Can blockchain technology help poor people around the world?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at The Conversation: “…Most simply, a blockchain is an inexpensive and transparent way to record transactions….A blockchain system, though, inherently enforces rules about authentication and transaction security. That makes it safe and affordable for a person to store any amount of money securely and confidently. While that’s still in the future, blockchain-based systems are already helping people in the developing world in very real ways.

Sending money internationally

In 2016, emigrants working abroad sent an estimated US$442 billion to their families in their home countries. This global flow of cash is a significant factor in the financial well-being of families and societies in developing nations. But the process of sending money can be extremely expensive….Hong Kong’s blockchain-enabled Bitspark has transaction costs so low it charges a flat HK$15 for remittances of less than HK$1,200 (about $2 in U.S. currency for transactions less than $150) and 1 percent for larger amounts. Using the secure digital connections of a blockchain system lets the company bypass existing banking networks and traditional remittance systems.

Similar services helping people send money to the Philippines, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Rwanda also charge a fraction of the current banking rates.

Insurance

Most people in the developing world lack health and life insurance, primarily because it’s so expensive compared to income. Some of that is because of high administrative costs: For every dollar of insurance premium collected, administrative costs amounted to $0.28 in Brazil, $0.54 in Costa Rica, $0.47 in Mexico and $1.80 in the Philippines. And many people who live on less than a dollar a day have neither the ability to afford any insurance, nor any company offering them services….Consuelo is a blockchain-based microinsurance service backed by Mexican mobile payments company Saldo.mx. Customers can pay small amounts for health and life insurance, with claims verified electronically and paid quickly.

Helping small businesses

Blockchain systems can also help very small businesses, which are often short of cash and also find it expensive – if not impossible – to borrow money. For instance, after delivering medicine to hospitals, small drug retailers in China often wait up to 90 days to get paid. But to stay afloat, these companies need cash. They rely on intermediaries that pay immediately, but don’t pay in full. A $100 invoice to a hospital might be worth $90 right away – and the intermediary would collect the $100 when it was finally paid….

Humanitarian aid

Blockchain technology can also improve humanitarian assistance. Fraud, corruption, discrimination and mismanagement block some money intended to reduce poverty and improve education and health care from actually helping people.In early 2017 the U.N. World Food Program launched the first stage of what it calls “Building Block,” giving food and cash assistance to needy families in Pakistan’s Sindh province. An internet-connected smartphone authenticated and recorded payments from the U.N. agency to food vendors, ensuring the recipients got help, the merchants got paid and the agency didn’t lose track of its money.

…In the future, blockchain-based projects can help people and governments in other ways, too. As many as 1.5 billion people – 20 percent of the world’s population – don’t have any documents that can verify their identity. That limits their ability to use banks, but also can bar their way when trying to access basic human rights like voting, getting health care, going to school and traveling.

Several companies are launching blockchain-powered digital identity programs that can help create and validate individuals’ identities….(More)”

Conditional Citizens: Rethinking Children and Young People’s Participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Catherine Hartung: “This book challenges readers to recognise the conditions that underpin popular approaches to children and young people’s participation, as well as the key processes and institutions that have enabled its rise as a global force of social change in new times. The book draws on the vast international literature, as well as interviews with key practitioners, policy-makers, activists, delegates and academics from Japan, South Africa, Brazil, Nicaragua, Australia, the United Kingdom, Finland, the United States and Italy to examine the emergence of the young citizen as a key global priority in the work of the UN, NGOs, government and academia. In so doing, the book engages contemporary and interdisciplinary debates around citizenship, rights, childhood and youth to examine the complex conditions through which children and young people are governed and invited to govern themselves.

The book argues that much of what is considered ‘children and young people’s participation’ today is part of a wider neoliberal project that emphasises an ideal young citizen who is responsible and rational while simultaneously downplaying the role of systemic inequality and potentially reinforcing rather than overcoming children and young people’s subjugation. Yet the book also moves beyond mere critique and offers suggestive ways to broaden our understanding of children and young people’s participation by drawing on 15 international examples of empirical research from around the world, including the Philippines, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, North America, Finland, South Africa, Australia and Latin America. These examples provoke practitioners, policy-makers and academics to think differently about children and young people and the possibilities for their participatory citizenship beyond that which serves the political agendas of dominant interest groups…(More)”.

Avoiding Data Graveyards: Insights from Data Producers & Users in Three Countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Samantha Custer and Tanya Sethi: “Government, development partner, and civil society leaders make decisions every day about how to allocate, monitor and evaluate development assistance. Policymakers and practitioners can theoretically draw from more data sources in a variety of formats than ever before to inform these decisions,but will they choose to do so? Those who collect data and produce evidence are often far removed from those who ultimately influence and make decisions. Technocratic ideals of evidence-informed policymaking and data-driven decision-making are easily undercut by individual prerogatives, organizational imperatives, and ecosystem-wide blind spots.

