Big data allows India to map its fight against human trafficking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nita Bhalla for Reuters: “An Indian charity is using big data to pinpoint human trafficking hot spots in a bid to prevent vulnerable women and girls vanishing from high-risk villages into the sex trade.

My Choices Foundation uses specially designed technology to identify those villages that are most at risk of modern slavery, then launches local campaigns to sound the alarm….

The analytics tool – developed by Australian firm Quantium – uses a range of factors to identify the most dangerous villages.It draws on India’s census, education and health data and factors such as drought risk, poverty levels, education and job opportunities to identify vulnerable areas….

There are an estimated 46 million people enslaved worldwide, with more than 18 million living in India, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index. The Index was compiled by the Walk Free Foundation, a global organisation seeking to end modern slavery. Many are villagers lured by traffickers with the promise of a good job and an advance payment, only to find themselves or their children forced to work in fields or brick kilns, enslaved in brothels and sold into sexual slavery.

Almost 20,000 women and children were victims of human trafficking in India in 2016, a rise of nearly 25 percent from the previous year, according to government data.While India has strengthened its anti-trafficking policy in recent years, activists say a lack of public awareness remains one of the biggest impediments…(More)”.

Solving a Global Digital Identity Crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Seth Berkley at MIT Technology Review:” In developing countries, one in three children under age five has no record of their existence. Technology can help….Digital identities have become an integral part of modern life, but things like e-passports, digital health records, or Apple Pay really only provide faster, easier, or sometimes smarter ways of accessing services that are already available.

In developing countries it’s a different story. There, digital ID technology can have a profound impact on people’s lives by enabling them to access vital and often life-saving services for the very first time….The challenge is that in poor countries, an increasing number of people live under the radar, invisible to the often archaic, paper-based methods used to certify births, deaths, and marriages. One in three children under age five does not officially exist because their birth wasn’t registered. Even when it is, many don’t have proof in the form of birth certificates. This can have a lasting impact on children’s lives, leaving them vulnerable to neglect and abuse.

In light of this, it is difficult to see how we will meet the SDG16 deadline without a radical solution. What we need are new and affordable digital ID technologies capable of working in poorly resourced settings—for example, where there is no reliable electricity—and yet able to leapfrog current approaches to reach everyone, whether they’re living in remote villages or urban slums.

Such technologies are already emerging as part of efforts to increase global childhood vaccination coverage, with small-scale trials across Africa and Asia. With 86 percent of infants now having access to routine immunization—where they receive all three doses of a diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus vaccine—there are obvious advantages of building on an existing system with such a broad reach.

These systems were designed to help the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and my organization, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, close the gap on the one in seven infants still missing out. But they can also be used to help us achieve SDG16.

One, called MyChild, helps countries transition from paper to digital. At first glance it looks like a typical paper booklet on which workers can record health-record details about the child, such as vaccinations, deworming, or nutritional supplements. But each booklet contains a unique identification number and tear-out slips that are collected and scanned later. This means that even if a child’s birth hasn’t been registered, a unique digital record will follow them through childhood. Developed by Swedish startup Shifo, this system has been used to register more than 95,000 infants in Uganda, Afghanistan, and the Gambia, enabling health workers to follow up either in person or using text reminders to parents.

Another system, called Khushi Baby, is entirely paperless and involves giving each child a digital necklace that contains a unique ID number on a near-field communication chip. This can be scanned by community health workers using a cell phone, enabling them to update a child’s digital health records even in remote areas with no cell coverage. Trials in the Indian state of Rajasthan have been carried out across 100 villages to track more than 15,000 vaccination events. An organization called ID2020 is exploring the use of blockchain technology to create access to a unique identity for those who currently lack one….(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)”.

Design thinking and health communication: learning from failure

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Priyanka Dutt at BBC Media Action: “Anyone working in international development will attest that human-centred design (HCD) has been a ‘trending topic’ in recent years. Design thinking has been applied to a range of challenges, from supporting democratic transition in Libya to building an all-terrain wheelchair for under $200. Melinda Gates even hailed HCD as the innovation changing the most lives in the developing world.

But what exactly is design thinking? It involves bringing together multi-disciplinary teams – think creative writers working alongside ICT specialists – to address challenges through rapid prototyping and repeated testing. At the core of HCD is building empathy with the people you’re designing for with the overarching aim of producing something genuinely valuable to them.

Marrying these principles with our own core value of putting audiences at the heart of everything we do, we decided to set up a ‘laboratory’ in Bihar, in northern India, which aimed to improve child and maternal health through communication. We saw Bihar as a great site for HCD-style innovation because it offered us the scope to test and fine tune new ways of using communication to promote healthy behaviours for women and children alike.

