Tag: m4d

Interested in learning about Mobile Phones for International Development? Early bird registration for our next class ends on February 25, 2013! Apply Now.

Last week, the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) published an article by Linda Raftree and TechChange Founder Nick Martin about challenges we saw upcoming in this field around mobile education (What’s Holding Back Mobile Phones for Education? (2/11/2013)).  But last week also marked the announcement of the winners for The Tech Challenge for Atrocity on “Capture.” What both of these events have in common is that they are entirely about the possibility of mobile phones to address global challenges.

According to the website, the Tech Challenge “sought new and innovative ways to enable the documentation of relevant evidence that may be used to deter or hold perpetrators accountable, while minimizing the risk posed to those collecting this information. These winning submissions were chosen on the basis of impact, innovation, scalability and feasibility.” Not surprisingly, the top three awards all went to mobile applications: MediCapt, Silent Lens, and International Evidence Locker.

If you haven’t learned about these innovative projects, we recommend that you head over to the USAID Blog or Humanity United and check them out. In particular, we’d like to congratulate our partners and friends on the Magpi team for their role in InformaCam, which claimed first prize in partnership with Physicians for Human Rights and InformaCam for developing MediCapt. According to Humanity United blog, “[t]his mobile app will equip doctors and nurses with critical tools for collecting, documenting and preserving court-admissible forensic evidence of mass atrocities including sexual violence and torture.”

But while these exciting tools promise new capabilities in atrocity prevention, the SSIR article we wrote also cautions not to take a tech-centric approach to problem solving. The success these tools will have once they are out of development don’t just depend on the latest features, but being in the hands of those who can skillfully apply their potential to the problems at hand. Sooner or later, all technology problems become education problems.

Shameless plug: For those who are unfamiliar with Magpi, please check out our blog post on Goodbye Episurveyor: Hello Magpi!, which lays out more detail on this tool. Or you can check out our video below:

Are you interested in learning with TechChange? Check out our next class: Digital Organizing and Open Government. Class starts April 8, 2013. Apply Now.

How can USAID use mobile technologies to more effectively collect, analyze and share data?  These are the central questions we will be addressing as part of a new course TechChange has developed in partnership with the Mobile Solutions team at USAID and QED.

USAID, together with its partners, has the opportunity to increase efficiency, improve the quality of the information its uses, and better meet USAID goals related to its Forward Reforms, Evaluation Policy, and Open Data Initiative by utilizing mobile technologies to collect and disseminate data about people, projects, and programs. This course will help USAID Missions and implementing partners understand how to do just that.

Building off of the success of our 8-week online certificate course this fall on Accelerating Mobile Money, TC311 Mobile Data Solutions will be a four week online course (February 1-March 1, 2013) designed to build the necessary technical capacity to deploy mobile data collection strategies by bringing together Mission staff and implementing partners. The four weeks are structured as follows to provide a comprehensive overview of mobile devices in data collection.

Week 1: Introduction to mobile data solutions

  • What is mobile data? What are the benefits and challenges associated with collecting data wirelessly?

Week 2: Project design

  • Designing projects and preparing concept notes, scopes of work, other documents to include mobile technologies.

Week 3: Implementation

  • Study design and programming, training, field operations, data management

Week 4: Analysis, visualization and sharing

  • Utilizing data for decision-making, sharing with partners

The course will go beyond explaining the benefits of this approach. Participants will learn the questions to ask in order to assess projects (Are mobile technologies appropriate?); design them to achieve the maximum benefits possible (How should interventions be designed to take advantage of these technologies?), implement them (What device should we use? How do we train staff? What resources do we need in the field? At the Mission?), and report and share the data (How do we create visuals that can inform decision making? How do we share the results with beneficiaries and partners in-country?).

Featured tools, organizations and projects include: Episurveyor/Magpi, Formhub, Souktel, EMIT, uReport, TexttoChange, RapidSMS, GeoPoll, iFormbuilder, PoiMapper, Catholic Relief Services, DAI, NASA, OpenDataKit at UW, SweetLab, JSI, ICF International, Tangerine at RTI, Futures Group. The course will be delivered on TechChange‘s custom learning platform and will include a mixture of presentations by experts, tool demonstrations, selected readings, and activities including designing and analysing a survey using mobile software.

