The Evolution of ICT4D and My Career

A Simple Website Started It All

In keeping with the stereotype, as someone of Indian origin, I've always been naturally oriented to technology. Over the years, I've taught myself graphic design, how to code in HTML and (some) CSS, how to wireframe and prototype, and how to use content management systems. Unlike a lot of Indians/Indian-Americans, however, my passion for technology was like a bag of dry seeds - unless I found the figurative water, the interest wouldn't sprout.

I discovered what that water was in my undergraduate education. I satisfied my parents demands of being a doctor or getting an MBA by enrolling in one of the easiest majors of the business school. Instead of immersing myself in marketing consumer products to people, I took my lessons learned and ran a sort of small business of my own - our university's International Relations Organization (IRO).

At IRO, we hosted conferences that turned a sizeable profit and gave the students of the depressed part of the state new opportunities. We we took up causes that few of our classmates had heard of let alone cared about, including the crisis du jour of the time - Darfur, Sudan. Our crowning achievement was sending six students - myself included - to work with a microfinance organization in Togo, a small West African nation.

The MFI, HELP Africa, in Lomé, Togo

Tech, the Global State of the World and My Master's ThesisSomewhere along the way, I realized how important it was to digitally document everything we did. When reporters from the campus newspaper wanted to run a piece on us, they had all the background information they needed on our website. Several high school students cited our work as the main reason they wanted to come to our university. Having a comprehensive website of our work may not have been groundbreaking in 2006 on the global scale. It was through IRO, however, that I understood innovation in technology is usually not being the first ever, but being the first that works in a particular context.
After finishing my undergraduate degree and living in France for a year, I ended up at The New School in New York City for my Master degree in International Affairs. One of the main reasons I chose the school was to work with a woman named Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, who had been the head of the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Reports. The HDR quite literally summarizes the state of the world through a particular thematic lens. The 2001 edition was titled Making New Technologies Work for Human Development. From that report alone, I knew I had to work with this woman.

My wish came true through my thesis; Sakiko agreed to be my advisor. Before I understood what confirmation bias meant, I charged in knowing that my thesis would show the world how great information communications technology (ICT) had been for India. After all, nearly my entire family in the city of Bangalore had greatly benefitted from the ICT boom. Surely there were others.

After a number of discussions with Sakiko, I landed on the idea of comparing Indian IT to Senegal. I would evaluate how India's models of business process outsourcing, service delivery, and calls centers had impacted the local population and see if those models could be replicated in West Africa for the European market, much like Indians call centers largely serviced the United States and Canada.

I proposed doing field research for my thesis and won a grant to allow me two weeks of evidence gathering in Bangalore and the surrounding areas. I spoke to everyone from IT business owners, to local activists to management consultants. I went to nearly a dozen government agencies and tracked down population and statistics reports that were only available in paper form. It was exhausting and rewarding at the same time, especially at the end of my second week when I got an email from a leading researcher on the global tech industry confirming that from the best of her knowledge, this kind of work had never been done before.

Outside Vishtar, one of the NGOs I visited in Bangalore, India

One thing I could have never expected was how radically different my conclusions were from my starting assumptions. Business leaders and local activists alike told me that the only people who were hired for these well paid jobs already had relative wealth, as poor people did not have the soft skills - interpersonal communication, good hygiene, body language - needed to work at multi-national corporations. IT business owners told me international companies that started an office in Bangalore received incomprehensibly large tax breaks, often paying zero percent corporate tax for 10, 15 or even 20 years. This meant people who were forcibly displaced from their land to make room for the tech complexes received no compensation. No tax revenue from the tech industry went into the government system or services, property prices skyrocketed and priced out locals, wealth inequality grew exponentially, local resources were strained and the majority of the profits went to international companies.

While this cycle of gentrification due to the tech industry is common knowledge now, back in 2010, it was jarring to understand what was happening in India. What I thought had been the saving grace of India was actually hugely destructive for most local people. There's no doubt that the IT industry benefitted millions, but a disproportionate gain went to those who already owned property in the city and could get the needed education. My family's good fortune was anecdotal, it was not the norm. The barrier to technology adoption was a key point in the 2001 HDR Sakiko oversaw. I didn't realize until my thesis that applied to the industry as a whole, not just the individual products.

Using Tech and Finance for a More Resilient Africa

How tech reinforces inequality stayed with me. I decided to make a career out of making tech work for more people. A few years after finishing grad school, I walked into the New York City office of the United Nations World Food Programme. Ironically, being one of those lucky people with access to a good education, I landed a job as a Programme Officer on WFP's African Risk Capacity, which combined finance, insurance, physics, tech and data to create the first pan-African drought risk insurance mechanism at the national level. For the first time, the same insurance modeling techniques that allowed a commercial farmer in Iowa to receive millions in compensation for a bad crop yield would be applied to help the poorest farmers in sub-Saharan Africa receive near-immediate assistance if their crops failed and they could not afford to feed their families.

On a team retreat in South Africa

Working on ARC taught me a lot about the bureaucratic overload of the UN system, what a truly interdisciplinary team can look like, and how large data/big data can work for a greater good, at least in theory. It also taught me about what was then being formulated as a new-ish discipline called UX design. Living in New York, most of my friends worked in the private sector and two in particular were working in "user experience" or "user-centered design". This translated into building digital tech products that fit with how people already think. It was a radical departure from the method the UN did and mostly still uses: build it, force people to use it, pray it works. I started using the phrase, "The UN likes to build a lot of bad online tools that no one ever uses."

While UX design had brilliant potential, what was disheartening to me was how much time and effort went into building digital tech products that were ultimately for the purpose of making people buy more stuff. For a lot of companies, a poorly designed online platform means a customer ends up with a product they don't want. On the other hand, I was working on a tool that if not intuitive, might result in hundreds of thousands of people not getting the assistance they need to not die.

