The ICT4D Jester

FailFaire in the NYT

August 23rd, 2010

The Jester is delighted to see the New York Times write about FailFaire, a series of events hosted by MobileActive, to allow ICT4D-ers to air project failures in the hopes of learning lessons. Katrin Verclas, the person behind MobileActive has always been a passionate, yet level-headed force in mobile phones for development. Hats off, with Jester bells jangling, to Katrin! Also to be congratulated is Mike Trucano at the World Bank, who apparently won the OLPC prize at a recent FailFaire; Mike is similarly level-headed in his work, advising governments on the potential pitfalls of national PCs for education programs. The Jester hopes to attend a FailFaire some day, but is currently stuck on the left coast.

The one comment the Jester has with respect to FailFaire would be for participants to consider the deeper reasons why certain kinds of ICT4D projects often fail — it’s not always that project implementation could have gone better if people had paid attention to X, Y, or Z. Sometimes, it’s that the project goal is fundamentally pointless or impossible — to fix what is at heart a human problem with technology.

Posted in Good ICT4D | No Comments »

Stuck on Technology

August 23rd, 2010

“Technology is the only way to bring [the costs of] education under control and to expand it.” This was a statement made by Bill Gates, at least as reported by MG Siegler of TechCrunch. The blog entry was titled, “Bill Gates: In five years, the best education will come from the web.” What he meant was that technology has to replace some part of real teachers and real schools, for education to remain cost-effective. And, in particular, the Internet will be the best source for real education. Before the Jester proceeds to pick on his alter ego’s former employer, he notes that he was not at the Techonomy conference where Gates apparently made these remarks, so everything he knows about it comes by way of TechCrunch. All errors are theirs, not the Jester’s!

To his credit, Gates is careful to circumscribe his techno-optimism. He apparently meant these comments largely for tertiary education, and emphasized the need for real schools for K-12 education. He also seems to have hedged his prediction for “self-motivated learners” only. The Jester also agrees with Gates that the best lectures in the world will mostly be online in a few years, if that hasn’t already happened. Many more people see TED talks online than can afford their hefty attendance fee. Gates is a sharp guy.

So, all the more reason to annoint him today’s FftT (”fool for the day”)! It takes a fool to be as smart as Bill Gates, and then to continue to overlook the importance — the central importance — of human factors in a good education. (It also takes a real fool to call Gates a fool, but we already know that about the Jester.)

As the frequent reader might have guessed, the Jester does not believe that technology is the key to educational cost-reduction or expansion, though it certainly might help for tertiary education of motivated students (a recent study released by the US Dept. of Education suggests that online learning in tertiary education has just begun to show signs of value).

There are three reasons for this. First, a good education requires human attention and effort, and quality teachers’ attention and effort makes a huge difference; for the foreseeable future, this cannot be replaced by technology. Second, too much of what is really valuable about college is not academic knowledge, but other things such as social skills, organizational skills, extracurricular activities, peer pressure, emotional maturity, and social connections. These traits are very hard to acquire through technology. And third, the root of the problem Gates is trying to address is that the people who have power over universities are not sufficiently serious about either cost control or low-cost expansion. That, too, is not a technological problem.

First, the value of human attention and effort. The most relevant attention and effort is that of the student. You can lead a kid to an online learning module, but you can’t make him do problem sets. Everyone may have an inborn desire to learn, but most kids don’t have a natural curiosity about 90% of what they need to learn to be a well-functioning citizen. How many children have a natural curiosity about basic algebra? How many children care about the global economic situation? Sure, such kids exist, but they are rare, and in any case, they’re not the ones who need an additional boost — they’ll find a way, regardless. (Just as Bill Gates did. One blind spot, incidentally, of smart self-starters like Gates is that they don’t realize everyone else isn’t like them. Most people didn’t sneak into their school’s computer lab, so that they could hack all night; most people sat at home and watched Knight Rider. Most people don’t watch educational videos while on the treadmill, as Gates reportedly does; most people zone out or listen to Eminem. At a conference where the Jester made some controversial negative comments about the value of PCs in education, one MIT Media Lab professor stood up to defend laptops for children: He said, “I hated school, but once I got my hands on a computer, I taught myself everything I know about them. That seems a perfectly good way to learn.” Maybe if he directed some of that brainpower to understanding other people, he’d realize not everyone was like him! Finally, the Jester points out that a good portion of MIT courses are online already — lectures, problem sets, solution sets, quizzes, the works. If all it took was for good material to be online, everyone with access to the Internet who wants to be an MIT engineer could already be one. Yet, few are. Why? The technology is there. The problem is human – insufficient application of attention and effort.)

So, given that the average student is, well, average, there’s a need for attention and effort expended by other people to motivate the average learner. “Other people” might involve parents, teachers, mentors, siblings, and peers, but in formal education, the responsibility is mostly with teachers. Prodding, encouraging, cajoling, rewarding, punishing, and all sorts of other -ings are what good teachers do to motivate their students. And, as good teachers will tell you, it is a neverending quest requiring ongoing creativity to stay one step ahead of student boredom and indifference, which are always just around the corner. This kind of motivation is also difficult to deliver at a distance or at scale or over the Internet, because it really requires individualized human attention. The Jester will snooze in a lecture delivered to 1000 people online; but he’ll perk up if the lecturer is in the room, looking right at him. It’s not clear why Gates thinks the value of a good teacher ends at 12th grade. Even adults need help to stay motivated, which is exactly why people spend money on personal trainers at the gym — it’s not because you couldn’t learn how to do a sit up on YouTube.

