found?
Edison, Charles and Erik, our colleagues from Uganda, did a short skit illustrating the different points in the primary education system where corruption happens. Their points correlated well with this summary of quiet corruption in education from a July 5, 2010 article in the Independent:
‘Early this year, the Transparency International (TI) Africa Education Watch Programme report: Africa Education Watch: good governance lessons for primary education showed that the government’s perception that massive enrollment is a sign of success of the UPE [universal primary education] programme must be revised to address the problem of overcrowding in classrooms, studying under trees, poor financial management, illegal fees, and lack of school inspection. The report exposes irritating embezzlement of UPE funds and abuse of authority by head-teachers who charge illegal fees, make students offer labour on teachers’ projects, sexual harassment, and systematic teacher absenteeism. The report noted that 85% of schools surveyed had either deficient accounting systems or none at all. In most cases, financial records were either unavailable or incomplete. The survey found limited financial documentation at district education offices and at schools. Most people who handle school grants had no training in basic finance management.
Another survey titled, The Efficiency of Public Education in Uganda, conducted in 2007 by the Ministry of Education to determine efficiency in provision of education services found an average rate of teacher absenteeism of 27% in Uganda, compared to other countries like Zambia (17%), and Papa New Guinea (15%). The aggregate loss caused by this absenteeism constituted 19% which translates into Shs 53 billion out of the Shs276 billion of the Education ministry’s wage bill.
In a swift headcount at the beginning of this year, the Education ministry established that the number of pupils listed in primary school registers was 25% higher than those actually studying. Similarly, the report established that the number of students in lower secondary schools had been exaggerated by 12%. For instance at Amaji Primary School last year, the school register had 816 pupils. But when the headcount was conducted the school administration could not account for 302 pupils.
It is reported that many districts’ chief administrative officers have failed to show proper accountability for the UPE and USE funds.’
The Uganda team also explained that:
Parental interest in education is very low because since Universal Primary Education launched, parents feel it’s the government’s responsibility. Some youth we were working with in Kenya last year made a short film about poor performance in primary schools covering the same issue (see below).
Teachers’ salaries are paid directly to their bank accounts, and there is no way to punish them if they don’t show up.
There are mechanisms to ensure that donor funds go from the national level to the district level and then on to the school, but no accountability mechanisms to ensure that they get from the school to the classroom and are translated into quality education for children.
District level government authority and accountability ends when they transfer funds to the schools; school directors can report to them that they have received funding and that everything is going fine when it’s really not.
Local school committees are often made up of people who are not neutral and who do not have the best interest of the children in mind. In some cases, school committee positions are used for personal gain and to launch individual political careers and political campaigns.
Lack of parental and community involvement in the education process and in school governance means that no one is demanding accountability from teachers and schools.
Sexual and physical violence in schools is very common and underreported. When it is reported, often nothing is done about it.
(Start playing the video, then click the small ‘cc’ button to turn on captions in English)
Colleagues from the other countries face the same challenges in their work and in their own children’s education.
Can ICTs play a role?
What is the solution then? Colleagues suggest that motivating parents and the community to get more involved in school governance and demanding transparency and accountability can begin to change the situation. This obviously requires a lot more than ICTs. So several different actions would be taken to engage and motivate parents and the community to take a bigger role in their children’s education. Then ICTs can be integrated into and support the process for sharing education information with parents, such as student absenteeism, grades, parent-school meetings, exam dates and scores, etc. Parents and students would also be able to report when teachers do not show up or suspected corruption. Students could also report abusive teachers, absent teachers, and other issues they are not happy with at the school. A neutral party would manage and hold the information that flows in and out to protect students from reprisal and to protect teachers from any abuse of the system in case fraudulent or incorrect information is reported. Commitment from those responsible for overseeing education to respond to the issues raised and take serious action is also needed, and this may be the biggest challenge overall. Plan can play a role there, leveraging existing relationships with local and national governments and Ministries.
The idea needs quite a bit of further work, a closer look at feasibility, and more research and input from local communities and parents. As mentioned, the ICTs are actually a small, but potentially very important, part of a much larger initiative to get parents and communities involved in school governance to demand transparent, accountable and quality education and budget spending.
Challenges in the process
Some of the challenges that we had to manage well during this initial piece of the longer process included:
We needed to ensure that we were starting with the context and the need for better information and communications, not starting with the technology and devices and building initiatives around them. Yet we also had to avoid getting lost in the overall context and missing the opportunity to pinpoint potential ICT solutions at specific places within the context. Role play and flip chart illustrations of the ‘problem’ and the ‘solutions’ were very useful for getting more concrete (“So, Kofi is here in his community and he wants to …. So he uses xxx to do this, and then this happens and then….).
Though we wanted to specifically look at places that mobiles and other ICTs could support, it was important to list out all the factors that needed to be in place in order for the ICTs to work and to think clearly about the constraints we might face during implementation. One good question to help with that was, after seeing an idea or ICT solution presented, to ask “What needs to be in place in order for that to happen?” Then you start to remember critical things like community motivation, government interest to actually resolve a problem, electricity, someone to set up and manage a server, a strong enough network to download multimedia content, mobile versions of websites, educational content re-design for mobiles, teacher training on how to integrate ICTs in the classroom, limitations of SMS for doing something other than rote learning, higher versions of a mobile operating system, a smart phone, etc.