This closed course is intended specifically for USAID and its implementing partners. But if are you interested in learning with TechChange and the topic of mobile data, Check out our upcoming course on Mobile Phones for International Development. Class starts on March 4, 2013. Apply now!

This is a guest post by TechChange alumna Julia Nagel.

If you’re interested in learning with TechChange, check out our next course on Mobile Phones for Public Health. Class starts June 3. Apply now! 

In December 2012, I traveled with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to Zambia and Malawi to shoot videos on women’s health. Armed with three cameras – a Panasonic HMC, a Canon Rebel T3i, and a Canon 5d Mark II – we sought to capture the voices of African women on issues that affect their lives and the lives of countless women in their country: maternal mortality, cervical cancer, and family planning. Why three cameras you might ask? My fellow videographer and I both agreed that while the Panasonic HMC is a highly versatile camera, its look does not compare to that of a nice DSLR.

With the DSLR cameras, colors are more saturated, images are more vivid, and you get a nice crisp focus on your subject (if you’re able to manage how sensitive that camera’s focus ring is) that nicely blurs the background. The DSLR does have two major downfalls though. One, it does not operate well in low light (a major problem during Malawi’s rainy season). Two, there’s no good way to capture audio. Thus, the
Panasonic was used for every shoot alongside the DSLRs.

 

In this video, Joyce Banda – the first female President of Malawi – talks about the importance of women’s health and empowerment, particularly in Africa and in her country. The interview was both inspiring to shoot and to edit. The two cameras we used in this video are the Panasonic HMC for the wide shot, and the Cannon 5d Mark II for the tight shot. The video was edited in Final Cut Pro and the cameras were matched in Final Cut using an incredibly helpful program called Plural Eyes. To read
more about the interview, please visit: www.SmartGlobalHealth.org/JoyceBanda. Also, stay tuned to www.SmartGlobalHealth.org for the additional videos that will be released from our trip, due out in February.

 

In preparation for our upcoming course on Mobile Phones for Public Health, we wanted to share our most recent attempt to blend compelling narration with informative animation. In this short clip, Laura Walker Hudson of FrontlineSMS shares insights on why SMS offers new opportunities in every conceivable area of social change work.

How’d we do? What do you think? Would love to hear your comments below.

[Maximizing Mobile Infographic. Source: World Bank]

This is a guest post by Avatar of Joellen RaderstorfJoellen Raderstorf, a participant in the TechChange course: TC105: Mobiles for International Development. You can follow Joellen on Twitter: @actingupmama 

How many people have had the experience of telling people you are studying ICTD or working in the field of ICTD to watch their eyes glaze over. How do you explain ICTD to a friend in the grocery line, your grandmother at a family reunion, or your father who thinks technology is ruining young people?

Most commonly, ICTD is described as an attempt to bridge the digital divide—the disparity between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in the technological world. Some consider it to be the latest golden bullet—with access to technology comes the ability to improve a livelihood. A farmer can access commodity information in Cameroon to ensure a fair price and expand reach beyond the local market. A family living in a rural community, who once found doctors out of reach, can significantly improve the chances of a child surviving past the age of 5 due to a community health worker equipped with a mobile health application connecting to doctors real time. A child can grow up with access to education and the opportunity to take college courses without great expense or the necessity of leaving her community.

 

Alternatively, perhaps a less altruistic view of ICTD depicts the field as a marriage between telecom companies in search of expanding markets and NGOs in need of new solutions to addressing hunger and poverty. The proliferation of the mobile phone in the developing world has been nothing short of a technological revolution according to the World Bank. Powerful infographics from the World Bank and USAID depict an undeniable success story regardless of the original intention. On a planet of 7 billion, there are over 6 billion mobile subscriptions and over 75% of the world has access to a mobile phone. Besides providing a link to markets, education and health providers, mobile technology is employed to create a safer and less corrupt world. Of course ensuring the bandwidth to handle the mobile data traffic expected to reach 1.2 GB per user by 2016 will present a challenge to the FCCs of the world and a subject for a future blog post.

