Category: Development

Static on the radio

I’ve been thinking more and more lately about how human behaviour divides neatly into good and bad, positive and negative, constructive and destructive, helpful and unhelpful, kind or evil, and so on. But however you describe it, for every positive there is a negative. For every person fighting for something, there are people fighting against it. These struggles have existed since the dawn of human-kind, and are still very much alive today.

The problem is that things are rarely black and white. What is good for one person can turn out bad for another, so it all depends on your perspective – which side of the fence you’re on, in other words. If you’re in the ‘fine by me’ camp it’s easy to forget people in the other ‘not so good for me’ camp. When people voluntarily reach across this ‘void’ we call this charity, and the reaching hand usually does so with a fistful of hard-earned dollar bills. This might solve the problem, but then again it might not.

When people give to good causes they assume their money will be used wisely and that it will tackle the problem in the best possible, most efficient way. But for every few dollars given to solve the problem, infinitely more goes towards keeping things as they are. Maintaining the status quo is big business. Indeed, big business, governments and lobby groups are all guilty to some degree. Their job is to keep things good for their ‘fine by me’ constituents, and what happens on the other side of the fence doesn’t concern them. With this going on, are people effectively pouring their money down the drain?

Take international trade as an example. The global system is heavily weighted against the smallest, poorest and most disadvantaged nations. At World Trade Organisation (WTO) gatherings, developing nations with their four or five delegates are regularly overwhelmed by the several hundreds sent by the European Union and United States. It’s not surprising they find it hard to get their voices heard.

Meanwhile, the man and woman on the street are giving their few dollars to ‘help’ tackle world poverty, wearing their white wristbands or whatever. This might be the easiest and most convenient thing to do, but is it the most effective? Is it really doing any good? The real problem might not be poverty, but the world trade system which perpetuates it.

Fact: A one percent increase in world trade would generate an extra $70 billion in Africa, five times more than it currently receives in aid

Isn’t it time we re-thought the problem?

Technology-aided aid

I’m always interested in innovative ways of getting aid directly to those who need it in the most timely and efficient manner possible. Kiva deals beautifully with one aspect of this – linking lenders in the ‘developed’ world with borrowers in ‘developing’ countries. But when it comes to financial aid to many of the rural poor – the man or woman on the street, so-to-speak – no mechanism exists (I don’t count giving to charity as being a direct donation, by the way). Not only is it a technical challenge to facilitate a direct donation (although mobile payments will soon unlock that particular door) there are other trickier issues, such as what we know about these individuals, or their needs and particular circumstances.

In times of famine or hardship, the typical Western response is to send over plane-loads of food aid. Although this might seem like the most logical thing to do, often it overlooks the chief cause of the famine. Lack of food generally comes below politics, political instability, access to resources and markets, and civil conflict in the famine equation. In other words, it’s rarely about a ‘simple’ lack of food. And flooding a country with food aid creates its own problems, from feeding the militia in conflict situations to destroying what’s left of the local and national agricultural market systems.

So, is there an alternative? Well, the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) seems to think so, and they’ve just started a $3 million pilot project to prove it. They’ll be providing cash payments instead of food to tens of thousands of hungry people in northern Malawi. You can’t get more direct than that. Although the full impact – and effectiveness – of the program won’t be known for some time, the signs look good. As with many microfinance projects in developing countries, women are the main recipients of the cash, and many take their money and head straight to local markets to buy food. This keeps the local economy moving and the agriculture sector bouyant. That’s one problem solved, and two avoided, on my count.

(Incidentally, direct payments are nothing new in the conservation world. They’ve been tried for some years with varying degrees of success. The process is pretty much the same – give the conservation dollars directly to the people living in the conservation area, and encourage them to help preserve their environment through their pockets. I’ve always quite liked the concept, but appreciate how controversial it is. A PDF paper on conservation direct payments is available here).

Meanwhile, back in Malawi, you may be wondering what this project has to do with technology. Well, administering a system where piles of cash are handed out to tens of thousands of naturally very willing recipients needs to be effectively managed and controlled. So, each of the villagers in the scheme are fingerprinted, and their details held on a smart card which they present at pay-out.

The whole idea of making direct payments is appealing to both the donor and the recipient. If it works it could take hold as an entirely new model for delivering aid, providing it is scalable. The fact that a simple and tested technology has proved to be a key enabler makes it all the more interesting, to me at least.

