What Works in ICT4D and M4D? Questions as Jargon

4 minute read

Figuring out a role for technology in rural health service delivery, urban utility provision, anti-corruption, humanitarian relief efforts, or group lending initiatives is not just useful, it’s increasingly inevitable. The rise of ICT4D and M4D approaches has revived questions and debates that have confronted international development practitioners for decades. Asking ‘what works’ is one of these questions. Intended as a sounding board for deeper inquiry, it often fosters a search for blueprints instead.

In his recently published book, Aid on the Edge of Chaos, Ben Ramalingam recalls a 1974 review of U.S. country strategy by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), which states that U.S. aid planning should be, “…more relevant to the complexities of the development process, and not… a guide and stimulus to detailed economic and social engineering.’” (fn 89, p 64)

In the age of tech and data for good, this advisory—written 40 years ago—could just as easily have been written last year. The development community both formally and informally recognizes that laying out entire prescriptions for change is anywhere from ineffective to outright disastrous (with the occasional exception). Nor is there a shortage of efforts to bring context up from the footnotes, and ask what’s working about the conversation as much as the outcomes seen as emerging from it.

ICT4D and M4D discussions are reviving this question with gusto because it makes sense from a technological and engineering perspective. Does the system have energy sources to power it for a few hours? Yes. When system A receives a group of SMS from system B, will it trigger an alert to system C? No. Okay, let’s see if there’s a bug? Is this service strong enough to support mass messaging alongside automated server updates from a server in a different country? Yes. From this angle, asking ‘what works’ is not only important, it is altogether necessary for finding accessible, affordable, optimal modes developing digital architecture beyond the scope of individual projects and programs.

Sensitivities are raised when the technical questions around ‘what works’ inadvertently (or intentionally) serve as proxies for the non-technological processes, relationships, politics, and contexts in which these technologies are used. Raised as a question, but expressed as a plan, it crowds out the space for asking what’s happening, or why the same analog processes faced difficulties before tech was considered an option for improving or transforming them. At this point, asking ‘what works’ in ICT4D or M4D may merely be the inverse of offering prescriptive frameworks.

Why are people afraid to report police misconduct? Are women likely to be the primary account holders in this community? Is data collection in ethnic minority areas putting people at risk? Are power sources unreliable because of corruption or because energy is too expensive? Do new information management systems exclude entire segments of the population by design, even if unintentionally? How many different directions are development and humanitarian projects pulling this community, state, or sector?

As an open-ended question, it can lead to an endless rabbit hole of hypotheticals, an exercise for which practitioners often lack the time, resources and energy. In the other direction, it can inform an approach to planning which sees the particularities of a given context as exceptions, as counterintuitive, or even as obstacles to project-specific progress. It sees people as peripheral to their own contexts, rather than as the primary agents within it.

In a recent analysis of Theories of Change, Craig Valters highlights how the push for evidence-based approaches can encourage similar behavior, “In international development circles, ‘evidence’ has acquired a particular meaning relating to ‘what works’—a narrow discourse in which the ‘how’ of context and process is ignored. It may often be the case that evidence is generated to validate certain policy narratives rather than as a foundation for planning interventions and building such narratives.” (fn 85, p 16)

We need something in between. Upstream questions, ethical questions and political questions are just as relevant to figuring out what works at the project-level, across sectors, and for different groups of people. The challenge, technology aside, is that these questions do not have a natural place in proposal writing, project planning, administration, or evaluation in ICT4D and M4D projects or otherwise.

Asking what works is as common as it is complex. The growing ubiquity, and potential utility, of ICT4D and M4D approaches to well known social, political and economic challenges raises the prospect of redefining inclusion, reconfiguring historically unimaginable forms of access, and renegotiating personal and communal agency of all kinds. These approaches can just as easily prompt a return to, and amplification of, the retrofitting of context in service of available solutions.

While asking what works may inflate the tendency to take ‘development’ short cuts, asking it amidst the shift from analog to digital also offers a unique opportunity to reconsider lessons and tensions alike from past experience.

Highest among them, context is key.