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ICT Training for Guyanese Sugar Workers…

Minister of Agriculture Robert Persaud addressing an audience

Credit:Guyana's Ministry of Agriculture

Sugar has been the mainstay of Guyana’s economy for over two centuries. But the sector has been contracting since the abolition of the 1975 Lomé Convention, a special arrangement under which the South American country’s famed Demarara sugar was allowed duty-free access into the lucrative European market.

The changing global trade environment forced many neighboring Caribbean countries, including Trinidad and Barbados, to shutter their sugar industry. Guyana, on the other hand, is holding firm. The government increased investments in the ailing sector, safeguarding the economy and livelihoods. Sugar is the largest single employer and contributor to the economy. So important is the sector to the country that the largest sugar producer, Guyana Sugar Corporation Inc. (Guysuco), puts more people to work than any other entity. Guysuco is also the country’s main source of foreign exchange, bringing in revenue that accounts for as much as 13% of GDP.

An economy so dependent on an industry prone to speculation, with a productive capacity outranked by other producers and alternatives, begs the question: How can this highly indebted poor country, with a per capita GDP hovering below US$1, 500 revitalize this crucial economic activity?

The Caribbean Farmers Network (CAFAN) points to Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) as a crucial set of tools in a mix of solutions. A view I share, as ICT is crucial for economic development. According to the World Bank, an increase of 10% in mobile phone penetration results in a 0.8% expansion in economic growth. The potential benefits of ICT expansion, especially to rural areas where farming is a mainstay, is wide-ranging. Farmers, irrespective of their crop specialty, are exposed to vital new information services that improves/enables a culture of enterprise.

Although Guyana is a slow starter in the ICT space, the government’s commitment to develop and promote ICT countrywide is strong. Earlier this year, Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud commissioned the second of eight ICT centers for the benefit of sugar workers and their families. Far too often states consider ICT expansion solely a matter for schools, ignoring the wider society and key aspects of the economy. Improving the ICT skill base among Guyanese sugar workers will better prepare them for planned improvements in sugar facilities, such as the new Skeldon Factory.

August 1, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Elections, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Rule of Law

Gov 2.0: Open Data Shaping Kenya’s Future

The President of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, watches a demonstration of the Huduma platform at the Kenya Open Government Data Portal launch, looking on is Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication

The President of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, watches a demonstration Photo Credit: Ushahidi

Last Friday, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki inaugurated the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI), an online resource to catalog and display the government’s expenditures—launching the ICT pioneering country into a new epoch of transparency and accountability.

The new initiative is a crucial step for Kenyan citizens to monitor public spending amid previous corrupt practices, including the alleged manipulation of the 2007 elections.

Kenya ranked 154 out of 178 total countries in Transparency International’s 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index.

Screenshot of Kenyan open data initative

Screenshot of KODI

The KODI contains 160 datasets arranged by country-level and county, and is organized within various sectors, including: education, energy, health, population, poverty, along with water and sanitation. Information for the datasets were taken from national census, government ministries, and information from the World Bank.

Prior to creating this information platform, the Kenyan government seldom made statistics and information on these sectors publicly available, or would postpone their release.

Now, however, they are taking a participatory approach to following the new 2010 Kenyan Constitution requiring the government to make information on the country publicly accessible.

On its homepage, the KODI website asserts the new transformation taking place:

Our information is a national asset, and it’s time it was shared: this data is key to improving transparency; unlocking social and economic value; and building Government 2.0 in Kenya

The platform allows citizens to actively engage on the information they want, and need to know.

Users of the open data portal can create interactive charts and tables, and developers can download the raw data to build applications for web and mobile. Additionally, users can press a “suggest a dataset” icon, which aggregates the requests for new information and sorts them according to relevance.

According to the Guardian, Kenyans have already made mass requests for data on youth unemployment, libraries, crime, and the locations of primary and secondary schools.

The data portal is managed by the Kenya ICT Board in partnership with the World Bank, and is powered by Socrata.

In addition to managing the data, the Kenya ICT Board plans to award groups and individuals who configure the data advantageously, intending to give out up to thirty grants to those with the best ideas.

A series of valuable initiatives have already been taking place.

Huduma (Kiswahili for “service”), derived from Ushaidi, has already started to use statistics collected on health, infrastructure, and education to compare the provision of aid across different districts of Kenya. Business Daily, a Nairobi-based news service, had announced plans to publish a series of articles on the newly released applications and services. Virtual Kenya built an application mapping counties where Members of Parliament declined to pay taxes.

Screenshot of Ushahidi's Huduma

Kenyan entrepreneurs are now in charge of publicizing this information and making it user-friendly.

Though the Kenyan government has been lambasted for a lack of transparency and accountability in the past, this open source data program allows Kenyan citizens to recognize development challenges and foster their own solutions—leading themselves and their county into a new era of progressive growth.

July 15, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Civil Society, Democracy & Governance, Governances, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Mobile Data Makes Projects & Policies More Efficient

Photo Credit: MobileActive

Aggregating and collecting data from cell phones is one of the best ways to ensure resources used to help fight poverty are efficiently being allocated, while gaining insight on what policies work the best.

According to Marcelo Giugale, the World Bank’s Director of Economic Policy and Poverty Reductions Programs for Africa, digital data collection is entirely transforming international development and bringing on, “revenge of the statistician”.

This transformation, he cites, have created two separate but interrelated effects in evaluating development projects.

Primarily, digital data collection allows funding from multilateral institutions, like the World Bank, to be more effective.

Goals set for monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are quantified to see if the results are reached. Such as: how many children were treated for malaria, or what proportion of women use contraceptives?