We had input from a potential corporate partner during the process. We learned that corporations are thinking several years ahead to what will be coming down the line; however non-profit are normally working within existing constraints and trying to find solutions that work here and now in the resource poor places where we work or ways to get around those constraints. Multi-level solutions seemed to be a good possibility; eg., ideas that can rely on SMS today, but have potential to expand as networks expand and data enabled mobiles become more available.
A corporation tends to think in terms of vendors, results, timelines, launch dates, price points, return on investment whereas a non-profit (at least ours) tends to think in terms of community members, organizations, process, participation, local context. Our facilitator even told us that a corporation normally does a presentation by starting with the solution, and then spending the rest of the presentation showing why that is the right solution. A non-profit usually starts a presentation by sharing all the context and background, and showing the process that led to eventually reaching the potential solution, including every step along the way, how ownership was achieved in the process, why different decisions were made and who participated in them. So keeping corporate vs non-profit cultures and languages in mind is also important when working on joint initiatives.
We need to remember to establish measurable indicators of success so that we can tell if this new type of intervention has a different/ better/ greater / lesser impact than carrying out a similar process without ICTs or with a different set of ICTs. This is something we will address once the full idea is developed. Impact measurement is very important to both corporate partners and development organizations.
This was the first time many were involved a process of this kind, so keeping the balance between technology and development goals was a constant challenge. We sometimes veered too far towards focusing on all the details of the context and then back to focusing too much on that piece of the context where a potential technology solution was seen. I think we were moving toward a pretty healthy mix of both. The process is nowhere near complete, and as we continue to work on the ideas and look at feasibility and actual implementation, we should find the sweet spot.
The work above was guided by Plan Finland’s recent publication ICT Enabled Development – Using ICT strategically to support Plan’s work. On the whole, it was a great learning process for everyone involved, and we came up with some good ideas that we will flesh out in the coming months. Having the opportunity to patiently and carefully think through areas and ways that ICTs can support program goals around education and discussing the ideas at length with colleagues was a capacity strengthening exercise for all involved and will mean that we will be more prone in general to thinking about incorporating ICTs in our work going forward.
Ivan and Massilau working on some mapping in Inhambane, Mozambique.
I had the pleasure of working with Iván Sánchez Ortega in Mozambique earlier this month, and I learned a ton about the broader world of GIS, GPS, FOSS, Ubuntu and Open Street Maps from him. We also shared a few beers, not to mention a harrowing plane ride complete with people screaming and everyone imagining we were going to die! But I suppose it’s all in a day’s work.
Below is a cross-post by Iván about Maps for Mozambique. You can find the original post here, and a version in Spanish here. Note: the opinions expressed below belong to Iván and not to his former, current or future employeers…..
*****
Last week was a small adventure. I went to Mozambique to make maps, as part of the Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media program. The main goal was to train youngsters in order for them to make a basic cartography of the surrounding rural communities.
This travel is part of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team activities. After the successes of Kibera and Haiti, we want to check how much we can help by providing cartography.
Cartography in developing areas provides a great amount of situational awareness – in order to help, one needs to know where the help is needed. In the case of Mozambique rural communities, we’re talking about knowing who has a water well and access to healthcare and education, and who doesn’t.
The problem with rural Mozambique is that the population is very disperse. Each family unit lives in an isolated set of huts, away from the other families in the community. There is so much land available that the majority of the land is neither used or managed.
Which leads to think that, maybe, the successes at Kibera and Haiti are, in part, due to them being dense urban areas, where a kilometer square of information is very useful.
It has been repeated ad nauseam that geographic information is the infrastructure of infrastructures. Large-scale humanitarian problems can’t be tackled without cartographic support – without it, there isn’t situational awareness, nor will coordinating efforts be possible, something very important in an era when aid can get in the way of helping. However, even with agile surveying techniques and massively crowdsourced work, the cost of surveying large areas is still big. And, as in all the other problems, technology isn’t the silver bullet.
—-
That said, the way one has to go to reach the rural communities doesn’t have anything to do with the occidentalized stereotypical image of rural sub-Saharan Africa. There are no lions, nor children with inflated bellies due to starvation.
There is, however, the image of a developed country but in which the public agencies work at half throttle. Mass transit, garbage collection, urbanism, civil protection, environment, job market, education, social security. Everything’s there, but everything works at a much lower level than one could expect. To give out an example, the Administraçao Nacional de Estradas (national roads administration) plans switching of one-way lanes over hand-drawn sketches.
The reasons that explain the situation of the country are not simple, not by far, but in general terms they can be resumed in two: the war of independence of 1964-1975 and the civil war of 1977-1992. Living is not bad, but also not good, and part of the population is expecting international humanitarian aid to magically solve all of their problems.
