Category — Musings

Whenever I find myself in front of a group of students, or young people aspiring to work in development, I’m usually asked to share one piece of advice with them. I usually go with this: Get out there while you can and understand the context of the people you aspire to help. As you get older the reality is that it becomes harder to travel for extended periods, or to randomly go and live overseas.

In the early days of ICT4D and m4d – and development more broadly – it may have been seen as a luxury to understand the context of your target users (many solutions were seen as “universal”, after all). Today I’d say it’s become a necessity.

In my earlier days I did a lot of travel, mostly to and around Africa. (One thing I regret never managing to do was walk across the continent, something I started tentatively planning a few years ago). As our organisation has grown and my role within it changed, I spend more time today travelling to conferences giving talks than actually doing the work. My last major piece of extended fieldwork (i.e. longer than a week) was back in the summer of 2007 when I spent a month in Uganda consulting with Grameen’s fledgling AppLab.

There’s more to it, though, than just “getting out there”. What you learn, sense, pick up and appreciate about the place you’re in and the people you’re with largely depends on the kind of traveller you are. The truth of the matter is you’ll rarely get a real sense of a place staying for just a few days in the capital city behind the walls of a four or five star hotel. Quite often the more you get out of your comfort zone the more you learn.

I’ve been hugely fortunate to have lived and worked in many countries – mostly in Africa – since I set out to work in development almost twenty years ago. And during that time I’ve developed quite a few “travel habits” to help me get the most out of my time there.

Here’s my Top 15:

1. Stay in a locally-owned or run hotel (or even better, guest house).
2. Spend as much time as possible on foot. Draw a map.
3. Get out of the city.
4. Check out the best places to watch Premiership football.
5. Ignore health warnings (within reason) and eat in local cafes/markets.
6. Buy local papers, listen to local radio, watch local TV, visit local cinemas.
7. Use public transport. Avoid being ‘chauffeured’ around.
8. Take a camera. Take your time taking pictures.
9. Go for at least a month.
10. Visit villages on market days.
11. Spend time in local bookshops, libraries and antique/art shops.
12. Read up on the history and background of where you’re going. Buy a locally-written history and geography book.
13. Be sure to experience the city on foot, at night.
14. Wherever you are, get up for a sunrise stroll. It’s a different, fascinating (and cooler) time of day.
15. Don’t over-plan. Be open to unexpected opportunities.

Finally, if you’re looking for advice on what to take on a trip to Africa, good friend Erik Hersman (aka WhiteAfrican) has an excellent post here.

Additional suggestions

Rebecca Harrison (@rhrsn on Twitter):
16. Seize any opportunity to visit homes, especially at meal times.

What do the Rolling Stones and FrontlineSMS have in common? Not much, you might think. Well, they’re not users, they’re a little better-off than us and they’re considerably more famous. But there is something a little more subtle we share with them – management innovation.

In his autobiography – “Life” – published last year, Keith Richards describes the evolution of The Rolling Stones‘ management. Three quite distinct individuals played key roles in getting the band to where they are today. From an article last November in The Week magazine:

“First up was Andrew Loog Oldham – described as an oddity of the London music scene – who successfully branded The Stones as the “dirty, snarling and mean” antidote to the then clean-cut Beatles. Then came Allen Klein, a lawyer expert in negotiating with record companies. Finally, there was Prince Rupert Lowenstein, a private banker with no roots in the music industry, who professionalised the outfit – establishing separate companies to handle publishing, merchandising and touring – which made The Stones one of the richest bands in history”

The evolution and management of FrontlineSMS can also be broken down into three phases:

• Technology innovation
• Organisational innovation
• Business model innovation

As The Stones example demonstrates, each phase requires a very different skill set, and it would take an extraordinary individual to be able to manage and deliver successfully on each. While I may have been the right person – in the right place at the right time at the very least – to successfully deliver on Phase One, that doesn’t mean I’m the right person for Phase Two, or Three. A large part of building a successful organisation is assembling a talented, diverse team with complementary skill sets. Identifying gaps and being honest about our own strengths and weaknesses is a large part of the process.

The social entrepreneurship sector, however, remains largely laser-focused on the innovator, the person behind Phase One. Recognising that organisations develop in phases, and have different needs at each, there needs to be a slight shift in how we view – and support – entrepreneurs and the vehicles or organisations they help create.

With this in mind, there might well be a few things the social entrepreneurship sector could learn from The Rolling Stones.

Close friends will know that I’m a bit of a walker. In fact, a few years ago I did start to put down tentative plans for a walk across the African continent, but a Fellowship at Stanford put pay to that. I rarely use public transport when I’m on the road, preferring to remain above-ground and on-foot to get a better sense of where I’m staying. And although I’ll sometimes carry my camera with me, I almost always carry my iPod.

