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.  

The Monetization of Risk in Our Lives

I have been lucky enough to do a lot in my life so far. If I were to die tomorrow, my range of experiences could compete with the lifetimes of many people in the world. Certainly two of the main reasons for this are due to my personality and interests. However, it would be in extremely poor taste if I neglected to mention one of the other main reasons - my monetary risk in doing what I love is very low. And in America, monetary risk is everything, even if it shouldn’t be.

For all of the great things about the United States, certainly one of the country's national shames is the number of people living in poverty. According to recent census data, 46.5 million people, or about 1 out of 7 of the total US population lives below the national poverty line. To get a better sense of what this means, visit the Occupy movement website or the many progressive content curation sites online, which have done a thorough job of creating infographics explaining the income inequality in this country that underlies how a nation so rich[1] can have so many people who are so poor.

When compared to Western Europe, the UK, and Australia, the lack of social safety nets afforded to American citizens and residents is both obvious and astonishing. Sure, one could argue the quality of services and systems in the States is superior, but the fact remains that in order to get health care[2], a higher education, or to find access to reliable public transportation, most people living in America do not have a free or even cheap option. If you are living in America and do not have a certain level of income (be it your own or through someone who is supporting you), you could easily starve, drop out of school, or die of a treatable condition.

Opinions aside on what the solutions are to this rather abysmal problem, these lack of social safety nets present a phenomenon that seems to be increasing in intensity as the economy continues to stagnate and the GOP shuts down the government – the monetization of life risk. At the UN World Food Programme, I worked on a project that quantified drought risk in terms of dollars. That is to say, if a drought were to occur, what is the cost of dealing with its effects? For the insurance mechanism I was working on, this method of approaching risk makes sense. In life, monetization is only one way to approach risk, yet it dominates the way we think of success (and therefore success in mitigating risk).

I have had every incentive to work hard to build my own career, to live in a place I enjoy, and to buy the things and fund the experiences that I want. However, being an incredibly fortunate individual who was born to parents who are both willing and able to provide me with a roof, food and clothes whenever I'm in need, I have been able to approach the world with the idea that if all else fails, I will still survive with a decent quality of life. If I completely fail to financially support myself, I will not starve or be forced out on the street. In having this kind of freedom, I have been able to measure the risks of my life in ways other than monetarily – the risk of being unhappy, the risk of not pursuing a career I want, the risk of not helping others in my work, the risk of not being surrounded by a community I find desirable.

Of course approaching life this way has led to its ups and downs, though even in the lows, I have the mitigated the risk of unhappiness in that I have broken ground on something that is truly important to me. Of course many people who do not have the safety nets my family has provided have also approached life this way. And certainly what we desire in life shifts as what we have available to us changes; someone who was not born into a life that allowed for basic amenities may simply want to provide, may simply be happy in providing that security to their children.

However, it also stands to reason that in not living in a country that provides enough to survive (let alone have a decent quality of life) to everyone, a very significant portion – likely even the majority – of the American population has had to make decisions based primarily, if not entirely, on monetary risk. Put in a very cliché way, much of the American population has approached life knowing they cannot follow their dreams if their dreams do not pay enough. It doesn’t matter if someone in this segment of the population is an especially talented computer engineer, grief counselor, artist, or teacher. If they feel as though the monetary returns in their investment to pursue what they want cannot provide enough to survive, there is no adequate safety net on which to fall back.

Some would argue that the incentive to simply survive means that people work harder than they would otherwise. Indeed, The Economist reported in their latest issue that the Pew Research Center found only 59% of Americans feel as though the government has a responsibility to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves, down from 71% during the Reagan years (1980s). As an international development practitioner, to that I simply say, look at the world around you. The basic need to survive in countries of South Asia, West Africa and Central America is not enough to take care of everyone when there is not enough to go around or the reality in place systematically keeps people at the bottom. Creating more from something is much easier than creating something from nothing.

Optimistically, this country has not wavered on the idea that anybody can become successful, regardless of race, creed, religion, or background. Unfortunately, with the increase in people who do not want social safety nets for all and the ever-declining social services provided in the United States, putting non-monetized life risk ahead will always have the danger of potentially not surviving. Without any breathing room, someone who could have been the next Albert Einstein may never feel empowered to move beyond a life as a cashier. And why would they? The risk is too high.

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[1] The 2012 GDP of the United States was USD 15.68 trillion.

[2] The States that have embraced the Affordable Health Care Act will be able to provide much cheaper options to more people starting in January 2014. Still, these options are much more expensive that our Western counterparts.

The Danger of Normalizing Obesity

As a kid, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. Like many first children of a household, I was born in a period of my parents’ life during which they were still establishing careers, house, etc. So contrary to my brother’s upbringing, much of my earlier years were heavily influenced by my mother’s parents. Besides having a natural sweet tooth, my grandmother grew up in abject poverty. When she immigrated to the States, she took great pleasure in discovering sugar in all of its American forms. Since sugar was a commodity of luxury in India that she had often been denied, her natural instinct was to shower me with all my heart’s content. Having a strong sweet tooth myself, yet little moderation, I was obese by the age of eight. 

