Using Technology to Power the Thomas Food Project: An Interview with James Lazarre

James Lazarre is project manager for the Thomas Food Project (TFP), in Thomas, Haiti. A minister with a degree in computer science, James oversees the day-to-day logistics for TFP and manages the school’s new computer center. TFP is supported by The United Methodist Church-California-Nevada Annual Conference, United Methodist Volunteers in Mission (UMVIM) and United Methodist Communications (UMCom).

Q: What is your role with the Thomas Food Project, and what does the project do?

A: I am the project manager for the Thomas Food Project, which provides an educational environment and a hot lunch program to feed kids in the Thomas community. We have a computer lab that just opened in June. We are using the computers to transform from a chalkboard-based learning environment to one that uses technology to improve education in the school.

Our goal with the computer center is to build computer skills in the community. When we started, only about 20% of the teachers in Thomas knew how to use a computer. So we trained the teachers to be able to use computers as part of their teaching. We also have classes to teach school children. And after 12:30, when school ends, we open the computer center to other members of the community.

Q: What kinds of classes does the computer center offer?

A: We offer several classes, including specific classes for girls, and for women looking to build skills that can help them earn money. We have ten computers right now, and we have different sessions throughout the day with ten to twenty people in each session. The whole community can get information and learn something.

Q:  What kinds of technology is the Thomas Food Project using?

First, we’re using a solar system so that we don’t have to buy fuel every day to run a generator. This powers the entire school, including the computer center. In our church, we used to spend money every day just to buy fuel. With the solar panels we don’t have to do that.

Second we are using low power computers. This means we can keep the computer center open and work all day. This saves us money, which means we can offer more and more services.

Q: What challenges have you found associated with using technology in the computer center?

A: When we identified that we wanted to install computer lab, I made a survey and talked to the community about our plan. Less than 20 people I talked to knew how to use a computer, so that’s our biggest challenge.

Most people in the community, about 90%, have a cell phone. But many of them use it just for voice calls or to send text messages. Kids sometimes know how to use a tablet or a cell phone, but many have never used a mouse.

So we have to reinforce basic computer skills in the community. We’re training the teachers so that they will be able to teach the kids. We offer classes to the community. And we provide services to the community, including web access, printing, scanning, and copying.

Q:  Have you heard any of the school children or community members talk about what it’s like to have access to a computer?

A: The kids are so excited about the computers. When I was teaching one girl said to me the other day, “I’m six years old and I can use the computer! When I go home to tell my brothers, they don’t even know what a computer is.”

The kids are using computers to research things they are learning in school. They are incredibly enthusiastic to participate in computer classes. They could spend the whole day there. Next year the Thomas school will teach most of its classes in the computer lab. It’s an easy way to teach the kids.

Q: What is your vision for the future?

A: We believe this basic computer literacy will have a big impact on the community. People who previously did not know anything about computers can come to use them to gain access to information and services.

We’d like to use the computer center to help the community build professional skills that they can use to develop into economic opportunities. So we’re putting together a business plan to support more job training.

People want to use technology. And for us this is an important way to serve the community. Any time we can receive support to be able to offer technology services, it is great thing to help us build opportunities. We welcome new partners or friends to help us to join us in this effort.

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The TFP computer center is being maintained by Haicom, an Inveneo-certified local partner.

Ethics in the Use of ICT in Development Projects: An Interview with Jennifer Chan

Jennifer Chan, MD/MPH, is an Associate Faculty Member of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and Lead Instructor for Humanitarian Technologies at the Humanitarian Academy at Harvard University. She is also an Assistant Professor and Director of Global Emergency Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Her recent activities have focused on humanitarian technologies and crisis mapping with a focus on field operations. As a consultant, she helps evaluate open source technology organizations such as Ushahidi, trains emerging practitioners in humanitarian technologies, and researches the interface between humanitarian agencies and volunteer & technical communities.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your work at the intersection of technology and humanitarian assistance?

A: The area of work I’ve focused on over the past couple of years is commonly referred to as crisis mapping in the field of humanitarian technology. Humanitarian technology refers to the application of technology to address humanitarian issues, including both acute onset disasters and complex ongoing humanitarian emergencies.

I’ve worked in high-tech, low-tech and near no-tech settings, and this has pushed me to continually think about and re-explore the relationship between information, privacy, security, and ethics. As a researcher and consultant I’ve worked with NGOs and other agencies to help them strategically and programmatically integrate ICT into complex humanitarian situations, including disasters, conflict settings, and drought prone regions. This work has included work on when [the use of technology] is appropriate, and how it is safe to use.

Q: From an ethics perspective, what do groups designing development projects with a technology component need to keep in mind?

A: A key ethical perspective to keep in mind is the  “do no harm” principle. Codes of conduct, when revised and applied to crisis mapping projects, provide very important guidance but this is still a work in progress. A concise, practical, and widely accepted set of ethical guidelines, and best practices that take into account principles, standards or guidelines, have yet to be developed.

