In recent months, unflattering headlines in response to technology related challenges. When the technology platforms through which mobile money services are delivered experience downtime, customers are unable to transact and agents are unable to earn a living. Understandably, both quickly become distressed. Recent headlines have brought attention to this problem, but to be clear, it’s neither new, nor limited in scope to a couple of deployments: for years, the world has read about M-PESA’s downtime in Kenyaon Twitter, and countless other services have faced similar challenges to varying degrees that, because they are smaller, haven’t attracted the same headlines.

Why is it so difficult to install and operate a reliable mobile money technology platform? This is not a question that can be answered in a blog post, but I’d like to highlight some key issues and invite readers to contribute in the comments.

Throughput and reliability
To begin, it’s worth clarifying the complexity of the problem at hand. A mobile money technology platform must meet the performance objectives of disparate industries: telecom systems that are optimised for throughput, and financial systems that are optimised for reliability. So “mobile” suggests throughput, and “money’ suggests reliability: operating a platform that delivers both is anything but straightforward.

Customization
In many cases, operators have a specific set of business requirements and aren’t willing to settle for a vendor’s off-the-shelf platform: they want a customized solution. Vendors that routinely concede to operators’ requests for customization are left with the daunting task of managing multiple versions of their platform. To put this in context, imagine every one of Visa’s member banks demanded a solution that would allow them to implement a unique purchase process and feature-set: it would be chaos. Mobile money technology vendors who find themselves in this situation, albeit at a much smaller scale, are faced with a difficult task – and it’s often compounded by their scarcity of resources.

Planning for the peak is costly
Some of the technology challenges faced by operators today have their roots in decisions made years ago, before it was clear what scale mobile money might achieve. In one prominent case, a software application and system configuration that was designed for a limited pilot made a rapid pivot and was rolled out nationwide. Inevitably, there were scale issues.

But even with time to plan, coping with scale is tough. Operators must anticipate the peak transaction volume their platform must be capable of processing (this is significantly different from a monthly transaction forecast) and design, invest, and manage accordingly.  To be clear: this is expensive, and if scale is never actually achieved (remember that for most mobile operators, mobile money is still a much more speculative play than their core business), investment will have been wasted.

Dependencies
No money platform operates entirely in isolation. Every platform has dependencies, and this can cause reliability issues. As an example, if a mobile operator’s SMSC has insufficient capacity at a given second, messages cannot be delivered and transactions cannot be completed.

People

Finally, it’s worth noting that technology is ultimately administered by people (at minimum, people still get to control the on/off switch!) We’ve written at length about the challenges of attempting to scale with a small team, and these challenges are equally relevant when it comes to technology: small problems are multiplied when operators do not have a skilled and experienced hand to liaise with vendors in case of an issue.

We have all seen or heard of an organization developing and implementing an innovative solution and then one or two months later the product is in the corner of the health clinic. It has not been used since the organization finished its initial training. While the outsiders who came in saw it as innovative, it clearly did not resonant as a solution to the users. But why? It seemed so obvious to the developers that this product would solve a glaring problem. Why wouldn’t these health workers want to use this application?

Photo Credit: Tecca

But not to worry. This is something that all organizations and companies deal with. Do you remember Windows Vista, Nokia’s N-Gage, and HP’s TouchPad? Well, each company would hope that you do not. There is an endless list of failed technology products and services. With the movement of leveraging high tech products in international development, especially in global health, failure has become a part of the dialogue in the sector. So much so that MobileActive began hosting FailFaire, where organizations utilizing technology in their projects can come and speak about their “failures.” The idea is to learn from mistakes that others have made. In the most recent FailFaire in New York, many of the stories were focused around design and collaboration issues. Not simply physical design issues (like there were too many buttons on the device), but multiple issues that the designers and implementers did not take into account.

While design has been on the forefront minds in the corporate world for many years (see iPhone and IDEO), design in the social sector is a relatively new idea. In order to decrease the number of failures, organizations have created partnerships with design firms. They are bringing user-centered design to the social sector. Below are some examples:

• Reboot has worked with United Bank Limited (UBL) in Pakistan and the Gates Foundation to expand branchless banking via mobile phones.

• IDEO.org is assisting Evotech in the further development of their low-cost endoscopy device. It is used during obstetric fistula procedures in developing countries.

• Frog Design teamed with the Aricent Group, PopTech, iTeach, the Praekelt Foundation, and Nokia Siemens to design programs to support HIV/AIDS patients as well as expand awareness and knowledge about the disease.

Design Strategy                                      

By focusing on the human-centered design, the product/service takes into account the culture and needs of the targeted consumer. As the pioneer in human-centered design, IDEO wrote a paper in 2010 for the Stanford Social Innovation Review entitled “Design Thinking for Social Innovation.” In the paper, they discuss some of the issues with design in social projects. Along with looking into the culture and needs of the end-users, they mentioned that the project failed because the intervention had not been properly prototyped with the users and receive direct feedback from them.  Human-centered design also sees a need to have the intervention fit into the infrastructure of the communities. The overall idea is to have the product/service that solves a problem that the user or community has. In order for this to occur, IDEO sees the solutions coming from focusing on those on the ground instead of the design process occur from outside the targeted community. Along with the design, they also believe that there must be a well thought out distribution and implementation strategy because that can kill a project too. Their most important strategy to the human-centered design process is observing people in their experiences and behaviors. This will tell the designers more than any survey because it can be difficult for people to explain what they need, especially if they do not know what that really is.

