Monitoring it happen
There is a growing movement among NGOs to use technology to involve communities in the monitoring of projects, so that people can hold donors and governments accountable for the delivery of services.
Owen Barder highlights a promising approach by Daraja in Tanzania which is going to use SMS messaging to provide feedback about which water points are working.
GlobalGiving is using Ushahidi and working with Map Kibera. They’ve been training volunteers to collect stories about any “community effort” and posting them to a public SMS-feedback-enabled website. Marc Maxson highlights the importance of embedding monitoring in daily life.
We’re starting by getting people signed up for SMS updates and inviting NGOs to advertise events, job openings, etc. The sort of daily communications that are difficult in a Nairobi slum.
A growing movement
These are not isolated examples of the application of mobile phones to community monitoring of projects. MobileActive is putting together a list of similar projects and providing a terrific online forum for the pioneers of these approaches to share ideas.
And it extends beyond mobile phones. For example, Maneno is a lightweight, multilingual blogging platform, built for Sub-Saharan Africa. It’s being used to discuss donors and aid to the region.
In India, volunteers are using video feedback to capture to the voices of the unheard on development projects. One of their videos, see above, reports on how funds for textbooks are being stolen in India.
New frontiers in technology
Ushahidi pioneer Erik Hersman discusses the challenges for tech entrepreneurs
It takes a paradigm shift in the of people, culture and spending habits to tackle this market. It’s not a population that understands the PC-web in the same way that you, me or anyone from the West does. It takes a different perspective, and a different type of entrepreneur.
Process is as important as technology
ALINe is made up of staff from the Institute of Development Studies and Keystone Accountability. Alex Jacobs says,
I guess one of our main findings is that the process is as important as the technology.
ALINe have put together some leading examples of how people have got feedback from intended beneficiaries and pulled together key principles for good practice in getting feedback.
Towards a new paradigm of aid delivery?
Clearly Africa and India are making strides to link connect communities through new media. This is an important opportunity for better aid and development. As Owen Barder says,
With changing technology and attitudes, we seem to be on the brink of a revolution in getting information from prospective benefiaries of aid.
Yet will donor agencies seize this opportunity to bring beneficiary feedback into the aid process?
(Thanks to everyone who fed in ideas and commented on our recent post on ‘How can donors use the crowd to monitor aid projects?’)