The same was true for a lot of other industries. At the time, my brother was working for an electronic medical records company and my father was dealing with terrible EMR platforms for his patients. Key in the wrong code, and the patient may not receive the right medicine. Similarly, what happens if a social worker couldn't distribute food stamps, or a fire department couldn't locate a burning house, or a student couldn't apply for financial aid to go to university? So much was being spent on getting someone to buy something, but those same principles were not being applied to life saving services because only a select few companies could afford the investment. We're now seeing the result with the Netflixes, Amazons and credit card companies of the world operating like fine-tuned machines while half of the global HIV/AIDS patients are being treated using digital services designed 10+ years ago.

Extreme Poverty in Burundi

After I left ARC in 2013, I embarked on the road of independent consulting broken up by a stint with UNICEF in Burundi. One of the lessons I have learned over the years is that most Americans think of the massive continent of Africa as a monolith of poor people and underdeveloped villages. In reality, the majority of black billionaires in the world are from and live in Nigeria, some of the fastest Internet connections in the world are in Kenya, and Cape Town, South Africa is probably the most beautiful city I have ever seen.

Burundi was not one of those African economic success stories. By the time I went there, I had worked throughout the African continent, but the poverty of Burundi was still hard to comprehend. It was my job to implement and deploy a platform called RapidPRO to help the Burundian Ministry of Health plan and track health services and commodities. It was also the first time in my life in which I had no idea where to start. In every other country I had been to, there was a real ICT ecosystem - telecom providers, millions of consumers, thousands of small and large business, hundreds of non-profit organizations, events, digital communities and even sub-cultures of techies. In Burundi, save a small website design company and a few self-taught coders UNICEF had recruited, the only thing that seemed to be keeping the ICT industry afloat were a handful of European telecom companies.

Burundian Health Center

I made it my mission to connect with all of the telecom companies and to see how they managed to stay in business. The simple answer was that they were losing money. In fact, all three were either charitable missions of a for-profit company or they were funded by the Aga Khan Foundation. One of the heads of engineering told me that their companies set up operations in part to stabilize the country, as the region overall was turning a huge profit. If Burundi went into another civil war that produced millions of refugees, neighboring countries would bear the brunt. So telecom companies decided to step in and provide a service everyone needs in hope it would help the political landscape. These companies understood the security risk of poverty. American companies did not.

Burundi was particularly challenging because as someone smarter than me pointed out, you can't innovate the basics. My boss and others responsible for funding the project had thought things through well. They had procured some ambulances, computers and medical supplies for local health centers because they understood even if tech made the system better, a more efficient system distributing nothing is still helping nothing. When I suggested bringing on an intern who was an electrical engineer, my boss agreed. But at the end of the day, we were left with the same fundamental problem. You needed grounded electricity, running water, roads, transportation and other infrastructure for things to work. You need the majority of the population to understand the fundamentals of a technology. Though it's possible to tackle one small piece of these issues in a project, no one project or organization can do all of these things at once. Just like in India, I saw how governments have to be able to provide basic services because the private sector will only to do something if they see a profitable gain. Of course. Technology can make something more efficient, but no technology can innovative around having the basics.

Good and Terrible Recognition Being an Author

For a number of reasons, I decided to leave my job with UNICEF Burundi and come back to New York City, where I threw myself into the marketing campaign and book tour of my debut novel. I had long known aspects of my writing career and working in ICT4D were tough to reconcile, including that it's impossible to do book events being based in a lot of Africa. Telecommuting in can be impossible when electricity isn't consistent and the time zone difference means finding a safe and secure spot in the middle of the night. So I was determined to take advantage of my time back in NYC and perhaps start an entirely new primary career.

Ironically, it was my marketing efforts that steered me back to ICT4D. One of the golden children of the modern-day tech era was social media. Millennials were and are famously cited (again, as a monolith) to care more about the social impact of a brand than the brand's products. Marketing campaigns have to connect on an emotional level with consumers or the brand seems heartless. Bearing all of this in mind, I set up book events in five different cities, authored articles and did interviews that spoke to this emotional message. And for good reason - I wrote an emotionally charged book.

My efforts worked. Within a year, I landed myself on the front page of USA Today, CNN India and The Advocate. Video clips I did ran in syndication and were viewed around the country, some even around the world. Dozens of people reached out with their own story, hundreds of people came out to the events, and thousands of people read my words.

Filming for a web series at USA Today

Then came the death threats. The first was in French and was an email sent directly to me. By the phrasing and from the IP address, I saw it originated in West Africa, probably Senegal. The next few threats came in English by email as well. Soon, in true viral form, the threats had spread through to Twitter, or as I started to call it: The Internet's Best Bullying Ground. Some were in graphic detail, others were probably bots designed to mimic the essence of a threat. Some had references to sexual violence. All of them were completely and totally disturbing.

By the time the last one came through, I had emailed 20 friends living within a 5-mile radius of me to distribute everyone's contact details in case the threat of violence turned into actual violence and someone needed to contact my family. I added an online security system to my website, and I turned down two high-paying jobs in areas I thought would put me at further risk. I gained weight, I stopped going out, and I felt like my life had careened out of control. It was only through the support of my friends, my brother and an ex that I made it through.

I did a lot of research into the possible courses of action against the people who threatened me. It didn't take long to figure out that there are few if any laws governing online abuse originating from other countries. Even within a jurisdiction like Palo Alto or San Francisco - where many of these technologies are born - there aren't many protections for those who face online abuse. Around this time, The Guardian published an article about online abuse, and it came at no surprise that their journalists who faced the overwhelming majority were a woman who writes about women's issues, an openly gay black man, and a brown woman.

Despite my efforts to move away from ICT4D, I had a project idea that I wanted to move forward. I connected to my ICT4D network only to hear many of my colleagues were dealing with the same existential crisis I was, albeit in different forms. In one case, a social media project meant to bring young women together was infiltrated by a sex trafficking ring. Several of the participants were tricked into meeting in person, abducted and sold into sex slavery. Another colleague was looking at initiatives to get students who were good at STEM to take on careers in coding apps, only to find out Google Play and Apple stores do not support work in most African countries, leaving the students with skills they could not use and a lot of wasted time they could have spent earning money. A third colleague did a study about online learning modules and concluded young girls were bullied so frequently that most felt they could not participate. Slowly but surely, we were all coming to the conclusion that beyond the hype, digital tech and specifically social media were doing a lot of damage.

