Category: Development
Unintended consequences
This is a subject which always fascinates me – “potential negative outcomes” from “perceived positive acts”. I’ve seen this kind of thing in the field before, but today found a blog which brings it much closer to home and, as a result, makes it far more relevant to far more people.
On her inspiring “Good Intentions are Not Enough” blog, Saundra Schimmelpfennig gives us “5 questions you should ask before donating goods overseas”:
Is the donation appropriate for the local climate, culture, and religion?
Do they actually need the donation?
Are the goods available locally?
Will the people receiving the goods be able to afford to fix or replace the donated item?
Will donating this item do more harm than good?
This reminded me a little of the opening of one of my older posts, which shared some application development observations in the social mobile space:
Sometimes we think we’re doing the right thing because our intentions may be good, but things don’t always turn out that way.
Saundra is currently taking a year off to write “Beyond Good Intentions: How to Make Your Disaster Donations Do the Good You Intended”. Her book and blog are an attempt to start a conversation about the endemic problems in aid and how we, as donors, can impact its quality. I can’t wait. In the meantime, you can follow Saundra on Twitter.
Why does this picture trouble me?
I wonder.
Is it because it looks staged? Or because it reinforces our perceptions of the “old” and the “new”, the “developed” and the “underdeveloped”? Is it because it likely shows the beginning of the end of a complex relationship going back generations between a people and their culture?
We have so much to learn from traditional, indigenous societies, yet technology and knowledge transfer is almost universally one way – “us” to “them” – and is almost always portrayed in eye-catching images like the one above. In our world this is what progress looks like, neatly caught in the lens of a travelling laptop owner.
The picture tells us that development is on the way.
I wonder…
FrontlineSMS: Peacebuilding in Afghanistan
In this, the second of a series of guest posts on how FrontlineSMS is being used around the world, Dr. Mohammad Akbar and Kenneth Adam – Director and Business Advisor respectively at Media Support Partnership Afghanistan (MSPA) – talk about their current and planned uses of the platform, and the impact it is having on their work
“A recent special edition of a radio programme for young people in Afghanistan was devoted to one topic – the shocking recent acid attack on girls attending school by violent extremists allied to the Taliban. The impact on the audience was recorded in some 300 phone calls from listeners – a record for the long running programme “Straight Talk”, produced by a team of young broadcasters from Media Support Partnership Afghanistan (MSPA).
This audience response provides an example of what is possible given the enormous growth in mobile phones in Afghanistan, well over 6 million and rising at over 100,000 a month. Young people in the troubled south often feel isolated and bored, trapped in a conflict which shows no sign of going away. Development activities have largely been suspended because of insecurity. They want to hear and view programmes on issues important to them, and to contribute to the debate, and with 84% of households possessing working radios and 38% TVs, there is great potential in this approach.
MSPA will be using FrontlineSMS as one of the tools in a new project as part of a British Government-funded media initiative to engage with young people specifically in conflict affected regions though interactive radio programming, tied in with a national competition for young people to produce short video films on their mobile phones. FrontlineSMS will play a key role in the competitive process of selecting the individuals to be given the new mobile phones and trained in their use. This project is planned to start in April 2009. Initial trials using the software are underway, with a view to collecting information on listeners’ views on a variety of topics and feeding these back to them with the help of FrontlineSMS. This will allow active dialogue on issues as varied as the activities of NATO forces in the country and whether Afghans should bear arms, to commenting on education and health services.
Another important application this year will be in the run up to the Presidential Election in September. The media is key to informing the population about the rights of voters, and about the policy of different candidates. FrontlineSMS could be used to elicit the views of listeners in different categories and feed back the results to listeners, prolonging the debate and in so doing capturing the interest of people who are actively engaged in the debate”.
Dr. Akbar, MSPA Director
Kenneth Adam, MSPA Business Adviser
Media Support Partnership Afghanistan (MSPA)
www.mspa.org.af