Second, much of a university education is not about the academic content; it’s about the life outside of classes and assignments. Harvard’s traditional insignia features three books of which two are face up and one is face down, signifying that a part of the education is not about academic learning. The Jester would have turned another book face down, if he had designed it. Managing projects, working in teams, hosting events, starting new ventures, meeting and interacting with different people… all of these experiences happen in college (at least for many students), and they contribute to lessons that will be valuable in high-paying professions. Among business-school students, it’s common lore that the main reason you attend is to build a peer network that will come in handy later; whether you learn a single thing about marketing strategy is secondary. (Note that if Harvard did anything for Bill Gates, it was to provide the conditions where he could meet Steve Ballmer.) Corporate VPs are rarely the best number crunchers, but they are almost always the ones who understand working with people. Where can you get that practice? At college or on the job. A broader point is actually true of all education — most of education isn’t about the specific knowledge learned (which most of us forget after the exam, anyway), it’s about the meta-skills and qualities one learns in the social process of going to school. Online is no place to learn those skills.

Third, if the goal is to reduce educational costs, the Jester would imagine that the right thing is to see why university education costs so much in the United States. University deans and observers appear to agree that most of the cost goes to faculty and staff compensation. And, of that, what is apparently growing faster than inflation is health insurance. No doubt, this is tied to the country’s larger issues of healthcare costs. College education costs will go down when university leaders and the United States as a whole is ready to fix their respective healthcare systems. And that, again, is not a technology problem.

So, that, in a little more than a nutshell, is why the Jester believes Gates is misguided in seeking a technology solution to America’s education challenges. And, these points apply even more strongly in the developing world, where, for the cost of a high-priced technology with questionable impact, low-cost interventions with known outcomes could have much more impact. The question, of course, is why Gates, like so many technologists, remains so stuck on technology as potential solutions to the deep social problems of the world. That’s a topic that the Jester will address in later posts, so for now, let’s just chalk it up to the fact that he doesn’t read the Jester!

Posted in Education, Not Quite ICT4D | 1 Comment »

ICT4D 4 D

July 12th, 2010

A two-and-a-half week trip to India was very productive for the Jester. He gave talks at an ICT4D summer school, spent quality time with friends and NGOs, and consumed six months’ worth of genuine Indian food, to make up for the six months since he was last there.

During this time, and in the synchronicitous ways of the world, the Jester encountered many groups of people who were tremendously excited about ICT4D. The summer school was attended by 70-odd students and would-be ICT4D-ers all eager to learn about ICT4D. And, many of the NGOs the Jester visited were beginning or continuing experiments with ICT4D. Although it was rumored that the Jester’s musings on “10 Myths of ICT4D” convinced one or two souls in the summer-school audience to reconsider ICT4D altogether, most seemed invigorated, perhaps in the manner of reckless, young, race-car drivers who taste adrenaline at the sight of crash and burn.

Their excitement was captured best by an e-mail the Jester received. In a strange juxtaposition of technological irony and global serendipity, the message was received while he was in India, but it came from America, and it was written by an Indian. The subject line announced, “Request for Guidance!” In it, the author (let us call him “Abhishek”) says… “During my final year at [university], I started to ask myself the question ‘What is the purpose/ultimate goal of my life?’ After a lot of thought process I came up with an answer like ‘do work which impacts the lives of millions in the poor communities’. What I am now trying to figure out is the suitable path through [which] I can contribute most effectively to these developing communities.” Earnestness like this, you can’t buy at a chai stall!

It turns out that Abhishek has recently joined a US technology company, but he feels that he can best achieve his purpose in life through ICT4D. Although there are some kinds of puffing-up the Jester enjoys deflating, he finds no joy in mocking sincere seekers. (Not much joy, anyway.) Too, it seems wrong to shut the gate on those who walk the path the Jester trod not too long ago. After all, as a great king of jesters once said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” What then, does the Jester say, to the excited ICT4D newbie?

Jump in!!! And, jump into direct experience, not piles of books, papers, and other second-hand accounts. The most important thing, if one is interested in impacting other people’s lives, is to become intimately familiar with what their lives are really like. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a visit is worth a million. Whatever it is, the Jester encourages any way to actually get involved with work that requires very close contact with the people one hopes to impact. This could be done in a number of ways, through volunteering, internships, jobs, etc. Many such opportunities are often posted on online websites (e.g., www.devex.com), as well as mailing lists (e.g., the TIER mailing list: http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu ), and a good fraction seek people with technical skills. The important thing is to sign up for an opportunity that involves significant engagement with poor communities – the more time with them, the better; don’t take a job that only involves coding in an air-conditioned office, especially if it’s in a rich city in the developed world. Then, once in the job (or internship or volunteer opportunity), keep volunteering for work that requires working with relevant groups. Find out as much as possible through questions, observation, living with them, etc. Do not complain to the Jester about language differences, cultural barriers, inconvenient weather, or guerillas brandishing guns. (Hmm, perhaps the latter are a valid reason for concern.) Where there’s a will, there’s a way. ICT4D intervention is a good entry point to development for those with technical ability. It can be used as a way to get an understanding for real development issues.

