I am taking an online course in mobile phones and international development with the TechChange Institute in Washington DC. The course is online and I do it all on weekends or early (yawn) mornings and a few late nights. I will blog about it a bit as it fits in with my plan to do a phD one day on ICT, social media, and what constitutes effective digital government (to which, of course, I feel communication is central).
Our first week of reading included the Foreign Policy magazine article, 'Can Silicon Valley Save the World?', by Charles Kenny (@charlesjkenny) and Justin Sandefur (@JustinSandefur). Here is my takeaway.
After running through a spate of much lauded, TED Talks, X Prize, and think/do tanks and projects in which tech-takes-on-poverty from Khan Academy to One Laptop per Child, the authors point out that the hope that technology will pull the masses out of poverty is nothing new.
The problem of poverty is huge. Today, more than "half the planet still lives on USD 4 a day and 2.4 billion people live on less than USD 2 a day."
Yet, the article points out some of these projects are reaping more hype than actual "profits".
For example, the Soccket, a USD 99 soccer ball that weighs 2 ounces more than a real soccer ball, lights up with eco-friendly LED lights after ' only' a half an hour of kicking is still 10 times more expensive than a solar powered lamp, which will light up when you flick a switch. And PlayPumps, child-powered merry-go-round water pumps, require 27 hours of child "play" to "meet the target of delivering water to 2,500 people." One Laptop per Child has distributed a lot of computers, but studies in Nepal and Peru suggest that there has been little to no benefit with regard to language or math skills amongst the laptop recipients. Finally, Samasource, a nonprofit that breaks down transcription and data-checking work into small 'byte-sized' tasks that can then be outsourced to refugees and disadvantaged women and children, has, Samasource itself reports, a "USD 1 in overhead to USD 1 in wages" ratio - so it seems to function more as a rather expensive job training program than an actual business.
The authors finally cite a World Bank report that "suggests a 10 percent increase in broadband access correlates to a 1.38 percentage point increase in the rate of GDP growth in low- and middle-income countries." If anything, the computer and internet access have fallen by the wayside while, in developing countries, mobile phones offer much more access and connectivity than the 'real' web.
The authors then explore if, more than the ideas, the attitude of Silicon Valley is what will spur the poverty reduction by tech. They point out that the 'fail fast and fail often' mantra of tech entrepreneurs mean that only the good ideas get funded while the market mercilessly destroys the bad (ahem, putting aside issues of net neutrality, which in my opinion increasingly disrupt the market.) However, in the world of nonprofit, there is no 'market test' that will naturally weed out the bad ideas and leave only the good ones.
The solution? Well, it's two-fold. The authors point to Harvard economist and MacArthur "genius" Michael Kremer who heads USAID's Development Innovation Ventures (DIV).
1. Make an "Advance market."
Kremer first explored finding an "advance market" based on existing needs and then guaranteeing funding for the 'winning' innovation when it came to providing what that market needed. When, in 2009, the GAVI Alliance created a USD 1.5 billion fund that promised to pay for affordable drugs that would "address the leading cause of vaccine-preventable death in children under 5 worldwide: Streptoccoccus pneumoniae." The market winner is currently being administered and is estimated to be on track to save as many as 1.5 million children from death by 2020.
2. Create venture capital for tech-fights-poverty innovations.
Kremer heads USAID's DIV, which funds, in stages, well-researched innovations designed to tackle a public sector problem. Examples include a new "m-health" app that literate community health workers (India has deployed 750 000 throughout the country) use to follow World Health Organisation protocols designed to prevent easily avoidable childhood maladies that all too frequently lead to death. Studies in India and Tanzania suggest this innovation may warrant a second round of funding. But DIV is not all about the flashy tech. DIV also sponsored a start-up idea that placed stickers in 2,300 matatus, commuter minibuses in Kenya, encouraging passengers to complain if drivers drove to fast. In a country where traffic accidents kill more people than malaria, this simple "tweak" saw a "60% reduction in insurance claims involving death or injury" - a cost of USD 7 per life saved.
I am reading articles on technology and public policy because one day I want to do a PhD on this stuff. To make sure I read the articles, I'm summarising what I remember here and filing it under 'professional stuff' in my labels. The parenthetical statements are usually mine while the rest is where I try to accurately represent what I took from the article.
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