November | 2015 | TechChange | The Institute for Technology and Social Change

By Ella Duncan

More than 300,000 people lost their lives in the bloody civil war that ravaged Burundi from 1993 to 2005. Almost twice as many were forced to leave their homes, slowly returning over the last decade. Today, the relative peace that Burundi so arduously achieved is again at risk; violent protests and rising tensions threaten to make the upcoming elections a moment of widespread chaos, rather than democracy and national unity.

Dr. David Niyonzima experienced the horror of the civil war first-hand. A member of the historically peaceful Quaker Church, which introduced him to peaceful social activism and helped him develop his spirituality, David survived a massacre in 1993. “I was teaching a training for young Quaker pastors when soldiers came to exact revenge, because they thought the students belonged to a rival ethnic group. I saw 8 out of my 11 students murdered,” he recalls.

David is now the Director of Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Services (THARS). He has dedicated his life to understanding the impact of peacebuilding programs on the communities they involve, in order to design better strategies. It was his experience as a survivor that inspired his determination to make his country a more peaceful place.

For David, meeting the man who led the soldiers to come to kill him and his students was a life-changing experience. “I extended forgiveness to him,” he says. “It gave me a great sense of transformation, even though I had not planned for it. I was inspired that there must be a reason I was alive, that God wanted me to plant a seed of peace.” Invigorated by the experience, David started community programs to foster reconciliation and healing, but met challenges that seemed insurmountable. “I began to organize peace workshops and seminars to promote peace through Quakerism. Yet we were not making progress, so I asked myself – why are we not making impact? Trauma healing was the missing element of peace.”

David believes that peace is not possible without trauma healing, that “treating the past” is the key component of peacebuilding. “Peace is not only the absence of fighting,” he explains. “It is also the restoration of relationships.” As a result, THARS takes a holistic approach to interpersonal development and relationships through Sensitivity Training, Trauma Healing Capacity Building, Individual and Group Therapy, and Self-Help and Self-Reliance initiatives.

To monitor and measure its work, THARS has adapted an existing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder tool to the context of Burundi. They assess participants as they enter a training or workshop, and then again six months later. Progress is measured on the basis of self-reported indicators of social behavior, the participants’ approach to conflict in their communities, and their decision-making strategies.

According to David, “the most important monitoring tool is testimony. It gives participants the opportunity to demonstrate through stories how they are self-reliant and addressing trauma on their own.” He strongly believes in the importance of developing a culture of speaking among the participants in THARS’ programs; “empowering people to speak truth about their history contributes to peace,” he says.

One of THARS’ current programs, Addressing the Past, focuses on villages where atrocities occurred during the civil war. It employs testimony and the growth of a culture of speaking to measure healing at all levels, using individual and group therapy to work through trauma issues. Addressing the Past doesn’t focus exclusively on those who were directly in the war, but also on people who are affected by the so-called remnants of war. David gives the example of wives who become victims of the untreated trauma of their husbands, when the latter return from fighting and engage in gender-based violence in the home.

David says that the major challenge in measuring THARS’ work is creating and communicating standard definitions of trauma and forgiveness. However, he and his colleagues have already made a lot of progress. “When THARS began in 2002, there was no discussion of trauma in Burundi,” he remembers. “We have brought awareness, and now people can see what trauma is, what to do to address it, where to go for help.”

David is hopeful that Trauma Healing will further spread as an accepted process in Burundi. He envisions it as an inclusive tool, that will unite all Burundians behind the common goal of emerging together, and stronger, from the violence of the past. “Peace will come when those who perpetrate violence join the healing process,” he concludes.

Dr. David Niyonzima

Suggested resources to learn more

Visit THARS’ website at http://thars.org/.
Read a mid-term evaluation of THARS’ work with Search for Common Ground on a 2007 Victims of Torture program, funded by USAID here (https://www.sfcg.org/2004-victims-of-torture-mid-term-project-evaluation/).
Explore Trauma Healing related resources on DME for Peace http://dmeforpeace.org/category/themes/justice-truth-and-reconciliation/trauma-healing.