Most of my thinking is done while I walk, and most of my blog posts take shape that way, too. I carry a note pad a lot of the time, stopping often to jot down ideas. This post came together while I was listening to music, walking through Cambridge earlier this year. That walk witnessed the birth of the “Ultimate Music Awareness App”, and Apple’s announcement of iCloud this week prompted me to dig it out again.

So, what would my app do? Well, it’s quite simple really.

• It would have an option to plays songs written on that day’s date, or which reference that day’s date
• It would be location-aware, and create an auto-playlist of songs written about the place I’m walking through, or with name-connections
• It would play songs by artists who were either born, or lived, in the area
• There would be an option to play songs based on that day’s news headlines (for example, if a study found annual rents were increasing – or decreasing – then it would play “Rent” by the Pet Shop Boys). A summary of the news story in question would also be displayed on-screen for context
• All of the playlists would be compiled in real-time, and streamed/buffered from the web
• Playlists could be uploaded and shared on-line (and mapped) for other music lovers/walkers

If anyone ever developed this, I know I’d buy it. After all, it would be my ultimate music awareness app.

When things work as they should, we often take them for granted, rarely stopping to think about their inner workings. It’s only when things go wrong, or something unusual happens, that we get a glimpse into the secret world of “how stuff works”.

This is an image from Google Earth, taken as a satellite passed over Hyde Park in Chicago, Illinois. (Click on the image for a larger version). There must be thousands of pictures like this given the number of planes in the air at any one time, but it’s the first time one’s passed under my nose.

Thanks largely to the Internet, many of us have unprecedented access to satellite imagery we’d only have dreamed of a few years ago. Flying around landscapes trying to find our homes, for example – something many of us have done on Google Earth – would have likely cost tens of thousands of pounds not so long ago (and maybe friends in high places).

If you’ve ever wondered how satellite images work, this one might give you a clue. If you’re still not sure or are hungry for more, check out this useful resource. It’s all good stuff.

Some people go on long walks. Some climb mountains. Others run marathons or go for weeks without smoking, drinking alcohol or watching television. There are many ways to raise money for charity these days, although many don’t have a direct connection with the area of focus of the charity itself. Even less put the fundraiser in the shoes of the target audience the charity’s very existence seeks to help.

Trying to live off a couple of dollars a day is an exception. Starting yesterday, thousands of people across the UK started doing just that – living off £1 (approximately $2) a day for a total of five days. That needs to cover all their food and drink needs. According to Live Below The Line, they’re doing this to:

get a better understanding of the challenges faced by people living in extreme poverty, and to raise funds for crucial anti-poverty initiatives

One friend who will be shortly joining the challenge is Laurie Lee, Deputy Director of Policy & Advocacy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. You can follow Laurie’s progress on Twitter, along with Live Below The Line’s own updates. There can be few better ways of helping people understand the challenge hundreds of millions of people around the world face than to put them in a similar position or predicament.

So, it got me thinking… I wonder what the equivalent challenge might be in the mobiles-for-development sector?

Some time last year we passed a critical point in the history of mobile when more people on the planet started owning one than not. Projected penetration and ownership rates vary, but within the next year or two we’ll be over the five billion mark, which is quite incredible.

Of course, ownership alone doesn’t tell the whole story. The hundreds of millions of people having to eek a living off a couple of dollars a day are not only trying to buy food and water for them and their families. They’re also trying to save to send their kids to school, to buy medicine, to keep a roof over their heads. In the context of their phone ownership, they also need to find extra cash to keep their phone charged, and to keep it topped up, usable and functional. There is already growing evidence which highlights the tough decisions mobile owners are having to make when balancing a restricted household budget.

So, what would an equivalent “$2 a day” challenge look like for mobile? Well, for a start we’d have to calculate the average telecommunications spend for an average mobile owner in a developing country. Without specific data to hand, I’m going to take a stab at $1 per week. If I were to cancel my mobile contract today and move to pre-pay, how would I manage with that kind of budget, and what decisions would I have to make on a daily basis before hitting “Send”, “OK” or “Dial” on my phone?

Let me take another stab at some of the things I’d likely have to do.

Service costs
For the first time I’d need to read up and make sure I fully understood all of the price plans and offers from each of the mobile operators in the UK. Right now I have no idea, because I’ve never needed to know. If I’m to maximise my $1 per week I need to know under which conditions which operator will be cheapest.

SIM choice
I’d need to go out and acquire one SIM card for each of those operators, and get used to swapping it in and out on a regular basis before making calls, sending texts, tweeting, checking emails, and so on in order to maximise my budget. Ideally I’d have a phone which takes multiple SIM cards to make this all slightly less painful, only they’re not available where I live.