Superficial/Substantive Tech

Somewhere in the deep throes of all things terrible about digital tech, I found a lot of glimpses of hope, namely, the number of people who thought my project idea had great merit and the audience I had cultivated for my book, neither of which would have been possible to find without the Internet. I thus decided to get a certificate in UX design and solidify the skills that I had been using for all of those years before. I made my ICT4D project idea my final project for the UX course.

The course itself was a great experience overall due to a smart class and an insightful, open-minded instructor. I had to admit that there were a lot of well-reasoned, thoughtful people working on the products that I had dismissed as unnecessary. The course made me pause every now and then and appreciate how some of the work presented in the class was helping people who didn't have the same means or motivation I have been lucky enough to have.

Unfortunately, a tech bro then arrived. On the first day of evaluations for the final projects, the day on which I presented, the panel of judges consisted of three white men, a hallmark of the homogeneity that plagues the tech industry. All three of them had made careers working on products that they themselves admitted were commodities for wealthy people. Among the worst was a motorcycle helmet that would allow the driver to watch TV while driving. I'm not joking.

Admirably, many of the students in my class chose to focus on problems that are actual issues, including homelessness in New York, children who have nightmares most nights, and a better system of understanding school choices in a particular neighborhood, especially low-income areas. Watching the panel criticize the projects, on the other hand, was hard to witness. According to their feedback, the context involved in the project didn't matter, the technology restrictions facing users didn't matter ("They should just upgrade their phones" was the advice I got), and the potential funding constraints were ignored. It was as though focusing on the user experience of a motorcycle helmet with a TV screen was more important than the fact that having a motorcycle helmet with a TV screen is a stupid and dangerous idea. It was as though being an active thinker who looks outside of the perceived norm has to ignore the real constraints of a society or an audience.

In the summer of 2016, I fortunately had the opportunity to channel some of those thoughts into a project I came up with as part of Art-A-Hack, a creative collective. The project was called "Superficial/Substantive" Tech. Our team of ICT4D professionals and coders spent a week discussing how to frame the project, and eventually made these two conclusions about the tech industry:

•  A deep understanding of superficial problems overshadows real societal problems being addressed.
• A superficial understanding of real societal problems overshadows real solutions being addressed.

Our Final Art-A-Hack Presentation

The parody project consisted of a VR experience, a fake app and a pitch deck for a fake company. The fake company "Pump It Up!" had people customize parts of a water pump through the app and "send those parts to Africa". The VR experience would then allow a user to take the parts sent and build a water pump. The project focused on the user experience of the app instead of the actual problem of water scarcity. The fake pitch deck reduced Africa down to a singular place that had easily solvable problems. Our commentary was on the tech community focusing on consumerism, using language like "solving problems" that gives importance to inane "needs", and reducing complicated issues to a few statements in a PowerPoint. To say the least, it was a cathartic project to put together, especially after my UX course project evaluation.

The Near-Present and Not Really a Conclusion

By the time I landed a job as a Solutions Designer and Insights Manager at a London-based NGO, I was ready for a reset in the industry. I needed to be excited again about the work I was doing, the impact it was making and potential good my work could have. In some ways, I was able to achieve this through focusing on UX and user centered design. I don't know if UX design is the panacea to a better and brighter tech world that the industry makes it out to be, but I do think it's a really great way to get teams talking to each other and to bring out opinions of people who normally don't want to or don't feel comfortable offering their opinions. If the team is paying attention, I also think that UX design can highlight when a team is dangerously homogenous.

The world has gotten smacked around with the past 18 months of the global political landscape - Brexit, Trump and the two referendums in counter protest have showed us how bad the situation, and how divided the United States and Europe have become. More and more people understand that it's dangerous to only care about the opinions and progress of a select few. Even if that hasn't quite yet made it to the mainstream's understanding of the tech industry, it doesn't decrease the importance of capturing diverse opinions now. In some small way, user centered design allows me to practice what I preach by including beneficiary opinions into the tools being created to help beneficiaries. It allows me to counteract the echo chamber that got us here.

One major concern still floats around in my mind, however. In the first class I ever took with Sakiko, she said a lot of the international development "industry" focuses on one kind of solution, then decides the solution was terribly misguided, then tries to undo what was done in the previous generation. The Millennium Development Goals were a prime example.

I can't help but wonder if ICT4D is this generation's solution to undo. For all of the promise that tech was supposed to offer, it seems as though many of us working in this field are on some kind of damage control. And it's not just us in ICT4D. Private sector companies are spending an increasingly large fraction of their budget on security to protect the users of the tools they created. Is that what we are doing? Will it be enough to use a new method of designing and making pre-emptive risk analysis the new norm? Or will we have to go one step further and actually discourage organizations that are not equipped for the possible fallout from working in ICT4D? As an industry, do the risks outweigh the gains? Or does it matter? Do we have a moral obligation to keep trying to make tech work for more people because tech will continue to evolve regardless of whether we try to make it more equitable?

To be honest, I don't know. And I don't think anyone else does, either. As a minority in several ways, I can say from my own personal experience that tech would be a lot scarier if I did not have the support systems I do to help me overcome the risks it poses. But that would never prompt me to discourage anyone else from using tech as a means to a better life. It would, however, prompt me to help them understand the potential consequences as best as possible.

All I can say is that for anyone concerned with the direction tech is taking our society, pay attention to what we do in ICT4D. So many ICT4D practitioners have been thinking about the fallout of tech longer than the tech companies themselves. It stands to reason what we learn in our work will shed light on the kind of world we'll all see in the future.



Find out more about my work at http://malakumar.com.

Advice to private sector companies trying "solve poverty" - from an International Development Practitioner

This was cross-posted on Medium, here.

 In the past few years, the start-up culture in the States and parts of Europe has exploded. Along with the explosion have come a record number of companies that aim to do a “social good” by providing products and services for the world’s poor. While the Global North’s[1] private sector (GNPS) wages its debate on what type of solution is needed – from social enterprises, to (lean) start-ups, to venture capital funds, to philanthropy to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives of major companies – I want to offer some thoughts from an international development prospective, regardless of which private sector solution you favor. After all, the areas these GNPS “social good” initiatives are aiming to reach come on the heels of decades of international development work. Both sides stand to learn a lot.

