Internet of Things tackles global animal poaching

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “ZSL (Zoological Society of London), one of the most famous zoos in Europe, has teamed up with non-profit technology company Digital Catapult to support the development of anti-poaching technology. The partnership will use the Internet of Things (IoT) and Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies to create a sensor and satellite-enabled network that will be able to help conservationists monitor wildlife and respond to poaching threats on land and sea in some of the world’s most remote national parks.

Up to 35,000 African elephants were killed by poachers in 2016, and black rhino and mountain gorilla populations continue to be at high risk. LPWAN could help prevent poaching in game reserves by enabling remote sensors to communicate with one another over long distance while using only a small amount of power. These connected sensors are able to detect activities nearby and determine whether these originate from wildlife or poachers, creating immediate alerts for those monitoring the area.

Digital Catapult has installed a LPWAN base station at the ZSL headquarters at London Zoo, which will enable prototypes to be tested on site. This technology will build on the revolutionary work already underway in areas including Kenya, Nepal, Australia, the Chagos Archipelago, and Antarctica.

The practise of poaching has been the target of many technology companies, with a similar project using artificial intelligence to monitor poachers recently coming to light. One of the many devastating impacts of poaching is the potential to cause extinction of some animals, and one startup has tackled this potential catastrophe with rhinos by producing a 3D printed horn that could help the species avoid being a target….(More)”.

These 16 companies want to make technology work for everyone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MIT Sloan School Press Release: “One company helps undocumented people create a digital identity. Another uses artificial intelligence to help students transition to college. Yet another provides free training to budding tech pros.

These organizations are just a few of the many that are using technology to solve problems and help people all over the world — and they are all finalists in the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy’s second annual Inclusive Innovation Challenge. During a time of great technological innovation, many people are not benefiting from this progress. The challenge is recognizing companies that are using technology to improve opportunities for working people…..

Here are the finalists:

AdmitHub
Did you know that of the students who have been admitted to college each spring, 14 percent don’t actually attend come fall? Or that of those who do attend, 48 percent haven’t graduated six years later. Boston-based AdmitHub created a virtual assistant powered by artificial intelligence to help students navigate the financial, academic, and social situations that accompany going to college, and they do it all through text messaging, communicating with students on their terms and easing the transition to college.

African Renewable Energy Distributor Ltd.
This company has developed solar-powered, portable kiosks where people can charge their phones, access Wi-Fi, or access an intranet while offline. Using a micro franchise business model, the Rwanda-based company hopes to empower women and people with disabilities who can run the kiosks.

AID:Tech
More than two billion people worldwide have no legal identity, something that is necessary for accessing public and financial services. Aid:Tech aims to end that, by providing a platform for undocumented people to create a digital ID using blockchain so that every transaction is secure and traceable. Aid:Tech is based out of Dublin, with offices in New York and London….(More)”

Who serves the poor ? surveying civil servants in the developing world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Worldbank working paper by Daniel Oliver Rogger: “Who are the civil servants that serve poor people in the developing world? This paper uses direct surveys of civil servants — the professional body of administrators who manage government policy — and their organizations from Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines, to highlight key aspects of their characteristics and experience of civil service life. Civil servants in the developing world face myriad challenges to serving the world’s poor, from limited facilities to significant political interference in their work. There are a number of commonalities across service environments, and the paper summarizes these in a series of ‘stylized facts’ of the civil service in the developing world. At the same time, the particular challenges faced by a public official vary substantially across and within countries and regions. For example, measured management practices differ widely across local governments of a single state in Nigeria. Surveys of civil servants allow us to document these differences, build better models of the public sector, and make more informed policy choices….(More)”.

