New Uses of Technology to Meet Local Needs

The technology introduced to third world and developing regions during development projects is no different from much of the technology we use every day. Cell phones, iPads, and other new innovations are almost universally present in effective ICT4D projects. Obviously, local populations that receive these devices and technologies have very different needs than users in the first world. The result has been the ingenious manipulation of these technologies to meet these needs. In a recently published paper entitled Mobile Phones and Rural Livelihoods: Diffusions, Uses, and Perceived Impacts Among Farmers in Rural Uganda, by Brandie Lee Martin, these new and creative uses are described in detail.

These uses fall into a number of different categories. The most prominent is use for coordination and increased availability of information. These include “coordinating access to market inputs, market information…and access to agricultural experts.” They also serve a purpose as record-keepers, especially to monitor financial transactions. Finally, they are useful during emergencies to maintain financial and agricultural security.

This innovation is extremely dynamic, and operates independently of the NGOs and other organizations that provide the technological inputs. As the paper notes, these innovations change as needs change and the two tend to evolve concurrently. This is important as a proof of the ability of developing communities to innovate effectively and of the presence of the same entrepreneurial instinct central to first-world development.

Communication + Pfizer Recall of Birth Control Pills

Communication. It’s necessary for all interactions, and in the 21^st century it’s thought to be possible across all land, seas, and everything in between because of technology.  In developing nations, this is not always the case.  In developed nations, this is not always the case.  Although technology has been spreading to the least likely of places, many parts of the world are left in the dark both figuratively and realistically when it comes to receiving information through any type of communication.  Marginalized communities both here and far are left in the dark when it comes to not only receiving information but also understanding it as knowledge.

Just two days ago, here in the United States, Pfizer recalled one million birth control/oral contraceptive pills for having packaged the pills in the wrong order.  Every woman taking those pills that have been recalled is at-risk for pregnancy because of the miss packaging and every one of those women has been deceived.  The question is how many of these women know that this has happened and furthermore, how this type of message would be communicated in a developing nation where electricity/communication technology is scarce.

Besides the fact that this was a mistake with heavy ramifications for the women who thought they were being protected, this recall has many other repercussions for the women on these birth control pills who don’t know about the recall.  For people who don’t watch the news frequently, listen to the news radio stations, or read the news online or in newspapers, how are they to find out?  For those with no access to televisions or internet and who don’t have the money to buy newspapers, how will they find out so further damage can be prevented?

The point that I am trying to make is that although we may have a great amount of technology in the United States, which many people have the privilege to use, there are many others who do not have access to it or who do not utilize it.  How do we accommodate everyone when mistakes are made and significant health-related or dire information must be communicated?  How can we use technology to communicate messages that need to be heard?

I heard about the recall from my mom, and while I’m fortunate to not be affected by it, there are many others who are.  Is relaying the information on news shows enough?  Are there better ways to communicate significant information or to encourage others to communicate this information to everyone they know?  This made me question the types of communication we use in the United States and whether or not they are as effective as we may think.  As soon as I found out about the recall, I wanted to tell every female I knew on birth control, and even others that I wasn’t sure about (whether or not they were on birth control).  I’m not so sure how many women or men would do this whether they felt comfortable doing so or not.  Have we lost sight of the communication practices of the old days that may have been more effective in certain ways than the systems we use now?

Unwin discusses effective communication in development practices and the different senses that play into communication.  I think as we consider how to develop communication in developing nations, it’s important we still think about our own communication processes and how the media affects the knowledge we receive as well as what we do with it.

Additionally, another topic I’d like to bring up for discussion with this is how this issue should be considered when dispersing medicine or any type of medical treatment in the developing world with broken communication systems.  Should issues like this play a role in what is dispersed or how it is monitored?  How can we change the communication networks and systems in place to reach as many people as we can in the developed and developing worlds?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jizcYLc3cA

Postdevelopmentalism

Since our discussion in class I thought it might be useful if I went over a brief summary of postdevelopmentalism. My understanding of these concepts stem from an author Richard Peet, whom I highly recommend to read if you are interested in a comprehensive summery of different development theories through time.[1]

Postdevelopmentalism felt that “development had grown obsolete”(227). It felt that development had been the problem instead of the solution and that it had undervalued local knowledge, grassroots groups, and life in the nondeveloped world.