Bihar is home to 29 million women of reproductive age, who give birth 3 million times every year. And although Bihar’s maternal mortality rate has declined in recent years to 93 per 100,000 live births, it is still well above the Sustainable Development Goals target of 70. As for the communication challenges, less than a fifth of these women watch TV and only 12% listen to the radio.

Yet the lab’s early creations achieved a great deal. Over 50,000 people have graduated from our Mobile Academy training course, which is delivered through mobile phone audio messages. The course teaches health workers how to communicate more effectively to persuade families to lead healthier lives.

We also produced a set of cards and audio messages delivered via mobile phone – called Mobile Kunji – for health workers to use during their visits with families. The evidence shows that families subsequently asked health workers more questions and were more likely to follow advice on preparing for birth, family planning and how to feed babies.

Rethinking strategy: learning from failure

High on our early successes, we set about developing Kilkari (a baby’s gurgle in Hindi). This programme sends weekly audio messages about pregnancy, child birth, and child care, directly to families’ mobile phones, from the second trimester of pregnancy until the child is one year old. The aim was that Kilkari would be listened to across Bihar, by the most vulnerable families, with the greatest need and least access to information and services.

Drawing on lessons from two similar services from around the world, Mobile Midwife and BabyCenter, in addition to our own prior experience in Bihar, we were confident Kilkari would be a success. Just to be certain, we ran some tests before rollout and found that we had failed in our vision – and spectacularly so. We weren’t getting through to our main audience, women, as we weren’t using the right channels and language.

In the end, we went back to the drawing board on Kilkari four times, simplifying and stripping down the content time and again, until we got it right. Through repeated prototype-test-redesign cycles, we made the vitally important discovery that our basic assumptions about our audiences were wrong. So we went back to basics and asked ourselves the following questions to push us to rethink our strategy:

1. Is the content relevant and easy to understand?…

2. Are we getting through to our target audience?…

3. Can we do more to keep our target audience engaged?…(More)”

Crowdmapping as a new data source for journalists

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ana Brandusescu and Renée Sieber in Data Driven Journalism: “Crowdsourced data, especially for mapping, is a boon for data driven journalism. In 2015, Nepal’s earthquake was mapped in an astounding 48 hours. The number of volunteers increased to over 2,400 mappers, most of them international, a number that increased exponentially from the initial range of seven to 100 mapping volunteers present before the earthquake occurred.

A significant use of crowdsourced data for mapping, or crowdmapping, is to inform crisis responses like the Nepal earthquake by providing a medium for citizens to communicate with one another and with those seeking to help victims. The benefits to affected peoples are immediate information sharing and visualization of dire and urgent events. These apps have the ability to fill information gaps and even provide aid for disaster victims. Volunteers from across the globe also can contribute to crowdsource entire maps of post-disaster road infrastructures and refugee sites. As a platform and medium, crisis mapping has become so popular that it is increasingly replacing traditional mapping methods for humanitarian emergencies. This is also a huge benefit to journalists as they demonstrate connectivity between open source software, humanitarian crises, and crowdsourcing. According to the Tow Center’s Guide to Crowdsourcing, “Crowdsourcing allows newsrooms to build audience entry points at every stage of the journalistic process—from story assigning, to pre-data collection, to data mining, to sharing specialized expertise, to collecting personal experiences and continuing post-story conversations”….

But let’s get real. Crowdsourced apps have a highly nuanced and complex process with many problems. Here’s five points.

1. Some crises are sexier than others…
2. These apps are far from being zero-cost…
3. Participant engagement is opaque…
4. The problem with “disruption” as a transformative tech…
5. The technical literacy of journalists… (More)
This article is based on the authors’ research article “Confronting the hype: The use of crisis mapping for community development”. Read the full article here.

From disaster planning to conservation: mobile phones as a new tracking tool

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

, , and  in The Conversation: “We can learn a lot about things by studying how they move through the world and interact with the environment.

In the past, for example, it was possible to study the mobility of people within the United States by monitoring things such as the movement of banknotes. Today we can use something that is much more global and widely available than US cash.

Mobile phones have almost totally infiltrated human society, with the number estimated at more than 7 billion in 2014. Ownership of mobile phones continues to grow, even in some of the poorest countries.

Many of those phones are geolocated, continuously providing the geographic location of the user, so effectively acting as tracking devices for human populations.

As biologists, our understanding of animals has been transformed over the past four decades by our ability to track their movements and behaviour.

We were interested to see what we can learn from the use of mobile phones tracking, as we show in a study published this month in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

It’s now possible to use the mobile phone data to gain a better insight into human movement under certain conditions.

