A Fundamental Problem in ICT4D Projects

In July, I wrote a post about how international development needs to disrupt itself. In talking to development practitioners since, I realized the issue of timing in ICT4D projects is one that many have encountered, so I thought I'd elaborate on what exactly I mean.

Of course there are many elements that make up an ICT4D project, but simplicity's sake, let's say we can roughly split up the project into two elements - the ICT platform itself and the international development context. The former is easy to understand; the latter includes everything from the problem statement, to the economic implications, to the need, to the funding, and the monitoring and evaluation metrics and systems. 

For example, suppose you want to design a project that allows female small merchants in Senegal to deposit their earnings via a free SMS in order to reduce the rate of robberies in the area. Your ICT platform would obviously need to work with local Senegalese mobile phones and carriers, connect to relevant financial institutions, and be able to be monitored. Development of the ICT platform will certainly take time, though given the number of open sourced platforms there are, the amount of technical documentation, and prevalence of SMS campaigns and usage, one would imagine the ICT platform development is fairly straightforward in competent hands.

On the other hand, building the international development context is less straightforward. How many women have access to phones in this particular region of the country? Are there negative cultural implications to these women having phones or handling money, including electronically? Would the possible stakeholders/clients/beneficiaries use such a tool? Even if all of these questions have been answered before somewhere else, do those answers apply here? Further, who is going to fund the cost of development and implementing the project? How is success going to be measured, both in terms of usage and determination of usage?

Timeline of ICT Platform and International Development Context Development

Unsurprisingly, it has been both my experience and the experience of most (if not all) ICT4D practitioners I know that the project development timeline looks like the above. A working beta or even version 1.0 of the ICT platform is created and ready to be deployed well ahead of building the international development context, especially in determining steady funding and making sure beneficiaries/stakeholders/clients know about and are prepared to use the platform.

What this essentially means is that for two reasons, the ICT development lifecycle doesn't flow as it would otherwise:


ICT Project Development Lifecycle

First, after creating the beta/version 1.0, without having beneficiaries/clients/stakeholders ready to test the tool as it would be used in the actual project, knowing to whom, where and how to deploy is often unknown. Imagine building a piece of software that does taxes, only you're not entirely sure you'll have access to people who actually pay taxes, so you don't know whether to make the software into something else and expand the scope of people who might want to use your software.

Second, critical and relevant user feedback is therefore also often not possible. Instead of giving your software to people who pay taxes to check to see if the software calculated their tax return properly, all you can do is give the software to people who don't pay taxes and see how much they understand even though they're an irrelevant group of people. You'll get feedback on the interface, aesthetics, and functionality of the software, but you still won't know if the software actually works before you have go back and make corrections for version 2.0.

  
In an ideal world, the iterative process in ICT platform development would happen indefinitely as technology evolves. In reality, resources in international development are scarce given the size of a problem, and highly skilled technologists can only be secured for small periods of time. 

 Going back to my other post, what this means is that the international development side of ICT4D projects needs to disrupt itself. Personally, I think there are ways to use existing ICT platforms to more quickly, more efficiently and more accurately to build the international development context. I have a few ideas of how to break these context parts down, and the accompanying solutions are something I hope to explore in the future.  

International Development Needs to Disrupt Itself

A few months ago, I heard Joi Ito, the current director of MIT’s Media Lab speak. One of the points I found the most telling in his talk was the idea of how the Internet has disrupted the traditional order of operations in creating a new technological innovation, especially at the global level. Due to heavy research and development costs, overhead, and patent protection, technological innovation pre-Internet often came in a very top-down approach at the behest of large government organizations or private corporations.

The Internet changed all of that; the Internet allowed individuals or small groups of people with little to no assets to create something and find investors to bring it to scale. One of Ito’s examples was YouTube, which was hatched by three software developers in 2005. Not knowing what the precise use of YouTube would be, the developers concentrated on creating the product, and eventually attached it to an online dating service that allowed customers to upload video clips. With time, YouTube migrated to MySpace before becoming its own platform that was eventually bought by Google.

This sort of disruption is seen on a daily basis in New York. In fact, Mayor Bloomberg even started a large campaign called Made in NY, which gives media backing to more than 3,000 tech start-ups in the city. From social media, to analytics, to online shopping, to crowdfunding, interactive mapping, and more, the transformative potential of the next wave of Internet behemoths is well known and well documented.

Indeed, this wave of innovation and entrepreneurship extends far beyond the reaches of major tech cities; in fact, it goes beyond small cities in the States – including my hometown of Richmond, VA. GSMA’s Mobile for Development Intelligence recently published a report on scaling mobile technology in economically developing contexts. In the report, they write about seven Internet innovation centers across Africa, including iHub in Nairobi.

If Internet technological innovation at this level has made it this far, if Internet technology is so pervasive in our lives, why then has it not been embraced at a strategic level in much of the international development community? ICT brings efficient, low-cost solutions, which are two characteristics continually sought out by an increasingly financially strained donor community. Among many other reasons, I believe one of the driving factors is that the disruption that has occurred in the ICT community has not happened in international development world.

One of the favorite international development expressions is,

            “In the context of.”

We as development practitioners are taught to build a “context” – a case – for everything that we do, and often for good reason. Solving one small problem in an environment with little infrastructure, high gender inequality, the majority of a population impoverished, and with highly imperfect systems means that nothing can be looked at in isolation.

A lack of due diligence before deploying a solution could very easily negatively affect those we are trying to help. Distributing computers to slum-dwelling youth to better education resources might put them at high risk for violence by non-recipients trying to steal the computer. Connecting adult females to job boards targeting women might ostracize these new workforce participants from their community. Automatically distributing internationally sourced food at the end of a bad crop season might crowd out farmers who cannot afford to sell their stocks at a lower price.

It takes time to understand a context, to understand how a solution to one problem can and should work in conjunction with solutions in the same community. It takes time to conduct literature reviews, secure ongoing donor funding, find political support, and build an argument as to how, why and when a solution should be implemented.

What this then means is that the pace of ICT solutions on the technical side often outpaces the international development side. As we all know, a perfectly executed piece of software, hardware, operating system, whatever, is useless if unused. Without constant market feedback loops telling us whether a solution has worked, the iterative process to innovation loses steam quickly.  

I have no doubt that ICT-based international development solutions will continue to grow in prominence and relevance in coming years. However, in order to achieve a better value add, the international development community – practitioners, donors, governments – will have to change the approach. We have to figure out how to disrupt ourselves.