ICTworks by Inveneo

There is an infamous Catch-22 in starting a career in information and communications for technology. In order to earn a job in ICT4D, I need to have experience. In order to gain experience in ICT4D, I need to earn a job. So many job seekers find themselves discouraged from being stuck in this infinite loop.

The Good News

There is hope! For practitioners willing to put extra effort into the career pursuit, don't sit idly by waiting for job interviews. Create your own job by taking on independent projects using ICT to address a problem in developing countries. Doing so gives an individual experience working through issues in the context of the developing world and proves to employers that an individual possesses the initiative and skills to make a project sustainable.

This is not an easy undertaking. It requires proper research, planning, and a thorough understanding of the resources that will be needed. Half-completed or poorly planned projects will do nothing for attractiveness as a potential employee.

If you’re not up to this challenge, stop reading now. This post is not for you. If you feel confident in your ability to step up to this challenge, there are some things you should consider. These are points that I have picked up from my own experience developing an independent project, coupled with tips from professional practitioners.

1) Problems come before solutions…ALWAYS.

Developing a solution and then trying to apply it somewhere in the developing world is backwards thinking. It does not address real needs. You should never go into an ICT4D project assuming that a certain tool or expertise is going to be applicable within a community. First, investigate areas that could benefit from technology, and then choose the most appropriate project design and tools.

2) There’s a not-so-fine line between thinking big and thinking gargantuan.

While it’s great to take risks and create challenging projects, designing a solution with an unmanageable scope is only doing you a disservice. Start with identifying a single problem within a single institution within a single community. Work with that community to develop a solution. At the same time, consider how the technology can be developed in a way that is scalable or transferable. This way, if you find later that a similar problem exists in another community, it will be easier to modify it to meet more needs.

3) ICT4D professionals love to talk about their work…and they have a lot more experience than you do.

All ICT4D practitioners love to talk about their work with those who are genuinely interested. Find people who have done work in the realm of your project via Twitter or Google+, and then ask them if you can conduct an informational interview. This will give you the opportunity to pick their brains on best practices, while indirectly making your work and interests known to others in the field. Anyone you talk to will likely gain a vested interest in how your project turns out.

4) In ICT4D, failure to learn from a mistake is the greatest failure.

Failure is increasingly becoming a less stigmatized word in ICT4D. With events like Fail Faire taking place, everyone in the field has been owning up to their failures in order to promote others learning from past mistakes. Pay attention to all of this on Twitter, blogs, and in conversation with professionals. There is a lot of great advice available and typical errors to avoid within these discussions.

5) It’s no longer Six Clicks to Kevin Bacon. It’s now Two Clicks to Document Heaven.

You’re going to find that you need certain documents and resources for researching and developing your projects. It can sometimes be very difficult to locate these documents, since the digitized versions of paper documents are not always kept up to date on websites within the developing world.

With Twitter, it only takes two clicks to track these documents down: one to hit the Tweet button after asking where to find the resource, and one to open the email containing whatever it is that you need. Make use of your Twitter networks when you are unable to find something. Practitioners are usually more than willing to help you out, and it further stimulates interest in your project.

6) Neglected stakeholders represent neglected projects.

A lot of people are affected when technology is brought into the developing world. Before designing and implementing a project, every stakeholder should be considered, and the design should be planned with the goal of obtaining support, maximizing benefit, and minimizing obstacles for each. Work with your stakeholders directly to ensure that you are not inaccurately assuming their needs and potential dilemmas.

7) Cool people blog.

Even if no one reads it while you are working on your project, it is very useful to maintain a blog to document each milestone. This will allow you to iron out thoughts on progress, setbacks, and what you are learning. Afterwards, you can point potential employers to your blog for an overview of everything that you did and what you discovered about working within the developing world.

8) Technology is just a teeny, tiny piece of any ICT4D project.

In ICT4D, it is never just about creating a technology solution. There are many other factors to consider in order to make projects sustainable. These involve training, developing standards and policies, planning for continued funding, among countless others. Be sure to identify these factors and plan for them. Dumping technology without these considerations makes sustained success very unlikely.