Meanwhile, the Jester recommends reading as much as possible about international development. Books, websites, papers, etc. Reading is valuable not so much because it describes what development really is (that sense – often a very personal one – is best gained through direct experience), but so that one becomes comfortable with the jargon and discourse of development. Among the most enlightening of writings is an obscure blog known as the ICT4D Jester. The Jester recommends reading every post. Thrice.

In short, ICT4D is the perfect entrance for technologists interested in development. (The key phrase here is “for technologists.” For those coming from a development background, the Jester says, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter ICT4D!”) It offers a means to engage with the complex, multi-faceted endeavor of development, while allowing a technologist to contribute a little technical support here, or a bit of electronic innovation there. ICT4D is a broad perch from which to learn about development, because technology’s tendrils can extend into every domain of development, whether it’s education, agriculture, microfinance, governance, livelihoods, gender issues, et cetera.

The Jester thus encourages a foray into ICT4D for technologists, albeit with the hope that wanderers will not stop there, but continue onto even more meaningful aspects of development. For technologists, ICT4D is a step in the right direction. (The Jester only requests that those taking this step remember his Golden Rule: If your goal is to accomplish something in development, then work with people who are already doing competent work in development; then, apply your technical skills to support those people.)

Posted in Q&A with the Jester, Teaching ICT4D | No Comments »

The Hand that Flips the Power Switch…

July 6th, 2010

The Jester gleefully welcomes a comment by Satyajit Nath[i] on a recent post. The following is an edited version of his comment (the full comment is here, below the original post):

SN> Sometimes, the focus of consciously applied technology can be to *diminish* the impact of crafty/ corrupt people who impoverish others and make the “victims” less than what they can be.

For example, the electronic train ticketing/reservation system in India simply eliminated the corruption rampant through reservation clerks, train conductors, and others. I remember 20-25 years ago when any long distance train travel meant interminable hours waiting in line at the station to book tickets, bribes doled out by those passengers who chose to/could afford them, and no travel/poor travel for those could/would not. And today, my brother-in-law just booked my confirmed train reservation from Mumbai to Hyderabad in 2 minutes at the local store! And what is true for him is true for anyone in India today.

Yes, behind that system were dedicated, high-caliber people and organizations who understood the appropriate use of technology. But the main benefit of the technology was to eliminate the impact of a huge number of corrupt/crafty ones.

So, I would argue for a transcended definition for appropriate use of technology that includes (1) to magnify good human intent; (2) to diminish bad human intent.

Satyajit – thank you, thank you, thank you! You have given the Jester a day off from playing the fool, because you are doing it so well! In fact, the Jester confers upon you the title of Fool for the Day (or F4TD, to simultaneously honor the genius who came up with “ICT4D”).

The idea that technology diminishes bad human intent is one of the classic traps that snare many an ICT4D enthusiast, and the Indian Railway System is the perfect example of a good technology system whose mechanism is misinterpreted by techno-utopians.

The Jester starts with his favorite broken record: Technology magnifies human intent and capacity. But, which humans’ intent and capacity? There are typically two relevant groups: (1) the people who produce the technology and/or operate it, and (2) the people who consume the technology or its output. Some combination of these groups’ intents and capacities are what technology magnifies.

In the case of railway computerization, the technology operator is the Railway Ministry, and the consumers are passengers. As our F4TD confirms, the intents of both the operator and the consumer were aligned with the positive goal: “behind that system were dedicated, high-caliber people and organizations”; and, just as his brother desires to buy tickets easily, “what is true for him is true for anyone in India today.” Thus, the relevant groups are positively inclined, and the ministry had the ability to follow through. Technology amplifies that, so it’s no surprise that the outcome was mostly good.

What of corrupt railway employees? It’s true that much of the old style of corruption was eliminated, but this in no way contradicts the Jester’s claim. If two groups of people have opposing intent, the more powerful side can impose its intent on the other, especially if it has suitable technology. In war, the side with greater intent, ability, and superior technology, wins. In this case, the Railway Ministry, which to start with had the position of power over railway employees, was firmly intent on implementing a fair, efficient system. With that kind of power and political will, it’s again not surprising that corruption was diminished.

However, there are plenty of instances that appear similar on paper, but where the political will or the organizational capacity is lacking. If human intent is negative, or capacity near-zero, technology will not contribute positively. This is, alas, the situation with many of the governments that ICT4D hopes to fix with e-government.

The Jester remembers one political science professor who claimed to tell a story of ICT supporting democracy, but then ended up telling exactly the opposite story: A well-regarded NGO in Bangalore once convinced the municipal government of that city to install a computerized financial tracking system with public access. For a couple of months, the NGO found irregularities or injustices in the city budget and lobbied publicly to get things fixed, with good results. Triumph for ICT, right? Wrong. Soon after, the government shut down the system, and it has not come back up since. If the government doesn’t want to be monitored, it won’t be monitored. The hand that flips the power switch is the hand that rules the ICT. And, behind that hand, is again, human intent.