Ceremony with the Burundian Ministry of Health and the vaccination alliance, GAVI - October 2014

How International Development Thinking Differs

Level of Accountability

By far, the concept in international development (ID) work the GNPS seems to understand the least is level of accountability. In ID, our ultimate goals are to lessen poverty and better economic empowerment in a given context, such as a community, a city or even an entire country. If a GNPS company offers a product or service to a client that fails to meet their needs, there is no punitive recourse so long as legal obligations are met. If I go to the drugstore and buy paper towels that are not strong enough to handle and actually create more of a mess in my kitchen, the company that made the paper towels may choose to better their product to stay competitive, but there is no inherent obligation on their part to ensure my particular needs are met with their product. So long as the company sold what they advertised – paper towels – they have met their requirements.

On the other hand, one of the first things we learn in ID is that we must ensure stakeholder participation does not lead to a worse situation than before. Fulfilling this obligation is incredibly hard in places with weak governments, infrastructure, social benefits and a dearth of employment opportunities, because if our work fails the stakeholder, we have wasted their limited assets, time or trust. If we advise an impoverished person to participate in a training program that doesn’t yield better employment opportunities, we have asked them to spend time and money to commute to the training program, to forgo their normal daily work wages, and to raise their expectations for no benefit. If we advise a farmer to purchase an individual insurance policy to protect against failed crops, and then her crops fail but not to the extent to receive compensation, we have asked for money she could have used to better her yields or purchase food for her family. Even seemingly benign methods of participation have a trade-off, and it is up to us to determine what that means.

Because of this higher standard of accountability, ID organizations have robust monitoring and evaluation (M&E) mechanisms. The main purposes of M&E are to define what constitutes “success” and “failure”, how to prevent unintended harmful consequences, how to improve, and to document what went wrong. M&E is a huge chunk of any given ID project because it is central to protecting our stakeholders and to how ID organizations fulfill donor requirements. The idea of accountability is thus present from start to end of the ID work lifecycle.

Understanding a context

Being a minority (South Asian) in America, I can speak from lived experience that many companies poorly understand segments of the population in the Global North. However, there are commonly used methods to get around this poor comprehension; as we move toward the Internet of Things, more and more of these methods will involve passively generated data. Other common data examples include analyzing purchase patterns and Internet analytics, or conducting focus groups or surveys.

Data certainly exists in the Global South. A large part of what the United Nations (UN) does is collect and analyze data on everything from populations to health centers to crop yields. Data in Global South often does not, however, paint as complete a picture because there are so many more unknowns about a society. That’s why building relationships on the ground is invaluable to contextualizing our work. In fact, these relationships are one set of critical advantages proper ID organizations, particularly the UN, have. Without these relationships, we do not understand why a community does what it does, where a community gets its information, what values are held in high regard, and what we can do to better the situation.

Similarly, understanding a country’s current landscape requires historical, political, and economic knowledge. I once attended an event hosted by a private sector firm that proclaims itself as a “leader in international development consulting”. As I got into the elevator to leave the event, I overheard one of the firm’s associates say that tonight she needs to, “Put together a presentation on Ethiopian food security”. The Ethiopia country office of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) is a massive operation, serving 8 million+ people. The time, money, and resources that go into WFP Ethiopia cannot be boiled down into a few PowerPoint slides, and neither can the entire food security landscape of the country.

One running joke I have is that ID is all think and no action, while the private sector is no think and all action. Of course the truth for both sides is somewhere in between. It should go without saying that if an issue is central to a company’s work the company needs to have a thorough understanding of the landscape beyond just market competitors.

Recommendations for GNPS companies trying to “solve poverty”

Define “poor”

Whether someone makes 2 USD a day or 10 USD a day makes a big difference. Anyone who wants to work with the “poor” should define what they actually mean by "poor". We have numerous indexes in ID to define and contextualize poverty – use them! Common indexes include GDP per capita, the Human Development Index and the Gini coefficient.

Do not push products and services unnecessarily

Along with understanding what “poor” actually means, a company trying “solve poverty” should understand their job is not simply to push products and services. Every company thinks they have stumbled onto something truly innovative, and while some products and services could do a lot of good in a particular context, to truly alleviate poverty and better economic empowerment, the humility to differentiate between a market opportunity and a value-add is critical.

Do not be afraid of the government

As an ID practitioner, it is truly painful to watch current US politics because the Republican party seems convinced that the government fundamentally has no place in helping people. For those of us who have worked intimately with governments that have little capacity, we know nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that the poorest of the poor will not be captured by the private sector (Global North or Global South). Further, certain needed services, like public transportation and healthcare, have to work at scale (and often at a loss) to stay viable, and therefore cannot be privately run.

ID work is not competing with the government. More often than not, we are working directly with the government to strengthen systems and services. Likewise, a GNPS company should not compete with or circumvent the government. Undoubtedly working with governments can be expensive and time-consuming, but even if direct collaboration with a government is not possible, a GNPS company should at least be aware of how the government operates, what they do, and who should be providing what.

Learn international development language

Like every industry or sector, ID practitioners use a set of terms and phrases – we have our own language. For the reasons listed above, ID work is important to a GNPS company trying to “solve poverty”. Some of the most brilliant colleagues with whom I have ever worked have been based in sub-Saharan Africa, rural South Asia and Latin America for years. They will not learn GNPS lingo, nor should they be expected to. If you want to work with them, learn how to communicate with them, even if that means finding someone like me who straddles the two worlds to translate.

Good luck, do well at doing good and get used to using a lot of acronyms.

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[1] I am not a fan of this term but am using it for simplicity’s sake.

LGBTQI in the context of ICT4D

Note: This summary is also available on the Technology Salon website and Linda Raftree's blog.

Click here to download the Word or PDF version.