Modernism and structuralism assume that the world is a knowable place and that we are capable of using reason to objectively find a universal truth. However, Poststructuralism and postmodernism throw out the baby with the bathwater. I agree with Peet in that one cannot just simply throw out development or rationality because it was been used improperly before. “We should continually contest its premises and conclusions, not abandon it”(239).

Many of these theories[2] felt that the problem was not in the so-called “developing world” but in those who strove to dominate it. Instead of seeing the deficiency or “backwardness” in indigenous people they valued local knowledge. Because they felt that development was just a tool to legitimize Western control (politically, economically, and intellectually) they were able to revalue what had previously been considered problematic or useless. By switching what in mainstream development discourse would be considered the solution to the problem they were able to create a whole new set of solutions.

For anyone interested in development, I think that it is important to think about what theories like these bring up. As Peet says, we must not abandon development because of how it has failed in the past, but strive to examine what we do, why we do it, and what assumptions underlie our actions.

Peet, Richard, and Elaine R. Hartwick. Theories of Development: Contentions, Arguments, Alternatives. New York: Guilford, 2009. Print.

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[1] This is just my understanding of the chapter and Peet’s views, however I do not pretend to be very familiar with these concepts. This is just a perspective from my understanding.

[2] Poststructuralists or postmodernist

Social Media and Revolution

One of the most interesting aspects of ICT4D to me is the effect of social media on development, especially political movements and development.  Personally, I am not a big user of social media and am not very fluent in it.  For that matter, I’m not very good with technology in general.  However, I still think that examining the role of tech, including social media, today is a crucial aspect in understanding development processes and in creating effective programs for the future.

I think one of the most obvious, as well as the most intriguing, examples of social media and its role in development is the case of Egypt and its 25 January revolution.  It’s known around the world that much of the organization and collaboration that was necessary to create such a huge crowd in Tahrir Square, the center of Cairo, was achieved through Facebook and Twitter.  Especially for the youth in Cairo, it was much easier to spread messages and plan events over Facebook and other social media outlets.  As an example of just how large a role social media played in the Egyptian Revolution, it is interesting to look at the most common words and phrases that were posted worldwide on Facebook and Twitter in the first quarter of 2011: Egypt, January 25, Libya, Bahrain, and demonstration.

Even before the mass realization that social media had such a huge cultural and political influence both domestically and worldwide, there have been been many studies, forums, and conventions about social media and its effect on today’s global climate.  Cairo itself has a yearly convention called Cairo ICT Summit.  One of their main focuses for the 2012 summit, which will occur on 26-29 April of this year, is social media and how it has affected (and will continue to affect) politics and development around the world, and especially in Egypt and other Arab countries.

The Cairo Summit this year will have many groups and individuals speaking and answering questions.  Two individuals in particular, Ahmed Sabry and Ahmed Rayan, both Internet experts, have much to say about Facebook and other social media outlets and how they played such a large role in both Egypt’s and other Arab countries’ recent uprisings.

One reason why social media outlets were so effective, says Sabry, is because they are actually much more credible than traditional media outlets such as TV, the newspaper, and the radio.  I found this surprising, but Sabry backed his statement up with some compelling arguments.  He said that several studies (which, unfortunately I could not locate on my own) had said that, in the Arab countries where they were conducted,) general public confidence in media outlets was about 15-16%.  On the other hand, these studies found out that people’s confidence in the credibility of posts on Facebook were about 70%.  There are several reasons for this discrepancy in faith.  The most important, according to Sabry, is the fact that what people post on social networks is done completely of their own volition; on the other hand, people who speak on the news or in commercials are advised by their superiors on what to say and are also inclined to say certain things because that is how they make money.

