Posts Tagged ‘ict4d’

1. There are other possibilities suggested, for the record. [↩]
2. Riddell’s “Does Foreign Aid Really Work?” provides a comprehensive examination of the question. [↩]
3. Waverman, Meschi & Fuss 2005 (PDF) [↩]
4. WSIS points to 170 studies suggesting this. [↩]

The Google/China back-and-forth that has played across the media for the past few months has raised the specter of a fragmenting Internet, catchily known as the “splinternet.” The fear, raised in various forms, is that proprietary networks and devices, in addition to censorship and corporate withdrawal from certain nations, are fracturing the unified, standardized Internet that made it such a promising medium for international communication. To add to these fears, exacerbated by the withdrawal of Google from China, GoDaddy has just announced that it will no longer register domains in China due to onerous regulations. This has many arguing that China’s Internet will be a separate entity from the rest of the world.

But was the Internet ever all that unified? Or was it merely a potential, a hope?

The potential to speak, or even the potential to link, does not mean that potential is met. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is often missed in the rhetoric surrounding the transformational effect of the Internet.

The barriers to a unified Internet are far more numerable – and long-standing – than proprietary code or government censorship (though these certainly do have an impact). For one, language is a significant barrier to communicating on an international medium. More fundamentally (and less cured by technological advancement), most people lack either the time or interest to meet the potential of a unified Internet. Even more, as UCT Professor Marion Walton notes, the billions of people excluded from the Internet due to poverty have never been connected to even the hope of a unified Internet.

It is important to be aware and attempt to counteract new divisions between the communicative capacity of humans – among which are censorship and technical incompatibility – but valuing interconnectedness requires a far broader view than most pundits have right now.

This past Saturday Mobile Active and Cell-Life organized Mobile Tech for Social Change Cape Town. I did not have any connectivity, so I just jotted down some thoughts that I thought I’d share.

Opening Session

First Session: Fair Mobile

Steve Song organized a session on the fair mobile project that seeks to realign the mobile phone markets to be more equitable and innovative.

• Much of the conversation centered around how to frame the project: is this the age-old question of universal access? Is this about competition? Is there something unique about mobiles?
• The psychology behind ICT user behavior seems to be important to understand. What type of pricing will lead to socially desirable usage? Are more calls or texts necessarily better?
• Telecommunications, arguably by nature, seems to be a sector that requires regulation, but many of the African regulators are ineffective and were ill-prepared for the popularity of mobile phones.
• What levers exist to produce change? Consumer pressure? Is government compelling existing firms enough? Or is the market so skewed that new entrants must be encouraged?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of different sorts of mobile usage? Is SMS “an extension of the Internet” by nature or just happenstance? Are the troubles and expense of SMS/voice so problematic that we should just try to accelerate IP use?

Second Session: Monitoring and Evaluating

Following some tech demos, Jonathan Donner hosted a session on how to measure and evaluate ICT4D projects. Some key takeaways:

• There seemed to be general dissatisfaction with the M&E experience as it is traditionally conceived. Outside audits lack appropriate context, and inside evaluations are inherently biased.
• Whose criteria for success is used? The subjects? The actors? Donors?
• Regardless, evaluation is always more work and expense than you think.
• Perception is powerful, perhaps more powerful than facts; narratives, though not rigorous measurements, help people understand the goals and (potential) outcomes. But are narratives biased towards success?
• Evaluation is a great planning tool; build it into the process and institutional mindset.
• Is openness the key? By living publicly you can attract information and insight from experts you didn’t know existed.

Over all, a very stimulating discussion, and the deeper I dive, the more questions surface.

I recently finished and highly recommend Portfolios of the Poor, a book examining the financial lives of dozens of impoverished families in Bangladesh, India and South Africa. The understanding of how the world’s poor survive on less than $2 per day was captured through an intensive research process that spent a year chronicling their financial activity through “financial diaries.” Researchers visited the surveyed families every two weeks to discuss their uses of money and in doing so came to have intimate insights into how they made and spent money.

The study sought to fill in the gap in between small ethnographic studies and large-scale surveys. The former cannot capture how lives change over time and the latter fail to capture the nuances of individuals. Portfolios is filled with revelations that came about solely due to their method.