When one stops to think, the situation eerily reminds of the Spanish movie Welcome, Mr. Marshall. Only that everyone’s black, they don’t dance sevillanas, and instead of railroads they expect healthcare and education.
Wait a moment. A reconstruction 20 years after a civil war, external aid, and the need of cartography for a full country. This reminds me to the 1956-57 Spain general flight, popularly known among cartographers as the American flight.
These aerial photographs, made in collaboration with the U.S. Army Map Service, had a great influence in the topographic maps of that period, and even today they are an invaluable resource to study changes in land use.
—–
Which is, then, the best solution? To inject geospatial technology may be a short-term gain, long-term pain in the form of 9000€/seat software licenses. Mr. Marshall won’t come with a grand orthophotogrameric flight. Military mapping agencies won’t implement SDIs (spatial data infrastructures) overnight. Training aid workers and locals into surveying is possible, but slow and expensive, although it might be the only doable thing.
I spent the first 2 weeks of November in Mozambique working on the continuation of the Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media project. This year, we are piloting digital mapping in addition to the other ICT tools that we’ve been integrating into the project. We weren’t able to find anyone locally in Mozambique who could train on Open Street Map but luckily were able to link up with Portuguese-speaking Iván Sánchez Ortega from OSM in Spain. (In case you didn’t catch the link – the official language in Mozambique is Portuguese…)
Iván was a great trainer and the youth from the two associations (Vuneka and Litanga) that we are working with really took to the idea of digital mapping and learning some new skills in the area of painting, theater, print journalism, radio, video and blogging. See some of Ivan’s thoughts on this Maps for Mozambique post.
Here are some photos of the work we did while in Mozambique….
Video training – this young woman took to video work amazingly fast. I was thoroughly impressed. She tended to her baby throughout the training and still managed to keep up with the rest.
We practiced digital mapping in Inhambane with Iván.
The arts group did a fantastic mural in the school yard that faces the busy street.
We met with community leaders to start mapping one sector of the Magaiça Community. Albertina sketched out on the ground where each group would go.
We split into 4 groups, each walking for over 2 hours, to map the perimeter of just one sector of Magaiça. (Things are really spread out here).
Albertina wasn’t quite sure why we couldn’t take any shortcuts and wanted to walk on every single path, but she was good sport. She eventually understood that we were tracking. She wanted to be sure that the community would get the map. “Lots of organizations come here but they don’t return.”
Albertina showed us a giant bees’ nest. Can we put that on an OSM map as a waypoint? It matters locally….
The ‘fuel tank’ on the little boat we used to cross from Inhambane to Maxixe to use the faster internet at the Plan Office. The scandal of the day was a girl on the boat, upon arriving to Inhambane, talking on her mobile and telling the person that she was in Maxixe. There was a general uproar on the boat and she was admonished and teased for using her mobile to lie to her man.
The guy on the left said he gets lost in Internet for hours, searching and learning. “I only go to school for the social part, I use the Internet for learning”
Working on a map.
Recruitment posters appeared on the Friday that we left. Interesting.
The fabulous team from Associations Litanga and Vuneka and the staff.
The FLAP Bag is a project that was initiated at PopTech, together withPortable Light and Timbuk2 (join the discussion on FLAP bags here) The FLAP is a messenger bag, designed by Timbuk2, which incorporates a removable flexible solar panel made by Portable Light. The solar panel can be left on the bag and charged on the go (i.e. while you walk around in the sun) or removed and laid out flat to absorb the sun. Connected to the solar panel is a battery that feeds into a small light, useful for walking/riding a bike at night, and a mobile phone charger. Photo: FLAP bag.
For use at home when there is no power, the light can be hung up or set up to reflect off the silvery back side of the solar panel for increased reach of its brightness. A day of charging gives 10 hours of light. Phones can be plugged into the USB port on the battery. The phone charger (I learned) is direct charge – i.e., it charges through the battery only while in the sun, not from the battery after sundown. Photo: FLAP bag with reflective side showing.
Note: I didn’t embed the video here because you can’t watch it with subtitles if it’s embedded, so you’ll have to check it out via this link. To turn on the captions/subtitles, click on the lower right hand triangle of the video player. That will show you a “cc” box. Click on the “cc” box to turn it red, and that will turn on captions/subtitles. To the left of the “cc” is another little triangle. Hover over it, and you’ll see the language options. (And for something really cool – then check out how you can translate the captions! but that’s another topic…)
————
After my month in Mozambique with the bag, and based on some conversations sparked by my last blog post, my thoughts are:
How the FLAP worked for me
I charged the panels up a few times in Mozambique and at first had trouble getting the light to turn on. I emailed Portable Light and they explained that you need to keep the button pressed down for a bit for the light to come on. Bingo, it worked fine then. We had a week of steady rain the 3rd week I was in Mozambique and the power was out in my room at the hotel. I was able to use the light for 4 consecutive evenings for a couple of hours and the battery held the power even though I wasn’t recharging the panel during the day. For some reason I wasn’t able to get my i-phone to charge, so need to figure out what’s going on there. I didn’t realize at first that phone charging has to be done via direct sunlight, not stored power, so maybe that is the problem. Will keep trying.