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By: Mala Kumar and Linda Raftree

Our April 21st NYC Technology Salon focused on issues related to the LGBT ICT4D community, including how LGBTQI issues are addressed in the context of stakeholders and ICT4D staff. We examined specific concerns that ICT4D practitioners who identify as LGBTQI have, as well as how LGBTQI stakeholders are (or are not) incorporated into ICT4D projects, programs and policies. Among the many issues covered in the Salon, the role of the Internet and mobile devices for both community building and surveillance/security concerns played a central part in much of the discussion.

To frame the discussion, participants were asked to think about how LGBTQI issues within ICT4D (and more broadly, development) are akin to gender. Mainstreaming gender in development starts with how organizations treat their own staff. Implementing programs, projects and policies with a focus on gender cannot happen if the implementers do not first understand how to treat staff, colleagues and those closest to them (i.e. family, friends). Likewise, without a proper understanding of LGBTQI colleagues and staff, programs that address LGBTQI stakeholders will be ineffective.

The lead discussants of the Salon were Mala Kumar, writer and former UN ICT4D staff, Tania Lee, current IRC ICT4D Program Officer, and Robert Valadéz, current UN ICT4D staff. Linda Raftree moderated the discussion.

Unpacking LGBTQI

The first discussant pointed out how we as ICT4D/development practitioners think of the acronym LGBTQI, particularly the T and I – transgender and intersex. Often, development work focuses on the sexual identity portion of the acronym (the LGBQ), and not what is considered in Western countries as transgenderism.

As one participant said, the very label of “transgender” is hard to convey in many countries where “third gender” and “two-spirit gender” exist. These disagreements in terminology have – in Bangladesh and Nepal for example – resulted in creating conflict and division of interest within LGBTQI communities. In other countries, such as Thailand and parts of the Middle East, “transgenderism” can be considered more “normal” or societally acceptable than homosexuality. Across Africa, Latin America, North America and Europe, homosexuality is a better understood – albeit sometimes severely criminalized and socially rejected – concept than transgenderism.

One participant cited that in her previous first-hand work on services for lesbian, gay and bisexual people; often in North America, transgender communities are prioritized less in LGBTQI services. In many cases she saw in San Francisco, homeless youth would identify as anything in order to gain access to needed services. Only after the services were provided did the beneficiaries realize the consequences of self-reporting or incorrectly self-reporting.

Security concerns within Unpacking LGBTQI

For many people, the very notion of self-identifying as LGBTQI poses severe security risks. From a data collection standpoint, this results in large problems in accurate representation of populations. It also results in privacy concerns. As one discussant mentioned, development and ICT4D teams often do not have the technical capacity (i.e. statisticians, software engineers) to properly anonymize data and/or keep data on servers safe from hackers. On the other hand, the biggest threat to security may just be “your dad finding your phone and reading a text message,” as one person noted.

Being an LGBTQI staff in ICT4D

Our second lead discussant spoke about being (and being perceived as) an LGBTQI staff member in ICT4D. She noted that many of the ICT4D hubs, labs, centers, etc. are in countries that are notoriously homophobic. Examples include Uganda (Kampala), Kenya (Nairobi), Nigeria (Abuja, Lagos), Kosovo and Ethiopia (Addis). This puts people who are interested in technology for development and are queer at a distinct disadvantage.

Some of the challenges she highlighted include that ICT4D attracts colleagues from around the world who are the most likely to be adept at computers and Internet usage, and therefore more likely to seek out and find information about other staff/colleagues online. If those who are searching are homophobic, finding "evidence" against colleagues can be both easy and easy to disseminate. Along those lines, ICT4D practitioners are encouraged (and sometimes necessitated) to blog, use social media, and keep an online presence. In fact, many people in ICT4D find posts and contracts this way. However, keeping online professional and personal presences completely separate is incredibly challenging. Since ICT4D practitioners are working with colleagues most likely to actually find colleagues online, queer ICT4D practitioners are presented with a unique dilemma.

ICT4D practitioners are arguably the set of people within development that are the best fitted to utilize technology and programmatic knowledge to self-advocate as LGBT staff and for LGBT stakeholder inclusion. However, how are queer ICT4D staff supposed to balance safety concerns and professional advancement limitations when dealing with homophobic staff? This issue is further compounded (especially in the UN, as one participant noted) by being awarded the commonly used project-based contracts, which give staff little to no job security, bargaining power or general protection when working overseas.

Security concerns within being an LGBTQI staff in ICT4D

A participant who works in North America for a Kenyan-based company said that none of her colleagues ever mentioned her orientation, even though they must have found her publicly viewable blog on gender and she is not able to easily disguise her orientation. She talked about always finding and connecting to the local queer community wherever she goes, often through the Internet, and tries to support local organizations working on LGBT issues. Still, she and several other participants and discussants emphasized their need to segment online personal and professional lives to remain safe.

Another participant mentioned his time working in Ethiopia. The staff from the center he worked with made openly hostile remarks about gays, which reinforced his need to stay closeted. He noticed that the ICT staff of the organization made a concerted effort to research people online, and that Facebook made it difficult, if not impossible, to keep personal and private lives separate.

Another person reiterated this point by saying that as a gay Latino man, and the first person in his family to go to university, grad school and work in a professional job, he is a role model to many people in his community. He wants to offer guidance and support, and used to do so with a public online presence. However, at his current internationally-focused job he feels the need to self-censor and has effectively limited talking about his public online presence, because he often interacts with high level officials who are hostile towards the LGBTQI community.

One discussant also echoed this idea, saying that she is becoming a voice for the queer South Asian community, which is important because much of LGBT media is very white. The tradeoff for becoming this voice is compromising her career in the field because she cannot accept a lot of posts because they do not offer adequate support and security.

Intersectionality

Several participants and discussants offered their own experiences on the various levels of hostility and danger involved with even being suspected as gay. One (female) participant began a relationship with a woman while working in a very conservative country, and recalled being terrified at being killed over the relationship. Local colleagues began to suspect, and eventually physically intervened by showing up at her house. This participant cited her “light skinned privilege” as one reason that she did not suffer serious consequences from her actions.