Another reason why people apparently find social media more credible in spreading information about government and human rights issues is because their “friends” or the people they “follow” on Facebook or Twitter (or on other social media sites) are people they trust and respect, whereas most people have no personal relation to or inherent trust of people on TV or other media sources, or even government speakers and employees.  This is exacerbated by the fact that in many Arab countries, oppressive regimes have much control of most aspects of their citizens’ rights, including the media and what information it puts out.

In my opinion, Egypt provides for an interesting case study on social media, a concept we have not talked about in class yet but one that I’m sure we will, and how great of an impact it can have on development.  This one case that I have mentioned focuses specifically on political change and development, but by interlinking people from different areas and classes of cities, countries, and even the world, I think we could find ways in which social media will eventually have the power to make change in cultural, economic, and other areas of development in the future.

Meaningful Education Through Internet Resources

There has been a significant effort to put modern technology in the hands of students in the developing effort. Projects such as One Laptop Per Child aim to catalyze the learning process with internet capable laptops. However, there has been trouble in using the internet as a substantive learning tool and not just for information gathering. A school in California believes it is making the transition. Using resources such as KhanAcademy, an online collection of video lectures and learning tools, the school is seeing marked improvement in students learning and comprehension. The online lectures allow students to learn at their own pace while the classroom teacher is able to devote more time to helping students one on one.

The system of using online lectures and tools in the classroom is still in experimental stages, and has its detractors. Even so, the potential for its application in development is exciting. For the teachers with overcrowded classrooms, video lectures provide an opportunity to reach every student at their own level while freeing up time to aid struggling students. For students with irregular schedules or obligations to family that impede regular attendance, the lectures and tools provide a means to keep up with the class.

There is, of course, the limiting factor of access. The One Lap Top Per Child project has made headway, but this resource is far from ubiquitous. Other considerations include those in ssimon1′s post, such as the lack of content in some languages and the need for quality teachers regardless of technology. All in all, if this resource is applied meaningfully it could potentially decrease the educational gap between students around the world.

Source:

http://www.economist.com/node/21529062

World AIDs Day

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), thought to be conquered by 2015, are geared towards ending poverty, hunger, and HIV/AIDS, in addition to furthering universal education, gender equality, child health, maternal health, environmental sustainability, and global partnerships. One of the many ways that could potentially assist in allowing for MDGs to succeed is to use ICT4D initiatives to better the flow of communication and information from individuals in developed nations to those in underdeveloped nations. If communication and information were better delivered, then development would be achieved much faster and we would be largely closer to accomplishing our MDGs by year 2015. Nevertheless, without understanding what the needs of the people are, no matter if they are aimed towards economic, social, political, or ideological/cultural frameworks, then we as a developed nation will not be able to help in furthering underdeveloped nations.

In November of 2011, the United Nations held a conference, aimed at young people, in order to communicate with society and relay information about the AIDs epidemic in underdeveloped countries. They had called this day the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. Held annually, this day focuses on youth leadership and ending gender based violence. Secretary – General Ban Ki-moon stated that their challenge “is to ensure that the message of ‘zero tolerance’ is heard far and wide. To do that, we must engage all of society – and especially young people – and in particular young men and boys” (www.un.org). In addition, he stated that in order to do this, we must promote ‘“healthy models of masculinity,’ and in particular encourage young men and boys to become advocates for change” (www.un.org). Ban had also stated that the right for women to live a life without fear of violence is fundamental and is cherished within the International Human Rights Law.

By speaking out to thousands of young people about the urgent need to end violence against women, developed nations will now understand the importance of helping those who suffer from violence and furthermore assist governments in underdeveloped nations to revise laws against domestic abuse, provide universal access to emergency services for survivors, engage men and boys in programs promoting violence against women, and bring perpetrators to justice.