In 2016, researchers from the AidData Center for Development Policy interviewed nearly 200 decision-makers and those that advise them in Honduras, Timor-Leste, and Senegal. Central government officials, development partner representatives based in country, and leaders of civil society organizations (CSOs) shared their experiences in producing and using data to target development projects, monitor progress, and evaluate results.

Specifically, the report answers three questions:

  • Who produces development data and statistics, for what purposes and for whom?
  • What are the the technical and political constraints for decision-makers to use development data in their work?
  • What can funders and producers do differently to encourage use of data and evidence in decision-making?

Using a theory of change, we identify nine barriers to the use of data and corresponding operating principles for funders and producers to make demand-driven investments in the next generation of development data and statistics….(More)”.

Towards an experimental culture in government: reflections on and from practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 Jesper Christiansen et al at Nesta: “…we share some initial reflections from this work with the hope of prompting a useful discussion about how to articulate the value of experimentation as well as what to consider when strategically planning and doing experiments in government contexts.

Reflection 1: Experimentation as a way of accelerating learning and exploring “the room of the non-obvious”

Governments need to increase their pace and agility in learning about which ideas have the highest potential value-creation and make people’s lives the rationale of governing.

Experimental approaches accelerate learning by systematically testing assumptions and identifying knowledge gaps. What is there to be known about the problem and the function, fit and probability of a suggested solution? Experimentation helps fill these gaps without allocating too much time or resource, and helps governments accelerate the exploration of new potential solution spaces.

This approach is often a key contribution of government policy labs and public sector innovation teams. Units like Lab para la Ciudad in Mexico City, Alberta Co-Lab in Canada, Behavioural insights and Design Unit in Singapore, MindLab in Denmark and Policy Lab in the UK are specifically set up to promote, develop and/or embed experimental approaches and accelerate user-centred learning in different levels of government.

In addition, creating a culture of experimentation extends the policy options available by creating a political environment to test non-linear approaches to wicked problems. In our training, we often distinguish between “the room of the obvious” and the “room of the non-obvious”. By designing portfolios of experiments that include – by deliberate design – the testing of at least some non-linear, non-obvious solutions, government officials can move beyond the automatic mode of many policy interventions and explore the “room of the non-obvious” in a safe-to-fail context (think barbers to prevent suicides or dental insurance to prevent deforestation).

Reflection 2: Experimentation as a way of turning uncertainty into risk

In everyday language, uncertainty and risk are two notions that are often used interchangeably; yet they are very different concepts. Take, for example, the implementation of a solution. Risk is articulated in terms of the probability that the solution will generate a certain outcome. It is measurable (e.g. based on existing data there is X per cent chance of success, or X per cent chance of failure) and qualitative risk factors can be developed and described.

Uncertainty, on the other hand, is a situation where there is a lack of probabilities. There is no prior data on how the solution might perform; future outcomes are not known, and can therefore not be measured. The chance of success can be 0 per cent, 100 per cent, or anything in between (see table below).

There is often talk of the need for government to become more of a ‘risk taker’, or to become better at ‘managing risk’. But as Marco Steinberg, founder of strategic design practice Snowcone & Haystack, recently reminded us, risk-management – where probabilities are known – is actually something that governments do quite well. Issues arise when governments’ legacies can’t shape current solutions: when governments have to deal with the uncertainty of complex challenges by adapting or creating entirely new service systems to fit the needs of our time.

For example, when transforming a health system to fit the needs of our time, little can be known about the probabilities in terms of what might work when establishing a new practice. Or when transforming a social care system to accommodate the lives of vulnerable families, entirely new concepts for solutions need to be explored. “If you don’t have a map showing the way, you have to write one yourself,” as Sam Rye puts it in his inspirational example on the use of experimental cards at The Labs Wananga….

Reflection 3: Experimentation as a way to reframe failure and KPIs

Reflection 4: Experimentation on a continuum between exploration and validation

Reflection 5: Experimentation as cultural change…(More)”.

Connecting the dots: Building the case for open data to fight corruption

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Web Foundation: “This research, published with Transparency International, measures the progress made by 5 key countries in implementing the G20 Anti-Corruption Open Data Principles.

These principles, adopted by G20 countries in 2015, committed countries to increasing and improving the publication of public information, driving forward open data as a tool in anti-corruption efforts.

However, this research – looking at Brazil, France, Germany, Indonesia and South Africa – finds a disappointing lack of progress. No country studied has released all the datasets identified as being key to anti-corruption and much of the information is hard to find and hard use.

