SIMLab’s Mobile Technology Trainings for NGOs Launches as an Online Course
In September 2014, supported by funding from the United Nations Democracy Education Fund (UNDEF), Social Impact Lab launched a new web platform for training and supporting civil society organizations on how to use inclusive technology in their work.
Credit and Fraud: How One M-PESA User Weighs Risk on Kenya's Largest Mobile Money Platform
I was recently in Kisumu, a semi-rural area on the coast of Lake Victoria in Western Kenya. I was there for ten days; training organizations on our mobile payments software, collecting indicators to monitor our DFID project and connecting with organizations to work with in the future. One of the places I spent the most time over the week was Support for Tropical Initiatives in Poverty Alleviation (STIPA), which is an amazing organization with projects in microfinance, health insurance, and economic opportunity programs. My time at STIPA was made very worthwhile by the dedicated, knowledgeable and passionate staff. We’ll be working closely with STIPA as they merge two of their major programs, Community Based Health Financing and Village Savings and Loaning to begin using mobile payments. They’re two very impactful projects with unique challenges and potential gains, more of which we’ll be highlighting in future posts.
M&E of ICTs4D: Project Level Learning in an Evolving Sector
ICT4D and M4D as fields are both exciting and clumsy, still in their infancy and most consistent in how quickly they are changing. The M&E Tech Deep Dive in New York in early October 2014 mustered up familiar conversations around monitoring and evaluation, as well as around ICT4D. Beyond the use of ICTs for M&E, finding common ground on the evaluation of ICTs was challenging. There is wide consensus that technology is not a silver bullet, and further, that it simply can’t be separated from the context in which it operates or is applied. How then, can we think about monitoring and evaluating the role of a particular ICT or digital platform in the context of a larger initiative?
Digital By Default: Too Much, Too Soon?
In a forward-thinking, but arguably optimistic recent shift, donors are increasingly encouraging grantees to default to digital or cashless operations for themselves and their partners. USAID and Nethope have gone so far as to require future grantees to make the shift to e-payments in their operations and programs, unless they can make the case that cashless solutions are inappropriate in their specific context.
What Works in ICT4D and M4D? Questions as Jargon
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.
How Can New Technologies Innovate and Demonstrate Evidence of Impact?
Evaluating the use of ICTs—which are used for a variety of projects, from legal services, coordinating responses to infectious diseases, media reporting in repressive environments, and transferring money among the unbanked or voting—can hardly be reduced to a check-list. At SIMLab, our past nine years with FrontlineSMS has taught us that isolating and understanding the impact of technology on an intervention, in any sector, is complicated. ICTs change organizational processes and interpersonal relations. They can put vulnerable populations at risk, even while improving the efficiency of services delivered to others. ICTs break. Innovations fail to take hold, or prove to be unsustainable.
Getting our Data Ducks in a Row
At SIMLab, we’re intent on examining the challenges of setting up communications technology projects in international aid and development from a practitioner’s perspective. The first few projects have arisen from our work with clients and Frontline users, many of whom are asking similar questions. For example, we’ll be looking at how to isolate and effectively monitor the impact of the use of technology on an intervention and on an organization’s functioning—and we’ll have more to share on that in the coming weeks.
Welcome to SIMLab
Well, this is an exciting day. Welcome to the Social Impact Lab. For almost nine years, we’ve been the team behind FrontlineSMS, the world’s most-used text messaging platform. Our users have monitored elections, managed clinics, gathered research data, But as we’ve worked with organizations all over the world, in every sector of social change work, we’ve learned that getting the technology up and running is just ten percent of the problem - the real challenges are human, organisational, financial, and ethical.