The peak of my heavy period was my senior year of high school. I spanned out to tightly fill a size 13 pair of jeans.[1] Certainly a 13 isn’t the most extreme of American sizes, but considering my age, that I came from a highly educated family with good constant access to healthy food, advanced medicine, a life that allowed for recreation time, and a solid understanding of the long-term health implications of obesity, my size was hard to justify short of a psychological explanation, which I have to admit I could not blame. It wasn’t until I saw myself on TV towards the end of that school year that I realized how large I had become.

I decided to make a lifestyle change, and have been an avid gym rat ever since. I take bad food in moderation and eat plenty of the good, all in balanced portion sizes. In the ten years since I made that change, I have lived everywhere from the cusp of the Sahara desert to some of the most expensive parts of Europe and the States. I have been through major surgery, dealt with a few traumatic events, and been through many highs and lows. Understandably there were some bad weeks in these ten years. Still, through it all, I have remained very consistent in always finding a way to exercise, to get proper nutrients, to find a way to take care of myself. After losing that weight, I become a happier, better, stronger person. Most of the health problems I had went away, I stopped having mood swings, and even my skin and hair look better.

When I was in grad school, I took a small road trip with two of my classmates and the sister of one. During that trip, the sister explained that she was working on a thesis examining a media movement in South Africa among HIV/AIDS infected people. While the movement did a lot good in bringing a much needed voice to those who were infected to ensure they were being treated fairly and HIV/AIDS as a disease was understood, the movement went too far as to normalize the disease itself. It was diminishing the gravity of what it meant to be infected. It was building an exaggerated sense of community in HIV/AIDS patients that it had almost become a badge of honor to be infected. Public health officials were concerned the simple fact that AIDS is a life threatening disease was being lost in the messaging of the campaign.

I by no means wish to suggest that discriminating against someone who is obese is anything but illogical. We all know physical lazy people who are mentally very driven, and physical driven people who are mentally very lazy. Being thin doesn’t automatically mean someone is healthy or in shape, and being overweight doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t care about their body. And in fact, it is not uncommon to see blogs, online forums, commercials and other media outlets promote the very pragmatic ideas of being comfortable in one's own skin, not being obsessed with size, and having a healthy self-image. 

Though not as extreme, my concern, however, is related to the example above: obesity is becoming normalized. Being obese is often now explained as “just another trait” some people have, like one’s race or sexual orientation. The problem is that in reality, the message of self-confidence can be misconstrued to mean that being concerned with one’s health and weight are categorically superficial goals. In that skewed interpretation of being comfortable with oneself, self-accountability for taking care of oneself can be demonized. Valid concerns for another person's health can be branded as shallow. Telling a friend they should quit smoking is socially acceptable; telling a friend they need to lose weight is not. Addictions to specific substances are a bad thing; arguing overeating is an addiction is not even considered to be a thing by many people.

Of course, losing weight is not the cure to all health problems, of course there are many physical and mental ailments that might prevent a person from being healthy, of course there are cultural implications for a lot of people in making healthy choices, of course the cost of being healthy in America is prohibitively high for many, of course modern medicine has increased life expectancy drastically even as the world becomes increasingly sedentary. But regardless of the reasons behind the problem, being obese does have many negative effects on the body and mind. As is the case with any disease, not treating both the cause and the symptoms can have dire consequences. The literature of what obesity is costing the United States alone in health care is endless. The quality of life obesity strips away is a finer, but equally important point. Looking at my life is a perfect example.

When I made that lifestyle change, I finally embraced the idea that wanting to be fit is not embedded in superficiality. Laughing at consistently unhealthy eating habits is a detrimental defense mechanism. Writing off a total lack of physical activity as “understandable laziness” is not an excuse. Increasing my clothes size every year is not a suitable alternative. My decision to lose weight was not based on media influence of impossible-to-achieve standards of attractiveness. It was not predicated on some idealistic notion of finding the perfect partner only after attaining the perfect body. It was a decision to become accountable for my own choices, and to allow my health to take precedence in my life.

I can only hope that individuals who are going through the battles of obesity make the same moves to learn how to prioritize eating well, exercising, and staying away from harmful substances (or, equally - harmful amounts of substances). Attributing unhealthy behavior to a beauty counter-culture is not the solution. Finding excuses instead of answers is not the solution. Normalizing obesity, justifying obesity, is not the solution to the epidemic. 

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[1] Back then I shopped in the juniors department. The adult American equivalent size is 14; the adult European equivalent size is a 44. For those who have seen me in the last few years, I currently wear a size 8 (38 in Europe), though my body composition is now of much more muscle than back when I was in high school.