Another participant recounted his time with the US Peace Corps. After a year, he started coming out and dating people in host country. When one relationship went awry and he was turned into the police for being gay, nothing came of the charges. Meanwhile, he saw local gay men being thrown into – and sometimes dying in – jail for the same charges. He and some other participants noted their relative privilege in these situations because they are white. This participant said he felt that as a white male, he felt a sense of invincibility.

In contrast, a participant from an African country described his experience growing up and using ICTs as an escape because any physical indication he was gay would have landed him in jail, or worse. He had to learn how to change his mannerisms to be more masculine, had to learn how to disengage from social situations in real life, and live in the shadows.

One of the discussants echoed these concerns, saying that as a queer woman of color, everything is compounded. She was recruited for a position at a UN Agency in Kenya, but turned the post down because of the hostility towards gays and lesbians there. However, she noted that some queer people she has met – all white men from the States or Europe – have had overall positive experiences being gay with the UN.

Perceived as predators

One person brought up the “predator” stereotype often associated with gay men. For this reason, he and his partner have had to turn down media opportunities where they could have served as role models for the gay community, especially poor, gay queer men of color, who are one of the most difficult socioeconomic classes to reach.

Monitoring and baiting by the government

One participant who grew up in Cameroon mentioned that queer communities in his country use the Internet cautiously, even though it’s the best resource to find other queer people. The reason for the caution is that government officials have been known to pose as queer people to bait real users for illegal gay activity.

Several other participants cited this same phenomenon in different forms. A recent article talked about Egypt using new online surveillance tactics to find LGBTQI people. Some believe that this type of surveillance will also happen in Nigeria, a notoriously hostile country towards LGBTQI persons and other places.

There was also discussion about what IP or technology is the safest for LGBTQI people. While the Internet can be monitored and traced back to a specific user, being able to connect from multiple access points and with varying levels of security creates a sense of anonymity that phones cannot provide. A person also generally carries phones, so if the government intercepts a message on either the originating or receiving device, implications of existing messages are immediate unless a user can convince the government the device was stolen or used by someone else. In contrast, phones are more easily disposable and in several countries do not require registration (or a registered SIM card) to a specific person.

In Ethiopia, the government has control over the phone networks and can in theory monitor these messages for LGBTQI activity. This poses a particular threat since there is already legal precedent for convictions of illegal activity based on text messages. In some countries, major telecom carriers are owned by a national government. In others, major telecom carries are national subsidiaries of an international company.

Another major concern raised relates back to privacy. Many major international development organizations do not have the capacity or ability to retain necessary software engineers, ICT architects and system operators, statisticians and other technology people to properly prevent Internet hacks and surveillance. In some cases, this work is illegal by national government policy, and thus also requires legal advocacy. The mere collection of data and information can therefore pose a security threat to staff and stakeholders – LGBTQI and allies, alike.

The “queer divide”

One discussant asked the group for data or anecdotal information related to the “queer divide.” A commonly understood problem in ICT4D work are divides – between genders, urban and rural, rich and poor, socially accepted and socially marginalized. There have also been studies to clearly demonstrate that people who are naturally extroverted and not shy benefit more from any given program or project. As such, is there any data to support a “queer divide” between those who are LGBTQI and those who are not, he wondered. As demonstrated in the above sections, many queer people are forced to disengage socially and retreat from “normal” society to stay safe.

Success Stories, key organizations and resources

Participants mentioned organizations and examples of more progressive policies for LGBTQI staff and stakeholders (this list is not comprehensive, nor does it suggest these organizations’ policies are foolproof), including:

• UN Women, UNICEF and LGBT stakeholder inclusion
• USAID staff training
• Peace Corps – Americans and local on-the-ground staff go through sensitivity trainings
• US Foreign Service provides comprehensive security for its staff
• Ally Forney Center – good training, modeling and sensitivity activities
• Sylvia Rivera Law Project
• Virginia Anti-Violence Project

We also compiled a list of resources on the topic here.

What can we do moving forward?

• Engage relevant organizations, such as Out in Tech and Lesbians who Tech, with specific solutions, such as coding privacy protocols for online communities and helping grassroots organizations target ads to relevant stakeholders.
• Lobby smartphone manufacturers to increase privacy protections on mobile devices.
• Lobby US and other national governments to introduce “Right to be forgotten” law, which allows Internet users to wipe all records of themselves and personal activity.
• Support organizations and services that offer legal council to those in need.
• Demand better and more comprehensive protection for LGBTQI staff, consultants and interns in international organizations.

Key questions to work on...

• In some countries, an African government owns telecom companies. In others, telecom companies are national subsidiaries of international corporations. In countries in which the government is actively or planning on actively surveying networks for LGBTQI activity, how does the type of telecom company factor in?
• What datasets do we need on LGBTQI people for better programming?
• How do we properly anonymize data collected? What are the standards of best practices?
• What policies need to be in place to better protect LGBTQI staff, consultants and interns? What kind of sensitizing activities, trainings and programming need to be done for local staff and less LGBTQI sensitive international staff in ICT4D organizations?
• How much capacity have ICT4D/international organizations lost as a result of their policies for LGBTQI staff and stakeholders?
• What are the roles and obligations of ICT4D/international organizations to their LGBTQI staff, now and in the future?
• What are the ICT4D and international development programmatic links with LGBT stakeholders and staff? How does LGBT stakeholders intersect with water? Public health? Nutrition? Food security? Governance and transparency? Human rights? Humanitarian crises? How does LGBT staff intersect with capacity? Trainings? Programming?
• How do we safely and responsibility increase visibility of LGBTQI people around the world?
• How do we engage tech companies that are pro-LGBTQI, including Google, to do more for those who cannot or do not engage with their services?
• What are the economic costs of homophobia, and does this provide a compelling enough case for countries to stop systemic LGBTQI-phobic behavior?
• How do we mainstream LGBTQI issues in bigger development conferences and discussions?

Thanks to the great folks at ThoughtWorks for hosting and providing a lovely breakfast to us! Technology Salons are carried out under Chatham House Rule, so no attribution has been made. If you'd like to join us for Technology Salons in future, sign up here!