9) Success will not make or break you. The gaining of knowledge will.

As mentioned before, the greatest failure in ICT4D is not to learn from a failure. If your project does not turn out to be successful, don’t assume that you’ve lost hope of earning that dream career. Be prepared to point out where your project went wrong and what you learned from it. Ultimately, having the experience working through a problem and solution in the developing world is the most important thing to show potential employers.

10) We’re not in it for the money; we’re in it for the good.

While it is great to gain the experience in this field and prove how wonderful you are to employers, it is also important not to forget the truest motives for developing a project. It’s not about you; it’s about who or what you are helping. Once the project is complete, don’t leave it hanging. Be sure to follow-up on it, and offer future help when needed. There is a certain moral integrity that comes with being in this field. Don’t let the pursuit of a job mask that.

In May 2010 the Ushahidi blog posted an awesome post fromChris Blow which was highlighting the importance of working through a Ushahidi project by thinking that the tool is only 10% of your project.

I loved that blog post and still think it is a very actual problem not only with Ushahidi deployments around the world, but in general with the increasing use of technology for development or human rights.

Working as New Media consultant for several project in information management based on the use of FOSS I have been encountering this problem several times, and I think that there are several misconception tat lead to the fact that we can see and increasing use in technology but not always this leads to an increase in the efficacy of those projects.

I will highlight here some of those misconceptions:

1. If it is free it is easy.

There is an incredible growing development of free open source software that is free and available for everyone in the net, like FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi, Freedom Fone etc. The fact that those tools are free makes organizations and individual that wants to use them think that they are easy to use. On one side this is true, but on the other side the fact that the tools is free doesn’t mean that the use of the tool is free, or that the project design based on this tool will be free. You can use volunteer as much as you want, but a project to work needs to be based on professional work and professional approaches. The tools is free, the professionalism behind the project is not.

2. Tech is difficult, non tech is easy.

If you are not a tech person everything that is tech seems very obscure and difficult. I myself cannot get around a Ushahidi installation without swearing a lot, calling friends to help me, getting 100 errors and finally get it done after 8 hours of work. A good developer gets it done in not more than 20 minutes. For this reason I was the first one thinking that the tech part of any technology based project is the most important one. Ones I started working on this I realized that this is really not the case. I don’t want to take out any merit to the awesome job that web developers and programmers do, but their job still is and will be 10% of any project if not less.

An example of this is the Ushahidi platforms done in Egypt for the Parliamentary elections: 5 platforms were set up to monitor the elections. The only one of them that was a huge success in terms of report gathered, quality of information, verification process and structure was the U-Shahid one. Why? I would love to say that this is because I worked on it (conflict of interest?) but the true is that in that project the tech part was really only the 10%: the project was a 5 months projects, with massive trainings, a month of project design, evaluation and monitoring system set up, sustainability study on the systems already present in the country.

The project was a success because of everything that you cannot see in the platform and that was the real difference in that project and the others: the massive investment in terms of time, money and human resources that the project deployed. Tech is not easy but either is the non -tech part of the project.

3. The use of technology is an end in itself.

Lots of people are getting increasingly excited with the use of technology. And with reasons: developing and poor countries as well as repressive regime are witnessing the emergence of new phenomenon of digital activism that are changing the political and social landscape and even if the debate on their efficacy or not is still going on, there is no doubt that those technologies are having an effect. But there is also a decreasing number, in my opinion of understanding of what is success in a technology based project: I am witnessing more and more a quantitative approach to the use of technology and less and less a qualitative approach.

The Ushahidi platform in this is a good example: people mostly look at the number of reports in a platform, or how many time has been used or viewed at, but not at what the reports are saying, who is following up on the reports, what the effect of the use of the platform is. Technology is still most of the time an end in itself and not just a way to develop a project. This can be very problematic because technology is not a panacea, and it cannot be the goal: sometimes thing are better without the use of technology or sometimes it is just not the right tool for that problem.

Not everything will be solved with the use of technology. But if you know when and how to use it, how to integrate with local systems, how to make it meaningful in the context of operations: if you know what your goal is and the technology is only one of the means to achieve it, and you are not afraid to sacrifice the toll for the goal, than you may succeed.

