humanitarian.info

• Following my mini-rant about how ReliefWeb hasn’t made the most of the potential of the web, a couple of projects surface which point the way to a better future for the humanitarian community’s hub. The ReliefWeb News Monitor is JRC on the pipes again, with an aggregated feed of news stories that can be sliced for your serving pleasure; more interesting for the aid worker is the Briefing Kit, which gives you the opportunity to build your own document package by country or emergency. One of the primary uses of ReliefWeb is for pre-deployment briefing, so this is a definite value-added service.
• More MapAction… er, action, at an Alertnet-hosted workshop in London on June 4 looking at how the aid community can use maps effectively. I understand from Liesbeth that the event is fully booked, but Mapping for communications, planning and advocacy will be streamed live for those of you who can’t make it. Plus:

We want your questions. Given the rise and rise of mapping technologies, what would you like to know about how NGOs can better use geospatial tools in their work? Use the comments section below, or submit your questions using the Twitter tag #askmaps.

• In the Financial Times: Tainted data hide the cost of Africa’s upheavals. Slightly contrarian article about the use and abuse of statistics in conflict situations. The FT casts its beady eye over IRC’s DRC statistics (which always looked a bit fishy to me) and UN statistics more broadly, and who knew I’d have an ally in the FT regarding funding for government statistics offices?

The first step towards compiling an accurate picture is to make assistance to Africa’s under-funded statistics departments a priority in international aid programmes… Accurate statistics, objectively gathered and responsibly used, are as essential as compassion in tackling Africa’s plight. Tracking its crisis without reliable data is like exploring the continent without a compass.

• Amnesty rolls out the sms bad times: Guatemalan activists receive death threats by text message. Part of the ongoing debate about how technology empowers both sides in a conflict. If there are in fact two sides in any conflict like this, which I somehow doubt. There’s even more complexity at the tail end of the “Twitter Revolution” story – I had so much to write about this nonsense. Now everybody except Evgeny has forgotten it by now (because yes that is how long the web’s attention span lasts), but this article is still worth reading:

So, while the events don’t fit the Western media’s narrative of a city full of protesters converging on Twitter and almost pulling off a revolution, technology did play an indispensable role in telling the story of April 7.

• From the Just Shoot Me files, In Iraq with Web 2.0 luminaries, as if they weren’t already filled with their own self-importance. If you don’t think this entire concept is self-parody, then read this extract and see if you can spot the deliberate mistake:

The idea is to use the brains of this small collective to give ideas to Iraqi government officials, companies and users that will help it rebuild. Iraq is short on the mojo that widespread internet can bring and the fast-track economic jolt that entrepreneurs feed on. Who knows that stuff better than a contingent of internet goombahs heavy on the Google juice and includes the guy who thought up Twitter?

“Sendhil Mullainathan is a professor of economics at Harvard University”, so they tell me at Seed magazine, where he writes:

All too often, the choices of the poor are viewed as a result of either some intrinsic failing (“they’re just very myopic people”) or some deep psychological feature of poverty (“they’re desperate”). Behavioral economics — the integration of psychological insights into economic analysis — offers a third interpretation: All of us face difficulties in making the right choices; the poor are just asked to do it more often and in tougher circumstances.

Now I like behavioural economics, and I looooooooooooove poor people, so you’d think I’d be really excited about this article. Unfortunately it’s a bit of a damp squib: he doesn’t really give any insight into the behaviour of poor people, either in terms of blank description or in terms of behavioural economics. One example: farmers’ aversion to farming sugarcane:

Sugarcane is harvested once a year and paid for in one lump sum. Planting sugarcane, although it’s more profitable monetarily, raises an unappealing psychological challenge. Imagine receiving your entire annual salary all at once, at the beginning of the year, and having to dole it out carefully over the course of 12 months. Meanwhile, many who own cows cite the daily income that milk provides as a primary benefit, even though cows are not as profitable as other investments. This is the far more consequential equivalent of someone purchasing the more expensive (per unit) but smaller bag of cookies to avoid the temptation of eating all of them at once.

Actually, no it isn’t. I would guess (from my non-farmer perspective) that the psychological challenge of sugarcane is more to do with the fact that if a crop that you only harvest once a year fails, then your family’s going to starve for an entire year. Cows not only provide a more stable income over the period, but they’re also more flexible – in pastoral contexts, owning cows is the equivalent of having money in the bank. So cows over sugarcane is not only a rational economic choice, it’s far from being as short-sighted as Mullainathan claims.