Purpose.
It’s a great idea and meets real needs: light and mobile phone charging. People love the idea. It turns heads and the bag is very nice. Everyone wants one, as you could see from the video. I liked the poetic quote that the FLAP gives you power for the fundamentals: “a telephone to communicate and a lamp to illuminate.”
Openness to testing.
I love that the FLAP folks are open to feedback and adjustments to the idea to develop something that’s localized and works for different populations/situations.
USB port.
Most people in the rural communities where I tend to travel don’t own or have access to computers and their phones come with wall plugs, not USB cables. So I think the USB port needs some kind of adaptor. I tested the few USB cables I was able to find, and they only transferred data, not electricity (they didn’t charge up while connected to either a computer or the FLAP battery). This includes the fancy Nokia E63 that I use when I travel. So either I’m missing something (highly possible!), or the bag needs to come with a cheap universal electricity/USB cable, or if the system is built locally, cables for the most popular phone types could be included or manufactured as an accessory. There are also different ways that people charge locally that could be looked at (though these are probably imported, worth a look?), for example, the universal charger in the photo above, which I’ve also seen in Senegal. You can connect a camera or phone battery directly. Perhaps an idea to think about. Another option might be something like this universal charger that was announced in October 2009, though it may not be compatible with existing phones that people already own.
Cost at ‘BoP’.
The cost is currently too high for people at the “Bottom of the Pyramid” (BoP). It probably needs to come down to $5-$10 for the solar panel/battery/light. Research on income, similar products (if available), current phone charging costs/costs for candles/other light sources, and perceived value would help to find realistic price point. People don’t normally carry bags where I was, except for backpacks for school, made out of very inexpensive plastic/vinyl. Some ideas that people had on where to put a solar panel included: on school backpacks, curtains, cloths, parasols, clothing, foldable panels that can be taken out and set up at the market or while doing outside work during the day, or something to set in a back window or on top of a car. Photo: Common style of school backpacks in Mozambique.
‘Cost per beneficiary’/ROI at NGOs.
One person at a large global NGO read my recent blog post and got very excited about the possibility of children having light to study by at night. When I revealed the cost, however, even at $50, the ‘cost per beneficiary’ that many NGOs adhere to due to internal rules or donor expectations was too high. It would be interesting for FLAP to find/do/publish some research on the benefits of light in education, learning, future income, etc., or cost saving in other areas by having solar light. This could be combined with research on economic benefits of mobile phones and the costs for charging locally (eg., in Mozambique this is about 10 MTs/day or USD $0.40) to make the case for FLAP. (Maybe this is already being done). I’m not sure if most NGOs currently include environmental benefits as a main factor when measuring ROI, but these kinds of numbers would be helpful to inform decisions.
‘MoP’ Uses.
The bag in its current form at a mid-range price (e.g. $30-45?) could be widely used at the “Middle of the Pyramid.” NGOs already spend on camera batteries, bags, etc. for staff as part of normal operations, and if they were manufactured locally they could generate local business. In the case of Plan (where I work), for example, staff take lots of photos for sponsorship and program operations. Using rechargeable digital camera batteries and FLAP, savings over time could potentially offset the costs, and could be one concrete way to start reducing negative environmental impact. So a good entry point for FLAP could be NGO workers, university students, government workers who spend time in communities and need to keep their phones or digital cameras charged up for mobile data gathering or collecting data, surveys, etc. in ‘the field.’ Another possible link would be with the Peace Corps or other large organizations that equip their volunteers or staff with essential gear before sending them to live/work in rural communities.
Note on who I was talking with:
In order to qualify things, I did a little unscientific research. While everyone at our workshop was together in the same room, I read 6 statements, and asked them to raise their hands if the statement was true. We had around 45 kids in the room, roughly 75% male/25% female, between the ages of 12 and 20, attending secondary school and living in communities within a 1 hour radius (by public transportation) from the school. The school is located along a main road, put in 3 years ago, and the communities/commerce along the road are growing. Also in the room were 10 adult teachers/local NGO partners/folks from national radio stations living in the district. I suppose you would consider the students “poor” by typical global standards, however the fact that they are attending secondary school means that they are not the poorest of the poor. Teacher salaries are around 3,000 MTs/month or about $100. Photo: The phones that were at the workshop.
The results:
·34% had their own mobile phones (more than half of this % were adults)
·100% of their families had mobile phones
·25% of personal or family’s phones had a USB cable
·25% of the phones can connect to internet
·24% had used the internet at least once before the workshop
·43% have electricity at home
I asked everyone in the room to put their phones on the table (photo above). You can see that the most popular types of phones are the Nokia 1100 or 1200 (which do not come with a USB cable, though I believe they do have a 5-prong USB jack).
Sometimes being a girl is no piece of cake. For the Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media (YETAM) workshop we hoped to have 50% girls participating, and we ended up with about 15 girls and 40 boys. The boys raised this on the 3rd day of the workshop (through no prompting by the facilitators). “Why aren’t there more girls here? And the girls who are here, they never talk, they just sit there.” “They don’t have the ambition or the drive to improve themselves so they don’t even come to workshops like this when they have the opportunity”. Photo: Painting the mural.