4. If the technology works the project works.

Doing a project based on the use of technology sometimes leads to the fact that ones the tech part is done and the technology is working people think that this will solve all the issues related to that project. In November I was at an Oxfam conference and doing my presentation on the only tech panel of the conference a guy did an intervention highlighting the fact that he couldn’t see how the use of technology for human right monitoring could have prevented or helped during the Sri Lankan conflict, and how technology is not helping in solving political issues. His intervention was the result of the fact that he was expecting technology to be the ultimate solution: if you use digital technology you may achieve more information, more accurate information, you may spread the world and make things more visible, but you will not solve all the problems.

Lets’ take the example of Sudan Sentinel: everyone is really excited about that project, and I think it is a great idea. On the other side, it is really going to change anything? I mean, do we really need that to know that there are mass atrocities happening in Sudan? Don’t the UN Security Council receive monthly reports from the UN mission there on the situation? Don’t all the NGOs and agencies working there spread the voice about what is going on? Didn’t the ICC already issue an arrest order on Bashir because of the mass atrocities? So why the hell to spend 750.000 dollars for a website that will tell us what we already know???

The reason is that the technology may be working perfectly, but what will make this project successful is if the use of this technology will lead to more awareness of the situation, to more people pushing their governments in doing something, to more visibility on the issue in terms of public opinion and the impossibility to say: I didn’t know. Will this be achieved? We will see, but we need to consider the fact that even if the technology is working, the project may be a complete waste of money and time. And also, we want also to consider that fact that maybe those 750.000 dollars would have achieved more if used to sustain local actors and local driven peace-building projects, but those are speculations of course…

As Chris said “Systems like Ushahidi have turned enormous communication barriers into a trivial installation and training process. But there is a whole other 90% of real work”. If you think that hiring and paying lot of money for a developer to install a platform and customize it will make your project works, you are wrong. It will make the technology works, meaning you still have to work on the other 90%.

This post was originally published as Why Technology is 10%

I saw this slide at a recent workshop and for me it states the obvious - having a good ICT partner is critical for a technology project to succeed. Then again, I am biased. I helped create the Inveneo Certified ICT Partner program, which has expanded to over 76 partners in 24 countries around the world.

Yet there are still people and programs that try to design and install ICT systems from afar, sending in Westerners where locals can and should do the job. The next time you see this happening, please remind them of the three reasons why local ICT partners matter:

Lower total costs

When a plane flight from the USA to Africa is $2000, sending just one expat once (and you'll never send them just once) is an expensive projecting staffing cost. Add in hotel, per diem, and salaries, and foreigner staffing costs will quickly be greater than your technology and power budgets. Instead, hire a local company with lower labor costs, no international travel needs, and faster time to site and reduce overall project costs by as much as 60 percent.

Better technology designs

When should you design a DC-only power system for an intervention or how should you locate desktop computers in a room? The answer to these questions depends on the country - even the location within a country - of your intervention. If there isn't another power source in the community, having any AC capacity will invite all manner of equipment to be used on your system, from cell phones to air conditioners. And depending on the local culture, screens may be considered private or public space. These tricks you learn from a local ICT partner. And when it comes time to ship local knowledge is invaluable

Improved tech support

When a client has a problem with the technology (or animals invading the tech), and they always do, who is going to respond to their needs faster? A staff person juggling several countries, based half-a-world away, and not conversant in local languages or customs, or someone from the same country, with the same timezone and cultural touchstones?

Of course the overall reason to use a local ICT partner is that we are in the business of international development - building local capacity, buying local at every opportunity, and being committed to African economic empowerment. So why work alone? Work with a local ICT partner. You'll be happy you did.

In researching the use of ICT in Jordan's education system, I came across conference notes where Michael Trucano has summarized points made by Jordan's Minister of Education on the lessons that Jordan learned in deploying ICT in schools. They are worth repeating here:

1. We have to be patient ... it takes time
2. ICT can not fix a bad education system
3. It's not about purchasing computers to schools but upgrading skills and knowledge of teachers
4. Education systems have to develop e-content materials ... if there is no e-content developed ... it is like building roads without cars on the road.
5. [You must have] change management at the school level ... involvement of school principal in training and all aspects of ICT integration is very important.