ICT projects have potential for faster, more accurate and wider inclusion of information, but they also present vulnerabilities that can cause risk and potential harm. Information shared using technology can be accidentally misrepresented or interpreted, carelessly distributed without consent, and even intentionally manipulated for a multitude of purposes that are not in line with the good intentions of the ICT project. And there are additional vulnerabilities that lie within the technology itself. But the flip side is that these types of obstacles are frequently surmountable with a good framework for learning, iteration, and revisions embedded in the project.

Working with technology, it is helpful to recognize and accept the tenet that access to information is related in many ways to power. Understanding that first is key. Beyond thinking about how technology can influence the design of a project, organizations should seek to understand the existing information ecosystem by asking:  What decisions would be made, or how would behavior change, on the basis of the information gathered with technology? Where are the vulnerabilities of information collection, sharing and communication that exist with the intended users and beneficiaries of the project, and with the technology itself?

In my evaluations of these types of projects, frequently I see organizations thinking about how they’ll use technology before developing a nuanced understanding of what information is desired, or how the information collected would be used. Rather infrequently is there a comprehensive assessment of information as it relates to privacy, risk and harm.  I often recommend that this process be inverted and efforts made to include as many users in the discussion. This speaks to the importance of user-centered design.

Q: What best practice have you seen in the use of ICT in development projects that incorporates sound ethical principles or guidelines?

A: In my experience, many of the emerging ethical principles and guidelines in these projects are focused on information, security and privacy. On the design side, organizations need to be mindful of the various planning phases and how much time it takes to understand the information security and privacy context. There needs to be an assessment at the country level of what information and privacy guidelines need to be considered. In addition, organizations should outline steps for the project, ask stakeholders to recognize and abide by codes of conduct, and link these activities to ethical principles that relate to ICT as well as to the organization’s mission.

It’s also critical to engage stakeholders at the local level to understand what is important to consider when it comes to information and privacy. In certain contexts a change in region within a country could mean a significant change in risk. Engaging the right people in the design process is essential to developing a sound security protocol. This can require a lot of resources, planning and advocacy for adequate funds to achieve these important goals, but will serve the project better over the long term.

Q: What about the importance of enabling a user to “opt in” or “opt out” in the context of a humanitarian mapping project?

A: With any crisis mapping project, the first thing you need to do is consider the purpose integrating ICT. But before you collect information you need to ask yourself and the community members involved: Why use a map? What’s the anticipated purpose? And within this exercise also ask whether or not this has a potential to do harm in addition to good.

Ideally, you would reach out to all of the people in the information ecosystem. You would ask local communities: This is what we’d like to do, what do you think about it? Find out what are people’s feelings are. Is this ability to share information beneficial or uncomfortable to them? These conversations become telling about whether there are under recognized or unanticipated challenges.

Q: Do ethical considerations change depending on whether you’re dealing with an area where there is high access to technology versus one with low or no access?

A: To some degree, yes, and to some degree no. What it really comes down to is an understanding of the information flow. You could have online-based mapping or curation of crowdsourced information, but if that information goes into a print format and is shared with communities, or if meetings take information from an online source and then folks talk about it, then you’re looking at an online-offline information pattern. Sharing information in an offline environment does not necessarily remove the risks associated with it.

To ensure information security and privacy, it’s useful for organizations to map out entire information communications systems, from high- to low- and no-tech communications, and then build in a vulnerability and risk model that engages the community in this process to make this a participatory practice. Once you have this framework, then challenge the assumptions around the risk model.  Could there be risk in collecting information by itself, even in an offline environment?  Having this framework facilitates community engagement, and allows analysis at both global to local levels.

Q: What else is important to consider?

A: Scenario planning is important from a programmatic design standpoint.  Whether you’re using FrontlineSMS or another ICT platform, scenario planning and simulation are valuable to understand vulnerabilities, risk, and unexpected privacy issues. It also can demonstrate how much time is required to start – often much more than people realize.

Having a budget line item for a simulation and practicum period is also very useful. Taking policy level discussions into simulation to implement protocols and understand what happens in the last mile helps strengthen the implementation phase of the program. You can learn from mistakes and ideally mitigate any potential negative effects with beneficiaries. Finally, simulations and a practicum period enable people involved in the project time to learn the tool and, more importantly, the process, and hopefully come to a deeper understanding the how ICT fits within the larger project goal.  Organizations that do this are much more successful than many of the implementations we’re seeing.

Q: What is the significance of organizations like United Methodist Communications incorporating ICT4D into their project design?

A: It’s important that groups thinking about engaging in ICT related activities, particularly those that are new to it, to remember that no matter what tool or technology approach you take ultimately these interventions come down to access to information and the benefit and the power associated with it. That’s why it’s important to have a thoughtful process around what that means, and what access to information entails for different people. We frequently assume that there are inherent benefits associated with increasing access to ICT – but are there also risks associated with it and harm as well?

We have to remember that when it comes to privacy and security in crisis mapping or ICT4D, this is a work in progress. Every organization should be part of the larger conversation about what works and what doesn’t—not only as listener, but as contributor. There’s still a ways to go.