About Ella

Ella Duncan is the DME for Peace Project Manager, DME for Peace is a project of Search for Common Ground which connects a growing global community of over 4,000 members to over 800 resources on Design, Monitoring, and Evaluation for Peace and Peacebuilding programming. Ella received her B.S. from Cornell University.

This post originally appeared on DME for peace.
Featured image credit: Dave Proffer Flickr (Creative Commons License)

by mPowering and TechChange

mPowering Frontline Health Workers is delighted to introduce a new video, developed with TechChange, that explains how publishing content under a Creative Commons license can maximize the reach and impact of health training materials.

Frontline health workers play a vital role in delivering health services to their communities. Yet these health workers often lack the training and information they need to feel confident and to do their jobs effectively. NGOs, academics, and governments are all developing materials to improve training, but often the content is not widely shared and does not reach the people who need it the most.

To address the shortage of high-quality health training content, and to ensure this is available for sharing widely between health workers, their trainers, NGOs, Ministries and others, mPowering launched ORB.

ORB is an open source content platform that connects health workers and training organizations with mobile optimized training content and job aids. With a focus on quality, ORB brings together multimedia content (videos, audio and text files) that can be used to deliver educational programs, refresher training, or counseling tools for health workers.

All of the content on ORB is released under one of the six Creative Commons licenses. Publishing under a Creative Commons license means that authors can retain their intellectual property while allowing others to re-use and share their materials. In many cases, users can also adapt and translate the content for use in a wide range of contexts.

mPowering believes that health content is a public good. Training resources, health information and job aids for health workers contain life-saving information and should be shared as widely as possible. Creative Commons or other open licensing allows more people to access this information. It also saves time and costs so that training can happen faster; and content can be remixed, translated, and compiled into courses.

This video gives more information on what Creative Commons licenses are, how they work, and why they matter. TechChange developed the animation to represent diversity and access to information; and to communicate the significance of a Creative Commons license in public health training. Through the short and compelling animation, TechChange delivers this core mPowering message – make health content freely available – in a simple and powerful way.

To learn more about how you can apply Creative Commons licensing to your work, we invite you to watch the short video and read the FAQ on ORB, or to contact mPowering at info@mpoweringhealth.org

This post also appeared on mPowering Frontline Health Workers blog

By Innocent Hitayezu and Ella Duncan

How can peacebuilding programs get a better understanding of trust? This question is at the heart of Innocent Hitayezu’s work with women and issues of reconciliation, and continues to shape his work as a peacebuilder and evaluator in Rwanda.

Innocent was working with a reconciliation project that brought together widows of victims of the Rwandan Genocide with widows of perpetrators of the genocide when he questioned, How do we know we are bringing community relationships to the next level? During group discussions and interviews, he asked the women if they were working together outside of project activities, and the group replied positively that, yes the project was changing their interactions and attitudes in daily life. However, during individual interviews, he found that some women were still experiencing extreme challenges of reconciliation and that outside of the mandatory group meetings these two groups were not coming together. Individual interviews showed that the project was not building trust in the community in the long term. To Innocent, this moment demonstrated that the power of group level projects could be better harnessed with the inclusion of reflective monitoring and evaluation on the individual level subsequently having positive effects on entire family and community at large.

Innocent works at the community level to examine the root causes of conflict in Rwanda, and on the issue of post-conflict intercommunal trust. Innocent’s work explores how new approaches to monitoring and trust-measuring evaluations can strengthen programs aimed at traditional community building through reconciliation and those focusing on the peaceful reintegration of former refugees.

Innocent’s own experience as a refugee sparked his passion for community building and trust building. In 1994, to escape the war, he and some of his family members fled Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Upon returning to Rwanda the family faced the suspicion and distrust of those who had stayed behind and experienced the genocide. In search of community, Innocent joined with other repatriated refugee youth to create support systems for community action and economic opportunity through informal youth symposium.