Most of the girls listened to this criticism without responding. “Girls – what do you have to say about this?” asked one of the facilitators. Silence. “See, even now they just sit there and don’t defend themselves,” complained the boys. More silence. Finally one girl spoke up “You don’t know what it’s like. We can’t get permission to come. It’s very difficult for us. Our parents don’t trust us. They think we are just coming to play. They want us to stay at home to do work during our school break.” “But you have the same letter from the school that we do! Why can’t you learn to negotiate with your parents like we do?” More silence. The discussion turned to effective negotiation skills to communicate with and convince parents to allow both girls and boys to participate. “Our parents and grandparents are not ignorant donkeys; they are just from another time. They have never had the opportunity to participate in projects and workshops or even to go to school. They don’t know why we think it’s important. We need to become better at talking with them, to counsel them and help them to see what we are doing so that they will allow us to join in these efforts.”
Being a girl isn’t only an obstacle to participating in workshops. In the community over the past 3 weeks, I saw and heard about the challenges girls face to achieve an education, avoid unwanted advances, including from teachers, and avoid early pregnancies. Most of the time there is no space for these issues to be discussed openly among both boys and girls, and with adults. Plan’s two campaigns, Learn without Fear and Because I am a Girl, seem extremely relevant to the context.
A Conquista
The hottest debate of the 2 weeks was not “poverty” or “lack of water” or anything typically thought of as a “development” issue. It was “a conquista” or the process of getting a girl/being wooed by a boy. It was nice to see the girls getting more vocal as we got further along into the workshop. “We try to talk to girls and they don’t respond. They just ignore us! So it makes us angry,” said one of the guys. A girl countered “We are afraid when someone approaches us, because if we don’t agree, a boy or a man may get angry and they can find us and take out their aggression on us, they can rape us.” “Sometimes if girls talk to one of us, and then talk to another of us also, what boys do then is to join together and show her that she can’t play with us, show her she can’t act like that,” said one of the boys. “It’s true,” said a girl, “We are afraid because they get mad if we don’t talk to them.” “You should talk to us then!” interrupted a boy. “What, can I give myself to every single male in the village just because he wants me?” exclaimed one of the girls. This forum was incredibly important for guys and girls to have a time and a place to hear each other out, see each others’ points of view and try to understand each other. There is a lot of room for awareness building on gender violence. I even heard one teenage girl in one of the nearby communities say “if it’s just one man, it’s not really a rape…. it has to be 3 or 4.”
So I was really happy that the theater group decided to do their play about the things that girls face, even more so because there were only about 4 girls in the theater group, and the 3 facilitators were male. (There are not many female teachers and facilitators to work with). Now that we had divided into small group and we’d been working together for several days, the girls’ voices were much louder. Photo: the issues chosen by the theater group included early marriage, drug abuse, physical aggression in families, corrupt police, professors/student fights, lack of value placed on girls within families.
Community Showcase
The groups had their showcase on Nov. 20, coinciding with the celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Some 300 people from nearby primary schools and communities attended the event.The painting group’s mural greeted people as they came into the school grounds. Under giant orange tarp (which pretty much ruined any chance of getting good photos/videos since everything had a very strange light) the music group sang 2 songs about education and HIV prevention and performed a traditional dance. The media group showed 6 of their videos, on life in the community, the importance of the river, trash in the market, the discotheque, and the local cinemas. The journalism group shared their community newspaper, and the theater group performed their play.
On being a girl…
The storyline in the play is of a girl whose father marries her off for money; she is taken off to her new husband’s place and becomes pregnant. Her husband is abusive, alcoholic and brings other women home. He beats her, but her mother finds out and they report it to the police. The police come to take a report, admonishing the husband and telling him that he is going to jail. No matter, nothing a little private conversation and bribe won’t solve. So the tables turn with the policeman admonishing the girl that she should not treat her husband badly and she deserves what she got. As soon as the police leave, he beats the girl again, shouting as her father had shouted at her mother “In this house it’s the man who’s in charge!” He throws her out on the street. A friend tries to convince her to prostitute herself and make good money and she refuses. The play ends as she looks at the audience, carrying the small bundle of her child, and asks “Why will people say this is my fault?” The other actors come out one by one, calling on governments, parents, friends, school, teachers to see the situation clearly and to take on their responsibilities to change this scenario. I have to say it was one of the best theater pieces I’ve ever seen, and it was written entirely by this group of 9th and 10th graders. Photo: Theater group closing out after a day of rehearsing.
The best tools to get the message across
Each different art or media form carried the messages on issues that the youth want to raise and change in their communities. Once more it was a reminder that it’s the communication objectives and impact on the audience that matter, and the choice of the tools should be secondary, based on the outcomes to achieve. We are not “doing media projects”, but helping kids to use different tools, including media, to dig into their realities and then use those tools as effective means of communication to make change in their communities. What may be a great topic for a video, may not work so well as theater, and vice versa. In the process of discussing the issues and the media forms that would be best to make change in the community, both boys and girls learn new personal skills and improve their self esteem as well as their own communication skills. They also have an opportunity to openly and deeply discuss issues among themselves and to understand each other better. The discussion around gender issues and how the same challenges may affect girls and boys differently is one of the most important that they can have.