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For more information about best practice in privacy and security in ICT implementations, see:

Chamales, George, Lea Shanley, and Aaron Lovell. Towards Trustworthy Social Media and Crowdsourcing. The Wilson Center, Washington, D.C. 2013

Collaborative Learning Projects. The Do No Harm Handbook (the framework for analyzing the impact of assistance in conflict). Collaborative for Development Action, Inc., Cambridge, MA. 2004.

The International Committee of the Red Cross. Professional Standards for Protection Work. 2013 Edition. Chapter 6, Pg 77.

Building Human-Centered Design into ICT4D Projects: An Interview with Danny Alexander and Sean Hewens of IDEO.org

Sean Hewens is knowledge manager and in-house counsel at IDEO.org. He oversees IDEO.org’s mission to spread human-centered design throughout the social sector. In his role as Knowledge Manager, Sean has helped document and tell stories about every aspect of the IDEO.org design process. Previously, Sean worked at a law firm and then ran a non-profit building computer labs in Kenya and Tanzania.

Danny Alexander is a Senior Designer at IDEO.org. Prior to IDEO.org he worked in industrial and product design, and  has been a partner in several start-ups. He works with IDEO.org’s clients and partners to explore new frontiers in design, with a focus on the intersection of design and social good.

Q: What is human-centered design?

A: [Sean]: Human-­‐centered design is a problem-solving process that puts humans at the very center. There are three key tenets.

First, immerse yourself within the community as much as possible [to understand the problem]. You can start very specific with folks in the community. Learn from them as much as possible.

Second, you focus on brainstorming and prototyping rapidly. The idea with brainstorming is to go as broad as you can with ideas. Use what you learned from the community and ideate.

Third, you get those ideas back out to the community to get feedback from real users as quickly as possible in the form of prototypes. Our early prototypes often fail, but in a way that allows us to iterate and refine our ideas based upon feedback from real users.

Q: Why is human-centered design important in the social sector, and is the social sector lagging behind the private sector in this regard?

A: [Sean]: Human-centered design started with IDEO in the 1980s designing the computer mouse and the folding design for the laptop computer. As IDEO expanded its process, it began working with the social sector and found human-centered design to be very effective.

There are a couple of reasons for this. In the social sector you have funders and beneficiaries. Frequently you find donor-driven programs and solutions that aren’t based on the real world needs of actual users, or the communities that are supposed to be benefitted. Human-centered design is an effective tool that designs programs and solutions based on real user needs.

[Danny]: There are a lot of missing feedback loops in social sector implementations. The private sector has a feedback loop, although it may be one-dimensional: do people buy a product, yes or no? But in international development you have projects being implemented thousands of miles away from where decisions are made. Frequently, there’s no feedback loop so it’s hard to say: Is it working, and are people choosing to use this? In these instances you have programs that are not at all sustainable and not having real impact, and yet donors continue to think they’re successful and promote them just because they have been implemented. Human-centered design helps give voice to the community, and ensures design is built around user needs and is sustainable.

[Sean]: Before I joined IDEO.org, when I was building a computer lab in Tanzania for my non-profit, from a tech perspective we nailed it. But we didn’t consider the actual needs of the community until we arrived there to build the computer lab. We didn’t ask: what about the parents of the kids who will use the computer lab? What about teachers or community members who won’t have access to the lab? All of these reasons that our project was most likely to fail were rooted around people and the community. Unfortunately, most of what we actually considered before we went was the technology of the computer lab that our donors had paid for us to build. This was my first glimpse into the idea that starting with the users in the community is the much more sustainable approach.

Q: Why is human-centered design important to the field of ICT4D?

A: [Sean]: In general the development community is very risk averse. If things go badly, you’re not talking about losing quarterly profits but losing lives. One of the benefits of human-centered design is to mitigate risk by testing early and failing fast.

In the developing world so often where projects fail is the not around the actual technology or solution, but about how it is implemented in the context of the community. You need to ask yourself: Even if it the technology is good, how it might fail anyway? For example, is microcredit needed to enable the community to make necessary purchase? Is training needed to ensure that the technology will be used? You need to figure out all the conditions necessary to the technology being implemented and sustainable.

[Danny]: In our work, we encourage testing ideas in a rough, unfinished form, often before the technology is even developed.

One example is a recent project called Pump Away, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as part of their Reinvent the Toilet initiative, which is investing in technologies to address sanitation challenges around the world. Our work on Pump Away was to take one of the technologies they’ve developed—an Omni‐Ingestor—and develop the business, service and brand for a sustainable pit latrine emptying service in Zambia. The team spent a few weeks on the ground in Zambia, interviewing community members about what the sanitation challenges were. This made things really tangible and enabled the team to prototype quickly, even though the technology is still months, or years, from being finished.

One of the key criteria for the project was to design a service that would be financially sustainable, and that investors would invest in. So we asked ourselves: What kind of a business model will make people pay to use this, and what makes it better than the competition? Could we get a bunch of people to sign up to empty latrines at the same time in the same place for greater efficiency?