Crowdsourcing Accountability: ICT for Service Delivery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Guy Grossman, Melina Platas and Jonathan Rodden: “We examine the effect on service delivery outcomes of a new information communication technology (ICT) platform that allows citizens to send free and anonymous messages to local government officials, thus reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of communication about public services. In particular, we use a field experiment to assess the extent to which the introduction of this ICT platform improved monitoring by the district, effort by service providers, and inputs at service points in health, education and water in Arua District, Uganda. Despite relatively high levels of system uptake, enthusiasm of district officials, and anecdotal success stories, we find evidence of only marginal and uneven short-term improvements in health and water services, and no discernible long-term effects. Relatively few messages from citizens provided specific, actionable information about service provision within the purview and resource constraints of district officials, and users were often discouraged by officials’ responses. Our findings suggest that for crowd-sourced ICT programs to move from isolated success stories to long-term accountability enhancement, the quality and specific content of reports and responses provided by users and officials is centrally important….(More)”.

These 3 barriers make it hard for policymakers to use the evidence that development researchers produce

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Callen, Adnan Khan, Asim I. Khwaja, Asad Liaqat and Emily Myers at the Monkey Cage/Washington Post: “In international development, the “evidence revolution” has generated a surge in policy research over the past two decades. We now have a clearer idea of what works and what doesn’t. In India, performance pay for teachers works: students in schools where bonuses were on offer got significantly higher test scores. In Kenya, charging small fees for malaria bed nets doesn’t work — and is actually less cost-effective than free distribution. The American Economic Association’s registry for randomized controlled trials now lists 1,287 studies in 106 countries, many of which are testing policies that very well may be expanded.

But can policymakers put this evidence to use?

Here’s how we did our research

We assessed the constraints that keep policymakers from acting on evidence. We surveyed a total of 1,509 civil servants in Pakistan and 108 in India as part of a program called Building Capacity to Use Research Evidence (BCURE), carried out by Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD)at Harvard Kennedy School and funded by the British government. We found that simply presenting evidence to policymakers doesn’t necessarily improve their decision-making. The link between evidence and policy is complicated by several factors.

1. There are serious constraints in policymakers’ ability to interpret evidence….

2. Organizational and structural barriers get in the way of using evidence….

 

3. When presented with quantitative vs. qualitative evidence, policymakers update their beliefs in unexpected ways....(More)

Civic Tech in the Global South

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Tiago Peixoto: “Civic Tech in the Global South is comprised of one study and three field evaluations of civic tech initiatives in developing countries. The study reviews evidence on the use of 23 digital platforms designed to amplify citizen voices to improve service delivery, highlighting citizen uptake and the degree of responsiveness by public service providers. The initiatives are an SMS-based polling platform run by UNICEF in Uganda, a complaints-management system run by the water sector in Kenya, and an internet-based participatory budgeting program in Brazil. Based on these experiences, the authors examine: i) the extent to which technologies have promoted inclusiveness, ii) the effect of these initiatives on public service delivery, and iii) the extent to which these effects can be attributed to technology….(More)”.

Massive Ebola data site planned to combat outbreaks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Amy Maxmen at Nature: “More than 11,000 people died when Ebola tore through West Africa between 2014 and 2016, and yet clinicians still lack data that would enable them to reliably identify the disease when a person first walks into a clinic. To fill that gap and others before the next outbreak hits, researchers are developing a platform to organize and share Ebola data that have so far been scattered beyond reach.

The information system is coordinated by the Infectious Diseases Data Observatory (IDDO), an international research network based at the University of Oxford, UK, and is expected to launch by the end of the year. …

During the outbreak, for example, a widespread rumour claimed that the plague was an experiment conducted by the West, which led some people to resist going to clinics and helped Ebola to spread.

Merson and her collaborators want to avoid the kind of data fragmentation that hindered efforts to stop the outbreak in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. As the Ebola crisis was escalating in October 2014, she visited treatment units in the three countries to advise on research. Merson found tremendous variation in practices, which complicated attempts to merge and analyse the information. For instance, some record books listed lethargy and hiccups as symptoms, whereas others recorded fatigue but not hiccups.