This youth-led community building has been the foundation of his life’s work building peace in Rwanda through inclusive community development. Innocent says, “in some families, People are taught that communities are divided, but they must fight to say instead that ‘Rwanda is for all of us.’’

It is this conviction that reconciliation processes, in Rwanda and elsewhere, must be inclusive that inspired Innocent to pursue a career in Monitoring and Evaluation. Digging into the root causes of conflict, and extensively measuring trust within communities led Innocent to question, “Where is our evidence that we are making positive change?” Innocent, like many others in his field, believes that peacebuilders must be able to demonstrate success.

In the two decades since the Genocide, Rwanda has made great progress toward stabilization. As a result, Rwanda is often cited as a model of stability and security in East Africa. Rwanda’s security has come through traditional methods of community justice and reconciliation such as the Gacaca, a community court system, and Umuganda, which roughly translates to “coming together in a common purpose to achieve an outcome,” which is observed through a nationwide monthly day of service. Innocent believes that these traditional group based reconciliation methods can be strengthened through modern monitoring and evaluation methodologies. This is because traditional community-based methods are focused on the group level, which may miss tensions and challenges that participants are hesitant to express in front of their peers. In response to this challenge, Innocent advises that group reporting be validated by individual reporting, to make sure minority voices have an opportunity to be heard in the process of evaluating, and designing programs.

Giving space to individual voices also helps a program remain vigilant to the concept that progress should come from within the community, and that no pressure is applied from the top-down.

Based on his experience, Innocent sees individuals’ ability to express their views as an important indicator that communities are healing and maintaining peace. For Innocent, monitoring self-expression is key to understanding what is happening at the community and individual level.

Innocent is proud of the progress of reconciliation in Rwanda, and of the power and strength communities have drawn from traditions like the Gacaca and Umuganda. He is also hopeful that new approaches to reconciliation will help community trust and open expression continue to grow, enabling communities and individuals to build a lasting peace.

* * *

Innocent Hitayezu is a peacebuilder and evaluator living and working in Kigali, Rwanda. He has over 13 years of experience, including consultancy work in sustainable agriculture, socio-economic assessment, strategic planning, market research and consumer behavior analysis, farmers’ trainings; 8 years working with International NGOs. He holds an MBA in NGO Management from Kampala International University (Uganda), a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology; and a Diploma in Philosophical and Religious studies.

This post originally appeared on DME for peace.
Featured image credit: Leandro Neumann Ciuffo Creative Commons License

TechChange courses are designed for busy young professionals. In any of our courses, you will find yourself taking the course alongside international development field and headquarter staff, university professors and students, freelancers, and so many other kinds of eager learners. Today, we are excited to chat with Eva Erlach, who is a full-time law student in Vienna, Austria and also works part-time for Ground Truth Solutions. Eva recently took our Technology for Data Visualization course. We caught up with her to see how she was able to apply what she learned in the course.

How did you come across the TechChange course?
At Ground Truth Solutions, I am regularly tasked with producing reports on the perceptions of crisis-affected people during humanitarian actions. In order to visualize the data, I was looking around for the best resources to learn more about data visualization. I came across TechChange’s Tech for Data Visualization course on Twitter and my employer helped me pay for the course.

Have you taken online courses before? What did you think of the TechChange course?
This was actually my first online course and I was very impressed. The ability to interact with other participants in the course was great! Also, since the live events with guest experts were always recorded, and I could revisit the course materials for four more months, it really gave me flexibility to manage my time to make the most out of the course. There were a lot of resources — which is always better than having less — and that gave me freedom to either just get an overview of the topic or dig deeper on the topics most useful to me.

Are you new to data visualization?
I have actually been doing data visualization for a while, and mainly on Excel. I also knew of the other data visualization tools but wasn’t sure which ones were good ones and how to really work with them. This course gave me the insights I needed on different data visualization tools. It also helped me see that you can do much more data visualization just with Excel. Most of the other data visualization software tend to be expensive, so learning more about data visualization on Excel was great.