To test this idea, we dressed our local translator up as a salesman and gave him an artificial price for this service and then let him loose in the community to see if people would sign up. Within two hours, we had more demand than the technology could even fulfill. Rapid prototyping enabled us to do all of this before anything was built. Testing in this fast, rough way enabled us to prove the concept and understand local demand. We also learned that people were interested in emptying part of their latrine if they couldn’t afford to empty the full latrine each time.

In the context of ICT4D, human-centered design can help with the design of a technology, and the context around it, long before the technology is ready for launch.

Q: Is failure at certain times not only acceptable but important?

A: [Sean]: Our ethos is not that failure is good or bad, but that when you learn from it, failure can be a very positive part of the process. You want to try to get some of the failing out early so that you can learn from it and let it influence the design of a better more successful project.

[Danny]: One example of failure with a small “f” is the Clean Team project in Ghana. In early field research, the team showed community members different kinds of toilets that they might get through the program to learn what their aspirational ideal was from a theoretical perspective. Most people said the standard western flush toilet was the ideal.

So a few weeks later the team went back to Ghana with 5 or 6 full-scale prototypes, some of which were water flush toilets that would work without connection to a water system or to a sewage grid. Despite having designed the toilets based on the community’s aspirational ideal, the water flush toilet was an abject failure. Two days later every single one had overflowed.

Why? In this particular community people used water to cleanse instead of paper. Older people couldn’t figure out how to use it. And then people realized they had to pay for the water. Across the board, the feedback was negative.

So what did we learn? When we interviewed the community, that’s what they said they wanted, but just asking wasn’t good enough. We needed to build, test, and fail. Trust me, you learn more from cleaning up a dirty toilet than you ever will from qualitative work or a survey. Prototyping and testing enabled us to fail on the scale of just a few households, whereas if we had invested in a major program around this aspirational toilet there would have been thousands of homes with overflowing toilets.

[Sean]: Here’s an opposite example of Failure with a big “F”, where folks didn’t fail early. In this example, an organization spent a lot of time investing in a large program that was rolled out without ever testing with the community. The program, which was implemented in a refugee camp in northern Kenya [near the border with Somalia], provided a nutritional pack called Sprinkles. The idea was that users would open the vitamin packet and sprinkle it on food or in water to provide basic vitamins for kids. But when the program was implemented, none of the parents would give it to their kids. Why? The foil wrappers that contained the vitamins looked just like condom wrappers. So this program had spent all this money designing and distributing the packets, and then failed. If they had run a small pilot initially, or even prototyped the packaging, they would have failed in a small way earlier in the process, and been able to change the packaging at a much smaller cost.

You want to start small, pilot early on and then scale up. This is the value of human- centered design.

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For more information on applying human-centered design to the work of social enterprises and NGOs, download the free IDEO.org toolkit available here.

Using Technology for Development Project Monitoring & Evaluation: An Interview with Linda Raftree

Linda Raftree is Senior Advisor for Innovation, Transparency and Strategic Change at Plan International USA; Special Advisor on ICT and Monitoring & Evaluation at the Rockefeller Foundation; and Co-Founder of the independent consulting firm, Kurante. She also manages the New York City Technology Salons, is on the board of the kiwanja Foundation, and is part of the Regarding Humanity project. An anthropologist by training, she has worked at the intersection of community development, participatory media, rights-based approaches, and new information and communication technologies for nearly 20 years.

Why is monitoring and evaluation, or M&E, important to development work and when do those designing development projects need to start thinking about building M&E into their work?

If you’re talking about monitoring and evaluation for an ICT project, it’s helpful to think about it in two ways. First, how will you measure the performance of your program? And, second, how might ICT be used to support that M&E plan? These are two separate pieces, and it’s important to address them individually.

The systematic monitoring and evaluating of ICT-enabled development projects is still relatively new. Monitoring is important because it can go a long way to helping you figure out what’s working and what’s not working. Monitoring can help you establish a framework through which you ask: What is my program trying to achieve, and what are the small steps I’ll measure along the way to ensure I’m on the road to achieving my project goal?

A lot of what we know about ICT4D projects is anecdotal. We don’t have a lot of good research about what makes projects work and what makes projects fail. So evaluation can be useful both to the project manager, and to the wider field so that other people can learn from you and avoid your mistakes.

Finally, it’s really important to think about M&E at the beginning of the project. If you don’t know where you’re starting from, it’s hard to measure where you’ve gotten to. If your project has already been underway without an M&E component, be reflective on what you’re already done and where you are: all that learning is really important. It becomes more difficult to do M&E midstream, but there are techniques that professional evaluators can use. It’s never too late to start.

New technologies are opening up all kinds of possibilities for improving monitoring and evaluation. Could you talk a bit about ways technology is being used to support M&E?

What ICT is doing for M&E is really broadening it out and allowing more people to participate. It also allows project managers to analyze data better and to make decisions more quickly. New ICT tools can make monitoring faster and more accurate.  Using mobile phones can also help you reach out to a wider group, and get feedback from the communities you serve. Some of the new ICT-enabled visualizations tools, including maps, graphs and charts, make it easier to analyze the data you collect and share it back to the community.