Configuration
Assuming I’m able to access the Internet and can afford to (see “Web challenges” below), whenever I do switch SIM cards I’d need to learn how to change the WAP/Web configuration settings on the phone (which are network dependent). This can be a challenge at the best of times, and even more so for less technical users.

Web challenges
Assuming my phone and SIM are data enabled, I’d be able to access the Internet. Only problem is I have very little idea what the costs would be. Right now, with my generous browsing allowance, I can pop onto Twitter or read the news, but if I had to pay for each page view or chunk of downloaded data, how would I know what the costs are ahead of time? Again, I’d need to make a conscious decision whether or not I could afford the luxury, and confusion over data costs could easily (and quickly) be the death of me.

My friends and family network
I’d need to make sure I knew which network each friend and family member were on, so I’d know which SIM to switch to before making a call, or texting (same-network calls or texts are cheaper in many countries). And with many of these contacts also likely having multiple SIM cards, I’d need to be confident that I could manage a complex address book.

To call, tweet, text – or not call, tweet or text?
Before making a call, or sending an SMS, I’d need to make a conscious decision whether or not I could afford it, and weigh up any cost with the anticipated benefit. Gone would be the days of having the luxury of thousands of minutes and texts to ‘waste’ away.

Battery
I’d need to put aside a few pence per week to cover the cost of charging (electricity isn’t free), depending on how much I used the phone. If charging costs were prohibitive then I’d need to make sure my phone was off when I didn’t need it (or wasn’t expecting a call) in order to maximise the time between charges.

Flashing and beeping
If I did need to contact someone urgently, and assuming I was okay with them being burdened with the call cost, I could “flash” or “beep” them (ring their phone a couple of times, and hang up and wait for a call back). Since there’s no real culture of this where I live, I’m not sure if it would work, and if the person I was calling was also short of credit, we could have a stalemate. (For an excellent article on the culture of flashing and beeping, check out this Jonathan Donner article).

Calling codes
For short, regular messages – “I’m at work okay”, “I’ve got the shopping” or “Leaving now” – I’d possibly need to devise a system where I could ring a recipient phone and use a set number of rings (or sequence of missed calls) to relay the message. I’d need to come up with a range of “survival strategies” in order to protect my phone credit.

Regardless of how well I did, one thing is abundantly clear – me and my phone would have a very different kind of relationship than we do today, and I’d certainly have to be a lot better organised than I am now. Both of those could, of course, be seen as a good thing.

If anyone else has any other “survival strategies” I’ve missed, please let me know (there are bound to be many). Either way, this would be a fascinating exercise, and well worth a try if anyone’s interested in putting themselves in the shoes of many mobile phone owners throughout the developing world.

From the primordial soup, to the rain forest, to the African savanna, to… this. Welcome to Sci-Fi City, United Arab Emirates. Not only the future of cities – the future of living!

“Here, residents will live with driverless electric cars, shaded streets cooled by a huge wind tower, and a Big Brother-style ‘green policeman’ monitoring their energy use”.

How far we have come as a species. Doesn’t life in Sci-Fi City sound clinical? Today, if you took away all our electronic gadgets most people would complain for a while, but most of us still remember how to live without them. How quickly that is changing. As our technical creativity increases, so does our dependence on it. Some call this progress. I call it scary.

Back in the early 90′s, when I started to take a serious interest in international development, I spent many weekends flicking through mail order booklets and “Working Abroad” publications that I had to order by post. Back then there was nothing relevant on the World Wide Web to speak of – actually, there wasn’t really much of a World Wide Web to speak of.

One thing that struck me back then were the number of overseas placements being offered by church- and faith-based groups, and how in most cases you had to be a practising ‘this’ or a practising ‘that’ before you’d be considered. To put it mildly, this bugged me a little.

Almost twenty years later and I’ve been fortunate enough to fulfil my ambition to work abroad – helping out with hospital and school building, and numerous conservation projects – although in the end I found a home in the ICT4D field. Having made that journey, one thing strikes me. While religious-based placements are still commonplace in “generic” development, they seem glaringly absent in ICT4D. In fact, religion or faith full-stop seem almost entirely absent from our discipline.

Is there a reason for this? Are technologists generally less religious or spiritual than those who work in health, or agriculture, or human rights? Or is it that technology-based work attracts an entirely ‘different’ crowd?

Speaking personally, my work represents something of a mirror image of how I think life should be led. Values I strongly believe in – unconditional help, kindness, the need to be respectful, humble, polite, responsive and so on – are also characteristics I try to embed in much of what I work on. The problem is that many of these characteristics are largely intangible, and although I feel spiritually driven by what I do I struggle to explain exactly what that means or what it is.