One last point of interest in the world of ICTD identity is confusion around the acronym. ICTD is often interchanged with ICT4D, a nuance on the surface, but politically charged when peering more deeply. What implications are being asserted when one says ICT for development? Some suggest this is another version of colonialism. Terminology does evolve over time and development lingo could certainly use an overhaul, perhaps alleviating the need to define what ICTD means to everyone. For an in-depth definition, refer to the Wikipedia page for ICT4D where some (or one) ICTDers have been doing a commendable job educating the world about this enigmatic field.

 

Interested in learning with us? Check out our next course on Technology Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship, starting Oct. 1. Apply now!

 

What does it mean in a country transitioning from a long and bloody civil conflict if almost every citizen owns a mobile phone? Can the ubiquity of mobile communication play a role in breaking-down perception barriers and promoting reconciliation between communities?

I workshopped this question last week with Sri Lanka’s largest youth movement, Sri Lanka Unites, at their 2012 Future Leaders Conference in Jaffna. The conference brought together more than 350 youth from all of Sri Lanka’s ethnic and religious communities for four days of workshops focused on building relationships and empowering students to take action to support reconciliation nationally and within their local communities.

Few countries have higher mobile penetration than Sri Lanka- where 95 percent of the island nation’s population has a sim card and access to a mobile phone according to GSMA’s Mobile and Development Intelligence Unit.

Leveraging that connectivity asset for peacebuilding could be immensely valuable, particularly for country-wide civil society groups such as Sri Lanka Unites which seek to re-build relations between previously warring ethnic and religious communities through youth conferences such as FLC as well as grass-roots development initiatives.

To explore the ways in which mobile and social tools could be deployed in Sri Lanka for peacebuilding and development, I spoke briefly about the evolving deployment of mobile-based tech tools such as FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi by civil society groups to assist in everything from mapping electoral violence in Kenya to supporting earthquake reconstruction in Haiti and coordinating flood relief and fundraising in Pakistan.

 


Myself and Chandika Jayasundara (the co-founder of a fantastic company called Creately) then split the 350 delegates into groups and asked them to workshop the potential role of geo-social tools and crowdsourcing approaches in addressing one of Sri Lanka’s major health crises: the recent upsurge of dengue fever infections throughout the country.

The responses of the delegates to the dengue fever epidemic provides a few key lessons and questions for NGOs and donor agencies looking to leverage mobile and social networks to support reconciliation efforts and development initiatives in countries transitioning from civil conflict.

 

Coalition building and feedback loops are key
Experiences from crowdsourcing operations in Kenya, Haiti and more recently Libya have shown that it’s not enough to simply collect information about the situation on the ground. If technology tools are to enhance development and humanitarian interventions in the slightest, this data needs to be properly analyzed, its meaning widely disseminated through effective public campaigns and resources mobilized by relevant actors to redress the issue or problem.

The need for a firm feedback loop between information collection and change agents, especially in post-conflict settings, was hammered home in the dengue fever workshop. The participants focused not only on collecting and mapping info on the spread of the disease, but also on the need to address much broader challenges of social norms around water maintenance through public campaigns and institutional change.

With these objectives in mind, a two-stage strategy of coalition building and campaigning emerged, each part of which was enhanced by deployment of mobile-based and social mobilisation tools. The first stage would be to accurately determine the extent of dengue fever within Sri Lanka. Some delegates proposed partnering with one of Sri Lanka’s major mobile network operators (eg, Dialog or Mobitel) to conduct a mobile survey using tools such as GeoPoll to determine prevalence of dengue fever and access to treatment centers. Others saw a SMS short-code service such as the 4646 service, which was used after the Haiti earthquake in 2010 to report needs, as the best means of collecting info.

 


Participants generally agreed that regardless of data collection method, the purpose of aggregating this data would ultimately be to visualise it spatially using mapping tools such as Ushahidi. Being able to physically see collected info on where dengue fever is prevalent, determine the specific location of stagnant ponds and identify districts where misconceptions about symptoms and treatment of the tropical disease are common was seen as vital to targeting of SLU efforts.

The second phase would thus be a large-scale and targeted public information and dengue fever eradication campaign, in collaboration with various NGOs, private sector operators and relevant government departments and Ministries, using this mapped, crowdsourced data.