The Value Add in ICT4D

I work at the intersection of information technology and international development, or how ICT platforms and technologies can better existing development solutions. Including the work I did for my Masters thesis, I have approached these questions in or about 10+ countries across Africa, and in India. Each of these countries has an ICT ecosystem comprised of individuals, for-profit companies, the UN, NGOs and governments. The pervasiveness and strength of these ecosystems varies widely throughout the African continent. (India is arguably one of the most advanced ICT ecosystems in the world, though the level of sophistication of the ICT industry within the country is also massive).

Technology in the African continent presents an interesting opportunity and an often frustrating paradox. Unlike the Global North, most of sub-Saharan Africa has not and probably never will go through an industrial revolution, at least not in the sense of building physical infrastructure for use by the common person. Mobile technologies and even some PC-based technologies are thus a huge economic and social opportunity, as they can potentially connect large segments of people to global opportunities with relatively minimal physical infrastructure. Yet, some physical infrastructure is still required to make these opportunities realized. In many countries that have large coastlines and/or a large population, the ICT ecosystem is growing and strengthening everyday. Large telecom companies, such as Orange, Vodacom, and MTN are investing heavily in the next generation of mobile users in Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and still others.

This investment is not, however, universally pervasive across the continent. I currently sit in one such country example, where extreme poverty, landlocked (i.e. not on an ocean coast) borders, a poorly educated and small population, and little existing infrastructure create huge disincentives for private sector investment. Further, much of the population in countries that do have a strong ICT ecosystem are not reached through technology, and in fact are crowded or priced out as the upper echelons of technology wealth grow in a non-inclusive way.

How we approach and use technology in our day-to-day lives in the Global North does not exist in the psyche of most Africans. If the average sub-Saharan African (not including South Africans) wants to find a place to eat, they don't use Yelp. If they want to contact a friend, they don't email. Because of a lack of competition or lack of access in many African markets, this "plugging in" to the banal tech world is not happening at the same pace as it is outside of the continent. Africans aren't nearly as likely to (or be able to) to turn to technology to find solutions to their problems, no matter what the level of complexity.

That, in my opinion, is where my work currently adds the most value. I love technology, I find it interesting, and I find ICT-based development solutions to be some of the most sustainable in the field. But, as the ICT4D field now stands, I don't think the platforms we build, the projects we conceive, or the partnerships we launch is what is really adding the most value to the African continent. I find the work incredibly interesting, and I do think some of the projects I have done will contribute greatly to a very specific problem on the continent. I don't, however, think any of my projects will completely reface the course of a large development problem, such as food insecurity or high infant mortality.

The direct impact of technology on development solutions does have the potential to revolutionize these problems. To reach that point, what I think needs to happen is simply this - more investment. Technological innovation demands iterative processes, and continued development. Solutions by and for Africans are no exception, but with the harsh realities of poverty, political instability, and limited opportunity, the waiting period to realize a profit in technology is not possible for most people. Until the average African individual can invest in themselves through higher education or entrepreneurial risk, a huge and important opportunity exists for the rest of the ICT ecosystem.

Until more money, more time, and more skills are invested to migrate away from a very piecewise ICT4D project world, my main value add rests in introducing a new way of thinking. Hopefully I will soon find my way to a world where the technology itself creates the most value.

International Development - The Process versus the Theme

I'm very fortunate to have been born to parents that were both willing and able to pay for my education. However, as with most Indian parents, the payment of my undergraduate degree came with a few restrictions:

- It must be public and in-state (I'm from the US state of Virginia)
- You have to do science/pre-medicine or business

Growing up with many medical doctors in the family, I knew straightaway that I had neither the passion nor aptitude for many aspects of being a physician, so I chose business. The less-than-desirable atmosphere my university business school created for me as a minority woman* aside, I think I made the right choice. Business classes are about learning a process, and it was then that I realized the subjects that took the least effort on my part to do well (namely, math) was because I am a process-oriented person.

If one looks at any major UN agency, NGO or non-profit in international development, one can quickly see how jobs are organized - by theme. UNDP, for example, breaks their posts up in themes including democratic governance, poverty reduction, and environment and energy. The IRC, a major international NGO that supports refugees, has child protection, economic recovery and development, and governance and rights as a few of their themes. Within each theme, there are still further sub-divisions based on specific content. For example, the IRC includes livelihoods within economic recovery and development.

A Senior Technical Advisor for environmental policy within the UN could have a vastly varied skill set. As with one of my previous bosses, they could be an atmospheric physicist, or a lawyer, or a statistician, or simply a person with a lot of knowledge on environmental policy. Thus, without specializing in a specific theme, searching for international development jobs can be a nightmare, as the title of a post does not tell you much about the skills required.

Conversely, many private sectors jobs - especially in consulting - are much less theme focused. Certainly having a certain background or degree will play in to what clients a consultant secures; however, a strategy consultant can easily switch from advising a pharmaceutical company to an engineering firm, to a food and beverage conglomerate. These switches can easily happen every few years, because much of consulting is about the process, not being an expert in knowledge of a theme.

I knew by my senior year of university that my passion truly lied in international development; ironic to my process-orientation, I decided to make my career there. Having now narrowed my focus on ICT4D, which is the application of ICT-based solutions for international development, I swung back to a more process-oriented method. Technology development, deployment and implementation is very much about the process. In the past seven months, I have networked non-stop for my next long-term ICT4D job. I realize part of my lack of success is due to this process versus theme.

In international development, I have worked in disaster risk management; public health; nutrition; economic, social and cultural rights, and microfinance. Because I have not focused on one kind of theme, I appear as a generalist in international development. Because I have made my career in places that have not invested in me receiving specific certifications, such as PMP, Prince2, or Agile/Scrum, I appear under-certified to many private sector recruiters. I am caught in a limbo between the two worlds, despite having a wealth of experience and skill sets that easily demonstrate I can successfully take on a multitude of jobs.

Of course, there are process oriented companies in international development - namely private sector development firms. Though without an MBA and former management or strategy consulting experience, my application quickly gets lost in pile. As much as my work, as much work in the UN can focus on a process, the processes are not as known or as emphasized either internally and externally.