How did you use what you learned in the course at Ground Truth Solutions?
I worked on Ground Truth Solutions’ three reports on community perceptions in the Nepal crisis. As part of the Inter-Agency Community Feedback Project, Ground Truth’s role is to provide the government of Nepal and aid agencies with real-time feedback from affected people and recommendations based on that feedback.

Our audience for this report were agencies involved in the humanitarian response in Nepal. Since the agencies wanted to be able to print and disseminate the reports to field staff as well as email to their branch offices, we decided to do a pdf report instead of an interactive dashboard. I used R for the analysis and created the graphs on Excel. I then created the maps on Inkscape, and used a python script for the labels and colors.

A snapshot of Ground Truth Solutions’ Community Survey Report 3

I was able to visualize the data in a better way because of the course. The reports are available on our website to download and we have been promoting it all over social media.

How has the course been useful to you?
The course really allowed me to understand data visualization on a deeper level, and to realize that we really need to think about the audience for any visualizations you work on and the kind of message you are trying to communicate through the visualization.

Would you recommend this course to a friend or colleague?
Absolutely!

Interested in learning more about how to use technology for your organization’s data visualization needs? We start our next Technology for Data Visualization online course on Monday, November 23! Join participants like Eva in this four-week online course!

About Eva

Eva Erlach is a program analyst at Ground Truth Solutions. The aim of Ground Truth is to support humanitarian actors to systematically listen and respond to the voices of affected people. Eva holds an undergraduate degree in Development Studies and is currently finishing her law degree at University of Vienna, specializing in human rights. She has volunteered on social projects in India and Uganda and has experience in the field of asylum law and domestic violence.

By Celestin Nsengiyumva and Ella Duncan

“Rwandan society has suffered the wounds of genocide. To make sure that the heart of the community is healed, to know that there is no more fear in society, we must work in peacebuilding evaluation.”- Celestin Nsengiyumva

When asked how he was introduced to M&E, Celestin Nsengiyumva says that he “joined accidentally”. After graduating university with degrees in applied statistics and development studies, he thought he would become an accountant or statistician. Instead he was accepted for a position as an evaluator. Celestin now describes M&E tools and methodologies as the “cornerstone of success” for peacebuilding programs in his homeland of Rwanda.

Rwanda has achieved stability since its civil war that ended in 1994, but continues to be challenged by its violent past. Celestin advocates for peacebuilding and its measurement, though he faces skepticism from those who say the nation should focus on more tangible things. To peacebuilding skeptics, Celestin counters that building peace creates opportunities for other change. He says “Peace is the building block of economic and social progress”, and believes that M&E is the path to a deeper understanding of what communities need to achieve sustainable peace.

Even before becoming an evaluator, Celestin believed peace and development programs must be contextualized to the needs of the communities they aim to serve. Working on a land dispute program with Landesa Rural Development Institute, Celestin was able to see how DM&E supports that contextualization through program design and learning. Land is a focal point in Rwandan society, and played major roles in the genocide and recurring conflicts the country has experienced. Around this key Rwandan issue of land, Celestin was able to be a part of the program from the very beginning. This involvement allowed him to collaborate with local partners and get feedback from partners and participants as he developed his M&E tools. By being involved and able to incorporate community needs and perspective from the beginning, Celestin believes he helped the program reach a better result, with meaning and relevance for participant communities.

As a method to achieve depth and contextualized understanding, Celestin uses and recommends storytelling as a tool to answer the questions of “How?” and “Why?” With Landesa, Celestin and his team used storytelling to collect feedback and success stories, adding personal elements to data. When communicating back their participant communities, showcasing stories of disputes the Landesa program resolved strengthened the presentation of the program’s value back to the community. And sharing practical examples and solutions to land conflict helped spread the program’s messages.