Key findings:

  • No country released all anti-corruption datasets
  • Quality issues means data is often not useful or useable
  • Much of the data is not published in line with open data standards, making comparability difficult
  • In many countries there is a lack of open data skills among officials in charge of anti-corruption initiatives

Download the overview report here (PDF), and access the individual country case studies Brazil; France; Germany; Indonesia and South Africa… (More)”

How a Political Scientist Knows What Our Enemies Will Do (Often Before They Do)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Political scientists have now added rigorous mathematical techniques to their social-science toolbox, creating methods to explain—and even predict—the actions of adversaries, thus making society safer as well as smarter. Such techniques allowed the U.S. government to predict the fall of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, helping hatch a strategy to ease him out of office and avoid political chaos in that nation. And at Los Angeles International Airport a computer system predicts the tactical calculations of criminals and terrorists, making sure that patrols and checkpoints are placed in ways that adversaries can’t exploit.

The advances in solving the puzzle of human behavior represent a dramatic turnaround for the field of political science, notes Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a professor of politics at New York University. “In the mid-1960s, I took a statistics course,” he recalls, “and my undergraduate advisor was appalled. He told me that I was wasting my time.” It took researchers many years of patient work, putting piece after piece of the puzzle of human behavior together, to arrive at today’s new knowledge. The result has been dramatic progress in the nation’s ability to protect its interests at home and abroad.

Social scientists have not abandoned the proven tools that Bueno de Mesquita and generations of other scholars acquired as they mastered their discipline. Rather, adding the rigor of mathematical analysis has allowed them to solve more of the puzzle. Mathematical models of human behavior let social scientists assemble a picture of the previously unnoticed forces that drive behavior—forces common to all situations, operating below the emotions, drama, and history that make each conflict unique….(More)”

State of Open Corporate Data: Wins and Challenges Ahead

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sunlight Foundation: “For many people working to open data and reduce corruption, the past year could be summed up in two words: “Panama Papers.” The transcontinental investigation by a team from International Center of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) blew open the murky world of offshore company registration. It put corporate transparency high on the agenda of countries all around the world and helped lead to some notable advances in access to official company register data….

While most companies are created and operated for legitimate economic activity,  there is a small percentage that aren’t. Entities involved in corruption, money laundering, fraud and tax evasion frequently use such companies as vehicles for their criminal activity. “The Idiot’s Guide to Money Laundering from Global Witness” shows how easy it is to use layer after layer of shell companies to hide the identity of the person who controls and benefits from the activities of the network. The World Bank’s “Puppet Masters” report found that over 70% of grand corruption cases, in fact, involved the use of offshore vehicles.

For years, OpenCorporates has advocated for company information to be in the public domain as open data, so it is usable and comparable.  It was the public reaction to Panama Papers, however, that made it clear that due diligence requires global data sets and beneficial registries are key for integrity and progress.

The call for accountability and action was clear from the aftermath of the leak. ICIJ, the journalists involved and advocates have called for tougher action on prosecutions and more transparency measures: open corporate registers and beneficial ownership registers. A series of workshops organized by the B20 showed that business also needed public beneficial ownership registers….

Last year the UK became the first country in the world to collect and publish who controls and benefits from companies in a structured format, and as open data. Just a few days later, we were able to add the information in OpenCorporates. The UK data, therefore, is one of a kind, and has been highly anticipated by transparency skeptics and advocates advocates alike. So fa,r things are looking good. 15 other countries have committed to having a public beneficial ownership register including Nigeria, Afghanistan, Germany, Indonesia, New Zealand and Norway. Denmark has announced its first public beneficial ownership data will be published in June 2017. It’s likely to be open data.

This progress isn’t limited to beneficial ownership. It is also being seen in the opening up of corporate registers . These are what OpenCorporates calls “core company data”. In 2016, more countries started releasing company register as open data, including Japan, with over 4.4 million companies, Israel, Virginia, Slovenia, Texas, Singapore and Bulgaria. We’ve also had a great start to 2017 , with France publishing their central company database as open data on January 5th.

As more states have embracing open data, the USA jumped from average score of 19/100 to 30/100. Singapore rose from 0 to 20. The Slovak Republic from 20 to 40. Bulgaria wet from 35 to 90.  Japan rose from 0 to 70 — the biggest increase of the year….(More)”

Participatory budgeting in Indonesia: past, present and future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IDS Practice Paper by Francesca Feruglio and Ahmad Rifai: “In 2015, Yayasan Kota Kita (Our City Foundation), an Indonesian civil society organisation, applied to Making All Voices Count for a practitioner research and learning grant.

Kota Kita is an organisation of governance practitioners who focus on urban planning and citizen participation in the design and development of cities. Following several years of experience with participatory budgeting in Solo city, their research set out to examine participatory budgeting processes in six Indonesian cities, to inform their work – and the work of others – strengthening citizen participation in urban governance.

