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Development 2.0

Technophiles, beware

Submitted by Ryan Hahn on Tue, 2011-01-04 14:49

In an article last month in the Boston Review, Kentaro Toyama, a former computer scientist for Microsoft turned ICT4D promoter, confronts the limits of technological solutions to development problems:

But the value of a technology remains contingent on the motivations and abilities of organizations applying it—villagers must be organized, content must be produced, and instructors must be trained. The limiting factor in spreading Digital Green’s impact is not how many camcorders its organizers can purchase or how many videos they can shoot, but how many groups are performing good agriculture extension in the first place. Where such organizations are few, building institutional capacity is the more difficult, but necessary, condition for Digital Green’s technology to have value. In other words, disseminating technology is easy; nurturing human capacity and human institutions that put it to good use is the crux.

Of course, the same criticism could be applied to most development interventions—institutions nearly always return as the limiting or enabling factor for every development program. 

34 million jobs lost

Submitted by Ryan Hahn on Wed, 2010-10-06 10:51

The most recent ILO estimates—from January of this year—put global job losses between 2007 and 2009 at 34 million. This, of course, is on top of the many people who continue to have a job but have seen their hours (and wages) slashed. Some persuasive research indicates that reduced hours was more of an issue than outright job losses in middle-income countries. A report last week (again from the ILO) indicates that developing countries have fortunately started to rebound. How can this rebound be put on solid footing?

That is the question that a panel of experts and officials from the Annual Meetings will be trying to answer during the Open Forum tomorrow. From 2:30pm-4:00pm on Thursday, panelists at the Jumpstarting Jobs session will look at how the financial crisis has impacted jobs, ask how developing countries can stimulate job creation, and then take a close look at issues of youth unemployment. The list of speakers is up now (full bios on the Jumpstarting Jobs page):

The World Bank opened its door. Will the world enter?

Submitted by Ryan Hahn on Thu, 2010-09-30 17:14

Logo-transparent-background-285 Governments, civil society organizations, aid watchdogs and many others have all demanded greater transparency from the World Bank. They've been getting progressively more and more of it, what with the Open Data initiative and the new Access to Information Policy. And now along the same lines, the World Bank for the first time will host an Open Forum on October 7 to run parallel to the IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings.

The idea behind the Open Forum is to draw in a global audience to participate in the event via chat forums, live blogging, Twitter, etc.—the full panoply of Web 2.0 tools. I have to admit to particular anxiety about the success of this event, since I've been helping organize one of the Open Forum sessions. Jumpstarting Jobs will bring in government officials, World Bank senior management, and topic experts who are attending the Annual Meetings to talk about the massive rise in unemployment following the financial crisis and what, if anything, can be down to resolve it. (The list of speakers isn't up on the web yet, but I'll update once it is.)

Zoellick, Development 2.0 advocate

Submitted by Ryan Hahn on Thu, 2010-09-30 10:52

World Bank President Robert Zoellick gave a speech yesterday on new approaches to development research that has set off a lot of chatter in the development blogosphere. Dani Rodrik is mostly supportive, while Bill Easterly is a little less impressed. Given the touchiness of setting the research agenda (economists' jobs are at stake here!), it might be easy to overlook this snippet, where Zoellick comes out in strong support of Development 2.0:

We are working to make data analysis and modeling tools more user-friendly, so that researchers, civil society, and local communities can come up with their own findings – and double-check ours.

Men with visions should go see a doctor

Submitted by Giulio Quaggiotto on Thu, 2010-09-16 11:01

Or at least, that’s what a former boss of mine used to say. Undeterred by his wise advice, I was totally won over when Bryan Sivak, DC’s Chief Technology Officer, came to the World Bank a couple of months ago to present his vision of a Civic Commons, under the tagline of “sharing technologies for the public good”. Here is how Civic Commons’ recently launched website summarises the objectives of the initiative:

In the face of budget crises, government entities at every level must cut costs and find efficiencies. An enormous opportunity lies in their IT infrastructure — the technology they require to provide their citizens essential services. For the most part, each city, county, state, agency and office builds or buys their technology solutions independently, creating huge redundancies in civic software and wasting millions of tax-payer dollars. They should be able to work together. An independent non-profit organization, Civic Commons will help these institutions share code and best practices, reform procurement practices, and learn to function not only as a provider of services but as a platform to which an ecosystem of industry can add value for government and its citizens.

A new way to do financial literacy?

Submitted by Ryan Hahn on Sat, 2010-08-21 10:10

Over on the All About Finance blog, Bilal Zia provides a comprehensive roundup of what we know about the impact of financial literacy programs. As Zia points out, there are a lot of reasons to believe that financial literacy is important, but evaluations of financial literacy programs have so far produced lackluster results. An evaluation of a financial literacy seminar in Indonesia targeted at the unbanked found no impact on the overall population (although some impact among the least well off); a program for farmers in India also had little impact.