For example, mobile phone data was used to study the movement of people during the 2010 earthquake and subsequent cholera outbreak in Haiti, and Hurricane Sandy in the United States in 2012.

It was interesting to note that the human reaction to escape from certain events we found was close to that of some animal groups, such as birds and fish, when fleeing from attack.

Such studies can help predict how people will respond in the future to any emergencies, and help to improve the delivery of any aid or disaster relief.

Conservation with mobile phones

The detail, immediacy and sheer volume of data from mobile phones also offers innovative ways to monitor and possibly solve some of the most pressing conservation problems that animal populations now face.

For example, geolocated phones are changing the way we tackle the crisis of illegal wildlife trade.

Not only is it a major driver of species extinctions, but the human cost is high with more than 1,000 wildlife rangers killed in the line of duty over a ten-year period.

In India, rangers on the front line use a smartphone app to monitor movements and record sightings of targeted species, such as tigers, and to report suspicious activity.

In Africa, mobile phones help rangers collate social and environmental information about reserves and encounter rates with animals killed by poachers….(More)”

Migration tracking is a mess

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Huub Dijstelbloem in Nature: “As debates over migration, refugees and freedom of movement intensify, technologies are increasingly monitoring the movements of people. Biometric passports and databases containing iris scans or fingerprints are being used to check a person’s right to travel through or stay within a territory. India, for example, is establishing biometric identification for its 1.3 billion citizens.

But technologies are spreading beyond borders. Security policies and humanitarian considerations have broadened the landscape. Drones and satellite images inform policies and direct aid to refugees. For instance, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), maps refugee camps in Jordan and elsewhere with its Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT; see www.unitar.org/unosat/map/1928).

Three areas are in need of research, in my view: the difficulties of joining up disparate monitoring systems; privacy issues and concerns over the inviolability of the human body; and ‘counter-surveillance’ deployed by non-state actors to highlight emergencies or contest claims that governments make.

Ideally, state monitoring of human mobility would be bound by ethical principles, solid legislation, periodical evaluations and the checks and balances of experts and political and public debates. In reality, it is ad hoc. Responses are arbitrary, fuelled by the crisis management of governments that have failed to anticipate global and regional migration patterns. Too often, this results in what the late sociologist Ulrich Beck called organized irresponsibility: situations of inadequacy in which it is hard to blame a single actor.

Non-governmental organizations, activists and migrant groups are using technologies to register incidents and to blame and shame states. For example, the Forensic Architecture research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London, has used satellite imagery and other evidence to reconstruct the journey of a boat that left Tripoli on 27 March 2011 with 72 passengers. A fortnight later, it returned to the Libyan coast with just 9 survivors. Although the boat had been spotted by several aircraft and vessels, no rescue operation had been mounted (go.nature.com/2mbwvxi). Whether the states involved can be held accountable is still being considered.

In the end, technologies to monitor mobility are political tools. Their aims, design, use, costs and consequences should be developed and evaluated accordingly….(More)”.

The Whatsapp-inspired, Facebook-investor funded app tackling India’s doctor shortage

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at TechInAsia: “A problem beyond India’s low doctor-to-patient ratio is the distribution of those doctors. Most, particularly specialists, congregate in bigger cities and get seen by patients in the surrounding areas. Only 19 percent of specialists are available in community health centers across India, and most fall well below the country’s requirement for specialists. Community health centers are located in smaller towns and help patients in the area decide if they need to visit a larger, better-equipped city facility….

The IIT-Madras grad’s company, DocsApp, co-founded with fellow IIT-Madras alum Enbasekar D (CTO), joins startups like Practo, DocDoc, and Medinfi in helping patients find physicians. However, the app’s main focus is specialists, and it lets patients chat with doctors and get consultations.

DocsApp’s name is directly inspired by WhatsApp. As long as you have a chat screen on your phone, you can input your problems and location, find a doctor, and ask questions. A user can pay for his or her own appointment over mobile. If treatment requires a physical visit, the user’s money is refunded….

Doctor profiles include the physician’s experience, medical counsel ID, patient reviews, specialty, and languages – DocsApp covers 17 different languages. DocsApp has 1,200 doctors in 15 specialties. All doctors on the platform are verified by looking up certification, an interview, and a facilities review.

If a consultation reveals that a patient needs a prescription, the doctor can provide a digitally-signed e-prescription. DocsApp can deliver medicines within two days to any location in India, says Satish.

Once a user has access to one of the doctors, he or she can message the doctor 24/7 and get a response in 30 minutes – Satish says that the company’s average is now 18 minutes. The team of 55 is aiming for a minute or less….

