On Tuesday I traveled to the United Nations to talk to UNICEF's Executive Board and also to meet with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on moving forward with the important work that we do together. These meetings are key to delivering results because our UN colleagues and we are committed to working closely together. Making that happen requires many things, including a big dose of humility. Please watch the video for more on this.
“All those who work in the international community on development tend to overstate the impact of what we’re doing. What’s far more important is the performance of governments.”
Anthony Lake, Executive Director, Unicef. As quoted in the Financial Times, May 19, 2012. How aid got smarter, by Simon Kuper.
Our Top Ten Blog Posts by Readership in 2011
Originally published on July 28, 2011
Recently I attended a course on social norms and social change organized by UNICEF at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Understanding how social norms affect change in practices and behaviours is becoming an increasingly ‘hot topic’ in development discourse, and rightly so I would add. In some of my previous blogs I’ve discussed how in many cases the failure to achieve expected results should be ascribed to technocratic solutions, which are not always understood and agreed upon with local communities. The lack of a clear understanding of the role and mechanisms of behaviour change has been responsible for many development failures. However, developing strict behaviour change strategies might also be not enough to promote change.
These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.
Mobile Active
uReport: Citizen Feedback via SMS in Uganda
“For aid organizations, knowing what local communities and beneficiaries want and need is the key to running successful, sustainable programs. In Uganda, UNICEF is using mobile phones and broadcast media to get direct feedback from Ugandans on everything from medication access to water sanitation. The project, called uReport, allows users to sign up via a toll-free shortcode for regular SMS-based polls and messages. Citizen responses are used both in weekly radio talk shows to create discussion on community issues, and shared among UNICEF and other aid organizations to provide a better picture of how services work across Uganda.
Sean Blaschke, a Technology for Development specialist at UNICEF Uganda, explains that uReport gathers information from participants and informs citizens of their rights and available services. Recent polls have included questions about school dropouts, water point availability, mosquito net usage, and youth employment, all collected via SMS polls.” READ MORE
Twenty years ago when I was a relatively new economist at the World Bank, I was part of the Bank’s delegation to Jomtien, Thailand, where the heads of several multilateral development agencies, bilateral aid agencies, and leaders of 155 developing countries came together to declare their commitment to universal primary education.
I remember that the mood was upbeat—and not only because the venue was set along Thailand's sunny coast. There was a strong shared feeling that it was time to recommit to education as a basic human right, as highlighted by James Grant, the Executive Director of UNICEF at the time, and as a powerful instrument for reducing poverty and promoting development, as outlined by Barber Conable, World Bank President at the time.
These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.
Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Harnessing technology for social good
"Last month the Ford Foundation hosted the Wired for Change conference ("Inspiring Technology for Social Good"), and a pack of Berkman Center folks, friends, and family were in New York for the event. Ford has posted full videos of all of the sessions, and more, on the Ford Foundation website and Vimeo and YouTube channels."
While computers and other ICT tools offer much potential to impact learning, teaching, and educational service delivery in beneficial ways, the use of such technologies also carries with it a variety of risks -- especially for children. While most people are familiar with attention-grabbing headlines related to pornography, sexual harrassment, illegal downloading and 'inappropriate' or political speech, these are only a few of the issues related to keeping kids safe online. In some places, for example, cyberbullying appears to be a more pervasive day-to-day threat for many students, and people are also increasingly understanding potential 'threats' to children related to things like privacy and data security.
To date, most of the internationally comparative work on issues related to child digital safety has taken place in 'developed' OECD countries, and the documentation and analysis of these risks in devellping country environmrnts, and their related policy responses, is largely unstudied. As noted in a recent publication from the Berkman Center at Harvard University and UNICEF,
"One of the next steps should identifying the problems children in developing nations are facing and map these issues in the respective technological, social, and economic context; from there, we will be better equipped to develop tangible, accessible targeted solutions and resources."
We usually think of schooling as a positive learning experience. However, sometimes this is not always the case. As recent news reports in the Hindu and on NDTV from India remind us, unfortunately for some children in low-income countries, schooling can be a nasty, brutal and short experience. They may suffer physical abuse, humiliation and be forced to endure the worst possible learning environments, while returning for the same punishment day after day after day.
How many of you have seen children working or perhaps begging in the streets? Or looking malnourished or unhappy? Growing up in Pakistan, I often witnessed this. It's always sad to see children who are not in school as they should be, or playing with other children and enjoying the outdoors. Childhood should be a carefree period in everyone's life; free of burden and hardship.
This is my first blog since I left the World Bank and relocated to New Delhi to work for UNICEF. Different cultures, different contexts, different communication challenges. Every change implies dealing with unknown and unexpected situations and it usually also entails refining a different way of thinking in approaching new challenges. In this case, the change I went through allowed me to see even clearer the critical role of communication for development (C4D), or program communication as it is also called in UNICEF, for achieving sustainable change.
The current trend in most international organizations towards results-based management planning is a further element confirming the crucial role of C4D. Results are now defined basically at outputs level and outcomes level. The former refers to results directly related to activities carried out as technical solutions (e.g. production of infrastructure or provision of services), but outcomes are results of a higher level, capable of achieving a greater impact, linked with institutional or behavioral change. That is where C4D becomes a sine-qua-non for the success of most development initiatives. No matter what is the technical solution to be adopted; i.e. latrines, water irrigation schemes, a new kind of crop, children immunization or better governance, these can only be achieved through a professional and systematic use of communication for social and behavior change.
When participating in discussions with officials planning for the use of computers and the Internet in schools in many developing countries, I am struck by how child Internet safety issues are often only considered as an afterthought -- if indeed they are considered at all. Yet these issues almost *always* present themselves during implementation, and schools (and education systems) then scramble to figure out what to do.
What do we know about child Internet saftey issues in developing countries?
Preliminary work done by the Berkman Center up at Harvard, in partnership with UNICEF, suggests: Not much.
I returned from my two weeks of traveling with a more optimist outlook about Communication for Development -C4D- and the way it is being considered and applied around the world. I went first to Lisbon, Portugal, where I was invited to be a guest speaker in a week-long workshop on communication for social change sponsored by the Objectivo 2015 - UN Millennium Campaign in Portugal and hosted by the Lisbon's School of Communication and Media Studies. The course was directed at Civil Society Organizations managers and program officers. It has been very encouraging to see not only the high level of interest of participants, but also to realize that C4D principles and concepts can be and are applied effectively in the context of more developed countries.
We’ve been hearing a lot of bleak news regarding the global economic crisis. Perhaps this recent update from the World Bank is the bleakest yet. According to the report, the crisis will cause child mortality rates to soar in developing countries; in fact, it predicts that between 2009 to 2015, an average 200,000 to 400,000 more babies may die per year—a total of 1.4 to 2.8 million—if the crisis persists.