We’ve completed our first week of arts and media training with around 55 youth in Cumbana, a coastal community some 450 kms north of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. If you ever tried to Google Cumbana, you’d find information about a photographer with the same last name or links to tourist hotels at the nearby beaches in Maxixe or Inhambane, and not much else. We actually did this as part of our Tuesday session on Internet with the youth. Googling New York was another story. But why?
We turned it around to the youth. Why is there no information on Cumbana? The conclusion was you only find things on internet that someone puts there, and no one had bothered, no one had ever really uploaded anything about Cumbana. And that meant that this group of youth has a big responsibility, because they are going to be the ones to put Cumbana on the map. Photo: After Cumbana, the top Google search among our small population was, of course, Michael Jackson.
What does that mean? Aside from producing arts and media to raise issues that affect them and engage their communities in jointly finding solutions, the youth will be the ones to define Cumbana. As Lauren (the Peace Corps volunteer who’s been teaching at the school for the past 2 years) said: “Did we find anything about you all in Cumbana now on the internet? No. When will there be something about Cumbana? When you make the effort to put it there.” Photo: Mobile phone connections are much more likely than computers in the near future, so we trained on internet also using mobiles.
Access to internet whether by laptop using mobile internet or directly on a phone is a huge hit with the kids, 75% of whom had never been online before. Our 2 hour session could have gone on all day for all they cared. The idea of putting yourself on the map seems to have appeal in the same way that having a Facebook page does. It’s about self publishing and creating an identity. Photo left: Anthony the local Peace Corps Volunteer supported with the internet and is working with the theater group. Photo below: Lauren, Peace Corps Volunteer, is working with the multimedia group.
But as we are seeing more and more, citizen journalism has its downfalls (think Fort Hood). So it was great to see the debates about ethics in journalism that also happened last week. Jeremias from Radio Mozambique facilitated a great session. He was excited to be part of the workshop because, as he said, “I’m a journalist. I want to groom more young people from right here in the community where I came from to follow in my profession, and this is a great chance for all of us.”
During Jeremias’ session on ethics, the kids hotly debated the question of whether you should show the face of someone caught stealing. Many felt that this would punish the thief as well as protect the community. Jeremias countered, “In Mozambique, whose job is it to determine guilt or punishment? Eh? It’s not the role of the journalist. It’s the role of the judicial system. Like it or not, that’s how it is.” He talked about the basic rules in journalism to protect people, about divulging information and objectivity. “When you leave here, to do work out there in the community, you need to be sure to hear all sides. You need to protect the good name of people. This is our responsibility. This is ethics. You cannot condemn someone until the judicial system has determined that they are guilty.”
I sat there wishing every self-appointed citizen journalist followed those rules, and self-examining whether I always do. But it also got me thinking about how when you are not in a free state, your judicial system is totally non functional, or there is corruption within the journalism profession or media houses, things are not nearly so clear. Sometimes things need to be filmed to get something to happen, whether they’ve been proven or not. What are the rules and ethics then? (I’m sure I can Google this and find a debate!)
The youth were cautioned to leave aside sensationalism. “Often wanting to be the first to get the news out makes us less careful as journalists” Jeremias said. If we drop the bomb, we’re likely to see the next day that we are the ones being processed, accused of not being ethical.” Photo: Jeremias and a youth participant share ideas.
“The ethics of a journalist come from within us,” he said. Sometimes even a journalist’s own employers may ask him do things that are not ethical. Or others want a certain story to come out and they try to bribe a journalist. This makes it really difficult to be a journalist. A journalist needs to have high and strong ethics and maintain objectivity,” he told the kids.
“So you see, journalist is under constant pressure. It’s REALLY easy to get a recorder, to make a story. It’s more difficult to think through what the consequences of publishing that story might be. As a journalist, your goal is not to get famous; it’s to transmit information, so get the idea of fame right out of your head.”
Jeremias is a wise man and we are really lucky to have him training our group of journalists.
Cumbana is the only secondary school (it covers to 10th grade) in the entire district, with 3 sessions a day, serving some 4000 students (if the teacher I asked is correct). The opportunity to participate in a program like YETAM is huge for students and teachers alike. In addition to the journalist group, there is theater, music and dance, multimedia, and painting. For the kids, it’s like a 2 week summer camp where they strengthen leadership skills, improve their studies, get organized to address community challenges facing youth, and think about careers outside of the norm. For the teachers, it’s an opportunity to engage with students in a different way, to strengthen their teaching methodologies and improve their ICT skills. For the partners, it’s an opportunity to give back to the community and, of course, to discover new talent for their professions.