Telemedicine is one of the ways tech is combatting India’s doctor shortage. Other startups in the industry in the country include Visit, which focuses on both physical and mental health, and SeeDoc, a physician video consultation app.

A chat is a little less personal than a physical visit, which can open the door for patients who want to discuss more taboo topics in India, like mental health and fertility questions. Satish adds that women who live in locations where it’s best to be accompanied by a man when going out also find convenience, as they don’t necessarily need to wait for a husband to come back from work before addressing a medical question she has about her child…(More)”.

Denmark is appointing an ambassador to big tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Hughes in The Next Web: “Question: Is Facebook a country? It sounds silly, but when you think about it, it does have many attributes in common with nation states. For starters, it’s got a population that’s bigger than that of India, and its 2016 revenue wasn’t too far from Estonia’s GDP. It also has a ‘national ethos’. If America’s philosophy is capitalism, Cuba’s is communism, and Sweden’s is social democracy, Facebook’s is ‘togetherness’, as corny as that may sound.

 Given all of the above, is it really any surprise that Denmark is considering appointing a ‘big tech ambassador’ whose job is to establish and manage the country’s relationship with the world’s most powerful tech companies?

Denmark’s “digital ambassador” is a first. No country has ever created such a role. Their job will be to liase with the likes of Google, Twitter, Facebook.

Given the fraught relationship many European countries have with American big-tech – especially on issues of taxation, privacy, and national security – Denmark’s decision to extend an olive branch seems sensible.

Speaking with the Washington Post, Danish Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen said, “just as we engage in a diplomatic dialogue with countries, we also need to establish and prioritize comprehensive relations with tech actors, such as Google, Facebook, Apple and so on. The idea is, we see a lot of companies and new technologies that will in many ways involve and be part of everyday life of citizens in Denmark.”….(More)”

Toward a User-Centered Social Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tris Lumley at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Over the last three years, a number of trends have crystallized that I believe herald the promise of a new phase—perhaps even a new paradigm—for the social sector. I want to explore three of the most exciting, and sketch out where I believe they might take us and why we’d all do well to get involved.

  • The rise of feedback
  • New forms of collaboration
  • Disruption through technology

Taken individually, these three themes are hugely significant in their potential impact on the work of nonprofits and those that invest in them. But viewed together, as interwoven threads, I believe they have the potential to transform both how we work and the underlying fundamental incentives and structure of the social sector.

The rise of feedback

The nonprofit sector is built on a deep and rich history of community engagement. Yet, in a funding market that incentivizes accountability to funders, this strong tradition of listening, engagement, and ownership by primary constituents—the people and communities nonprofits exist to serve—has sometimes faded. Opportunities for funding can drive strategies. Practitioner experience and research evidence can shape program designs. Engagement with service users can become tokenistic, or shallow….

In recognition of this growing momentum, Keystone Accountability and New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) published a paper in 2016 to explore the relationship between impact measurement and user voice. It is our shared belief that many of the recent criticisms of the impact movement—such as impact reporting being used primarily for fundraising rather than improving programs—would be addressed if impact evidence and user voice were seen as two sides of the same coin, and we more routinely sought to synthesize our understanding of nonprofits’ programs from both aspects at once…

New forms of collaboration

As recent critiques of collective impact have pointed out, the social sector has a long history of collaboration. Yet it has not always been the default operating model of nonprofits or their funders. The fragmented nature of the social sector today exposes an urgent imperative for greater focus on collaboration….

Yet the need for greater collaboration and new forms to incentivize and enable it is increasing. Deepening austerity policies, the shrinking of the state in many countries, and the sheer scale of the social issues we face have driven the “demand” side of collaboration. The collective impact movement has certainly been one driver of momentum on the “supply” side, and a number of other forms of collaboration are emerging.

The Young People’s Foundation model, developed in the UK by the John Lyons Charity, is one response to deepening cuts in nonprofit funding. Young People’s Foundations are new organizations that serve three purposes for nonprofits working with young people in the local area—creating a network, leading on collaborative funding bids and contracting processes, and sharing assets across the network.

Elsewhere, philanthropic donors and foundations are increasingly exploring collaboration in practical terms, through pooled grant funds that provide individual donors unrivalled leverage, and that allow groups of funders to benefit from each other’s strengths through coordination and shared strategies. The Dasra Girl Alliance in India is an example of a pooled fund that brings together philanthropic donors and institutional development funders, and fosters collaboration between the nonprofits it supports….

Disruption through technology

Technology might appear an incongruous companion to feedback and collaboration, which are both very human in nature, yet it’s likely to transform our sector….(More)”