humanitarian.info

Ken Banks has almost written a manifesto for himself in Time to eat our own dog food? I think there’s a lot of potential in his project FrontlineSMS – mainly because it’s a platform. Like any good platform, it’s up to the end user (in this case, grassroots NGOs) to work out how they want to use it, and how they want to incorporate it into their organisation and activities. I need to work out why I feel more positively towards FrontlineSMS than I do towards Ushahidi, particularly since the two projects have a good working relationship, but right now I want to focus on something that Ken says in his blog post:

If we draw parallels between the concerns of Easterly and Schumacher and apply them to the application of mobile phones as a tool for social and economic development, there’s a danger that the development community may end up repeating the same mistakes of the past.

I don’t think I’ll put myself in any danger by predicting that the development community will absolutely repeat the mistakes of the past, since that’s one of the things that the development community is good at. Ken rightly feels that we need to avoid developing an “NGO digital divide”, but once again I don’t think there’s much danger in stating that there’s already an NGO digital divide. It’s been quite clearly identified, at two levels.

1. Between the richer UN agencies and the (usually) Western NGOs who do most of their contracting, and their poorer cousins (particularly national NGOs in the developing world). As the two groups diverge further (which I admit will be a slow process) communications between them will become increasingly problematic. When one organisation has a 24/7 broadband connection and the other needs to go to the local internet cafe twice a day, you’re going to feel it.
2. Slightly less alarming but potentially more damaging is the digital divide within organisations. In most organisations, the further out into the field you go – both geographically and organisationally distant from headquarters – the poorer the ICT capacity is. Considering that field offices are our eyes and ears on the ground – the source of nearly all the baseline information our organisations need to do their work – this is something which needs to be fixed.

Ken’s proposal for how we can avoid this:

To do this we need to think about low-end, simple, appropriate mobile technology solutions which are easy to obtain, affordable, require as little technical expertise as possible, and are easy to copy and replicate. This is something I regularly write about, and it’s a challenge I’m more than happy to throw down to the developer community.

It’s a challenge that we all need to deal with, and one of the critical things that Sahana has (and continues to) wrestle with. I think that this approach – exemplified by projects like FrontlineSMS – is the right way to deal with the first point I discussed above, because the most likely common denominator between organisations is the mobile phone. However while mobile phones can play a role in improving communications within organisations, there are deeper political and cultural questions that need to be addressed regarding priorities within the structure.

Read Ken’s full post and leave him a comment – this is a discussion which needs to be continued and expanded.