Hugely creative ideas for the awareness-raising phase of the campaign were proposed, with suggestions ranging from YouTube clips and cross-country walks to online courses and mobile games educating users about the causes and preventative measures associated with dengue fever.

Deploying SLUs high-school chapters to run educational workshops in local communities and partner with medical NGOs, the private sector and relevant government departments to eradicate stagnant ponds in their local neighbourhood was also proposed.

Rather than simply creating a shopping list of ‘cool’ technologies and apps that could help SLU outreach, the participants therefore conceived of the avenues of information collection and popular participation offered by mobile technologies in an institutional context in which change agents (eg. civil society actors, the private sector and government agencies) must partner to create feedback loops capable of taking substantive action.

 

Common issues cultivate common identities
Creating new mechanisms of accountability should be central for all social change initiatives or interventions deploying technology tools. But underpinning this integrated thinking in Sri Lanka is a larger observation about the nature of reconciliation in post-conflict societies.

In many ethnically, religiously and linguistically diverse countries recovering from bloody and divisive civil conflict, distrust between communal groups often continues to pervade inter-group relations for years after the end of formal hostilities.

These perceptions and ties can come to permeate and intermediate the social and economic interactions of everyday life, in many cases being manipulated by political candidates in close contests to catalyse voters- often violently- at local, state and national elections. The repeated paroxysms of Hindu-Muslim violence in India are just some disturbing examples.

Electoral and party regulations that incentivise (or require) inclusion of all regional and communal groups into political campaigns and agendas are vital, as is sharing of power through inclusion of minority groups in cabinets and various forms of decentralisation. However, research on civil society and peacebuilding by Ashutosh Varshney has also shown that it is the relationships and trust developed between individuals of ethno-communal groups which are vital to preventing minor scuffles or even false rumours about other ethnic groups from taking on a communal nature and escalating into all-out ethno-religious warfare.

Sri Lanka Unites’ recent ‘S.H.O.W You Care: Stop Harassment Against Women’ campaign is a fantastic example of the kind of local campaign that can help build trust between communities and be enhanced by tech tools. Across the country, more than 300 young men involved in SLUs high-school chapters boarded over 1250 buses in Colombo district to inform women of their avenues of redress and encourage passengers to intervene when they see incidences of violence.

The campaign received widespread media attention. But the merits of ‘S.H.O.W,’ and even the potential dengue fever project developed in our workshop cannot be assessed solely on how they change attitudes and behavior towards gender-based violence or eradicate dengue fever.

Just as important is how large-scale campaigns such as these can foster new relational ties and trust between individuals and organizations of diverse ethnic and religious groups, creating popular consciousness of issues which cut across various individual identities and require action on an equitable basis- regardless of ethnic or religious backgrounds.

 

Put tech in its rightful place
So what role can mobile phones play in reconciliation? TechChange’s own Greg Maly recently observed that 90 percent of the social impact created by technology-enhanced development initiatives are the result of feedback loops created by people (or ‘the crowd’) partnering with various organizations and institutional actors to improve service delivery and solve collective problems through public campaigns or grass-roots action.

The workshops on dengue fever in Sri Lanka demonstrated how true that observation is in divided societies transitioning from conflict. Ultimately, even when campaigns such as SHOW or the proposed dengue fever eradication campaign prove only partly effective in achieving their immediate objectives, it’s vital to remember the importance of large-scale, public-interest campaigns and other regular avenues of cross-communal collaboration in reframing notions of identity and slowly re-building trust between deeply divided communities.

Mobile and social tools provide new avenues for information collection, political participation and communication that can assist in establishing ties and building trust. But their utility for reconciliation is dependent in the end on the values and expertise of coalition partners and the technology-enhanced feedback loops of institutional change they help to form.

As we prepare to launch the next iteration of online course Mobile Phones for International Development on September 24, we wanted to talk about what some speakers have done in the past to make the class a success. If you haven’t taken a TechChange course before, guest expert speakers play an important role in bringing the content in our four-week online courses to life as well as engaging the students in direct conversation during a one-hour speaking slot. While it seems like these would be pretty standardized (webcast or screen share plus Q&A), we’re frequently impressed by how our speakers have found innovative ways to engage, so we wanted to share some of our favorites.