There is no end to these examples in e-government. India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is struggling to authenticate workers, so that they can be paid correctly. But, without an inherently strong bureaucracy, fingerprint readers and other technology are readily sabotaged by people in the payment chain, who’d rather not have their skimming of government funds detected. In failed and failing states outside of India, ICT often presents a way to get the word out about gross injustice; but no amount of protest or harangue online about the government changes leaders secure in their absolute power. And, in repressive regimes, Internet and mobile-phone networks are even bent to the will of a controlling government. Websites are actively censored; e-mails are subpoenaed to track “enemies” of state; and the government-sponsored press preaches its propaganda online. Without positive intent and institutional capacity in the government implementing the technology, e-government doesn’t work. At least, not for the public good.

The Jester also notes that the corrupt intent of lower-level bureaucrats also requires something more than technology to stamp out completely. In the case of the railways, our F4TD may be aware that even today, in the case that a train is full on the publicly available online system, he can often go to certain travel agents and purchase a seat for an additional fee. Behind the scenes, however, these tickets have been sold under the table by those who have inside access to the computerized system, who undoubtedly receive a portion of the “fee.” The Jester himself has also gotten on ostensibly full trains that were already in motion (and therefore, beyond the online booking system), only to find empty first-class sleepers for which the price seemed a little high. (The Jester is no activist-saint; he happily paid and got a good night’s sleep.) Corrupt intent doesn’t go away with technology; it just works around it.

So, does technology “diminish bad human intent”? Not in and of itself. Technology only magnifies intent and capacity. If technology is operated by the just and competent, it certainly can help them — this is what we’re all after in ICT4D. But, it’s not the technology alone that does it. If technology is put in the hands of the powerless, it has nothing to magnify. If technology is wielded by those with negative intent, it only magnifies that. For these latter situations to be turned around, only a change in the underlying human intent or capacity will allow the technology to magnify things in the positive direction. Technology’s impact is multiplicative, not additive.

[i] Note to empathetic souls: The Jester knows Satyajit in person and has great respect for him. Satyajit, an otherwise accomplished person, has recently thrown himself body and soul into ICT4D. The Jester’s jabs are only friendly ribbing. Or, at least, the Jester hopes he will take it that way, despite the public spanking to follow.

Posted in Government, Q&A with the Jester | 4 Comments »

Digital Green is actually People Green

July 4th, 2010

In the middle of vast tracts of terraced rice fields, haphazardly partitioned into small half-acre-ish plots of land, villagers slowly begin to gather into the local primary school courtyard just around sunset. By the time it’s completely dark, a mixed-gender group of about fifty people ranging from infants to gray-haired grannies sit cross-legged on the ground, surrounding a 1.5′x2′ makeshift screen that is nailed against a schoolhouse pillar. A man stands next to the screen and begins to play a video using a portable pico projector — the only video-playback device in the area for miles around. The video demonstrates a particular method of preparing the soil before planting rice, and it features a farming couple from a nearby district building gridded plateaus of mud on their own land. Amidst the din of crickets, the audience strains to hear the underpowered audio; even the babies are quiet. Every minute or two, the session leader pauses the video, and asks the audience a question. Most questions meet with quick responses, but in a few cases, an extended discussion takes place. After about a half hour, the session leader takes attendance, responds to further questions, and asks if anyone plans to try the technique. About a third of the adult hands go up. The session adjourns, and the villagers disperse, likely not to meet again in a group like this until the following week. Perhaps a handful will actually implement the technique in their fields.

In an environment where there is no TV, no electricity, and no traffic (beyond the occasional NGO worker), such is pace of rural transformation. It might seem slow to city slickers, but apart from festivals, it’s the peak of community activity in this remote village of Kumadawahali.

The video sessions are the heart of Digital Green, a system for agriculture extension for smallholder farmers. DG uses a combination of locally produced digital video and mediated group instruction to teach farmers more productive, sustainable agricultural techniques.

The videos are a compelling instructional aid, even for a mostly illiterate audience, and they permit a greater range of influence for expert extension agents, who otherwise do their work only through verbal dialogue and posters. For many villagers, the sessions are as much entertainment as they are education — this is their only exposure to moving images every week. Pilot studies have shown that DG can increase adoption of newly introduced farming practices by 7 times the rate at which classical agriculture extension works, and at 10 times the cost-effectiveness.

If this were the typical sort of ICT4D journalism or grant proposal, the story would end here, and readers and program officers would likely be left with the strong impression that video is an effective means of agriculture extension. They might think, “If video projectors were provided to every village, and if a worldwide database of agricultural techniques could be built, we could improve farmer productivity and food security around the world!” Nincompoops who haven’t had the fortune of meeting the Jester would go further: “Gosh, let’s do this over mobile phones! Mobiles are all over the planet, and they’ll all have video and Internet capability soon!! We could crowdsource agricultural video content on the Internet!!! Farmers would become agriculture PhDs in no time!!!! Video-over-mobile-phone will solve hunger forever!!!!! Yes, yes, YESSSSS!!!!!!”

