We do a lot of work on open learning as well and it was clear there was tension between these open educational platforms (like Coursera, edX, etc.) and their use in local contexts, particularly in emerging economies. There is tension there. Open educational technologies are too often framed as a transparent instrument for educational export, keeping (specifically Western or Global North) curricula, pedagogy, and educational values intact whilst they are broadcast to a global population in deficit.
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Do you want this guy giving you sexual health advice?
Got bots? A beginners guide to Facebook (chat)bots 4 good
I remember when I first started hearing the buzz about bots. My first thought? 'Here we go again...' - a reaction to the endless cycles of hype followed by business-as-usual that typifies the digital sector. However, over the past few months I've had the opportunity to design a few 'bots 4 good', and I'd like to share what I've learned: how they work, what they could be useful for, and where to start if you'd like to get one. I believe that done well, they could be really useful add-ons to your digital strategy as they provide a rich 'in-between' space for mobile users who aren't fully digitally literate.
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Credit: MySociety, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
How can we ensure that the citizens, government and civil society work together?
Last week, I was at TICTeC 2018 where researchers, activists and practitioners discussed the impact of civic technology, or civic tech. This blogpost summarises the discussion of Two heads are better than one: working with governments.
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The Nexus of ICT4D and Environmental Justice: A US Perspective
Well, as a Black American woman from a low-income background, I constantly say that "development" not only takes place in Africa, Asia, and any other place typically associated with the Global South. There are several places even in the world's "richest" country that reflect not only deprivation but what happens when environmental justice is not served. In light of this and in honor of Earth Day on Monday April 22, in this post I will focus on the nexus of ICT4D and environmental justice in the US.
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Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash
AI in ICT4D: Accumulated Advantage, Data Driven Bias and Invisibility, and Ethical Care
With artificial intelligence (and perhaps with all things technological), we as humans seem to run the gamut between dystopian visions of complete AI takeover and dysfunction (think HAL) and utopian daydreams of gracious ubiquity where personal assistants attend to the less pleasant aspects of daily life (think every edtech advertisement ever, and an increasing portion of Amazon’s advertising budget it would seem). AI is pervasive, regardless of how you critique it.
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whatsapp vs. gender based violence: notes on a pilot
This is part three in a series of blogs tracing each step of an iterative approach to digital programme design. As part of a UNFPA-funded project run by OneWorld to explore strategies to tackle Gender Based Violence (G.B.V.) using ICTs, we decided a sensible entry-point was to address the lack of information about laws and services in rural Benin, working with stakeholders to co-create messages for dissemination via WhatsApp and SMS. This blog details the process and results of rapid-testing this model.
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Getting ICT Into the hands of more women
March 8 is International Women’s Day! To celebrate, we look at a course on women and ICT inclusion developed by USAID Digital Inclusion, mSTAR, and Panoply Digital.
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Wakanda forever: a fintech tribute
By the time you are reading this blog post, you most probably have already gone to the movies to watch Black Panther. If not, do yourself a favour: stop reading and go watch it NOW.
Yet, regardless of whether you watched it or not, I hope you have come across the bountiful articles, tweets and social media posts that describe what makes it so revolutionary: it is the first Hollywood blockbuster movie to have an African-American director, starring a predominantly black cast, with the first black super hero. Above all, it is a celebration of blackness and a movie that finally offers black people the representation they deserve: that of powerful, smart, creative and beautiful people.
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Photo credit: Charles Moehle, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Indonesia needs net neutrality protections, urgently
Net neutrality rules may address many issues of the internet users in Indonesia. Indonesia, however, doesn’t have such rules. The time is ripe for the country to adopt them.
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Shondaland via Getty Images
A Digital Angle to Oxfam's #MeToo Moment?
Last week I think many of us who work in international development were quite shocked and disappointed to learn of the scandal with Oxfam employees who paid (?) prostitutes for sex, in housing provided by Oxfam no less. Before we had time to say that this was an isolated incident, it emerged that possibly the same thing had happened in Chad with a man implicated in the Haiti scandal, Roland van Hauwermeiren. These incidents are in no way solely a problem of Oxfam, or of international development more broadly, but rather form a part of the overarching and global challenges around men who commit violence against women and girls with relatively little impunity. I believe this Oxfam story may be the start of the #MeToo movement shining its light on injustices in international development. In this blog post, I'll explain why mobile should urgently be considered as a safeguard to help prevent further abuses of this nature.