Read more at The Use of ICT in Education Reform: Sharing the experiences of Jordan and Indonesia -- and Singapore

Using ICT to manage distribution and supply chains can increase efficiency and predictability and reduce waste in value chains and have positive impacts on all market actors. ICT applications presented in this paper are divided into the following categories: 1) applications that assist in the management of supplier networks, 2) applications that facilitate traceability, and 3) applications that assist input supply companies to manage their distribution networks.

TYPES OF ICT APPLICATIONS

Management of Supplier Networks: Large buyers often use ICT applications to manage their producer supply networks. Applications address record keeping, monitoring field agent activities, procurement operations, credit and payment tasks, input distribution, measuring productivity, and forecasting.

Buyers use a range of management information systems (MIS), from basic spreadsheets to complex software used to track resources and facilitate the flow of information. Increasingly, they are using mobile phone based systems for the “channel” to reach the suppliers or their own field agents.

Traceability: Traceability refers to the recording of movements of products along the food chain from production to consumption (i.e., tracing products back to their source). For example, “relationship coffee” links coffee from its origin within a specific coffee cooperative and geographic location, increasing its retail price.

Across the globe, export standards are becoming more stringent. There is growing demand among consumers to know where their food comes from. As a result, ICT solutions that allow companies to track goods from individual farms to retail shelf are increasingly available, using, among other technologies, tracking via cell phone systems, and bar codes.

Management of Distribution Networks: Input supply companies selling seed, fertilizer, and animal feed frequently use ICT to help manage their inventory and rural distribution networks. These applications include systems that process seed orders and invoice products electronically, control inventory and costs, communicate with clients, and identify new markets. Applications vary and range from simple spreadsheets to more sophisticated tailormade applications.

LESSONS LEARNED

1. Before promoting an ICT solution, companies and development organizations must be sure of demand for the solution from existing market actors and engage those market actors in developing the solutions from the start. As noted in the prerequisites, companies must also have commercial incentives to invest in the solution. Dunavant, for example, perceived potential cost savings and efficiencies from the solutions that MTZL created and even purchased an equity stake in the ICT company once they realized how valuable the system was to them.
2. Companies should conduct an assessment of external forces and risks that could potentially affect the viability of the solution. For example, if a company’s uptake of a particular technology is premised on a strong market demand for their products, then an assessment of the market for those products should take place.
3. All users of a given technology should be given appropriate training and capacity building to avoid delays in implementation. When a new database software system is first introduced, for example, all users must be properly trained in how to effectively enter data, track production, and run reports.
4. An ICT solution has costs for operations, maintenance, and occasional upgrades. All costs need to be considered up front when gauging how much the system is worth to those benefiting—and how much they will pay for it. All too often such solutions begin during a donor project only to end at project close because no one anticipated how these operating expenses would be paid. Companies and development organizations also need to be aware of the enabling environment for certain technologies. For example, government regulation of RFID technology may limit its use.
5. Using such systems in developing countries may require adaptations due to the cost or lack of availability of telecommunications services. For example, pineapple growers in Ghana can comply with traceability requirements by recording pineapples from origin to pallets in a packing shed in the field and simply transport that information to the port via a ‘data stick’ carried by the truck driver rather than transmitting it electronically. At the port, the data can easily be transferred into the international traceability system for the pineapples, tracking them onward from the port to their destinations in Europe.
6. This set of applications are often financed and operated by large buyers, processors or exporters given how valuable they can be for them. USAID projects need to be especially cautious if heavy subsidies are requested by such large companies—it is likely to be a sign that the system has been designed in a way to outweigh its core value to these large companies

ICT Applications for Distribution and Supply Chain Management in sub-Saharan African Agriculture is one of a series of briefing papers produced by the FACET project to help USAID missions and their implementing partners in subSaharan Africa use information and communications technology (ICT) more successfully — via sustainable and scalable approaches — to improve the impact of their agriculture related development projects including Feed the Future projects.