Archive for 2011
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Civil society has been working for years on participation, transparency, accountability and governance issues. Plenty of newer initiatives (small and large) look at new technologies as a core tool in this work. But are these groups talking and learning from each other?
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Open your wallet right now. Most likely, you have a debit card, a credit card, a health insurance card, and access to the massive financial infrastructure that these three cards represent. The ability to store, save, use, and borrow money anywhere in almost limitless fashion, without worry about amount, theft, or even making change. Add…
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Terms like mobile money, mPayments, and M-PESA are all the rage in International development these days, but what do they really mean for the national development of countries we attempt to help? Menekse Gencer of mPay Connect will lead us in a discussion of mobile financial services, the full gamut of finance that is now…
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In theory, making information open and available leads to more transparent decisions of governments, aid agencies, corporations and other such institutions because stakeholders at different levels push for accountability and better governance. That is why civil society actors have been working on transparency, accountability and good governance for years. Now new actors on the scene…
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Back when Bill Gates was young, he had multiple opportunities to geek out – he had access to computers at home and at school – but he would sneak out of his house to go the library. Why? Because he loved the wealth of knowledge, curated and guided by libraries.
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Access to information has been part of the development discussion since the Internet arrived. Previously, many saw community telecenters as the way to bring technology to the developing world. Yet telecenters are not sustainable without donor funding and the concept of public access hasn’t kept pace with advancing technology.
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Fail Faire DC 2011 is a celebration of failure. We will have great speakers with fun, fast, Ignite-style presentations of their professional failures. Audience participation is not only encouraged, it is mandatory! We are all peers and none of us is perfect. Expect much laughter as we navel-gaze at where we have all gone wrong…
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This month’s Technology Salon ICT4Ag – Enriching rural coffee farmers via iPads raised a couple of eyebrows from the outset. How can Exprima Media and Sustainable Harvest realistically improve rural coffee farming via iPads? Initially, it struck me as another attempt to use the latest and greatest technology to tackle longstanding challenges within the value…
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We all lust for iPhones, iPads, and the like, and yearn for the day the developing world can use the same cool gadgets we geek on. But did you realize that iPads could be used in remote areas today? That rural coffee farmers in Mexico, Peru, and Tanzania are enriching themselves and their communities through…
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A new form of capitalism is arising that recognizes our ability to direct the power and efficiency of market systems toward social impact, leading to a more balanced set of “returns”. This social capital market is real and growing, and has real impact on emerging economies. But does it impact ICT4D? How can technology companies…
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One of the sad truths that emerged at the Technology Salon on ICTs and M&E was that failure in development is rarely about the project performance, but about winning the next contract. This means that monitoring and evaluation is less about tracking and improving progress towards social change and more about weaving an advertising pitch….
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Last month, the M&E for ICT4D Technology Salon noted that we lacked quality tools to measure outcomes. We all intuitively know that ICT could be the basis for great M&E tools, but what about taking that feeling into action?
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No one ever fails in ICT4D. Isn’t that amazing! Technologies come and go quickly – bye, bye PDA’s, Windows Vista, and soon Nokia – yet in ICT4D, each project has impact and we never fail. We just have lessons learned. In fact, can you name a single technology program that has publicly stated that it…
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Everyone talks about measurement and evaluation (M&E) like it matters. Yet, few of us do it well or even at all with ICT projects. So why should we measure and evaluate? How can we go about it? And what are the industry best practices, applied to the uniqueness of ICT? Our goal is to explore…
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I am Charles Kenny, and I spent part of yesterday at a United Nations Foundation meeting with Dr Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer at USAID.
There was a lot of discussion of development applications using mobile phones (m-development) and how to do them better – things like interoperability and collecting models in an ‘m-app marketplace.’ And there was the usual back-and-forth between those who wanted to see more transformative projects where IT reformed whole agencies and ministries and those who thought that way madness (or at least obscene overruns) lay.
But I thought the most interesting discussion was around learning from experience -particularly in an area where technology is evolving rapidly, so a robust evaluation may not be completed before the project itself looks as dated as an integrated rural development scheme or a structural adjustment loan. The randomized trial result suggesting limited evidence of educational spillovers from a distribution program of Nintendo 64’s might not carry too much weight for those wanting to hand out Wiis as part of a youth fitness program.
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Local Internet Service Providers woefully under served rural communities in Haiti before the 2010 earthquake. ISPs said that broadband infrastructure was too expensive to deploy and there were too few customers to make the investment profitable. Using traditional sales models and technology, they were right. Then the earthquake happened. During the humanitarian relief phase, Inveneo…
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You’re staring down a new Request for Proposal and you know the goals can be achieved quicker, cheaper, and more effectively with the help of a software solution. You want to include your killer app in the proposal but you’re a development expert not a hacker. Where to start?
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Let us start by agreeing that technology has great promise in increasing the economic empowerment of youth in the developing world. We all believe it. But what is that promise in reality? Which technologies hold greater promise? What innovations work? That was the issue we discussed at the Technology Salon on Youth Economic Empowerment with…
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Today’s youth population is the largest in the history of the world, and 90% of these young people live in developing countries. The global youth unemployment rate is the highest on record, and we’re seeing discontent and disenfranchisement play out on the news each day. In fact, the revolution in Tunisia started with an under-employed…
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According to Women & Mobile: A Global Opportunity (PDF), authored by Vital Wave Consulting and sponsored by the GSMA Development Fund and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, the 73% of women in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia who do not have a mobile phone represent $13 billion per year in incremental revenue for mobile…