While reading Portfolios, I couldn’t help but feel that ICT4D suffers from the same gap as microfinance. On the one hand, there are plenty of small, short-term studies of people’s interaction and relationship with technology (e.g. Chipchase), and on the other are large-scale surveys of national ICT usage (e.g. RIA).

So, what would an ICT diary project look like? Luckily, the authors of Portfolios provided an appendix detailing their methodology and processes. Some key points:

• Conceptualizing as diaries is useful because tracking in (near) real-time avoided memory loss (who really remembers how they used a cell phone two months ago?). It also helps to capture the relationship between money (or ICTs) and time. Looking at the flows was important for the Portfolios project because if they had simply surveyed irregularly they would have thought that large assets, which were the majority of the wealth for the subjects, were important; instead, it was the margin – small loans, daily wages – that provided most of the activity about their welfare.
• Given the deeply personal nature of both finances and communication, a long-term relationship between researcher and subject is necessary to develop trust. The Portfolios researchers were close in socioeconomic characteristics to their subjects to minimize the barriers. Even then, subjects were not always forthcoming and the researchers needed to really probe to discover all the financial instruments used. The trust issue also meant that the bimonthly visits needed to be conversational, not interviews. However, they write that “the strength of the diaries approach is that it can, over time, break down much of this reticence and confusion.”
• The effort wasn’t meant to be statistically representative, but they did choose families in low, middle and high levels of poverty.
• The information they gathered did not match their preconceived categories, so the researchers had to iterate towards perfection.
• There is the possibility that merely observing the financial lives of the subjects changed their behavior (a Heisenberg effect).

For an ICT diary project, there would obviously be differences. I imagine that ICTs are used more frequently and with less thought than major financial transactions, so there will definitely be uses that are forgotten or not mentioned to the interviewer. This problem could be minimized by using software to track usage, but capturing this quantitative data would need to be done very carefully to avoid privacy implications. A solid framework for usage would need to be utilized to make sense of various uses of ICTs and the behavioral evolution that I would expect to see in a year’s time.

Discussing this at Mobile Tech for Social Change Cape Town on Saturday, it was pointed out that the ISPs and telcos have much of this data, but getting them to share it would be next to impossible. Certainly looking at that would be useful, but the ICT diaries would be another way, and perhaps a better one, because the discussions with the participants would provide insights into their relationship (perceived and real) with technology.

If development practitioners are going to build ICT solutions for the poor, they must understand how they use technology. That understanding is certainly aided by the existing studies, but the gap in the middle seems to be where much of the insights will be found. Following ICT usage for a year would allow researchers to explore the evolving behavior that comes from both internal and external changes.

[Image from Kiwanja's mobile gallery.]

There is an enormous wave of interest in the role that mobile phones play in development. The widespread access to increasingly sophisticated mobile phones have opened up an information and communication platform that is improving, among other goals, livelihood, health and stability. Two new articles remind us that they come with a heavy price.

First, Ethan Zuckerman writes about the implications for innovation and activism that result due to centralization:

Creating novel functionality on a mobile phone network is much harder [than on the Internet]. Truly revolutionary applications like mobile money transfer have generally been deployed in tight collaboration with network operators – M-PESA was not an independent startup, but an initiative of Vodaphone/Safaricom with support from IBM and DFID. It is unclear whether Safaricom would permit a rival mobile banking system to develop expanded functionality and deploy on the same network.

Mobile applications in the developing world generally focus on providing services via short message services (SMS). This is due in part to the need to provide services on a wide range of devices, and in part to the comparative ease of deploying SMS gateways without cooperation from network operators. Voice-based services (IVR – interactive voice response) would often be a better technology for the needs of low-literacy users, but it’s difficult to deploy at scale without co-locating equipment with network operators… Unlike with the Internet’s decentralized DNS system, assignment of shortcodes is generally centrally controlled, giving operators control over the promotion of platforms by refusing to issue easy-to-remember codes. (Imagine if Skype had needed permission from AT&T or France Telecom to register skype.com.)

