More Tech Salons About government
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Data is top of mind during the COVID-19 response. Quality data can help to direct the response and to make decisions, but it’s not the silver bullet that everyone is hoping for. We need to remain aware of the power dynamics represented in how data is collected, treated, protected and interpreted. There needs to be…
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The model citizen participation process has citizens holding their governments accountable to deliver quality public services in a transparent and responsive manner. At the recent Technology Salon on How Can ICT’s Support Citizen Engagement with Governments? around 30 thought leaders debated the best ways to empower citizens and governments to define what a government should…
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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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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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Whew, I think this was one of the most intense and contentious Technology Salons yet! After an hour of lively discussion around what “sustainability” and “scale” means to information and communication technology programs, we were just starting to pull back the layers around the topics.
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Sustainability Means Many Things
We quickly found that there were many definitions of sustainability and scale. Maybe too many, as these terms differed wildly across implementers and donors. It was even suggested that in the realm of ICT, development has an unbroken string of failures since none of the projects have scaled to the extent of mobile phones.
Before we cast out the entire body of work to date, much of ICT4D is done as experimentation – there is an expectation of failure while we figure out models that would work. At least we have mobile phones to show that there are ICT models that can scale, sustainably.
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What do you think is the single most important issue at the intersection fo technology and development? Recently, the twin issues of sustainability and scale have come to the forefront in many conversations, with both peaking in October in several forums:
Is it only about money?- Sustainability: This month’s Educational Technology Debate is focusing on ICT4E sustainability and at an IADB meeting, virtually everything that USAID does was suggested to be unsustainable.
- Scale: I was recently reminded that while there is an incredibly vibrant mobile phone industry, after 15 years of PDA and mobile phone pilots there are few, if any, sustained mobile technology development projects that are more than 5 years old, continued after funding ended, and scaled beyond pilots.
But what do we mean by “sustainability” and “scale” in ICT4D?
Now here’s the real issue. What might be our shared definition of both “sustainability” and “scale” with information and communication technology programs in international development?