Props are key: Isaac Holeman of Medic Mobile

One of our best received presentation was about as analog as they get: Isaac Holeman of Medic Mobile holding a flip phone up to a webcam to demonstrate SIM Apps. It was also perfectly appropriate for the message that Isaac was trying to get across about using SIM Apps instead of focusing on smart phones or other newer technology: don’t worry about doing something fancy and new, but try to leverage what you have as best as you can to affect real-world change. According to their website, SIM card apps allow Medic Mobile to run on any carrier’s SIM card on virtually any standard GSM phone to run programs relating to mHealth.

Isaac took the class on a guided tour of their latest tool and then turned it over virtually to the students who made requests (“Can I see the menu again?”) that Isaac executed remotely. Very simple, very cool.

Launch a new product: Amy Demos FSMS 2.0

Amy O’Donnell of FrontlineSMS didn’t just demo an existing project, but rather used the class as an opportunity to walk the students through the brand new Frontline SMS Version 2. While we already love this product, it gave us a chance to do something new for our students, many of whom were already using FSMS is come capacity for their work: We put them online with a member of the FSMS team to not only learn about how the changes could affect their work, but also so they could chat directly with Amy about their questions and needs. This type of two-way conversation fit perfectly, and we’re hoping to see some of the ideas from our students in the next version!

 

Have a conversation: Joel Selanikio of DataDyne

Sometimes your best moments aren’t scripted and sometimes polished is worse than rough. When we first started our online videos, we did most of our live interviews using webcams with remote speakers. Once we had proven the model, we used some of our extra budget to invest in a production studio, green screen, and a more studio-style interview format. Guess what? Engagement went down, not up, as students started treating our presentations as scripted TV shows, not spontaneous opportunities for engaging with experts.

Some of our best expert moments have come not by carefully calibrated moments, but rather surprise interactions. One of my personal favorite interviews was by Joel Selanikio of DataDyne. After realizing that he wasn’t going to get home in time for a scheduled speaking slot, Joel hopped off his train and went to a nearby cafe with wifi and did his presentation from there. Once the students (and we, the facilitators) got over the sounds of breakfast being consumed in the background, we had one of the most genuine and riveting interactions of our Mobiles class.

It doesn’t hurt that Joel is an incredible speaker, but an event that could have or should have been a technical disaster ended up being one of our more powerful learning experiences.

Beyond Powerpoint: Bill Siemering

Even when you get everything right, be ready to be frustrated. Not because your speakers aren’t delivering, but because inevitably you’ll have students without sufficient bandwidth to participate in the event. That’s why you need to think of your content not just in terms of putting on a good TV show, but rather how it will sound over the audio podcast as well. A 1-hour session based entirely on visual cues is going to flop if half your students don’t have a visual to go with it. Fortunately, this is becoming less of an issue for our students, but it’s alway something we need to account for.

Have real-world connection: James Eberhard of GeoPoll

Although each of these was fun, in my mind the best speakers are those who tie their presentation to a real-world event. And GeoPoll did just that by asking hundreds of real survey responders in DRC and Tunisia questions generated in our courses by students in our Digital Organizing and Mobiles for International Development courses. Once students realized that they weren’t passive watchers of a presentation, but an integral part of a group project that would design questions asked to hundreds of people, they couldn’t help but be engaged.

So there you have it! If you’re interested in joining our next Mobiles class, we’d love to have you. We’re holding the early-bird price until the course starts and you can apply here to join.

Are you already enrolled in our Technology, Innovation, and Social Entrepreneurship course and interested in mobile phone applications for the developing world? Do you want to deeply examine organizations and social entrepreneurs that have disrupted the mobile phones for good sector?

We are offering our TC105: Mobiles for International Development course that starts Monday for $195.00 (more than 60% off) to all our enrolled participants and their colleagues in TC108: Technology, Innovation, and Social Entrepreneurship. We believe having social entrepreneurial-minded participants can make TC105 even better and add a new perspective to class discussions. We have an incredible group of guest experts lined up that have had a renowned social impact in the tech space like Joel Selanikio of Datadyne, Jacob Korenblum of Souktel, and Lynn Eisenhart of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

If you are interested in this offer then email us at info[at]techchange[dot]org and we will add you to the course. If you aren’t enrolled in TC108 yet and would like to take advantage then send in an application here and we’ll get you set up. This is the biggest course discount we have had yet, so this is a great opportunity to take two courses with a large deduction. Act quick because there’s just a few days left until course start!