Because mobile phone networks are centralized, they are more easily controlled by governments than the Internet. Filtering and censoring the Internet has proved a frustrating cat and mouse game for both governments and activists. Despite millions of dollars spent to filter the Chinese internet, hundreds of thousands of Chinese users access and publish banned content. By contrast, Ethiopia simply turned off SMS services in June 2005 over fears that students were using the technology to organize protests against rigged elections – and services remained turned off for more than two years.

Secondly, Yochai Benkler notes that the expense of traditional computers puts them out of the reach of individuals in the developing world, thus limiting the radical redistribution of capital that has occurred in the West. Although mobile phones are affordable and increasingly powerful, Benkler reckons they may be a Faustian bargain that “comes at the expense of a truly open, neutral network.”

As we think of ICTs for development, we must understand that the challenge is a focus on widespread distribution of high-capacity devices, in the hands of a highly skilled population, over open networks running simple and non-proprietary standards.  Devices must be cheap enough to be widely distributed as basic background features, owned by individuals in a pattern uncorrelated with pre-existing power relations.  Devices must be accompanied with skills training in the use of the device and the open network, so that the difficulty of use does not continue to drive people to the simpler devices that deliver the more predictable, controlled, and “safe” applications.  In the near future, this may mean programs focused on women, much as micro-lending has been, or youths and children.  In the longer term, it must mean an emphasis on cheap computers from the lineage of the personal computer, not souped-up mobile phones.  Or, in the alternative, it means that we need a heavier focus on regulatory interventions that will require mobile phones and phone networks to be more open and flexible—although this is a harder row to hoe.  And in all events it means devices coupled with training.

The networked information economy and society promises a radical shift in power and capabilities from industrial, centralized forms to decentralized forms that counterbalance market dynamics more effectively with social dynamics.  To achieve this, a highly distributed physical and human capital structure is necessary.  Understanding this requires that our focus on ICT for development should be on achieving the radical, decentralized distribution of flexible, open, physical capital throughout the population, coupled with the necessary training to harness the wisdom, insight, and creativity that is already there.

This is not to say that mobiles for development should be sidelined. I believe quite the opposite, in fact. But these reminders of the properties and structure of the mobile phone ecosystem should weigh heavily on those working in ICT4D.

[P.S. These are from a new collection of articles posted by Berkman in preparation for the high-level Sept. 23rd discussion on communication and human development.]

Update: Steve Song has posted his recent presentation on the Village Telco project that seeks to create a better network.

(Some caveats: I’m relatively new to this subject, don’t have on-the-ground experience and haven’t yet read ‘Small Is Beautiful’.)

If you hang around ICT4D long enough (that is, more than a day or so), you’re sure to hear people promoting “Appropriate Technology.” The important idea is not widely understood outside the ICT4D community, but refers to designing and using technology with special consideration to unique environmental, cultural and economic situations. People that work on these issues know that the same technologies that are successful in Silicon Valley are unlikely to be successful in the Great Rift Valley – there are simply too many differences to make it possible.

Supporting “Appropriate Technology” (AT, to those in the know) is taken as something of an article of faith for ICT4Ders – worthy of my admittedly obnoxious capitalization. But, outside of broad (and rather useless) generalizations, how useful is the concept?

Take laptops. The OLPC was touted as AT because it was dust proof, highly readable, mesh networkable, etc. Where my MacBook Pro would kick the bucket in 24 hours, the OLPC would hum away contently. However, plenty of folks have argued that, actually, OLPC is inappropriate for education in important developing countries. In fact, maybe the ubiquitous mobile phone is better suited for educational technology. Or could it be radio? Or (*gasp*) simple paper?

My (half-formed) idea is that “Appropriate Technology” may, in reality, be of very little use to practitioners a priori. Obviously, the Mac isn’t right for a rural Rwandan classroom. But, in determining what specific technology to deploy, I think there are broader, more determinative, aspects of technology utlization such as the passion and dedication of the users and implementers, than simply designating some tech as appropriate and some as not. There are many possibilities and I worry that we lose sight of the non-technical aspects of ICT4D when quibbling about the ICT.

[By the way, infoDev has recently launched Educational Technology Debate, an interactive debate website, that will address issues such as this in the field of ICT for education. Check it out and spread the word - there are a bunch of fun debates coming up.]