Inspiring the local [by default]

I’m all for local solutions to local problems. Or even locally-inspired solutions to local (or national) problems. Or nationally-inspired solutions to local or national problems. I think you get the picture. But one thing I’m not quite so keen on is the default state of international solutions to local problems, or national problems in some cases. Sure, you can quite rightly argue that certain solutions need to be developed internationally to obtain economies of scale, particularly if your solution involves manufacturing, or if you’re working on the environment or in the health arena (after all, malaria is malaria, wherever you are). Just take the One Laptop Per Child Project, or OLPC, for example. For all it’s good and bad points – and I’m not going to go into any of those here – it troubles me on two interconnected fronts. Firstly, it’s international trying to solve local, and secondly, it really doesn’t need to be. Once again we’ve reverted to the ‘default state’ (one day I’ll draw up a diagram of how this should work. I keep getting asked what my ‘model’ is!).

(One point I’d like to quickly clarify here is my own belief in providing tools and not solutions wherever possible. Capacity-building is generally far more effective this way. This blog entry, however, deals with the issue of “solutions” because these are usually what’s offered. Hopefully one day this will also change).

With all the hype around the OLPC project you could have easily thought that it was the only computer-based ‘digital divide’ solution in town. Well, you’d be wrong. It’s quite possible that you may not have heard of some of the others, despite the big names behind them. How about the Eduwise laptop from Intel, or FonePlus by Microsoft? No? Maybe..? Okay, the Personal Internet Communicator from AMD, the chip maker? These are all being touted as THE solution to the digital divide problem (that’s providing internet connectivity/IT to the worlds’ poor, to you and me). A couple of these solutions use similar, but others distinctly different, technical approaches. But the one thing they have in common is they are all US-based responses to problems outside of the US.

Ever heard of NetTV, NETPC or Novatium? Well, soon you could be hearing a lot more. Ramesh Jain, one of the men behind Novatium, is an Indian. Not surprisingly he knows India, and he’s working on his own (not surprisingly, Indian) solution to India’s own digital divide. Luckily for Ramesh (if that’s the right word to use), his government rejected an offer of a million OLPC’s on the grounds that they were too expensive. His solution – a unit based on a cheap cell-phone chip, no hard drive, a keyboard, a screen and a couple of USB ports – comes in right on the $100 mark (OLPC is hovering around $140 these days). What’s more, Ramesh believes he can get the price down to nearer $70.

What’s so different about the two approaches – other than the obvious technical ones and the fact that one is a national and the other an international solution – is that Negroponte’s OLPC is based on heavy subsidies from private and public philanthropy. Ramesh is in it to make money. OLPC- and NetPC-style initiatives often lack sustainability, a ‘minor’ issue which often ends up totally spoiling the party. Look at the history books – the superhighway is scattered with the remains of initiatives forced to leave early with their USB cables dangling between their legs.

Now, a local or national approach to the problem, based on a socially-focused business model? That could just work. It certainly ticks all the right boxes for me.

It’s capacity building, stupid..!

Most of us know the story about teaching a man to fish. It goes something like this. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him to fish and he can feed himself and his family forever, or at least a lot longer than one day. I have a similar story, but with a slightly different ending.

Benson in Zambia needs to dig a hole. The way most international aid works today, we’d fly a team over and dig the hole for him. We’d bring over the spades, use consultants to decide the hole’s parameters, and then return home with the spades. The hole might be the wrong shape, or the wrong depth, and in the wrong place, but it’s a hole, right? You may ask why we’re digging it. Benson knows where his hole needs to be, the optimum depth and shape. Why aren’t we giving him the spade, and letting him to do the rest? And, hey, with a spade he can then go and maybe dig holes for other people, and maybe make a little money along the way.

Okay, this may be a simplistic version of capacity building, but it’s so obviously the way we should be going it’s quite amazing that it’s still not standard – or even best – practice. Many ICT programs simply replicate these old models. The “West” holds the intellectual property over the systems, they’re developed in our capital cities, they give us jobs, they’re often big and grand and expensive, and we then let them loose in the developing world. Hey, some even work! But I still wonder why we don’t let developing nations develop their own solutions. As with Benson and his spade, all they need are the tools and a little help, and they’re well capable of doing the work themselves. They understand their predicament more than many of us could ever do.

While I was in Bangalore last December for the W3C Workshop, I had the pleasure to hear first-hand about an amazing project being run by Nathan Eagle, an MIT Research Scientist based at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. The EPROM project (IT experts will get the irony!), or Entrepreneurial Programming and Research On Mobiles, aims to foster mobile phone-related research and entrepreneurship at Kenya’s leading university. Students are taught how to program mobile phones, and develop applications, for use within the university, within their communities, and nationally. Quite simply it’s a brilliant idea, and an example of capacity building at its finest.

If you dig around it’s still possible to find little gems like this, but it’s a shame we have to look so hard. Initiatives such as EPROM and Kiva (see the blog entry below) are setting the new standard. They’re breaking the mould for how we go about “helping” the developing world. As many of us may already know, it’s not really help they need. It’s the tools. There are some very bright people over in Africa too, you know.