Like all science journalism, I assume that this article doesn’t fairly represent his research findings or full analysis, so I’ll be heading to his research page to see what’s behind his assumptions. Behavioural economics could have a tremendously positive impact on the development sector, so I’m hopeful – as long as we remember that behavioural economics doesn’t just focus on behaviour, but on the motivations underlying that behaviour.

As some light relief from the news from Burma and China, it looks as if the One Laptop Per Child project is falling apart under the weight of – well, mainly under the weight of Nicholas Negroponte. Ivan Krstic explains in a fascinating essay on his reasons for leaving his position as security director of OLPC:

In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

Yes, that’s right – welcome back to Magic Future Kingdom, where technology will solve everything! One thing that’s interesting is that Krstic (and I think many of the OLPC team) didn’t share this view – for them, the public mission of improving education in developing countries was what fired their hard drives up. However I’m not sure that this focus on education is any different in terms of misplaced idealism – even Krstic admits that

As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale constructionist learning pilot that has been convincingly successful; when Nicholas points to “decades of work by Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and Jean Piaget”, he’s talking about theory.

I’ve never said exactly what I thought about OLPC on this blog, for three reasons. First, my opinion is irrelevant. Second, my opinion is frequently wrong. Third, everybody deserves a chance to test their idea against reality and see if it breaks. However as far as I was concerned, OLPC was broken as soon as it ran into the reality of logistics – actually distributing these laptops to their intended recipients – but nobody seemed to want to talk about this aspect of the project, as if it would somehow corrupt the purity of the vision.

Peru’s first deployment module consisted of 40 thousand laptops, to be deployed in about 570 schools across jungles, mountains, plains, and with total variance in electrical availability and uniformly no existing network infrastructure. A number of the target schools are in places requiring multiple modes of transportation to reach, and that are so remote that they’re not even serviced by the postal service. Laptop delivery was going to be performed by untrusted vendors who are in a position to steal the machines en masse. There is no easy way to collect manifests of what actually got delivered, where, and to whom… Other than the incredible Carla Gomez-Monroy who worked on setting up the pilots, there was no one hired to work on deployment while I was at OLPC, with Uruguay’s and Peru’s combined 360,000 laptop rollout in progress. [my emphasis]

What I don’t understand is that I could have told them about all these problems. Anybody with any experience working in the development sector could have told them about all these problems. Hell, anybody who’s ever been outside of the G8 countries could have probably have told them about all these problems, which raises the tricky question of – why didn’t anybody tell them? There are two possibilities. The first is that the people they asked only told them what they wanted to hear – this seems very likely, especially if they were mainly listening to governments, who don’t like to admit that they haven’t in fact been able to extend basic services to rural areas. The second is that they didn’t bother to ask anybody, which in light of Krstic’s essay seems to be equally likely – he quotes from a memo that he sent in December 2007:

We still have not a single employee focusing on deployment, helping to plan it, working with our target countries to learn what works and what doesn’t. Evidently our “deployment plan” is to send whichever hotshot superhacker we have available to each country such that he may fix any problems that arise on the spot. If that is not in fact our plan, then we have no plan at all.

To his credit, Krstic recognises that the

the last key problem, transforming laptops into learning is a non-trivial leap of logic, and one that remains inadequately explained.

What I don’t quite understand is who he thinks is going to do that explaining. It seems clear – not just from this essay, but from general observation of the way in which OLPC has been built up and the claims that it’s made – that this project was not in fact designed to meet the educational needs of poor children around the world. Instead it was about proving a series of ideological points – about private versus public sector, about Open Source software, about constructivist learning – and the impact that it’s had on the technology sector (and it has had a not insignificant impact) has been incidental to proving those points. Now, slowly but surely, each of those points has been tested against reality – and broken. At least now we know what doesn’t work – but we knew that before.

One Laptop Per Child has been a textbook example both of the worst kind of development (broadly, rich white people believe that they know what’s best for poor black people) and the most egregious kind of technotopianism (broadly, complex social problems can be solved if only we have the right technology). These two strands of thought were summed up in a comment by Guido van Rossum:

I’ve thought for a while that sending laptops to developing countries is simply the 21st century equivalent of sending bibles to the colonies.

Amen.