When I think of all the different career paths I could have taken, and the many others working in ICT4D could have taken, I can’t help but wonder what drives us all. What common values do we share, why do we do what we do, and does spirituality play a part in many – or any – of our stories?

Last week at the Rutberg Summit in London – an event dominated by senior mobile industry executives – one of the more interesting topics for me was differentiation. How will the new Microsoft/Nokia relationship impact the mobile OS ecosystem? What does the proliferation of Android mean to the many handset manufacturers bundling it with their phones? In a world being increasingly dominated by just a small number of mobile operating systems, how does one smartphone manufacturer differentiate themselves from the next?

Of course, the operating system on a phone is just one part of it. Not only is our choice of OS becoming increasingly limited, so is our choice of “look”.

Take this image – a small cross-section of the handsets on the market today. We’re almost at the stage where you can have any smartphone you like, as long as it looks like one of these. Spot the difference? Not much.

This week, Apple took out another law suit – this time against Samsung – accusing it of stealing/borrowing/using its iPhone design for it’s latest range of phones. (Apple also claim the Galaxy is a little too close to looking like an iPad). The Register has a good article on all of this.

If being a consumer really is all about choice, then there’s certainly less of that today than there used to be. It will be interesting to see where all this goes – court battles included – and where the growing tension between innovation and differentiation ultimately takes us.

A year may have passed since this particular edition of the Economist hit the shelves, but I bet you could replace “April 2010″ with “April 2011″ and few people would notice. I kept this edition back because of it’s special report on business and innovation in the developing world. It goes a long way to explaining and describing what’s happening not only in the commercial world, but also the informal sector. I’d say that makes it a must read for members of the ICT4D community.

There are dozens of takeaways from the report. Here are a few of the highlights which resonated most with me:

“Most striking is the emerging world’s growing ability to make established products for dramatically lower costs – no frills $3,000 cars, $300 laptops and $30 mobile phones may not seem as exciting as a new iPad, but they promise to change far more people’s lives”

“Emerging countries are no longer content to be cheap sources of cheap hands and low-cost brains. Instead, they too are becoming hotbeds of innovation, producing breakthroughs in everything from telecoms to car making to health care”

“Innovation in the emerging world will encourage, rather than undermine, innovation in the rich world”

“Emerging economies are not merely challenging [our lead] in innovation. They are unleashing a wave of low-cost, disruptive innovations that will, as they spread to the rich world, shake many industries to their foundations”

“Multinationals expect about 70% of the world’s growth over the next few years to come from emerging markets”

“Old assumptions about innovation are being challenged. People in the West like to believe that their companies cook up new ideas in their laboratories at home and then export them to the developing world, which makes it easier to accept job losses in manufacturing. This is proving less true by the day”

“Because so many consumers are poor, companies [in emerging markets] have to go for volume. But because piracy is so commonplace, they also have to keep upgrading their products”

“General Electric and Tata Consultancy Services are doing something more exciting than fiddling with existing products – they are taking the needs of poor consumers as a starting point and working backwards. This approach has been dubbed ‘reverse innovation’, or ‘frugal’ or ‘constraint-based’ innovation”

“Emerging markets are far more varied and volatile than mature ones. Cultural complexities are confounding and tastes are extraordinary fluid”

“Indians often see frugal innovation as their distinctive contribution to management thinking. They point to a national tradition of ‘jugaad’ – meaning, roughly, making do with what you have and never giving up – and cite many examples of ordinary Indians solving seemingly insoluble problems”

“Because of the lack of brand loyalty, companies have to put even more thought into marketing than they do in the West”

(This image, taken on one of my trips to Uganda, shows ‘alternative’ advertising at work)

“To flourish in this atmosphere it helps to have a spirit of a frontier settler, not a corporate bureaucrat. A property company, say, might suddenly move into computers. Rather than worrying about synergies or core competencies, they see opportunities and seize them”

“The corporate go-getters love to explain that if you can make it here – despite the poverty, the dismal infrastructure and the unpredictable politicians – you can make it anywhere”

“Hostility to globalisation in the developed world is likely to grow as emerging giants disrupt one product market after another”

I find the whole topic of innovation, emerging markets and globalisation – and how the three intertwine – fascinating. What would our reaction be if globalisation, for example – which has long been accused of disadvantaging the developing world – turned on us? And what for the international development community? As more and more countries “emerge” less and less remain to be “developed”. A fully emergent African continent would leave a considerable number of international NGOs looking for a new home, and in dire need of a little innovation themselves.

Maybe that’s one measure of success they wouldn’t be so keen to find themselves meeting.

“Lost and found” meets street notices in a mobile world… Spotted on a lamp post in a residential area outside Cambridge in the UK.