When I was at PopTech in October, I saw the solar FLAP (Flexible Light and Power) bag, a joint project of Portable Light, Timbuk2, and PopTech. It seemed like something that could help make mobiles in program work more feasible for staff, community volunteers, or community health workers. One of the main challenges we find in our work is lack of electricity, to charge phones among other uses. Photo: FLAP bag looks nice next to a pink tablecloth. 🙂
I already had a trip to Mozambique planned in November to facilitate a workshop with teachers, partners and youth as part of our youth empowerment through arts and social media (YETAM) project in Cumbana, a community about 30 minutes outside of Maxixe, and some 450 km north of Maputo, the capital. So I decided to get a FLAP bag and take it for a spin to see what people thought about it. Electricity to charge phones is of course not only an issue in Mozambique. Last year some of the kids we worked with in Senegal made a video specifically about the chore of charging their phones.
Trying it Out.
I brought the bag to the YETAM workshop one morning last week, removed the flap with the solar panels and laid it in the sun to charge. Jeremias, one of our project partners from Radio Mozambique in Maxixe, saw me setting it out in the sunniest spot and asked what it was. I gave the 30 second explanation: that it was a bag with solar panels, and it charges up a small light to use at night, and has a battery to charge phones. He quickly said – Oh! I can charge with my USB cable here, and showed me his phone. Then I had to rush inside to start the training.
At break time, I discovered a little crowd gathered around the flap. Jeremias was crouched down, explaining to Badru (a journalist from Radio Progresso) and Joao (a journalist from Maxixe) how it functions. Photo: Jeremias explaining how the Flap bag works to Badru.
So Jeremias and I did a short video interview of Badru, to see what he thought of the bag, how he would improve it, and if he thought it was something that could be sold locally (and for how much). “This is really a good idea. It would facilitate the lives of people in the communities. It has a light and a phone charger, that’s pretty essential,” he said. I asked what he thought people would be willing to pay for it. He stalled a bit, because he wanted to know first how much it cost to make and what the value in the US was. I said I didn’t really remember (true). He finally said for the bag alone, about $5. For the bag with the solar components, about $15.
Joao stepped in and said that this kind of thing would necessarily be expensive because the technology is not available in Mozambique, where most technology like this is imported. In any case, I asked, how much would it be worth to someone to be able to have light in the evening and to charge a phone? How much do people spend normally to charge a phone? “Well,” Badru explained, “you have to send your phone somewhere to get it charged, or you have to go pay 10 metacais a day (around $0.30), and then sit around and wait for it to charge up.” So you end up spending about 300 metacais a month to keep a phone charged here.
Badru thought the idea of making the bag locally and incorporating imported solar panels would be a possibility, and that a bag like the Flap bag would be helpful for university students, government staff or NGO workers who spend time out in communities and need to charge their phones up.
Today Luisa, from the Casa de Cultura (Cultural Organization), Delcia and Eucidio (teachers at Cumbana school) asked about the bag, so I showed them the light and where the phone plugs in. I asked them what value a bag like this would have, and what they thought people would pay for it if it was available in the local market. Their first answer was that it would depend on how good the salesperson was, and that they would need to know what other similar products cost so they could barter. “This is something we haven’t seen before, so we have no idea what it would cost,” Eucidio explained. “But,” he encouraged Luisa and Delcia “look, it has light, it charges your phone, it’s a bag….” “Ooooouu, then it must be really expensive!” they concluded. Photo: Luisa, Delcia and Eucidio discussing the suggested price for a flexible solar panel.
Delcia doesn’t have electricity at her house and said a bag would be great because she would have everything at the home, and wouldn’t need to spend on candles or charge her phone outside of the house.
I mentioned that I haven’t seen anyone here carrying a bag. People seem to use flimsy little plastic bags from the market or local store, or burlap sacks to carry vegetables, coconuts, etc., or they carry things on their heads. So where would it be best to actually put a solar panel? They thought a little, and suggested incorporating solar panels on backpacks for school kids, or on a hat, a shirt, back of a skirt, on a parasol, or as something that could be set on top of or in the back window of a car. Photo: Luisa showing us where she could carry her solar panels: na bunda!
Now as I’m sitting here in my little hotel room in Maxixe at the end of the day, across from the noisy gas station, slapping mosquitoes as I write this post up, I’m wondering if maybe the FLAP folks could add some kind of solar insect repellent to the bag…. That would be perfect.
Landing in Inhambane, Mozambique, the first thing you see is the blue Vodacom sign: ‘Welcome to Inhambane – a land covered by palm trees and the best cellular network’. I don’t usually believe ads and this time was no exception. But I have to say, it seems to be true. My sim card is actually on mCel, not Vodacom, but the coverage is still damn good. And the two cell phone companies are everywhere. I’m not sure which I saw more of – yellow Frelimo t-shirts (elections were last week), yellow mCel kiosks or blue Vodacom kiosks.
Which reminds me that I saw a statistic last week saying that more people have mobile phones than latrines. And I’m not sure how I feel about that…. And then I start thinking about the hierarchy of personal needs – which perhaps needs some revising. So does communication rank higher now than toilets? What about food? I was certainly more worried about getting online than about eating for the past 4 days (as a vegetarian, your choice is limited unless you really make an effort). I mean, at least I got to complain about the 4 days of fried eggs on Twitter…. but what if it were access to food in general? Where would I put my effort? hmmm. I digress….