While I still have hope that ICT4D will become a more commonly known and appreciated niche in international development, the waiting game to secure relevant jobs is a struggle in an already highly competitive field. My advice to those looking to get into the international development career path is this: focus on a theme, develop a highly technical skill set (preferably quantitative in nature), and network like crazy. Things will change, but as with all things international development, that will not happen quickly.
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* I plan on elaborating this point in a future post about why diversity initiatives actually matter.

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Related Posts:

• Big data needs to make the world a better place
• STEM - force the technology to the person, not the person to technology

We need to better force the technology to come to the person instead of forcing the person to come to the technology

If one were to take my education and professional background and turn it into a survey that could be aggregated to derive trends, my profile would not be included in the STEM category. My bachelors degree was in marketing, my masters degree was in international affairs, and my work is in international development. Minus a year of directly being called an IT project manager, broad categories would classify most, if not all, of my experience as business or liberal arts. Fair enough, right?

Not really. For those of you who know me, you know that my specific brand of international development is mostly focused on the role of information communications technology (ICT). Ironically enough, it was through the student international affairs organization I ran in undergrad that first alerted me to the power of ICT in economically emerging contexts, as it was through this organization that I helped build my first website. From there, my professional work has included all kinds of research, UI design, web content, and information architecture – all to do with the T in STEM – technology.

Yet despite my total embrace of using and wanting to learn more about technology in my career, I am not considered a part of STEM fields. Not only does it make it insanely difficult to talk to both engineering companies and many of my international development colleagues about what exactly I do, it’s discouraging and often isolating to not be given much of a platform to embed myself further in the intersection of the two fields. It’s also misleading. If I were to do the exact same work at an engineering company, my title may change, and my inclusion in the STEM category also may change, even though my job didn’t.

I am an ardent supporter of all of the initiatives of the White House, major corporations, academic institutions, and the like to actively encourage and recruit females to take on the hardest, most challenging, most complicated STEM majors, jobs and career paths possible. But while I think these campaigns and initiatives are incredibly important to the future of female-kind, and really world-kind, I think there is a huge opportunity that is being missed. And that opportunity is mainstreaming technology; it’s forcing the technology to come to person instead of forcing the person to go to the technology.

The UN is a perfect example. There are thousands of brilliant, analytical, logical thinkers that work at the various agencies and the Secretariat of the UN. But because staff members were not forced to be exposed to technology early on, and were subsequently able to get away with never learning much about their computer, with very few exceptions, anything ICT is considered tangential or limited in role to the core operations.

Of course, technology is merely a facilitator of solutions, and often not the solution itself. And this is precisely why it is such a waste to not be promoting technology as a mainstreamed component of non-STEM classified professions. Even if the US Government and every major tech company were to allocate a significant portion of their budgets to promoting STEM majors in high schools and universities around the world, it may take decades to significantly shift the current 24% figure of total STEM roles being done by women. Even if it didn’t, what about the generations of women – mine included – who are currently in the workforce in non-STEM classified roles? Should they be ignored if they can’t afford to go back to school and get a relevant degree?

Consider some of the most popular (by number of women employed) industries for women in the States and Europe:

·      Education

·      Human Resources

·      Social Work

·      Fashion/retail

Based on my experience, I can safely guess the majority (or at least close to half) of the people employed at the UN in professional capacities are also women.

So imagine then that in addition to encouraging women to go into unequivocal, undisputable STEM professions, we also mainstreamed the use of technology in the above professions? I’m not speaking in small strokes, like having a teacher give homework out to students via a tablet, I mean actually require a technology component to these professions.

Imagine if your primary school teacher set up the information architecture to have each student digitally paired with a foreign pen pal? Or the HR rep worked directly with software engineers to set up how job-sourcing sites interact with their department? Or a social worker design an app to pinpoint areas most prone to a certain type of violence, so programmatic efforts could bring workshops where most needed? Or a wedding gown designer worked with a 3-D printer to prototype new designs on different body types?

Sure, there are undoubtedly women who are doing each of the above, but how many of them are doing ICT work for their jobs electively or as a requirement? Imagine how many more people would reach a much higher level of ICT competence if we figured out a way to make this a core requirement of all work? The possibilities are endless, yet we seem to disproportionately focus on driving people to STEM professions instead of promoting STEM applications in all professions. As a result, the above functions now almost entirely go to engineers, programmers, or IT people instead of being done by the experts in the actual profession.

Of course one could make the argument that cross-disciplinary education or professional experience is always useful, so this idea is already being done. And indeed, some links between do exist between traditionally liberal arts and STEM degrees and professions, such as international development and science (public health), art and math (graphic design, architecture), and sociology and engineering (urban planning).

One could also argue that not every job can include every kind of function. True, though 20 years ago, many people would have argued there is little to no application to use the Internet in their profession. 30 years ago, the same was said about computers; 100 years ago, the same was said about human resources departments. The point is that as the world evolves, so do the requirements to make it function. Not giving everyone the opportunity to exercise what is increasingly being seen as a life skill - the use of STEM in the work place - sets a dangerous precedent that will surely affect generations like mine that did not have STEM requirements past high school.

I like to tell myself that had I known there are degrees focused on the intersection of technology and international development (called ICT4D), I would have gone for that instead of an M.A. in International Affairs, but I didn’t, and I am not sure when I started my Masters if I knew that’s what I even wanted. It wasn’t until I started researching for other classes that I realized what is out there, but by then it was too late; I was already an expensive semester into my courses, and there were neither any tracks nor classes in my department geared towards this ICT4D intersection.

Ultimately, what I am saying is that if we want to encourage any group of people, be it women, minorities, or the poor to go into STEM fields, we need to do a better job of making STEM work applicable and apparent to those who are choosing or already in another field. I myself chose international development out an overwhelming desire to make the planet a better place; had I known how critical technology could be to the equation, perhaps I would have gone into a STEM field and worked my way into the international development world. Better yet, maybe the Mala of the next generation will choose exactly the same degrees and work places I did, but have the option to better engage with technology. Who knows, maybe next generation Mala will even be included in the elusive STEM category.

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.