Their research looked at:

  • the current status of participatory budgeting in six Indonesian cities
  • the barriers and enablers to implementing participatory budgeting
  • how government and CSOs can help make participatory budgeting more transparent, inclusive and impactful.This practice paper describes Kota Kita and its work in more detail, and reflects on the history and evolution of participatory budgeting in Indonesia. In doing so, it contextualises some of the findings of the research, and discusses their implications.

    Key Themes in this Paper

  • What are the risks and opportunities of institutionalising participation?
  • How do access to information and use of new technologies have an impact onparticipation in budget planning processes?
  • What does it take for participatory budgeting to be an empowering process for citizens?
  • How can participatory budgeting include hard-to-reach citizens and accommodate different citizens’ needs? …(More)”.

Information for accountability: Transparency and citizen engagement for improved service delivery in education systems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lindsay Read and Tamar Manuelyan Atinc at Brookings: “There is a wide consensus among policymakers and practitioners that while access to education has improved significantly for many children in low- and middle-income countries, learning has not kept pace. A large amount of research that has attempted to pinpoint the reasons behind this quality deficit in education has revealed that providing extra resources such as textbooks, learning materials, and infrastructure is largely ineffective in improving learning outcomes at the system level without accompanying changes to the underlying structures of education service delivery and associated systems of accountability.

Information is a key building block of a wide range of strategies that attempts to tackle weaknesses in service delivery and accountability at the school level, even where political systems disappoint at the national level. The dissemination of more and better quality information is expected to empower parents and communities to make better decisions in terms of their children’s schooling and to put pressure on school administrators and public officials for making changes that improve learning and learning environments. This theory of change underpins both social accountability and open data initiatives, which are designed to use information to enhance accountability and thereby influence education delivery.

This report seeks to extract insight into the nuanced relationship between information and accountability, drawing upon a vast literature on bottom-up efforts to improve service delivery, increase citizen engagement, and promote transparency, as well as case studies in Australia, Moldova, Pakistan, and the Philippines. In an effort to clarify processes and mechanisms behind information-based reforms in the education sector, this report also categorizes and evaluates recent impact evaluations according to the intensity of interventions and their target change agents—parents, teachers, school principals, and local officials. The idea here is not just to help clarify what works but why reforms work (or do not)….(More)”

The Emergence of a Post-Fact World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Francis Fukuyama in Project Syndicate: “One of the more striking developments of 2016 and its highly unusual politics was the emergence of a “post-fact” world, in which virtually all authoritative information sources were called into question and challenged by contrary facts of dubious quality and provenance.

The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s was greeted as a moment of liberation and a boon for democracy worldwide. Information constitutes a form of power, and to the extent that information was becoming cheaper and more accessible, democratic publics would be able to participate in domains from which they had been hitherto excluded.

The development of social media in the early 2000s appeared to accelerate this trend, permitting the mass mobilization that fueled various democratic “color revolutions” around the world, from Ukraine to Burma (Myanmar) to Egypt. In a world of peer-to-peer communication, the old gatekeepers of information, largely seen to be oppressive authoritarian states, could now be bypassed.

While there was some truth to this positive narrative, another, darker one was also taking shape. Those old authoritarian forces were responding in dialectical fashion, learning to control the Internet, as in China, with its tens of thousands of censors, or, as in Russia, by recruiting legions of trolls and unleashing bots to flood social media with bad information. These trends all came together in a hugely visible way during 2016, in ways that bridged foreign and domestic politics….

The traditional remedy for bad information, according to freedom-of-information advocates, is simply to put out good information, which in a marketplace of ideas will rise to the top. This solution, unfortunately, works much less well in a social-media world of trolls and bots. There are estimates that as many as a third to a quarter of Twitter users fall into this category. The Internet was supposed to liberate us from gatekeepers; and, indeed, information now comes at us from all possible sources, all with equal credibility. There is no reason to think that good information will win out over bad information….

The inability to agree on the most basic facts is the direct product of an across-the-board assault on democratic institutions – in the US, in Britain, and around the world. And this is where the democracies are headed for trouble. In the US, there has in fact been real institutional decay, whereby powerful interest groups have been able to protect themselves through a system of unlimited campaign finance. The primary locus of this decay is Congress, and the bad behavior is for the most part as legal as it is widespread. So ordinary people are right to be upset.

And yet, the US election campaign has shifted the ground to a general belief that everything has been rigged or politicized, and that outright bribery is rampant. If the election authorities certify that your favored candidate is not the victor, or if the other candidate seemed to perform better in a debate, it must be the result of an elaborate conspiracy by the other side to corrupt the outcome. The belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust. American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life….(More)”