One way we’re seeing ICTs being used frequently in M&E is in mobile data collection. A lot of people are transferring paper surveys to a mobile format. There are cultural and technology challenges associated with making this transition, but it can help get data collected more quickly and, some say, more accurately.

Another way that new tech can help with M&E is on the qualitative side. There are interesting ways that video can be used. For example, a group called Insight Share uses participatory video to work with communities to understand the most significant changes that have happened at the personal or community level due to the project. If the process is done correctly, it can inform future project design and bring learning to bear on how future programs are developed and carried out.

Finally, while SMS is not a new technology, now almost everyone has access to a mobile phone. In addition to using text messages to survey communities, you can also use the cameras built into mobile phones to take before and after pictures, to have people to share their ideas about a project, and to draw out insights from a project.

How is M&E changing as a result of this technology?

Ideally, people would be able to collect and share information more quickly using new ICT tools. Data visualization tools are also helping people make better use of data, and make better-informed decisions about framing and refining the kind of data to collect in the first place. But we’re still at the beginning of using ICT for M&E and we have several big challenges before us.

One of these challenges is that we’re collecting a lot more data than we’ve ever collected before. We’re not always collecting the most useful data or headquarters may be asking for data that is unnecessary. This can be burden to people on the ground if the data is not actually used.

Another stumbling block comes around the sharing of M&E data. We haven’t completely cracked this one yet, but we do know there would be value in trying to collect information that could be comparable across different organizations. For example, data collected as part of a large mosquito bed net distribution campaign could be useful to the organization conducting the campaign and to the Ministry of Health. A lot of organizations are not thinking about this and checking which other organizations might have similar data needs before starting.

This gets to a larger conversation about standards in data collection, and the health field is a lot further ahead of other development sectors in this area. It also opens up concerns about how to protect respondents’ privacy, how to keep data secure, and how to ensure that respondents are fully informed about how data collected about them might be used.

What organizational changes, such as new policies and processes, are needed for organizations who are growing their monitoring & evaluation processes?

It’s important to keep in mind that using ICT for M&E is not necessarily cheaper when you start out. It requires a thoughtful process to change from paper to mobile.  It’s also important to be mindful that this is a behavior change process and needs to be managed properly. People may feel threatened or think that their jobs are going to be eliminated. Let people know what’s going on, and make sure people feel confident and well trained.

For organizations that are new to M&E it’s also important to be clear from the beginning about how the data and reports collected are going to be used. You don’t want to generate a lot of reports and then put them in a drawer. So think from the outset about how an M&E program is going to influence future decision-making and program design. This can help you identify what data to collect, and ensure that your organization, project or initiative can change according to what you learn.

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On her blog at Wait…What?, Linda has several excellent posts about the use of ICT for monitoring and evaluation including: Twelve Tips on Using ICTs for Social Monitoring and Accountability, and The Benefits and Barriers of ICT-Enabled M&E.

Using SMS to Strengthen Community Communications in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Betty Musau of The United Methodist Church talks about how cellphone technology is strengthening communications and transforming communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she is a UMC conference communicator.

“Instead of waiting for Sunday or Wednesday for an announcement in Church, now we use SMS to tell people” about urgent news using FrontlineSMS, Betty says.

What happens as a result of increased community communications via SMS? “People are changing their behavior,” such as by boiling water during a cholera outbreak, or using bednets to prevent malaria.

“Cellphones are the only means of communication that are effective because people don’t have access to the internet,” Betty says.

What’s her vision for the future? “If every woman can have access to a cellphone, it will save lives and transform the community.”

Learn more about how The United Methodist Church is using technology to improve lives, livelihoods and spiritual wellbeing at http://www.umcom.org, and follow the discussion on Twitter using #ICT4DBP.

Five Steps toward Designing Context Appropriate ICT4D Projects: An Interview with Kristin Peterson, CEO of Inveneo

Kristin Peterson is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Inveneo, a nonprofit social enterprise that delivers sustainable computing and broadband in the developing world. With the goal of transforming lives through better education, healthcare, economic opportunities and emergency relief, Inveneo and its partners have delivered projects in over 25 countries and impacted the lives of over 3 million people in some of the poorest and most challenging regions in the developing world. Kristin was named Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur of the Year in 2013, and honored in 2011 with the ITU World Telecommunication and Information Society Award for her work connecting rural areas.

Q: What factors do development practitioners need to keep in mind when designing ICT products and projects?

A:  In the design phase, there are a number of key principles that need attention aside from the technology. It’s not just about the use case but, also the users of the technology. You have to understand the needs of the organization you’re working with, but also those of the community and the individuals you want to serve.

Here are five things to keep in mind in designing an ICT4D project:

#1: Needs Assessment

The first step is to start with a needs assessment. Engage with the project participants who will use the technology, and with the community that will be served. Learn their issues and their needs so that you can design a technology solution that fits.

