kiwanja.net has a long and proud history of student support and mentoring going back well over a decade to the early days of ICT4D and mobiles-for-development. Student support was offered right up until our closure in April 2018.

Much has changed since those very early days. For a start, we now know that owners of the problems – and those living closest to the problems – are often the ones best placed to find the most meaningful solutions. The days of people from afar developing solutions to ‘the problems of others’ are ending, and the support that we provide students is changing to reflect that.

Students are encouraged to check out kiwanja’s Donors Charter to help them think through what they’re doing, for who, and why. Although the Charter was originally designed as a checklist to help donors determine whether or not a project had done enough due diligence before applying for funding (see this article), it is also a useful tool for students and entrepreneurs looking to develop solutions – tech-based or otherwise – targeting communities in the developing world.

The Donors Charter is already being used by some academic institutions to help guide their student’s thinking, including those taking the Interactive Design for the Developing World course at The College of New Jersey. 

You can download a PDF of the checklist here. Feel free to print, share, re-post and distribute anywhere you think it might be helpful.

If your answers point to you not being best-placed to solve ‘that problem’ in a far-away land, you have two options. Firstly, you could take some time out and go and live in the places (and with the people) where you want to focus your work – admittedly not always an easy thing to do. Alternatively, you could pick a problem closer to home, perhaps in your own community.

If it’s further reading you’re after, you can download copies of the introductions to kiwanja’s first two books, and a full free PDF copy of Musings – our most recent blog compilation eBook – from the Writing page of this site.

kiwanja also recently launched a site, Everyday Problems, seeking to highlight the fact that people around the world continue to suffer even if the newspapers aren’t reporting it. You can read the launch post here. Its main message is that we all need to be paying more attention. In particular, in relation to everyday problems, it recommends you:

If you’re a student interested in helping make the world a better place, this site is for you. If you’re an educator please make use of it as you encourage your own students to take an interest in, and build solutions for, the kinds of problems people face around the world on a daily basis – whether those problems are in the news or not.

There’s also a podcast available on the Aid.Evolved website where we cover a lot of ground on how you might kick start a career in the humanitarian sector. We also share a wide range of thoughts and reflections on best (and worst) practice. You can listen to that here.

Finally, if you’re interested in some of the broader challenges and approaches in social innovation and international development, check out our books page. In addition to the two paperbacks we’ve published, it also includes a link to a free PDF eBook with approaching 200 pages of some of our favourite blog posts from the past twelve years.

If you’d still like to talk you can find our contact details here – but please note that responses will be slow following our closure in April 2018. Please also don’t email asking for advice about a solution to a problem ‘somewhere in Africa’ if you’ve never been there, or never spent the time trying to understand the problem. If we’re honest, those days should be over.