My travel diet (in addition to the eggs) has been around 5 hours of mobile internet on my laptop a day (skype, email, blogging, Twitter, maps, google translate, and a few doses of Facebook thrown in), and several mobile internet snacks from my phone itself in between. I’ve gone through about 600 credits in 5 days, or around $4/day. I fully recognize that is expensive for someone who is not earning a US salary, but I love that I was able to just purchase a sim card, put it in my phone, hook up my phone as a modem, and ta-dah.
Yes I’m using a ‘smart phone’ (Nokia E-63), but my point is that it’s much easier to use your phone as a modem in Mozambique than it is in the US (seems the latest i-phone update disables that so I’m afraid to download the latest update) or in the other African countries that I’ve been in over the past year. Compared to Cameroon, Senegal and Kenya where we had to purchase a special data package and get help/permission from the phone company (or were we just not doing it right? It does get easier to figure out the more you do this stuff). In any case, internet hardly worked once we finally got connected. So in that sense, Mozambique is an internet junkie’s dream.
I asked about internet as a precursor to the social media session of the Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media (YETAM) training of trainers workshop yesterday. We are working from a secondary school about 30 km outside of the town of Maxixe, where I expected internet would be nil (and it is, except by mobile phone modem). Several teachers and partner organization members from the area are participating. Starting on Sunday, for two weeks they’ll work with youth to use arts and media as tools in the community development process. The same arts and media are a way for youth to put themselves, their community and their issues on the global map by uploading the photos, drawings and videos they will make to the web.
As an example during yesterday’s session, I Googled the name of the school. All we found in the first couple of pages was Maxixe and nearby towns listed, with content related to tourist beaches. There was also a blog by Lauren, the Peace Corp Volunteer who is teaching there. Several months back when we were planning the training, Lauren’s blog was the only information I was able to specifically find about the school and area. Because of her blog, I was able to connect her and our local staff to work together on the whole training. After the YETAM training, the ideas is that people will be able to find information created by the community and youth themselves, from their own perspective.
I’m really excited about the good internet, because maybe then the whole process can be done from the community – including the uploading and subtitling of the videos (usually is done from the Plan office in the US due to slow connections). That will be huge in terms of community and youth ownership. Im crossing my fingers that we can make this happen. Or we’ll have to sue the land of palm trees and the best cellular network for false advertising :-).
I got into Maputo (capital of Mozambique) around 3 on Friday and stopped by the Plan Mozambique office to meet the staff on the way to my hotel. The office here is small. Plan’s only been working in Mozambique since 2007 and in one province only so far. Maputo is absolutely gorgeous. It’s calm, not at all crowded, and on the coast. I’ll be here for about 3 weeks working on the Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media (YETAM) project in a community near Maxixe, which is a 50 minute plane trip north. The coordinator for the project in Mozambique is Pedro, the IT Director, and we had a nice discussion today over lunch.
Pedro is from the IT sector and used to work for a government ministry and came to Plan right when we opened here. He’s convinced that “Plan is not in the IT business. We’re in the business of community development, so our IT has to be in service of community development, not just the office.” So ICT4D is high up on his list of interests, and he’s hoping that over the next few weeks we can share lots of ideas. We discussed how just like media, ICTs are becoming more easily accessible for people, so a good ICT person should know how to support and train other people, to take the mystery out of ICT. He or she also has to know how to see the trends coming down the line to stay ahead of the game.
Aside from lunch, we spent most of the day installing software on the computers that we’ll be using in the media project. We got the anti-virus going on all of them – a lesson learned and never forgotten on my part. We also got the Nokia phones and laptops synced so we can use them for mobile internet while in the community. Pedro said that mobile internet is a huge eye opener. “If it works there, communities will know that if they can get the phone, they don’t need to go all the way to the city to access the internet.” I’m crossing my fingers that the signal will be strong enough to make this a reality. We shall see…. That social media session I have planned will not make much of an impact if we can’t get online. Which reminds me how great it always is to get your feet back on the ground and adjust ideas to reality.
Linda Raftree, LLC: I work as an independent consultant on digital development research, strategy and evaluation with an emphasis on responsible data use, inclusion, gender, and children and young people. I support organizations to develop, implement, and engage staff and partners in responsible data policy and practice. I enjoy facilitating and moderating convenings, workshops and learning-focused events.
MERL Tech: conference, blog, and discussion forum that facilitate discussion and learning about the role of digital data and new technology in monitoring, evaluation, research and learning (co-founder and lead organizer)
Technology Salon: convening and facilitating discussion on the role of ICTs in international development. (co-founder and NYC convener)
White Save Me: the app that helps white men deliver privilege with a simple tap of the finger. (co-creator)
This is a personal blog that does not represent official views of my current, past or future employers, affiliates or other organizations with whom I engage. Any opinions expressed herein are my own, and I take responsibility for them.
Wait... What? 