Ahem. With the sarcasm out of his system for the day, the Jester will now hold his critical tongue for a bit to provide the positive side of this story for those doing ICT4D work. Having just returned from two days of visits to DG field sites, he’s inspired to say a few things about ICT4D done well. (Full disclosure: The Jester has been involved with Digital Green from its inception as research advisor, organizational midwife, and board member. He receives no financial compensation from DG, but he does enjoy basking in the brilliant glow of this young, promising project.)

The field visits were to rural sites in northern Orissa’s Mayurbanj district, where DG works together with two NGO partners, PRADAN and VARRAT. The villages where these organizations work are populated by India’s tribal and low-caste communities. They are remote, but still reachable by car. Electricity from the power grid is rare. So are TVs and mobile phones. Incomes are in the dollar-a-day range, and much of the farming is subsistence agriculture. The dominant staple crop is rice, and thanks to the work of the NGOs, there is more and more growing of vegetables, both for income and nutrition. The visits took place during the wet pre-monsoon season, but the area is dry the rest of the year, and scarcity of water is an issue.

Let’s now deconstruct the single instructional session above. First, the 50-odd villagers all gathered within a 15-minute window of time, for a once-a-week session. Getting this to happen at all is no small feat, as anyone who has started a village self-help group (SHG) will tell you. Often, it takes months of constant engagement, to get an SHG together, to meet regularly, and to resolve any historical tensions that members might have with one another. Giri, a young PRADAN staff member was responsible for working with Kumadawahali, and he had spent much of the past two years there building rapport with the villagers. As part of PRADAN’s new-employee orientation, Giri spent weeks living with a family in the village; PRADAN encourages him to see his work as a partnership with the community. He and the villagers greeted each other warmly when they met.

Next, the session leader. This person needed to be identified, recruited, paid, and trained. Session leaders must be moderately educated, and willing to travel to local villages on a regular basis. They need to see their work as a job that requires a regular commitment. They need to be remunerated for their efforts. Additionally, the session leader needs to be trained in video instruction and simple record-keeping — skills akin to those of a school teacher in a place where teachers are few. They’re recruited from nearby villages and trained by PRADAN and DG staff. Nihar Ranjan Maharana, another young PRADAN staff member who is the point person for DG within PRADAN’s Mayurbanj office, works closely with session leaders in multiple village clusters.

During the session, there was lively discussion (which was partly translated for the Jester by his NGO hosts). This might not seem like anything special to someone raised in a modern, progressive educational system, but in a place with few formal organizations, and where classrooms believe in discipline over engagement, it’s another considerable achievement. The Jester has been to many village meetings elsewhere where little dialogue takes place at all, or where one or two village leaders monopolize the discussion. In Kumadawahali, many people, both men and women, actively participated in discussion.

As for the video, it was produced by PRADAN in a nearby village (tens of kilometers away) just weeks prior to the screening. Because agriculture is sensitive to season and soil conditions, content is only relevant for a short while and in a limited region, though it can be reused annually. This particular video was shot in Oriya, the language of Orissa, and versions of similar video were also available in Ho, another language common in the region. Using DG’s standard processes, the video was based on a storyboard constructed and verified by PRADAN staff. Chandra Shekhar, an enthusiastic member of DG’s staff, stayed with PRADAN’s Mayurbanj office and helped PRADAN produce a range of such videos.

The use of the pico projector was suggested by Matt York, an informal advisor to DG, who runs a non-profit in the United States that makes it its business to be aware of electronic gadgets that could be useful to NGOs like Digital Green. The projectors are highly portable, but require frequent maintenance, in no small part due to power surges that fry batteries. PRADAN and DG staff are constantly moving projectors back and forth to villages for this reason. Where projectors are scarce, they resort to TVs, DVD players, batteries, and inverters. DG is currently facing a shortage of pico projectors due to some manufacturer delays, and both DG staff and Matt are working on getting cheaper, brighter, pico projectors more quickly into India.

Finally, to track its impact, session leaders and PRADAN staff keep track of DG session attendance, technique adoption, and questions that arise during sessions. Over time, they hope to measure gains in agricultural yield and household income, as well. Collecting this information is again, no easy task, and it requires process and discipline.

All of this has been done under the capable leadership of Manas Satpathy, PRADAN’s regional head in Orissa, Surjit Behra, PRADAN’s team leader in Karanjia, Rikin Gandhi, CEO of Digital Green, and Avinash Upadhyay, DG’s regional leader in Orissa. Rikin himself helped initiate PRADAN into DG techniques over a year ago, and Surjit and Avinash have successfully overseen its spread in 17 villages across Mayurbanj; DG sessions are otherwise happening in hundreds of villages in four states across India.

This is a brief, incomplete description, but even so, it’s evident just how much human effort is required to make things work, and it’s effort that can’t be replaced by technology. Whatever impact DG has depends first on well-intentioned, competent people. In the case of the story above, the people are members of PRADAN and DG’s staff. The Jester has visited quite a few villages of comparable socio-economic status, and he has rarely seen the kind of promptness and organization that he saw with the DG session in Kumadawahali. That is due almost entirely to PRADAN’s expertise, methodology, and dedication — all traits for which they are well-known and respected. (Incidentally, although the Jester didn’t see as much of VARRAT, they seemed equally capable and integrated with their communities.)