Collaboration

In order for the human-centered design to occur, there is a need for greater collaboration in mHealth. mHealth is a complex web of networks as it includes individuals from all areas affected in the sector – mobile operators, ministries of health, telecommunications regulators, community health workers, doctors, technology developers, global health NGOs, etc. As mentioned before, by understanding the problem and how a solution would be used in the field, the technology is more likely to be adopted. The creation process needs to understand all the aspects involved in the usage of the product/service. By creating a collaborating environment, no matter who the end user is (a mother, family, community health workers), the team has the experience and knowledge to look deeply into all the internal and external issues that are causing the problem. Once those are understood, then the group can start to see how the intervention can be both designed and implemented in the field with the end-user in mind. With this focus, there will be a clear incentive for the end-user to utilize the technology. Without understanding how a technology will improve their lives, there will be a low adoption rate. And then the technology becomes useless and another wasted investment.

The process of creating greater collaboration and utilizing a design strategy is easier said than done. Clearly money is an issue when including a design firm in the development of a mHealth product. It would be beneficial to include extra funds in budgets for the design process. The funds should be used to design the look, functionality, and business plan of the mHealth intervention as well as allow for greater collaboration. The end goal of developing a design strategy and increasing collaboration is to create products/services that will solve a problem but also that will be used by the indented users.

Photo Credit: Ben Addom

“Meeting the Challenges of Value Chain Development: A Learning Event,” was the subject for discussion at the just ended 2-day conference organized by USAID at the Night Conference Center, Newseum, Washington DC.

The learning event was hosted by the USAID Microenterprise Development office with funding from the Accelerated Microenterprise Advancement Project (AMAP), implemented by ACDI/VOCA and its partners. It was attended by a wide range of actors including donors, private consultants, practitioners, researchers and academics, and administrators.

Activities during the 2-day event included a keynote address, concurrent electives (sessions) covering topics like understanding gender and culture in market systems; engaging the private sector; creating an enabling environment; integrating food security and nutrition; financing value chains; reaching the very poor; facilitating sustainable change; learning and evaluating within dynamic systems; and a final panel session on challenges of value chain development.

My reflections – “What is missing is….”

I would like to state that the event was really an excellent learning event for me due to my interest in the use of the agricultural value chain to ensure efficiency and effectiveness of programs and activities that aimed at reaching the poor and vulnerable.

An observation that I made from the sessions that I attended is that, while contributing during the question and answer (Q&A) sessions, participants mostly used the phrase “what I think is missing from the presentations is that….” to point out some loopholes in the sessions. These missing links observed by the participants are in one way or the other related to the individual interests and experiences of these contributors with respect to the subject under discussion. As an agricultural information specialist, I also think that what was prominently missing during the entire 2-day event is the absence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in facilitating communication between and among the value chain actors in the system. This, I think, is one of the challenges to the development of the agricultural value chain.

Why the need for communication tools within the value chain?

In her keynote address to the conference participants, Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, the Deputy Coordinator for Development for the Feed the Future, the U.S. global hunger and food security initiative, asked the conference participants to explore how to create synergies between programs and activities being designed and implemented.

Synergies will result when stakeholders within the value chain work together so that their combined actions lead to outcomes greater than the sum of their individual effects or capabilities. In order for this to happen, an effective communication system is needed to facilitate exchange of resources between and among the individuals and organizations within the value chain. Not integrating ICTs into the communication process in this information age can be disastrous. Unfortunately, this was clearly missing at the sessions, something I believe is the reflection of what is on the ground.

Another important component of the value chain that calls for incorporation of ICTs, is its systemic nature. Several contributions during the event have alluded to the complex nature of the agricultural value chain, and the increasing dependence of the key stages of the chain – R&D, production, market, and M&E, on each other as a prerequisite for a reasonable return on investment.

From my years of experience working with the agricultural value chain and assessments and analysis carried out on ICT solutions for collaboration and coordination, I believe specific ICTs solutions are necessary for each of the stages within the value chain. The World Bank’s eSourcebook that was launched recently has briefly touched on some specific examples of applications of ICTs in agriculture across the world. These solutions when strategically deployed can have significant impact on internal communication within the institutions involved in the value chain as well as external communication with other partners.

An assumption and “aha” moment!

I have observed that either the organizers of the event, the presenters or both who might have had extensive experience with the agricultural value chain system, assumed that all participants knew what the value chain is. But my conversation with few people during the networking time and also observation during some of the discussions revealed that it was not the case. A number of participants at the event actually had little experience on the agricultural value chain and were there to learn – a learning event.

On the other hand, one revelation that I got from the session “integrating food security and nutrition” is that while value chain approaches aim at increasing income by targeting the productive population, food security approaches target the vulnerable population and aim at improving their nutrition and food security situation.

Participants at the closing panel session (Photo Credit: Ben Addom)

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) works with a variety of implementing partners to accomplish its strategic objectives in microenterprise development. The vision of the Agency for microenterprise development involves addressing the needs of poor people within the context of globalization and dynamic domestic and global markets to help them harness the resources they need to participate meaningfully in markets (often through market linkages to larger firms). The microLINKS website hosts a number of innovative, interactive learning tools and thousands of resources to serve a global community of practitioners by helping to link knowledge with practice. Visit the Microlinks site for detailed information on this event – slides, recording and other resources as well as future events.