After the conference for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women was held, a report was created giving recommendations to underdeveloped nations about how to improve the law in order to decrease violence. In consequence, information and communication was directly used to better the developement of nations and bring us one step closer to achieving our goals.

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=40494&Cr=violence+against+women&Cr1=

International Institute for Communication and Development

IICD (International Institute for Communication and Development) is a non-profit foundation established by the Ministry for Development Cooperation of the Netherlands in 1996. They work in several countries in Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. In these areas, they aim to support sustainable development through the use of ICTs, notably computers and the internet. They work in 9 countries supporting policies which include sectors such as health, education, livelihoods (mostly agriculture), and governance.

IICD’s mission statement on its website includes the quote: “Access to the right information is a potent tool in the fight against poverty”. One of their many projects which exemplifies this thought process is one in Uganda focusing on the education sector titled Content Development at National Teachers’ Colleges. This project started in May 2005. It’s central goal is to help incorporate the use of computers and internet in order to develop educational materials for secondary schools and National Teachers’ Colleges (NTCs). This is very important in a country like Uganda where only 9.8 out of 1000 people are internet users and only 29 out of 1000 are mobile subscribers (World Bank, Development Indicators 2009; ICT at a glance 2008).

One example of how IICD is working to help Uganda’s education ICTs is through this project where it aims to create over 20 modules for all ordinary level subjects and place them on CD-ROMs so that they can be used by other National Teachers’ Colleges and secondary schools. In addition, the sustainability of these projects is very important to IICD so they are having large numbers of staff at Kyambogo University (the participating institution in this given project) as well as staff from the NTCs train on how to work with computers and internet to look at, create, and share educational materials.

The content development program which started in 2005 has 2000 users and can potentially reach 40,000 students and teachers throughout Uganda.

IICD connects people and enables them to use ICTs effectively. This project in Uganda is just one example. The local people own each IICD project in order to maintain the sustainability. There are other projects throughout these 9 participating countries such as the agricultural project in Uganda to set the prices for farming commodities like maize which has benefited farmers greatly. In Mali, IICD helps utilize ICTs in health in order for doctors all over the country to be able to use the internet to download x-rays or other pictures and comment on them immediately.

Why ICT4D fails and potential new approaches

During class, we watched a video about the Top 7 Reasons Why ICT Projects Fail. The article that I read (on an ICT4D blog), Richard Heeks briefly highlights five reasons why ICT4D projects fail and then explores the idea of a “process approach” to ICT4D projects. Using this process approach, the five highlighted reasons for failure are turned around into five key points for success.

The process approach includes beneficiary participation, flexible and phased implementation, learning from experience, local institutional support, and sounds project leadership. These elements have all been found in successful ICT4D projects. Heeks describes the process approach as a wheel, with all five components as an integrated whole. This is most beneficial of ICT4D projects because it can lead to concrete and well organized projects.

 

In addition to this, I found that the most successful aspect of the process approach is that instead of the project being an outright “success” or “failure”, the project would contain many “successes” and “failures”. Turning perceived failures into successes is one of the most important aspects of the process approach. This idea can help to give hope to ICT4D projects that may be abandoned early on due to a small perceived failure. The notion that these failures can occur alongside successes is essential for an overall successful ICT4D project.

MITx: A Step Towards Greater ICT Dissemination

In 2001, MIT launched its OpenCourseWare (OCW), a website providing, for free, the educational content of more than 2000 MIT courses. The OCW’s Fact Sheet states its mission to encourage “open dissemination of educational materials, philosophy, and modes of thought, and will help lead to fundamental changes in the way colleges and universities engage the web as a vehicle for education”. Harvard and Stanford, among other higher learning institutions, have developed their own OCWs in the wake of MIT. In the past, OCW content has included lecture notes, course outlines, reading materials, and course assignments in multimedia formats.