Contrast this with what might be the ridiculously misguided, but unfortunately more common, forms of ICT4D: Donate a bunch of pico projectors for a lot of villages, or perhaps attempt to design a $50 pico projector, so that more villages could afford one. Or, set up a website so that agriculture experts all over the world could upload videos, presumably in languages and seasons completely irrelevant to anyone but themselves. Or, dream up clever variations of NetFlix for farmers, for financial “sustainability.” Etc. But, none of it would actually work, except to win social-enterprise business-plan competitions judged by Silicon Valley tycoons.

Again, it’s not that technology is pointless. DG itself uses technology extensively: low-cost video cameras, microphones, PCs and a mishmash of software for video production; TVs, DVD players, and pico projectors for instructional sessions; and a sophisticated online tool for tracking of its own activities even over poor Internet connectivity. But, none of these tools are worth anything in the absence of a PRADAN. Conversely, PRADAN accomplishes a lot without these tools. The tools are, again, magnifiers of human intent and capacity.

DG is well aware of this and strives to identify good partners with which to work, effectively seeing its role as assisting other organizations’ ability and amplifying their impact. That certainly has value in development.

DG is thus a textbook instance of the right kind of ICT4D. It studiously avoids any illusion that it or its technology can accomplish anything on its own. Instead, technology is consciously applied to magnify the impact of dedicated, high-caliber people and organizations… ultimately, the only things that really make a difference.

(The Jester thanks the staff of PRADAN, VARRAT, and Digital Green for hosting a great visit to rural Orissa, and for answering lots of pesky questions!)

Posted in Agriculture, Good ICT4D | 13 Comments »

The Inventor’s Dilemma and Our Fix-It Faith

June 1st, 2010

It seems that plenty of jesters in other domains are also raising the volume in questioning techno-utopian ideology.

A New Yorker article (May 17, 2010, p. 42) talks about MacArthur Fellowship winner Saul Griffith’s realization that ”The real problem with eyeglasses in the developing world isn’t making lenses, it’s testing eyes and writing accurate prescriptions.” Sound familiar?

A New York Times article (May 28, 2010) discusses our society’s hubris in believing that technology can fix all problems, with regard to the oil spill. It quotes David Eyton, BP’s head of research and technology: “[Technology] becomes both an enabler, while at the same time being itself a source of risk.” Andrew Khout, president of the Pew Resaerch Center for the People and the Press, says “American have a lot of faith that over the long run technology will solve everything.” The article ends with a note about air passengers frustrated by the inability for volcanic ash delays. Khout says, “The reaction was: ‘Fix this. Fix this. This is outrageous.’” Indeed! How could it be possible that our technology can’t solve a problem caused by volcano?!

(The Jester, incidentally, was also caught in the Netherlands when the volcano struck and decided to take advantage of train and bus to reach Barcelona, and from there to fly home. The Jester is thus thankful for land-based transport technologies. He fears an all-too-soon need to return to animal-based transport technologies.)

Posted in Not Quite ICT4D | 1 Comment »

How can cell phones be used to strengthen teacher support networks?

May 27th, 2010

Q: ”I work as a consultant for very poor country X and am advocating the use of cell phones to strengthen teacher support networks in the country. For example, lesson plan outlines could be blasted to all 3rd grade teachers by SMS text messages. Unfortunately, SMS appears to be too short, and high-end phones and data plans would be too costly. What to do?” [Paraphrased from a real mail to the Jester.]

A: In an ideal world, the Jester would respond: “First, clarify your goal, which should be something like ‘to improve education in the country,’ and not ‘to use cell phones for everything.’ Second, drop any a priori attachment to any technology (and for heaven’s sake, please stop advocating something when you don’t even have the answer!). Third, go back to the basics that have worked — believe it or not, there are countries that have exceptional public education systems, and which don’t connect all the teachers via cell phone — and see if any of it transfers. Meanwhile, try not to be distracted by the existence of Facebook, Twitter, or the iPhone.

Unfortunately, this is a less-than-ideal world, where development budgets and jobs are allocated under “ICT” line items, and people with “ICT” in their job descriptions have to find a way to be relevant to all sorts of random situations. It makes you wonder whether “Plumbing and Piping” ever enjoyed a similar heyday, with P&P4D experts going around trying to connect teachers with lead pipes. Or, P&P for microfinance, anyone?