Celestin draws not only on his experience as an evaluator, but also three years he spent as a teacher for his guidelines on how to collect and tell a good story. For him the value of a story that it can be both instructive and engaging, so that the audience doesn’t only learn but also cares, and is able to draw parallels to their own challenges and strengths.

Celestin’s Guidelines for Collecting and Telling a Good Story in Evaluation:

Know what kind of story you need;
Prepare the questions you will ask, use the structure as a balancing tool to be open to unexpected statements and still stay on task;
Focus on using the story to identify the most significant change resulting from the storyteller being exposed to programming;
Do not get hung up on only looking for successes, collect stories on what isn’t working and what is slowing processes;
Ask for stories that include not only individual beneficiary experiences but also capture how those around them are affected.

The growth of Peacebuilding M&E in Rwanda depends on individuals like Celestin, who come to value and advocate for contextualized and reflective practice. Celestin’s hope is that there will be more opportunities in Rwanda to study M&E, so that stronger local evaluators can emerge and bring local insight to peacebuilding programs. Stories like Celestin’s will be repeated as peacebuilders are asked to expand their skills and roles, learning by doing, to learn what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Celestin Nsengiyumva is an M&E professional living and working in Kigali, Rwanda. Celestin received his BA in Applied Statistics from the National University of Rwanda.

This post originally appeared on DME for peace.
Featured image credit: Neil Palmer (CIAT) Creative Commons License

Today, most of us can have Pad Thai, a craft cocktail, and a professional masseuse all arrive at our doorstep with a click of a button on our phones, but the same can’t be said about data for our projects. I can’t tell you whether the thousands of schools we paid for last year were actually built and functioning! How about an on-demand service for that data-delivery?

The on-demand economy is delivering increasingly brilliant things for our daily lives – at least in advanced economies. There are so many on-demand food delivery options that investors now see the market is beginning to bottom out with saturation. Last year, over $3.89 billion, purely of venture financing, went to on-demand startups other than Uber.

But it’s yet to penetrate how we do business. First Mile Geo wants to change that.

Insights on Demand
We call it Insights On Demand. Drop a pin anywhere in the world, place a bid, task a local to capture data on your behalf, and generate near real-time dashboards, maps, and comparative analytics. No tech team, no GIS specialists, no field managers tabulating survey results. The entire process delivered, on-demand.

How it works
The process is pretty simple. Like all of the other tools you may have seen in First Mile Geo (eg mobile, SMS, websurveys, physical sensors), all you have to do is create a form or survey then select the technology for collection –in this case ‘on demand’.

Drop a pin (or multiple), set a sample size (running a survey?), set a bid on how much you’re willing to pay, and you’ll see results shortly thereafter.

As data arrives you’ll be greeted with real-time maps, dashboards, and powerpoint or pdf executive briefing documents in your preferred language.

A future envisioned
Today, there are over 4 dozen mobile data collection apps. And that’s not even including the other ways we use phones like SMS, IVR, or mass analysis of phone use patterns. But regardless of how we use these tools, data analytics can still be time-consuming: identify the need, allocate resources, create a survey or form, train enumerators, analyze results, write-up findings, brief it, and market the successes.

The future of data analytics in development, where systems are smarter and the institutional burden is lessened, is arriving. We think data delivered on demand, through services like our affiliate partners at Findyr, will have a major role to play in realizing it.

We are excited to have Matt present a demo of First Mile Geo’s Insight on Demand in our data collection course tomorrow! Interested in learning how to implement technology for your M&E needs? Check out our courses related to Technology for Monitoring and Evaluation!

About Matt

Matt McNabb is CEO of First Mile Geo and a member of the TechChange Board of Advisors. He also serves as an Adjunct Fellow at the American Security Project and a member of the Board at Epirroi, a Beirut-based management consulting firm.

By Kevin Flanagan and Yuting Liao

A few weeks ago, my colleague Yuting Liao and I had the opportunity to attend MERL Tech—an industry conference of sorts designed to bring together M&E practitioners, researchers, technologists, and development professionals—on behalf of the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) team at the National Democratic Institute (NDI).