• The Economist article Of internet cafés and power cuts was passably interesting on the subject of technology in developing countries, although it takes the usual optimistic approach that the Economist favours. The Economist picked up on this issue was the publication of this year’s Global Economic Prospects by the World Bank, with a focus on technology adoption and a barrel full of blindingly obvious conclusions.
• More interesting is the research that both of those draw on quite heavily, building a Historical Cross-Country Technology Adoption Database. You can download the database itself from that page, but the overview article Cross-Country Technology Adoption: Making the Theories Face the Facts by Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn is much more manageable. I haven’t dug into the data yet, but the initial Economist article made me suspicious – the data itself may suffer from survivor bias (e.g. the many failed technologies don’t feature), doesn’t explain disrepancies such as the dominance of VCDs in developing countries as opposed to DVDs in developed countries, and the focus on mobile phone uptake doesn’t take account for the nature of that particular technology. I’m not sure I can face the data itself, as the sun is shining.
• Eagle-eyed Declan Butler (a literal description; he’s at the cutting edge of trans-species surgery) quotes short-sighted Paul Currion in Nature magazine. Declan’s article Satellite can spot razed villages in Darfur on the fantastic work of Erik Prins for Amnesty International on monitoring burnt villages using remote sensing. Amnesty used his research as part of their campaigning back in 2004-5, but Erik has just published an article, Use of low cost Landsat ETM+ to spot burnt villages in Darfur, Sudan, in the International Journal of Remote Sensing. The research is right on the mark, although it’s unlikely that the large-scale study that he calls for in the conclusion will happen any time soon; lack of funds, lack of will.
• I’m angry with Firoz, who published his dissertation without telling me. Or maybe he did tell me and I just forgot. Anyway, my revenge for his oversight and/or my memory loss is to link to it here: The Utility of GIS Analysis in Coordinating Humanitarian Assistance. Congratulations, Firoz; now get back to work.

A pleasant break from all this GIS-related blogging, the World Bank Private Sector Development Blog has tipped me to a new Open Source application that the World Bank has just released. I know, I know – when I read that last sentence it doesn’t make sense to me either, but I imagine that project lead Pierre-Guillaume Wielezynski pushed quite hard to get this out there.

Given that it’s the World Bank, the app is not what you might imagine. In the words of the site,

We developed the BuzzMonitor, an open source application that “listens” to what people are saying about the World Bank across blogs and other sites in order to help the organization understand and engage in social media.

So it’s full speed ahead on the Web2.0 bus at the World Bank! The jury seems to be out on whether this is a really awesome new approach or a bit of a hog on your server, but it looks interesting enough to try – a super-aggregator with some nice features, particularly eliminating dupes, attributes sources, and allows users to collaborate on tracking and tagging. Apparently they open-sourced it in response to requests from other organisations, so there must be some demand – but you’ll need your own server to set up.

There’s been discussion around the application on Britt Bravo’s blog, the Net-Savvy Executive blog and (gasp) an article at Salon. Plus Pierre seems to be taking an active role in any discussions, so I’m sure if you email him he’ll be happy to give you a guided tour!

If you still don’t believe me that statistics can be fascinating and, in some cases, change the way that you see the world, then watch an amazing presentation by Hans Rosling on GapMinder.

I thought it had gone defunct, but there’s a new issue of Information Technologies and International Development out at the MIT Press.� And the better news is that they’ve made the journal Open Access, which means that you can download all the articles for free.

Forget about One Laptop Per Child, Afrigadget is awesome! I particularly like the Wheel Chair / Mobile Phone Booth…

Fellow itinerant keyboard-basher Michael Howden sent me a link to the specification that he developed for monitoring and evaluation (M&E) database that he’s developed for Save the Children in Aceh. He’s become something of a one-man database development shop recently, working in Aceh and Pakistan and soon in Uganda.

In the accompanying post, he mentions that the critical difference between development work and emergency relief is that the former operates on a much longer timeframe than the latter. In my experience, development projects aren’t necessarily any longer-term in their thinking than emergency projects, but that’s not my main point.

Michael is talking specifically about the problem of incorporating qualitative information into M&E processes, particularly if you’re building a database to deal with those processes. Qualitative info – narrative text, pictorial records, and so on – is notoriously difficult to deal with.

I tend towards the maxim “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, so I often question the value of much qualitative information for the purposes of project management. It is extremely useful, however, for a number of other things – fundraising or advocacy work, for example.

This argument often gets me into bar fights with disgruntled development workers, who feel that the qualitative information is in fact the more important stuff. In particular there’s a feeling that factors such as capacity or attitude can’t be measured by numbers alone, which may be true; but they can be measured (opinion polls being the obvious example), and that makes them amenable to a quantitative approach.

I’m a big fan of Edward Tufte. Most normal people don’t get as excited by data visualisation as much as I do. So what kind of tools can Web2.0 provide to help make some of the more critical data more accessible?

Developed and managed by the Gapminder Foundation in Sweden (and hosted by Google), Gapminder presents a wide range of statistics in support of the Millenium Development Goals. Presenting statistics in an engaging way is difficult at the best of times, but Gapminder does it, with charts and maps. It’s easy to use, less easy to understand, and hard to beat.