But, getting back to the topic at hand, the Jester thinks, the question here is what exactly the point of the “teacher support network” really is. It could be one of three situations…

The teachers are competent, but require core academic content. Frankly, that can best be distributed as physical materials (either as teachers’ editions of textbooks; or as CD-ROMs, if teachers have PCs available; or as DVDs, if TV and DVD players are common; or as SD cards that can be inserted into some mobile phones, etc.). There is really no need for a real-time system that allows teachers to interact, given that the core of basic education is not going to change any time soon. Conversely, if teachers have these materials, but think they need more, see Situation 3, below.
The teachers are competent, but need emotional support. Perfectly understandable in places with overcrowded classrooms, abusive or indifferent headmasters, poor school resources, etc. If so, permitting teachers to have lots of talk time is probably the best thing. Audio bulletin board systems might be effective; see, for example, Avaaj Otalo, by Neil Patel et al. If social networking technologies aren’t good for helping people connect and vent, what are they good for?!
The teachers are somewhat less than competent or well-meaning, and need X. Whatever “X” is, the core problem in this case is not going to go away with any amount of clever use of cell phones. It would be far more effective to lobby for more teacher training resources, such as workshops where teachers are physically brought together, teacher mentors who work with teachers on site, ongoing teacher training, etc. Of course, this puts us back in the ideal world, which we are not in. Alas!

Posted in Education, Q&A with the Jester | No Comments »

Q&A with the Jester!

May 27th, 2010

The Jester and his alter ego receive an intermittent stream of questions soliciting free advice about ICT4D projects. Most are too far gone for effective recommendations; the questioner has already committed to using ICT to address a deep development problem, akin to tying both hands behind one’s back before a piano competition.

The Jester’s alter ego is similarly hamstrung in responding to these requests, since his superego commits him to diplomatic, constructive responses (or at least, attempts at such) that wouldn’t thoroughly discourage idealistic folk who still believe there is a shortcut to meaningful development.

Luckily, the Jester himself can be as obnoxious as he wants to be! In this series of posts, the Jester paraphrases requests for ICT4D advice wherever he may find them, and responds to them as he pleases. Woo hoo!

Questions? Send them to the Jester! The Jester promises to remove all personally identifying information prior to making fun of you.

Posted in General Overview, Q&A with the Jester | No Comments »

“Myth of Scale” at TEDxTokyo

May 18th, 2010

Here’s a man after my own heart! And, with striking good looks that rival the Jester’s…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxutDM2r534

The talk is about the “myth of scale” – the misguided notion that scaling technological solutions can ever solve complex social problems.

Posted in Myths of ICT4D, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Blind Man’s Design

April 28th, 2010

The Jester has recently been involved in a number of ICT4D classes. These are all well-meaning courses with respected faculty teaching them. They are also all located in the United States. For anyone hoping to teach practical ICT4D skills, such as design or entrepreneurship, this latter point immediately brings up a question: How does one teach practical ICT4D skills at a university that is inconveniently located thousands of miles from Africa?

In this post, the Jester discusses interventionist projects in which the goal for students is to design or prototype technologies, or to write business plans or grant proposals for new ideas. (Note that this post does not discuss academic ICT4D, in which the goals are to cram student brains with language-obfuscated journal articles and to teach them to spout incoherent jargon. That can be effectively done in a classroom even on Mars.)

As a problem faced by wealthy professors teaching rich kids at elite universities in developed countries, it might not be among the most pressing of issues in development, but since these courses are often the first indoctrination of the next cadre of idealistic changemakers, it seems important to set them off in the right direction.

The wrong direction is to make young impressionable minds design solutions for environments that they don’t know anything about while sitting in first-world classrooms and libraries, and then to pretend that they’ll have learned something useful without actually implementing anything on site. This all-too-frequent exercise in ICT4D design and business classes, is effectively asking students to practice what the Jester calls Blind Man’s Design: Attempting to solve problems one’s never encountered for people one’s never met in places one’s never been to. Blind Man’s Design is a lot like White Man’s Burden – arrogant, misguided, and ineffective in bringing about meaningful learning. Actually, it’s even worse if a lucky good idea comes out of these exercises, because students then learn the wrong lesson – that you can devise good ideas in development without a clue.

The right direction is to ensure some sort of immersive experience, ideally where sincere attempts are made to implement ideas “in the field.” The best designers and the best entrepreneurs have great intuition for their customers. How does a person develop good intuition for an environment she’s unfamiliar with? She spends time in the environment. She gets to know everything she can about it. Most importantly, she feels its vibrations until she can tap the rhythms herself. That can lead to a good gut feel for the “real” problems and for real demand, as well as the myriad constraints that a design has to navigate. There is simply no substitute for good intuition in design, and there’s no substitute for time spent physically in the environment to gain good intuition. Anyone who says there are even reasonable approximations to firsthand experience has a bridge to sell.

In particular, the Jester notes that reading case studies of successful design-for-development doesn’t count as knowledge (even if they’re written by as august an intellect as the Jester!), any more than readers of books about Google have real insight about what it takes to be the next Larry Page. Steve Jobs never took a formal course in design, and Bill Gates never finished college. What they know, they learned directly from their personal interaction with their market. Mathematics students have to do proofs on their own; English literature majors have to read actual literature; budding anthropologists have to spend a couple of years living among the natives – why should ICT4D intervention be any different?

Unfortunately, not every ICT4D course conducted in a wealthy country can afford to send all of their students to a developing country for an immersion experience. There are constraints of money, time, and other classes. Plus, not every student taking such a course will be committed to seeing an intervention through.