At NDI, the MEL team is always on the lookout for innovative M&E practice that can be effectively applied to the democracy and governance sector and this event seemed like an excellent opportunity to explore the “big ideas” and partake in a larger discussion: what can information and communication technologies (ICT) offer to monitoring, evaluation, and learning work as the pressure to integrate ICTs into many aspects of development programming continues to rise.

Offering nearly thirty presentations, the event provided us ample opportunity to sit back and revel in the opinions of the experts, as well as contribute meaningfully to roundtable discussions and collaborative brainstorming activities. As such, these are the five takeaways:

1. More data does not necessarily mean more learning

ICT can make data collection easier, however, it’s crucial to ask the question: is this the data we need? “Big data” is enticing and a common mistake of the novice researcher is: let’s collect as much data as we can. But will that data answer your evaluation questions or will it simply be distracting? While collecting larger volumes of data could certainly result in unexpected observations, if data collection is not strategically tied to your evaluation questions, it does not necessarily lead to better learning. Quality is more important than quantity.

2. ICT can increase the level of risk for the subjects of the evaluation

Data hacks happen, so start by being scared. Whether we want to admit it or not, ICT implementations introduce additional risks to M&E work, particularly when it comes to privacy and data security. And yet, too often M&E practitioners don’t address the risks until after a breach happens. Worry about this in advance and create a threat model to assess assets, risks, and vulnerabilities.

3. Be a data-led organization, not just data-driven

While ICT does help improve data accuracy, organizations that embrace a “data-led” mentality will empower their users to strive to better understand data and incorporate it into their decisionmaking processes. Successful learning initiatives rely on better interpretation and analysis of data, and ICT for evaluation is useless without capable analytical and sector experts.

4. ICT can expand your sample size, but be mindful of the unexpected challenges in sample bias

When collecting data, ICTs can expand the reach of your evaluation efforts, creating opportunities to capture data beyond the traditional “beneficiaries” of a program. However, the “digital divide” may perpetuate the issue of sample bias, and your results may be valid only for those segments of the population with digital access.

5. There’s no ICT “quick-fix” to improve monitoring & evaluation

While it’s possible to achieve a high level of methodological rigor through carefully designed ICT studies, it’s not always easy to do so—often being technically complex, expensive, and time-consuming. Most importantly, effective ICT is built on sound monitoring & evaluation strategies, and incorporating ICTs into M&E requires long-term institutional commitment and evaluation capacity development.

Despite the wide breadth of content, there was a common theme: “It’s ok to reinvent the wheel, not the flat tire.” These words spoken by Susan Davis during a five-minute “lightning” presentation, struck an unexpected chord with the audience, attendees and presenters alike. Whether these are words of comfort for the tech-timid or caution for the tech-tenacious, Davis pointed us all to the indisputable fact that it’s okay to look to new technologies to address old problems in development as long as we are all aware that any new process, tool, or approach has just as much potential to fall flat as did their predecessors. The successful integration of M&E and ICT is fully reliant on sound monitoring and evaluation strategies and realistic expectations.

Kevin Flanagan is a TechChange alum from Technology for Monitoring and Evaluation course. He is a learning technologist on the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning team at the National Democratic Institute.

Yuting Liao is senior assistant for data analysis and visualization on the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning team at the National Democratic Institute.

The National Democratic Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to support and strengthen democratic institutions worldwide through citizen participation, openness and accountability in government.

Featured image: Wayan Vota Flickr

By Zacharia Diing Akol and Ella Duncan

“It is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be older than your country, to raise it and help it grow.” – Zacharia Diing Akol

The crisis that broke out in South Sudan in December 2013 has multiple root causes. A broken sense of national identity and lack of trust in the state at the national level, coupled with intercommunity grievances and mistrust, as well as high level of individual trauma and frustration have resulted in 22 months of a conflict that killed an estimated tens of thousands of people and displaced more than 2 million. South Sudan gained its independence in 2011, yet the cycle of violence stretching back to the First Sudanese Civil War in 1961 continues today. It is in this environment of violence and war that peacebuilder Zacharia Diing Akol was born.