“People were just collecting what they could,” she recalls. Non-governmental organizations “were keeping their data private; academics take a year to get it out; and West Africa had set up surveillance but they were siloed from the international systems”, she says. …

In July 2015, the IDDO received pilot funds from the UK charity the Wellcome Trust to pool anonymized data from the medical records of people who contracted Ebola — and those who survived it — as well as data from clinical trials and public health projects during outbreaks in West Africa, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The hope is that a researcher could search for data to help in diagnosing, treating and understanding the disease. The platform would also provide a home for new data as they emerge. A draft research agenda lists questions that the information might answer, such as how long the virus can survive outside the human body, and what factors are associated with psychological issues in those who survive Ebola.

One sensitive issue is deciding who will control the data. …It’s vital that these discussions happen now, in a period of relative calm, says Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust in London. When the virus emerges again, clinicians, scientists, and regulatory boards will need fast access to data so as not to repeat mistakes made last time. “We need to sit down and make sure we have a data platform in place so that we can respond to a new case of Ebola in hours and days, and not in months and years,” he says. “A great danger is that the world will move on and forget the horror of Ebola in West Africa.”…(More)”

Open & Shut

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Harsha Devulapalli: “Welcome to Open & Shut — a new blog dedicated to exploring the opportunities and challenges of working with open data in closed societies around the world. Although we’ll be exploring questions relevant to open data practitioners worldwide, we’re particularly interested in seeing how civil society groups and actors in the Global South are using open data to push for greater government transparency, and tackle daunting social and economic challenges facing their societies….Throughout this series we’ll be profiling and interviewing organisations working with open data worldwide, and providing do-it-yourself data tutorials that will be useful for beginners as well as data experts. …

What do we mean by the terms ‘open data’ and ‘closed societies’?

It’s important to be clear about what we’re dealing with, here. So let’s establish some key terms. When we talk about ‘open data’, we mean data that anyone can access, use and share freely. And when we say ‘closed societies’, we’re referring to states or regions in which the political and social environment is actively hostile to notions of openness and public scrutiny, and which hold principles of freedom of information in low esteem. In closed societies, data is either not published at all by the government, or else is only published in inaccessible formats, is missing data, is hard to find or else is just not digitised at all.

Iran is one such state that we would characterise as a ‘closed society’. At Small Media, we’ve had to confront the challenges of poor data practice, secrecy, and government opaqueness while undertaking work to support freedom of information and freedom of expression in the country. Based on these experiences, we’ve been working to build Iran Open Data — a civil society-led open data portal for Iran, in an effort to make Iranian government data more accessible and easier for researchers, journalists, and civil society actors to work with.

Iran Open Data — an open data portal for Iran, created by Small Media

.

..Open & Shut will shine a light on the exciting new ways that different groups are using data to question dominant narratives, transform public opinion, and bring about tangible change in closed societies. At the same time, it’ll demonstrate the challenges faced by open data advocates in opening up this valuable data. We intend to get the community talking about the need to build cross-border alliances in order to empower the open data movement, and to exchange knowledge and best practices despite the different needs and circumstances we all face….(More)“

Where’s the ‘Civic’ in CivicTech?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Pius Enywaru: “The ideology of community participation and development is a crucial topic for any nation or community seeking to attain sustainable development. Here in Uganda, oftentimes when the opportunity for public participation either in local planning or in holding local politicians to account — the ‘don’t care’ attitude reigns….

What works?

Some of these tools include Ask Your Government Uganda, a platform built to help members of the public get the information they want about from 106 public agencies in Uganda. U-Report developed by UNICEF provides an SMS-based social monitoring tool designed to address issues affecting the youth of Uganda. Mentioned in a previous blog post, Parliament Watchbrings the proceedings of the Par­lia­ment of Uganda to the citizens. The or­ga­ni­za­tion lever­ages tech­nol­ogy to share live up­dates on so­cial me­dia and pro­vides in-depth analy­sis to cre­ate a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing on the busi­ness of Par­lia­ment. Other tools used include citizen scorecards, public media campaigns and public petitions. Just recently, we have had a few calls to action to get people to sign petitions, with somewhat lackluster results.

What doesn’t work?