The problem is not, the Jester stresses, that someone who’s never been to a poor community could never design something valuable for that community. Exhibit A is the mobile phone, which was more or less fully formed before anyone considered them for poor communities in developing countries, and yet it’s perhaps the most successful ICT4D ever (the Jester believes this fact will hold even until his death). Sometimes, good design for rich human beings has value for poor human beings. No surprise - good design is good design, and poor people are people, too. But, if the goal is to nurture generically good designers, presumably there are generic design courses for that.

No, the problem with Blind Man’s Design in ICT4D courses is that it reinforces the bad habit of rationalizing decisions made in the absence of real data. This is a cardinal sin in development. Better to admit you don’t know and that you’re guessing. The Jester sometimes repeats himself when he worries that people didn’t hear the first time: The problem with Blind Man’s Design in ICT4D courses is that it reinforces the bad habit of rationalizing decisions made in the absence of real data and experience.

Design projects inevitably include phases where faculty and students whittle down brainstormed ideas, discuss them, critique them, or attempt to pick “the best” idea out of a bunch. If done by people unfamiliar with target environments, all this does is to reinforce everyone’s badly formed preconceptions, as the Jester has seen in student competitions where teams defend their Blind Man’s Designs to probing judges whose own credentials in ICT4D intervention are questionable. This is often worse with the brightest students, because bright students are spectacularly good at rationalizing in the absence of data. Inevitably, this kind of interaction teaches people to get attached to their own bad ideas, to become proficient at defending baseless decisions, and to believe that a made-up justification is better than acknowledging, “I don’t know.” That’s how the road to hell gets paved.

Many professors who teach ICT4D courses have had years, if not decades, of formal training in buzzwords like “appropriate,” “contextual,” “ethnographic,” and “human-centered,” all of which place a premium on knowing the customer right down to how many hairs they have on their left pinky knuckle. Many instructors also realize – deep in their hearts, if not in their syllabi – the hypocrisy of having students design solutions for groups they have never even interacted with. Yet, they feel compelled to run these courses – maybe they feel it’s the most they can contribute given their own expertise, station, and the golden handcuffs of academic tenure in a developed country. So, what is a well-intentioned teacher to do in the absence of a healthy travel budget? Here are some practical ideas from the Jester, for what could be done in lieu of a Blind Man’s Design project…

Do a project for a local, poor community. Of course, the reality of poverty will be different from place to place, but the methodology of how to go about it, and the experience of unexpected challenges will all apply. Important meta-lessons can be learned. As a bonus, a recurring class can develop an ongoing relationship with local partners. The Jester applauds Keith Edwards at Georgia Tech for going this route.
Run a wacky design project or an entrepreneurship project, without a focus on “D.” Again, there are meta-lessons in design and entrepreneurship that are worth gaining through direct attempt, rather than through bookish learning. Tina Seelig of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program has some great ideas along these lines. With some cleverness, they could probably be bent to have a little more of a “D” element. The project goals could be less about revenue and more about positive social impact, for example.
Establish ties with development organizations “on the ground” who have need for the kind of skills the course is attempting to teach, and let students do projects for them. The important thing is that the partner organization has enough understanding of the problem context, that it has the ability to provide real direction and feedback. There’s no point in taking on an outsourced design project from an organization that is itself at arm’s length from the problems. Likely, the more the project is specified by the organization, the better – while there will always be room for creative input, well-spec’ed projects are hard to find.
Take ideas generated elsewhere, and ask students to come up with questions that they’d have, if they were to undertake the projects themselves. Push them to ask any and all questions. The important thing here is to keep the focus on asking questions, and not on answering them. Any attempt at answering them without firsthand experience will, again, be brittle and empty.
If it’s absolutely critical to do a complete design/plan project (the Jester doesn’t understand why it should be, except that some academic tradition demands it), put the emphasis on the degree to which the students arrive at the right kinds of questions, and their strategies for answering them. When they make design decisions, stress that they are only guesses, and that what’s important is that they are explicit that they are guesses. Perhaps allow students to arrive at multiple designs, based on multiple possibilities. Don’t even bother trying to comment on the quality of any answers however they get them (unless it’s through actual trial and error at the location). Ask students to explicitly include words like “tentative” and “preliminary” in the title of their projects and throughout any documents they write. Grade students based on their thoroughness in asking questions, and plans for how to get them answered, as well as their explicit admission of decisions made tentatively and with suboptimal knowledge. Deduct points when they make assumptions they shouldn’t be able to make. Resist the great temptation to articulate judgements about the likelihood of the idea working, even if the idea stinks – the problem is that that then pressures students into trying to come up with good ideas on the basis of poor knowledge, instead of thinking through questions and the plan of attack.

All of these suggestions avoid what the Jester believes to be the big no-nos: to have students design their own ICT4D interventions prior to immersion, to build prototypes or business plans which they then rationalize and justify with nothing other than secondhand information, and possibly to have those projects critiqued and judged by faculty or “experts.” The reality is that no one knows whether something will really work or whether it’ll meet all the constraints until it’s tried in situ, not even when endowed with a spectacular intellect like the Jester’s. Why, then, reinforce such a pretension in class?

Posted in Teaching ICT4D | No Comments »