Although Zia suggests that in both these cases perhaps what is needed is simply more -- longer trainings, more often -- maybe the problem is rather in the delivery mode. Rather than delivering in the format most familiar to those who are responsible for the training, i.e. some kind of formal training module, perhaps the solution is to use a now widely available form of communication: mobile phones.

Harnessing development’s information shadow

Submitted by Giulio Quaggiotto on Thu, 2010-08-19 09:37

In a previous post, I introduced the concept of development’s information shadow (mediated from Tim O’Reilly), arguing that the development world will gradually produce an increasing amount of digital data with a relationship to real world objects (think, for example, of a digital map of safe drinking water sources in a given location). This will shed new light on different aspects of the reality of development work (particularly in the field) -- a reality for which we currently have no effective narrative, providing an opportunity to rewrite the script for aid.

A recent prototype initiative of AidData, the Development Gateway, and the World Bank to geocode the Bank’s projects at the subnational (rather than the national) level is meant to showcase the potential of enhancing development’s information shadow (hopefully, there are techies out there who will be inspired!).* All of a sudden, thanks to the increased level of granularity of geospatial data, a whole new narrative is emerging that will allow us to account for regional differences in, say, the impact of education projects between capital cities and rural areas (more in a blog post and video on Owen Barder’s blog). What used to be a bird’s eye view of development work at the national level, thanks to the magnifying lens of geodata, will now turn into a more nuanced account taking into account regional variations.

Development 2.0: The skills gap

Submitted by Giulio Quaggiotto on Tue, 2010-08-10 14:23

No summer lull for the Development 2.0 world, it would seem, judging from recent activity: from Richard Heeks’ paper on Development 2.0: Transformative ICT-Enabled Development Models and Impacts to a comprehensive checklist comparing “old school development” with Development 2.0 aid; from Idealware’s Social Media Decision Guide for nonprofits to UNITAR/FAO’s e-learning course for social media for development professionals. The buzz generated by the 35$ laptop and the use of social media around the referendum in Kenya (see e.g. here and here) has filled the blogosphere and endless twitter streams. IDB’s recently concluded Mobile Citizens contest and the upcoming World Bank’s Apps for Development competition indicate that the “oh so 2.0” crowdsourcing-for-innovation craze has become mainstream in development, too.

In spite of all this fervor, one has the impression that Development 2.0 is still far from reaching its full potential and has not really had an impact where it matters most – in the core processes and operations, in the business model of development organizations. We are still far from a situation where, say, a community development specialist or a biologist in the field who is interested in testing out what my colleague, Prasanna Lal Das, has dubbed “Fieldwork 2.0” options, can easily find expertise to guide them through the process. Falling foul of organizational inertia, their requests are typically

directed to either communications departments (whose main focus is,

understandably, to “push out” the message) or IT specialists for whom

web 2.0 and the mobile web are often a brave new world.

World Investment Report 2010: Investing in a low-carbon economy

Submitted by Kusi Hornberger on Tue, 2010-08-10 11:51

Low-carbon FDI in areas such as renewables, recycling and low-carbon technology manufacturing is already large (some $90 billion in 2009), but its potential is huge. This is one of the conclusions of UNCTAD’s 2010 World Investment Report, released last month. The report is the most recent in an annual series exploring the latest trends and prospects for FDI flows and recent policy changes, and also offers a deeper analysis of a topically relevant issue of the day.

This year’s report attempts to dive into the hot topic of foreign investment and climate change. It’s definitely worth checking out for anyone interested in the climate change agenda. The report is also supported by the world’s most authoritative database of FDI statistics – an excellent source of data on FDI stocks and flows for anyone who is interested.

But if you do not have the time to bury your head in the nearly 200-page report or database, here are some of the highlights from my reading:

The trial-and-error process of policymaking

Submitted by Ryan Hahn on Mon, 2010-08-09 11:24

Jim Manzi, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, recently wrote an article that contains perhaps the most incisive critique of randomized control trials (RCTs) I've seen so far. RCTs already have a long history in the social sciences within the U.S. (I was embarrassingly unaware of this fact even though I have spent a lot of time blogging about their use in the field of development.) Criminologists have tried to use them to figure out what might reduce recidivism, with little luck:

...since the early 1980s, criminologists increasingly turned to randomized experiments. One of the most widely publicized of these tried to determine the best way for police officers to handle domestic violence. In 1981 and 1982, Lawrence Sherman, a respected criminology professor at the University of Cambridge, randomly assigned one of three responses to Minneapolis cops responding to misdemeanor domestic-violence incidents: they were required to arrest the assailant, to provide advice to both parties, or to send the assailant away for eight hours. The experiment showed a statistically significant lower rate of repeat calls for domestic violence for the mandatory-arrest group. The media and many politicians seized upon what seemed like a triumph for scientific knowledge, and mandatory arrest for domestic violence rapidly became a widespread practice in many large jurisdictions in the United States.