It was a long path for a child in war-torn Jonglei State to become a researcher who shapes the growth of a new nation. At the age of 11 Zacharia left his family to cross into Ethiopia by foot, traveling with groups of other children and young men, all fleeing the Second Sudanese Civil War. His personal journey has taken him around the world and back to South Sudan, where he now works as a Senior Policy Analyst at the Sudd Institute in Juba, supporting good governance and policy as part of what Zacharia calls the “collective journey” to build South Sudan.

When Zacharia first returned to South Sudan, he intended to stay for two weeks, but quickly became convinced his skills as a policy expert and researcher were needed to support the fledging nation. As Zacharia says, “It is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be older than your country, to raise it and help it grow.”

Zacharia believes data can effect positive change by helping people, organizations, and governments make better choices. The pursuit of this belief drove him to co-found the Sudd Institute.

The Sudd Institute is an independent research organization premised on the belief that public policy, especially in this key historical moment of state building in South Sudan, must be informed by reliable data, objective analysis, and thoughtful debate. Backed by data and evidence, Zacharia and the Sudd Institute make policy recommendations to the new government.

Men gather in a South Sudanese IDP Camp, Photo Credit USAID

For Zacharia, giving solid evidence-based recommendations is the best way to effect smart and responsive policy. Furthermore, Zacharia believes evaluations are for posterity, that they capture the realities of the new country – he says, “People will look back in the future and ask, what were they thinking? What were they doing? The work of the Sudd Institute will help people understand what was going on during this time in South Sudan.”

Zacharia hopes that his work will inspire other civil society organizations so that evidence-based policy recommendations become the norm in South Sudan. The next project for Zacharia and the Sudd institute is to include trainings for CSOs so that local organizations can provide their own recommendations for action, and policy advocacy efforts across South Sudan may be strengthened by evidence. Through sharing information and skills, Sudd hopes to make their goals and impact sustainable. By empowering more groups to engage in evidence based advocacy, the institute’s work strengthens public policy lobbying power to inform government decisions.

The Sudd Institute also works though public research publications, including a weekly review, monthly brief, and quarterly special report. These publications aim to give everyone – from civil society organizations (CSOs) to government officials – the research they need to make informed decisions about the trajectory of South Sudan. Moving forward, the Institute is increasing the influence of their work by forming more direct relationships with CSOs using their publications.

These goals are especially important in South Sudan because as a new country, that was formed by and continues to be defined by conflict, “It is not just important to end conflict, it is about HOW you end it. The process is as important as the ending.” Zacharia sees that there must be a collective effort to address the issues candidly with honest data and evaluation, because he says the country has this choice: “deal with the issues, or the issues will deal with you”.

“It is not just important to end conflict, it is about HOW you end it. The process is as important as the ending.”

Visit the Sudd Institute’s website at http://www.suddinstitute.org/
Read their policy briefs and other publications at http://www.suddinstitute.org/publications/

Zacharia Diing Akol is the Director of Training at the Sudd Institute. Diing has extensive experience in community outreach, government and organizational leadership. He is currently working on M.Res./Ph.D. in political science at the London School of Economics. Diing’s research interests include the role of civil society organizations in peacebuilding, traditional leadership and democratic governance, post-conflict reconstruction, faith and public policy, and the dynamics of civil war. Diing holds a Master’s degree in Peace and Justice Studies from the University of San Diego and two Bachelor’s degrees from Michigan State University in Public Policy & Administration and Policy & Applied Economics.

This post originally appeared on DME for peace.

Featured image: Daniel X. O’Neil (Creative Commons License)

Social media has become a very important diplomacy tool to engage with the public. Realizing the evolving nature of diplomacy in the 21st century, the Italian embassy in Washington, DC regularly hosts their #digitaldiplomacy series to discuss the role of technology in diplomacy and to engage with all stakeholders and partners.