In the spring of 2012 MIT plans to up the ante for free educational material by offering a new level of participation in its prestigious academic community. MITx, as the new program will be called, will offer not only deeply discounted certification of subject mastery but the chance for asynchronous communication with MIT professors, students, and other MITx participants. Certification for courses will not equate with university credits and will likely be issued under a name other than MIT– as OCW’s Fact Sheet makes clear, the cornerstone of an MIT education is the synchronous interaction of faculty and students on campus. However, MITx expands on OCWs by offering faculty feedback on assignments and questions from students. The extent of this interaction has yet to be determined but the Chronicle of Higher Education offers one such example from Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, “Through voting and other mechanisms, you can create a funnel of requests so that the requests that come off the funnel at the very top can actually be answered by MIT professors and MIT TA’s,” he said. “A large number of questions at the lower parts of the funnel can actually be answered by other learners who may be slightly ahead.”

MITx can still be critiqued as a Western-based, top-down example of information communication that fails to offer indigenous forms of communication or knowledge, but it is not the goal of the program to specifically reach out to non-industrialized communities. As far as ICT4D is concerned, engineering courses in English currently have little use for the rural poor, but the new program does have implications for technology-based firms located in the urban centers of the global South. As Heeks pointed out in his article mid- to large level firms are often left out of today’s populist-oriented development initiatives, yet growing evidence suggests investment in ICT production leads to greater economic growth than investment in ICT consumption.With this in mind, MITx could be a very positive step towards greater global ICT and overall development.

Sources/Additional Readings:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/ocw-facts.html

http://chronicle.com/article/MIT-Will-Offer-Certificates-to/130121/

ICT’s help battle Locust swarms in Mauritania

The locust swarms in Mauritania have been a big problem for the last 3,000 years in this sandy West African country. When the locust swarm they destroy crops and kill livestock off as well which has led to severe food insecurity and poverty. When the locust swarm there can be up to tens of millions of them per kilometer and in 2004 a major swarm impacted thousands of people.

Recently, scientists have been working to solve the problem. They have come up with several types of ICTs such as “eLocust” computing devices, satellite images, and crowd sourced locust reports from nomads with cellphones. All of these technologies together work to predict swarms similar to the way in which weathermen predict the weather. However, the technology can only tell if the conditions are right for swarms to come; for example if it has rained a lot recently and the vegetation is lush for the locust to feed on. The satellites are not high resolution enough to find actual swarms and the scientists say they need to work on getting higher resolution satellites and more monitoring. Currently, 150 people work on this “eLocust” technology and collect and look at data about locust sightings from the people who call the free telephone number when they see a locust. The article states that, “forecasting these events could save lives”.

However, there are many problems with these current ICTs. First off, scientists are not completely sure why these locust swarm. There are many different theories and the scientists should put more effort into figuring this out so that they can more effectively predict swarms. Furthermore, this article made me think of the tomato example that the man in the video we watched in class gave. The man in the video stated that giving farmers the information on the current market value of their tomatoes is great but it does not really help them because they have no choice but to sell their tomatoes right then before they rot in a few days. He went on to say that what scientists should be focusing their energy on isn’t getting the farmers these technologies so they know current market values, but coming up with ways in which the farmers can make their tomatoes last longer so that they have more control over when they sell them before they rot. Similar to this example, how does it help the Mauritanian farmers to know when the locust swarms are coming? They are not able to move their land, and while they can move their livestock, they still have to return to their destroyed land eventually where there is no longer any food to feed their animals. The only group I can think of that this information is useful to is nomadic herders because they can avoid areas where they know swarms might appear. However, if the nomadic herders do not have cellphones, which I imagine most of them do not since there are not many outlets for nomads to charge their phones, they do not have regular access to this information. The article did provide one promising example though. The locust center in Nouakchott predicted a swarm successfully by combining the different technology. It said that, “the center identified a potential swarm in advance and treated the area with insecticides to prevent a disaster from occurring”. If they pair this new technology with cheap and effective ways for farmers to get insecticides then the information about locust swarms coming becomes extremely useful.

Link