Although the usage of these tools have dramatically grown, there is still a lack of awareness and consequently, community participation. In order to understand the interventions which the Government of Uganda believes are necessary for sustainable urban development, it is important to examine the realities pertaining to urban areas and their planning processes. There are many challenges in deploying community participation tools based on ICT such as limited funding and support for such initiatives, low literacy levels, low technical literacy, a large digital divide, low rates of seeking input from communities in developing these tools, lack of adequate government involvement and resistance/distrust of change by both government and citizens. Furthermore, in many of these initiatives, a large marketing or sensitization push is needed to let citizens know that these services exist for their benefit.

There are great minds who have brilliant ideas to try and bring literally everyone on board though civic engagement. When you have a look at their ideas, you will agree that indeed they might make a reputable service and bring about remarkable change in different communities. However, the biggest question has always been, “How do these ideas get executed and adopted by these communities that they target”? These ideas suffer a major setback of lack of inclusivity to enhance community participation. This still remains a puzzle for most folks that have these ideas….(More)”.

The Tech Revolution That’s Changing How We Measure Poverty

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alvin Etang Ndip at the Worldbank: “The world has an ambitious goal to end extreme poverty by 2030. But, without good poverty data, it is impossible to know whether we are making progress, or whether programs and policies are reaching those who are the most in need.

Countries, often in partnership with the World Bank Group and other agencies, measure poverty and wellbeing using household surveys that help give policymakers a sense of who the poor are, where they live, and what is holding back their progress. Once a paper-and-pencil exercise, technology is beginning to revolutionize the field of household data collection, and the World Bank is tapping into this potential to produce more and better poverty data….

“Technology can be harnessed in three different ways,” says Utz Pape, an economist with the World Bank. “It can help improve data quality of existing surveys, it can help to increase the frequency of data collection to complement traditional household surveys, and can also open up new avenues of data collection methods to improve our understanding of people’s behaviors.”

As technology is changing the field of data collection, researchers are continuing to find new ways to build on the power of mobile phones and tablets.

The World Bank’s Pulse of South Sudan initiative, for example, takes tablet-based data collection a step further. In addition to conducting the household survey, the enumerators also record a short, personalized testimonial with the people they are interviewing, revealing a first-person account of the situation on the ground. Such testimonials allow users to put a human face on data and statistics, giving a fuller picture of the country’s experience.

Real-time data through mobile phones

At the same time, more and more countries are generating real-time data through high-frequency surveys, capitalizing on the proliferation of mobile phones around the world. The World Bank’s Listening to Africa (L2A) initiative has piloted the use of mobile phones to regularly collect information on living conditions. The approach combines face-to-face surveys with follow-up mobile phone interviews to collect data that allows to monitor well-being.

The initiative hands out mobile phones and solar chargers to all respondents. To minimize the risk of people dropping out, the respondents are given credit top-ups to stay in the program. From monitoring health care facilities in Tanzania to collecting data on frequency of power outages in Togo, the initiative has been rolled out in six countries and has been used to collect data on a wide range of areas. …

Technology-driven data collection efforts haven’t been restricted to the Africa region alone. In fact, the approach was piloted early in Peru and Honduras with the Listening 2 LAC program. In Europe and Central Asia, the World Bank has rolled out the Listening to Tajikistan program, which was designed to monitor the impact of the Russian economic slowdown in 2014 and 2015. Initially a six-month pilot, the initiative has now been in operation for 29 months, and a partnership with UNICEF and JICA has ensured that data collection can continue for the next 12 months. Given the volume of data, the team is currently working to create a multidimensional fragility index, where one can monitor a set of well-being indicators – ranging from food security to quality jobs and public services – on a monthly basis…

There are other initiatives, such as in Mexico where the World Bank and its partners are using satellite imagery and survey data to estimate how many people live below the poverty line down to the municipal level, or guiding data collectors using satellite images to pick a representative sample for the Somali High Frequency Survey. However, despite the innovation, these initiatives are not intended to replace traditional household surveys, which still form the backbone of measuring poverty. When better integrated, they can prove to be a formidable set of tools for data collection to provide the best evidence possible to policymakers….(More)”