Today, there are tech tools, beyond social media, that have the potential to promote diplomacy and engagement, so we collaborated with the Italian embassy to discuss the other players in the digital diplomacy field. Moderated by our founder, Nick Martin, our panel included Sarah Frostenson (Vox Media), Heba Ghannam (State Department Professional Fellow), Sarah Heck (White House), Suzanne Philion (Yahoo!), and Jennifer Walsh (U.S. Department of State). Our panelists shared their experience about the impact that data visualizations, digital mapping, and e-learning can have on diplomacy today.

Here are a few takeaways of an evening of great insights and engaging conversations:

Digital maps can tell powerful stories

While important pdf reports may be buried online, maps can tell a compelling story understood by all.

The ongoing refugee crisis has affected many families, but for someone living far away from the region, it can be difficult to see its global impact. Sarah Frostenson from Vox Media presented how putting the refugee story on a map, like The Refugee Project can have a much bigger impact and urge respective governments to work towards a solution.

Mapping has been a great asset in disaster response. Digital maps have allowed international humanitarian organizations to collaborate and better coordinate relief efforts during disasters like the recent earthquake Nepal.

Online education can help bring equal opportunities to people across borders

In 2011, social media brought together thousands of social activists together in Tahrir Square in Egypt to demand change from their leaders. The power of the Internet to create a movement led the founders of Tahrir Academy to leverage the same tool to bring equal educational opportunities to the people of Egypt. Heba Ghannam explained that as the only online learning platform in Arabic, Tahrir Academy was able to influence other learners beyond Egypt, and in the Arab world.

Many refugee communities may not have access to these tech tools in the refugee camps, but the potential for e-learning to help refugees continue their education in refugee camps is undeniable. Heba Ghannam recalled Syrians using Tahrir Academy’s online content for their education initiatives in the refugee camps in Egypt in 2012.

From left to right: Nick Martin, Sarah Frostenson, Heba Ghannam, Sarah Heck, Suzanne Philion, and Jennifer Walsh

Online learning and engagement platforms allow the public to engage with decision makers and experts

E-learning initiatives like Tahrir Academy have created bridges between the Arab expat communities working at renowned universities around the world and the eager learners from the Arab world.

The U.S. State Department’s Virtual Student Foreign Service platform engages U.S. citizen students’ by harnessing their expertise and digital excellence in the work of the government. We are excited to collaborate with the State Department on GovUp, an online platform where U.S. diplomats from around the world can engage virtually with other diplomats and get trained.

However, whether it is in Egypt or the U.S., it is always very crucial to localize the content so that it is relevant and applicable for the local population.

An increased need for engagement between the tech and foreign relations experts

There are tech experts and foreign relations experts, but it is rare that someone can influence both the sectors. After eleven years at the State Department, Suzanne Philion, is now at Yahoo!, where she is able to look at tech initiatives with a different lens. Suzanne and Sarah Heck from the White House, both stressed the importance of breaking out of organizational bubbles, and engaging with parties from other sectors. Tech companies and international organizations need to collaborate more to best use the available technology to meet citizen’s demands, while respecting their data privacy.

It was clear that tech tools beyond social media can significantly impact diplomacy today, but there are clearly some important issues to think about when talking about data-driven diplomacy. Diplomacy and decision-making are increasingly becoming more data-driven, and citizens are demanding more transparency from their governments. However, as more data is becoming available online, data privacy becomes an important concern for all. How do you navigate data transparency and data privacy? Also, online content available for all can help raise funds and help populations in need, but are also being used by terrorist organizations for recruitment purposes. Where do you draw the line?

These important questions are being discussed in the tech industry as well as the international relations and development industry today. You can continue the conversation on digital diplomacy by following the Italian Embassy’s #digitaldiplomacy series. We will also be discussing these topics in relation to data visualization in our course on Technology for Data Visualization this month.

Missed the panel? You can watch the recording here.