For example, if you’re a local church in the States looking to start up an ICT4D program abroad, start by working with your peers in that location to understand what the profile and needs of that community are. Is this community agricultural or urban? If you’re working with a peer church in rural Nigeria where 90% of the community members are farmers, then you’ll probably want to build a program that addresses how to get out better information for farmers.

Once you understand the needs of the community, then you can start thinking about which assets the team can bring. Ultimately this is about getting the technology to serve the community, and enabling the community to gain improved access to information.

#2: Understand User Capacity

Second, you need to understand the capacity of the community to absorb that technology. This will enable you to consider capacity building is needed to build technology adoption.

For example, if you’re going to build a community center where you want to use shared computing or tablet access as a means of providing information to that community, you need to ask: What is the level of familiarity with using these technologies? With using the Internet? You need to consider user ability and agility in deciding which technologies to use, and how to build user capacity.

If you’re building ICT solutions for a school environment, consider how the teachers and the administrators will become familiar with the technology. How might they integrate the technology into day-to-day lesson planning and education/classroom delivery to make the desired impact? How do you build that adoption process, the training, capacity building, and integration, into the technology program you are designing?

It’s also important to look at the community’s needs independent of what tech can do.

#3: Appropriate Technology

Once you’ve done those things, then you’re ready for the third step: identifying appropriate technologies to create a solution set. From a technology standpoint you need to look at a number of items.

First, what is the appropriate physical or hardware technology to use in a setting? In many developing county settings the technology needs to be robust. It has to be survivable in challenging environments with dust, heat, and humidity.

Second, it needs to be low power because many rural areas and even some urban areas in developing countries have issues with power. Power can range from unreliable, where there is grid access but power may be intermittent, to unavailable where there is no traditional power at all.

To consider how your technology will be powered requires an understanding of the physical environment that the technology will be implemented in. You need to know what will be supportable and survivable over the long term, which requires an understanding of what power exists, how stable that power is, and what will be needed to operate that system on a regular basis.

Finally, you need to design around the mission of the project or organization. If you’re designing technology for a school that needs to be open 8 hours a day for students, and then four hours at night and four hours over the weekend, then you have to design a power system that will enable regular powering and consistency of use to meet that demand.

#4: Affordability

Affordability is key to successful ICT product and program design in development projects. Power can be a very expensive component in implementing technology, so use of low power computer screens, servers, and tablets (which already are lower power solutions) is important.

You need to remember that you are designing across the lifecycle of the technology’s use, and think about the affordability both in the short term and the cost of ownership overall.

Once you understand the physical and power situation, then you have to look at affordability both short-term and long-term. You need to be able to design a highly sustainable technology solution from a power, physical, and usability standpoint. Your solution needs to be adaptable in the situations it is designed for.

#5: Support and Integration Plan

Even once you’ve got appropriate and affordable technology factored into your project design, there’s still more to do. Remember that technology frequently is just 10% of the solution. Next you’ll need to look at building a solution that meets the needs of the organization you are serving.

You need to ask: How will the technology be implemented, and how can local capacity be built around using the technology and integrating it into that setting? What training can be providing to build familiarity and confidence with the new technology? How can you build local capacity to integrate the technologies into everyday activities?

Once the technology is implemented, no matter how sustainable it is, you need to have a technology management and support plan that supports users in that environment. You’ll need to identify local support that can come in to fix things and provide regular maintenance on an ongoing basis.

One last thing around the technology: When implementing technology systems, you need to think about how to minimize maintenance and support issues. For example, when you’re implementing a computer lab or a tablet program, how do you ensure that those computers and tablets that will be used by novices cannot be erased or ruined by viruses? It’s really important to look at how that can be done in a way that enables optimum use of the technology but also keeps the system easy to use. Tools like Deep Freeze on a desktop or tablet can help ensure that it can be returned to its original format.

Once you’ve taken these steps, then you can determine whether technology can help you take your program to a new place.

Q: You’ve worked with UMCom on several projects now, including building two computer community centers in Haiti, a grants program, a workshop and site assessments. What is the significance of an entity like The United Methodist Church taking a strategic approach to the use of ICT as part of its work on development related initiatives?

We’re really excited about our work with UMCom around the world and the impact that it is making on peoples lives – and we’re just beginning!

Through its mission efforts, UMCom’s reach and resources are vast. Moreover, UMCom is taking a strategic and practical approach to community development. When combined with technology, this can truly make impact on a global scale.

By designing an approach to local community development that works with local churches and Methodist aligned schools as community development hubs, and by using the right sustainable technologies, UMCom can strengthen community coordination and improve access to information.

In many countries, Methodist universities can be engaged to design and deliver locally relevant programs for these centers.  And by recruiting and training volunteers to support these centers in strategic ways, UMCom can serve as a catalyst for the effective use of ICT to meet local community needs.

Now imagine if this is done not once, but a thousand times using the same approach, the same technologies and only differing the designs based on communities needs. By doing this, UMCom can enable United Methodist churches, schools, and volunteers in mission to become more powerful agents of change throughout the world.

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For a detailed guide about the use of ICT in low-resource environment, see the Inveneo primer on that subject available here.