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Bangladesh’s first app for women by women: in conversation with Ivy Russell, CEO of Maya Apa
Over the Christmas and New Year period, I was back in Dhaka - catching up with friends and family, but also spending time with movers and shakers in the Bangladesh ICT4D space. I spent a day with Drinkwell visiting their mobile-enabled ‘water ATMs’ in low-income communities in Dhaka, and I also spent some time with Ivy Russell and the Maya Apa team.
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Mobile Mentoring in Teacher Training: ideas, projects, and further development
I have been working a bit recently with colleagues in Finland, Nigeria, and Nepal on developing a more robust teacher training curriculum for delivery in low resource environments primarily through mobile. There is activity in this space so this isn't a novel idea, but I'd rather be focused on impact over originality. At least that is what I tell myself. I wrote a bit about it a few years ago.
Read MoreTips and Tools for Creating Educational SMS and WhatsApp Content with Rural Stakeholders
In my previous blog I outlined how and why we planned to run ‘co-creation workshops’ with a varied group of stakeholders in rural Benin, as part of a UNFPA-funded project run by OneWorld to explore strategies to tackle Gender Based Violence (G.B.V.) using ICTs. The stakeholders included rural women and men, youth peer educators, and the heads of social services and civil servants responsible for local response to cases of violence against women and girls.
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GeekFest 2017: Talking Gender-Disaggregated Data with DAI Global
Earlier this week, I did an interview with DAI Digital about the need for more gender-disaggregated data, and how the USAID Gender and ICT Survey Toolkit can help people collect this data. We've reproduced the original blog post here, with thanks to Chloe Messenger and the DAI team.
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Does mobile learning stand a chance in France?
Hey France! Ban education budget cuts, not mobile phones!
My friend Michael Trucano at the World Bank wrote a blog post two years ago about the pros and cons of banning mobile phones in schools. He noted that as early as 2009, France had introduced a bill to ban phones in schools. Now, that ban is a reality. Since when does France care more about mobile phones than their shrinking education budget?
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The Hard Problem for ICT4D: Net Neutrality, Zero Rating and Algorithmic Culture
Is the ad-based business model destroying the Internet and, moreover, is it destroying our society?
As someone who has been a long time advocate of free ICTs like email, social networking, Google Docs, and all other things free, I didn’t arrive at this focal point willingly or with any preconceptions. Like many of you reading this post, I had simply grown accustomed to ignoring the targeted ads that followed me around online, and in fact viewed it as a fair exchange for the technologies being offered. But as technologies have continued to advance, their downsides are also becoming bigger and more visible.
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Digital Frontiers: gender data, the private sector, and user consent
Earlier this week, I was a panellist at the Digital Frontiers event in London, hosted by DAI Europe. The event focused on digital inclusion, and how we can integrate vulnerable and marginalised populations into the global digital ecosystem and provide them with the information and service, and opportunities that access to digital technology can bring.
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Students and schools: imports, exports, and some flattening of context
Returning to a favorite (re: only) theme of mine, education, I was struck recently by the uptick in the number of foreign universities setting up branch campuses in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and presumably throughout the continent, ideally bolstering domestic capacity for graduates who can push forward development agendas requiring greater and greater access to skilled labor. The schools and university sectors are just strands of a larger neoliberal loosening of public control over what was once the exclusive purview of the public sector, but no need to get too big picture for the time being.
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Co-creating Content to Combat Gender Based Violence (and Other tongue twisters)
One of the hardest things to get right when it comes to M4Dev, is content. This is especially true when working on complex and sensitive topics such as gender based violence, where even mentioning the subject can be considered taboo.
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On Norms and Agency Conversations about Gender Equality with Women and Men in 20 Countries, The World Bank
Digital Financial Services and the Financial Inclusion Gender Divide
In my previous blog post, I wrote about smallholder farmers and how they are more likely to experience financial exclusion because of heightened operational and risk assessment challenges. Today, I want to focus on another group of people that is disproportionately underserved by financial institutions: Women.
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