Nick Martin is President and CEO of TechChange and is the Lead Facilitator for the upcoming course: Mobile Phones for International Development. Class starts Sept. 24. Apply Now!

In the last month, I’ve witnessed an exciting shift in how development in Africa has been treated in the media, especially with regards to mobile phones (Including this excellent post by Ken Banks in BBC). For the first time, we’re seeing the perspective shift from how the US needs to intervene to assist the helpless and needy, to a new frame of what lessons the US and the rest of the world can learn from the many innovations in high tech and mobile technology taking place across the African continent.

Just Saturday afternoon, I found myself checking CNN to see the latest headlines and events from around the world. The top story of the hour, “Seven Ways Mobile Phones have Changed Lives in Africa,” could have been written specifically for our upcoming course on Mobile Phones for International Development by referencing case studies such as M-PESA, the popular mobile money transfer program in Kenya and a case study that we look at extensively in a number of our online courses. I was also pleased to see other projects and organizations mentioned like m-Farm, Ushahidi, Mxit and more– all of whom are already pushing boundaries globally.

There were also references to mHealth initiatives directly relevant to our upcoming course with the mHealth alliance on Mobile Phones for Public Health.One of the organizations specifically mentioned is m-Pedigree, which is the result of Bright Simmons (disclosure: a colleague and International Youth Foundation global fellow) and the work he is doing in Ghana to prevent counterfeit pharmaceuticals with mobile phones.

It’s certainly exciting to see our field getting mainstream attention like this. I’m heading to Ethiopia this week with UPEACE to conduct a workshop, but mainly what I’m looking forward to is an opportunity to meet some of these innovators and see what’s happening first-hand. In Africa and elsewhere, it’s exciting to see the frame shift from “What can we teach?” to “What can we learn from each other?” Stay tuned for a post from the field!

This week will mark the launch of our new eight-week online certificate course on Mobile Money in partnership with the Mobile Solutions team at USAID and The QED Group. Today, we open our doors to over 70 staff from USAID and implementing partners in 10 countries to connect them with leading experts in the mobile money space and share best practices. Building on the materials in our TC105 Mobiles for International Development course, we will focus more specifically on how to implement and operationalize mobile money programs designed for scale.

USAID is the first bilateral donor to establish a dedicated Mobile Solutions team to help lever the power and reach of mobile technology to accelerate development outcomes. It is also an emerging leader in mobile money. Already, USAID’s work in Haiti led to more than 5 million mobile money transactions and a doubling of financial access points. In Afghanistan, USAID worked with the Central Bank to reduce regulatory barriers to entry for mobile network operators to establish mobile money products. And it is working to transfer large payment flows from cash to mobile money–this summer, for example, 110,000 households will have the chance to pay their electricity bills via mobile money. This online course will help inform this work and future programs, as USAID intends to expand its mobile money work to countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Malawi and a host of others.

Participants will explore at issues of regulation and interoperability, as well as strategies for working effectively with MNOs, banks and governments. We’ll consider case studies from countries like Pakistan, Philippines, Haiti, Uganda, Kenya and hear from guest experts such as David Porteous of Bankable Frontiers, Kabir Kumar of CGAP, Nadeem Hussain of Tameer Bank, Tomasz Smilowicz of Citigroup, Jordan Weinstock of Open Revolution, Chrissy Martin of MEDA, and more. Self-paced content including animated and interactive overview videos will complement live discussions.

According to Priya Jaisingani, Director of the Mobile Solutions team at USAID, this type of online facilitated course “will go a long way to ensure USAID’s mobile money work is informed by the best thinking in the field.”

TechChange president Nick Martin said of the partnership: “We often find that the biggest barrier to using mobile phones for international development is bridging the rift between development projects and technologists. We’re hoping this class can do exactly that through sharing best practices and connecting with leading experts.”

If you’re interested in mobile money and other possibilities for mobile phones for your projects, TechChange will also be offering an open-enrollment course TC105: Mobiles for International Development on September 24th.

Image link from USAID IDEA: http://idea.usaid.gov/tags/haiti