The Role of Mobile in Development: An Interview with Priya Jaisinghani, Mobile Solutions Director at USAID

Priya Jaisinghani serves as Senior Advisor to the Administrator and the Director of Mobile Solutions for the U.S. Agency for International Development. She has previously served as Program Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation launching a $1 billion Global Development Program, and as Development Officer in the South Asia Program of the UN Foundation. Priya received a BA in Commerce from the University of Virginia and received an MA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University’s SAIS.

Q:  What is your role at USAID, and what does your office do?

A: I’m the director of mobile solutions for USAID, we’re part of an independent office that reports directly to [USAID Administrator] Raj [Shah]. People are working on technology issues across the agency: in health, in agriculture, and in education, to name a few. My team is helping to coordinate ICT activities across these areas, and pushing the agency on issues that are crosscutting, such as financial inclusion, mobile data solutions, and mobile access.

Q:  Can you tell us more about one of these crosscutting areas, like mobile data solutions?

A:  Everyone is talking about big data, but in this case we’re looking at small, project-based data. USAID has a programs budget of over $20 billion per year, which is largely focused in humanitarian assistance, agriculture and health. We have an opportunity to use technology, including mobile technology, to collect real-time or near real-time data on the progress and performance of these programs. And [we’re using technology] to hear directly from the communities we serve about whether and how programs are fulfilling their needs and wants.

In Afghanistan, for example, we’re using mobile [phones] to survey teachers about how they’re currently getting paid, and if they’d prefer to be paid in a different way. So far we have about 600 people surveyed, and the results are showing that there’s a strong preference to be paid by mobile or by card instead of being paid in cash, which is how most teachers in Afghanistan are paid today. Having this kind of information gives us the impetus to work with our partners, [including the government,] to pay civil servants through electronic means.

Q:  Could you talk a bit about the intersection of technology, including mobile, in the monitoring & evaluation of development programs?

A:  The opportunity is huge. Technology can make monitoring and evaluation work faster, cheaper, and of higher quality because of the reduction of human error involved in transforming data collected manually into an electronic system. USAID has been very methodical about how we approach this issue. You don’t want to create a situation like the one we saw in Uganda where everyone is out there doing mobile data collection – but doing so using systems that don’t connect, and in the absence of policies about what data to collect, how to do so securely, and on what kind of platform this data should reside. So while there is huge promise around the potential of ICT for transforming M&E work, it’s also important for large organizations with offices around the world like the United Methodist Church to think about the design and policies around the M&E system first.

Q:  Speaking of policies, could you talk a bit about USAID’s policy on the use of ICT for development?

We’re in the process of updating USAID’s ICT4D guidance now to help us focus our investments in ICT4D and achieve greater impact through them. We’re seeing that there’s not a lot of clarity about how best to procure ICT4D solutions. There’s also a lack of awareness in the development community about existing solutions. A lot of partners are building their own solutions, which leads to reinvention rather than existing solutions really scaling.

The USAID guidance will, for example, encourage reusability by suggesting partners to either choose from the existing landscape of software solutions or provide justification if they feel they need to build a new tool. This guidance will also probably include language around sustainability, such as by asking partners to identify, at the outset, who will pay for the project after an initial USAID grant, and how this project will be maintained and upgraded over time. We all, collectively, need to be much more thoughtful about the longevity of these solutions, including their reusability, sustainability and scalability.

Q:  What do funders like USAID look for in the ICT4D projects they fund?

A: In a very decentralized organization like USAID, we’ve got deep content experts who aren’t themselves focused on the ICT4D element of their investments. The vast majority of USAID staff is thinking first and foremost about the impact their investment is having on the poor. So it’s incumbent on partners to demonstrate how investments in ICT can lead to faster, cheaper and better program impact. And when you have a tough budget environment as we do today, ICT tends to be the easy thing to lop off unless prospective grantees show how ICT-based investments can have a real, direct impact.

Q:  In your opinion, what is the significance of the United Methodist Church developing an ICT strategy to guide its development work?

A: I think we’re entering a new world of development. There’s increasing emphasis on local sustainability and building up capacity among non-traditional partners. And we’re beginning to see a shift from funding flowing to the big organizations, to funding flowing more directly to the communities themselves. So we’re looking at world where traditional development funding methods could be totally reorganized.

Larger traditional organizations focused on humanitarian relief and assistance need to prove that they are as or more effective than just giving money directly or to local partners. If you don’t have the systems in place to track and prove impact, and to get funds flowing directly to these communities, then you risk being left in the wake. I don’t mean to be alarmist, but I do think big development organizations can’t stay still.

In part due to the way information can now be collected through advances in ICT, increasingly there will be a litmus test in the development space. Donors will ask: Should I really give money to a large organization, or should I just give it directly to a local partner? So it will be incumbent on large development groups to be laser focused on impact, best practices, ability to track in real time what their performance. ICT can enable and empower these efforts.