This increased accuracy in household surveys can precisely identify who benefits from each dollar the government spends, also known as “benefit incidence analysis,” then structural adjustments can then be made to funnel funds to the appropriate recipient. Giugale elucidates by providing an example:

Most developing countries spend more bankrolling free public universities than building primary schools. But the main beneficiaries of that subsidized college education are the rich (who could pay tuition) not the poor (who could not)…Statistics lets you quantify these aberrations—and argue that the money should be redirected to those who really need it

Secondarily, he observed that surveys conducted on cell phones provide data to assess human capabilities so future policies and projects can be altered to fit the needs of those living in poverty and make outcomes more useful.

By assessing non-cognitive skills—such as reaction time and social interaction—educational programs can be designed to teach behaviors that will increase people’s productivity.

Marcelo Giugale Photo Credit: World Bank

Giugale argues that digital data collection can also measure how personal circumstances affect human opportunity. “We all know that children have no control or responsibility over their gender, skin color, birthplace, or parents’ income,” he contends.

“And yet, those kind of circumstances are sure-shot predictors of a child’s access to vaccination, potable water, kindergarten, the internet and many other platforms without which her probability of success is close to nil.” Giugale cites the Human Opportunity Index as being a large proponent of this initiative in shaping policy.

The use of cell phones to collect data has broken the once unconventional method of researching people in their communities. These randomized trials are useful in gauging what policies and projects work best, and which are seemingly wasteful.

“As the use of cellular telephony expands among the poor — at flash speed in places like Kenya –the possibility of turning them into data sources becomes real…” he concludes, “How ironic that, in the end, the war against poverty may be won when those who try to help the poor get to literally listen to them.”

In this video, Guigale explains the Human Development Opportunity Index and how it helps reduce poverty:

June 20, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Agriculture Markets, Food Security, Health, Irrigation and Water, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Sustainable Agriculture

U.S Leadership on Global Food Security

U.S leadership on global food security will get a major boost for the fiscal year 2011. This follows strong bipartisan support from Congress for a $1.15 billion budget to tackle food security issues around the world. Last week, USAID Administrator Dr. Raj Shah announced that nearly $1 billion will go towards Feed the Future, a global initiative launched by President Obama in 2009 to tackle hunger through sustained and endogenous multi-stakeholder partnerships.

Dr. Raj said, “$90 million will be spent on strengthening our nutrition programming”. Since the world food crisis in 2008, which caused riots in several countries and toppled governments, food security and agriculture grew in prominence on the international agenda.

He says, pending congressional approval, the agency will contribute $100 million to the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, a joint multilateral trust fund established in partnership with the World Bank, to address food security and agriculture globally. Since its conception in 2009, the fund attracted nearly $1 billion from donors, and allocated over $330 million to eight countries.

Conflict, natural disasters and the slow integration of ICT into agricultural policy remains a major impediment to food security and the improvement of livelihoods. Nearly 2 billion people worldwide are unable to grow or get enough food to eat. Most of those affected by chronic food security problems live in rustic areas, where they have limited information about where to access and trade food, in the least developed countries.

The World Bank has warned that the problem is likely to become even more intractable in the next two decades. According to the Bank’s report, Reengaging in Agricultural Water Management: Challenges and Options, “by 2030 food demand will double as world population increases by an additional two billion people. The increase in food demand will come mostly from developing countries.” The publication says improved food security depends on increased agricultural productivity and improved water management across the developing world.

June 2, 2011/by actualize

Anti-corruption, Democracy & Governance, Governances, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

WB Launches “Accountability Through Public Opinion”

From CommGap

“Accountability” has become a buzzword in international development. Development actors appear to delight in announcing their intention to “promote accountability”—but it is often unclear what accountability is and how it can be promoted. This book addresses some questions that are crucial to understanding accountability and for understanding why accountability is important to improve the effectiveness of development aid. We ask: What does it mean to make governments accountable to their citizens? How do you do that? How do you create genuine demand for accountability among citizens, how do you move citizens from inertia to public action?

The main argument of this book is that accountability is a matter of public opinion. Governments will only be accountable if there are incentives for them to do so—and only an active and critical public will change the incentives of government officials to make them responsive to citizens’ demands. Accountability without public opinion is a technocratic, but not an effective solution.

In this book, more than 30 accountability practitioners and thinkers discuss the concept and its structural conditions; the relationship between accountability, information, and the media; the role of deliberation to promote accountability; and mechanisms and tools to mobilize public opinion. A number of case studies from around the world illustrate the main argument of the book: Public opinion matters and an active and critical public is the surest means to achieve accountability that will benefit the citizens in developing countries.

This book is designed for policy-makers and governance specialists working within the international development community, national governments, grassroots organizations, activists, and scholars engaged in understanding the interaction between accountability and public opinion and their role for increasing the impact of international development interventions.

May 16, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Cross Cutting, Democracy & Governance, Economic Growth & Trade, Education, Environment, Environment, Health, Humanitarian Assistance, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

Apps for Development

Apps for Development.

Voting is open for the World Bank’s apps for development competition.

“The Apps for Development Competition aims to bring together the best ideas from both the software developer and the development practitioner communities to create innovative apps using World Bank data.”

I like the idea. But many of the apps appear to be solutions looking for a problem, probably due to the requirements that entries use World Bank data and address the Millennium Development Goals. Many entries were not meant to address field-level development needs, which is disappointing. But it is a great initiative, which can be adjusted in future efforts.

The Microsoft sponsored ImagineCup 2011 student IT competition is under way too. Its theme is imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems, also based on the Millennium Development Goals. Deadlines loom so pass the word to interested students.

It will be very interesting to see what comes out of these contests, and if someone can analyze them, see what we can learn about ramping up efforts to develop technologies to solve real-world problems.

Personally, I would like to see the GBI portal become a clearinghouse for practical apps for development – an app store for development, if you will.

March 1, 2011/by actualize