10 Tips for Successful ICT4D Interventions: An Interview with ICT4D Pioneer Ken Banks

Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net and FrontlineSMS, devotes himself to the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world. He has worked at the intersection of technology, anthropology, conservation and development for the past twenty years and, during that time, has lived and worked across the African continent. He is a Pop!Tech Fellow, a Tech Awards Laureate, an Ashoka Fellow and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. His latest project, Means of Exchange, is looking at how everyday technologies can be used to democratize opportunities for economic self-sufficiency, rebuild local community and promote a return to local resource use.

 Q:  You’ve been working in this field for some time – is it surprising to you that there is no “best practice” guide for ICT4D, or is this to be expected in a field that is being transformed so rapidly by changes in technology?

A:  A lot of people have opinions on what works in ICT4D and what doesn’t. Just because a particular tool or lesson might apply in one place doesn’t mean it will work everywhere. This oversimplifies the issue of replication, scale and getting things to work in what are often very different environments. The idea of “best practices” almost assumes that there are commonalities that you can apply globally. This may be true in some cases, but it won’t be true in all.

Q:  What about your experience in creating and growing FrontlineSMS – what factors have you found to be important in building a successful ICT4D project?

A:  There are a handful of important factors – I can list off my top 10, in no particular order.

• Build for what people already have in their hands. It’s critical to understand the hardware and device landscape, particularly which technologies your users have access to and ownership of. Many projects still have this problem – looking at smart phones or other top-of-the-range technologies that don’t work for the people they’re trying to help.
• If your product needs an installation guide, that’s a barrier. When ICT4D tools are developed, there are often things that need to be plugged in, connected or configured. Any installation process needs to make sense to people – especially people who need convincing that they can do it themselves. If people can get a tool to work on their own, they often feel incredibly empowered.

• Projects have to be sustainable, but by charging users you often put barriers up to adoption. The target users of your ICTD tool may not be able to pay, or have a mechanism to pay. Good business models in the field are few and far between. Joel Selanikio’s ‘freemium’ model with Magpi may be one of the best. It certainly seems to work.
• If you need to fly in and out to carry out installation, you’re going to struggle to get to scale. For ICT4D projects to scale, you need replication on the ground by users to other users. If users can share, learn, and replicate among themselves, there’s a chance you’ll get a viral effect. Some projects try to generate a degree of financial sustainability by creating a need for users to draw on paid services – but for many this becomes a barrier.
• If you build your ICT4D tool to work without the Internet, then it will work anywhere.  Always start off with assumption that there’s no Internet. Too many projects that fail start off with the opposite assumption. Not only that, just because a user has a smart phone doesn’t mean that they are online. They may swap out their SIM card so frequently that their phone isn’t configured to access the Internet, or they may not be able to afford data services, or they may not live in an area with reliable data coverage.
• Community is absolutely critical. This is often the hardest thing to create because you can’t force people to engage. In ICT4D, community is the Holy Grail. You want to create an environment where users can connect and provide technical support to one another – one where you don’t get in the way. One thing I always used to ask myself with the FrontlineSMS community was, if I stopped providing support to it tomorrow, would users take up the reins themselves?
• We need to think of appropriate technology as a discipline. The ICT4D field would undoubtedly benefit if there was a stronger appreciation for the ethos of the appropriate technology movement. We need to keep E. F.  Shumacher in mind when building tools to ensure that they are designed to work with the local environment, culture, and people in mind.  So much of what we see doesn’t work, and yet people continue to do it.
• Collaboration is key.  There isn’t enough collaboration in the development space as a whole. Everyone wants their own project with their own name and sense of objectives. Some people also see ICT4D as competitive, pitching tools against one another when, in reality, no one ICT4D tool is inherently better than another. It all depends on the context in which the tool is being used, and that can vary a lot.
• Think beyond technology. Good technology has a certain spirit and meaning, and can connect with people on a non-technical, higher level. How you feel when you buy an Apple product, for example. There’s something special about it, it feels part of you. FrontlineSMS has done an amazing job of not only helping people do their work better, but feel better about themselves. It empowers and encourages. Tools need to engage, entertain and connect with the user on multiple levels.
• Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. People often get carried away with the technology, so much so that it can be easy to forget why you started doing what you were doing in the first place.  Ask yourself every day why you’re doing what you’re doing, and whether it gets you any closer to that wider goal. Looking to simply build a cool app isn’t likely why you got started. Keeping the big picture in mind, and the challenges you’re looking to help people overcome, reminds you to stay focused.

Q:   The United Methodist Communications agency first reached out to you in 2008 and now has a number of active projects using FrontlineSMS. What are your thoughts on the importance of ICT4D to the work of the United Methodist Church?

A:  Anybody anywhere trying to improve peoples’ lives naturally wants to figure out how to best maximize their impact, and how to get the biggest bang for their buck. It’s refreshing to see a church looking so openly at how technology can improve their work. The [United Methodist] church is going out with the single objective of improving the lives of their community.  This is something they’ve dedicated their lives to. To them it’s not just a job, but something that needs to be done, and that’s their purpose in life. For me, that’s exactly the right way [for ICT4D] to be done. Start with the problem. People like technology because it can do good things for them, just like a spade or a ruler can. At the end of the day, you can’t eat a mobile phone.