Building Data Responsibility into Humanitarian Action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan Verhulst at The GovLab: “Next Monday, May 23rd, governments, non-profit organizations and citizen groups will gather in Istanbul at the first World Humanitarian Summit. A range of important issues will be on the agenda, not least of which the refugee crisis confronting the Middle East and Europe. Also on the agenda will be an issue of growing importance and relevance, even if it does not generate front-page headlines: the increasing potential (and use) of data in the humanitarian context.

To explore this topic, a new paper, “Building Data Responsibility into Humanitarian Action,” is being released today, and will be presented tomorrow at the Understanding Risk Forum. This paper is the result of a collaboration between the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), The GovLab (NYU Tandon School of Engineering), the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and Leiden UniversityCentre for Innovation. It seeks to identify the potential benefits and risks of using data in the humanitarian context, and begins to outline an initial framework for the responsible use of data in humanitarian settings.

Both anecdotal and more rigorously researched evidence points to the growing use of data to address a variety of humanitarian crises. The paper discusses a number of data risk case studies, including the use of call data to fight Malaria in Africa; satellite imagery to identify security threats on the border between Sudan and South Sudan; and transaction data to increase the efficiency of food delivery in Lebanon. These early examples (along with a few others discussed in the paper) have begun to show the opportunities offered by data and information. More importantly, they also help us better understand the risks, including and especially those posed to privacy and security.

One of the broader goals of the paper is to integrate the specific and the theoretical, in the process building a bridge between the deep, contextual knowledge offered by initiatives like those discussed above and the broader needs of the humanitarian community. To that end, the paper builds on its discussion of case studies to begin establishing a framework for the responsible use of data in humanitarian contexts. It identifies four “Minimum Humanitarian standards for the Responsible use of Data” and four “Characteristics of Humanitarian Organizations that use Data Responsibly.” Together, these eight attributes can serve as a roadmap or blueprint for humanitarian groups seeking to use data. In addition, the paper also provides a four-step practical guide for a data responsibility framework (see also earlier blog)….(More)” Full Paper: Building Data Responsibility into Humanitarian Action

Society’s biggest problems need more than a nudge

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 at the Conversation: “So-called “nudge units” are popping up in governments all around the world.

The best-known examples include the U.K.’s Behavioural Insights Team, created in 2010, and the White House-based Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, introduced by the Obama administration in 2014. Their mission is to leverage findings from behavioral science so that people’s decisions can be nudged in the direction of their best intentions without curtailing their ability to make choices that don’t align with their priorities.

Overall, these – and other – governments have made important strides when it comes to using behavioral science to nudge their constituents into better choices.

Yet, the same governments have done little to improve their own decision-making processes. Consider big missteps like the Flint water crisis. How could officials in Michigan decide to place an essential service – safe water – and almost 100,000 people at risk in order to save US$100 per day for three months? No defensible decision-making process should have allowed this call to be made.

When it comes to many of the big decisions faced by governments – and the private sector – behavioral science has more to offer than simple nudges.

Behavioral scientists who study decision-making processes could also help policy-makers understand why things went wrong in Flint, and how to get their arms around a wide array of society’s biggest problems – from energy transitions to how to best approach the refugee crisis in Syria.

When nudges are enough

The idea of nudging people in the direction of decisions that are in their own best interest has been around for a while. But it was popularized in 2008 with the publication of the bestseller “Nudge“ by Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago and Cass Sunstein of Harvard.

A common nudge goes something like this: if we want to eat better but are having a hard time doing it, choice architects can reengineer the environment in which we make our food choices so that healthier options are intuitively easier to select, without making it unrealistically difficult to eat junk food if that’s what we’d rather do. So, for example, we can shelve healthy foods at eye level in supermarkets, with less-healthy options relegated to the shelves nearer to the floor….

Sometimes a nudge isn’t enough

Nudges work for a wide array of choices, from ones we face every day to those that we face infrequently. Likewise, nudges are particularly well-suited to decisions that are complex with lots of different alternatives to choose from. And, they are advocated in situations where the outcomes of our decisions are delayed far enough into the future that they feel uncertain or abstract. This describes many of the big decisions policy-makers face, so it makes sense to think the solution must be more nudge units.

But herein lies the rub. For every context where a nudge seems like a realistic option, there’s at least another context where the application of passive decision support would be either be impossible – or, worse, a mistake.

Take, for example, the question of energy transitions. These transitions are often characterized by the move from infrastructure based on fossil fuels to renewables to address all manner of risks, including those from climate change. These are decisions that society makes infrequently. They are complex. And, the outcomes – which are based on our ability to meet conflicting economic, social and environmental objectives – will be delayed.

But, absent regulation that would place severe restrictions on the kinds of options we could choose from – and which, incidentally, would violate the freedom-of-choice tenet of choice architecture – there’s no way to put renewable infrastructure options at proverbial eye level for state or federal decision-makers, or their stakeholders.

Simply put, a nudge for a decision like this would be impossible. In these cases, decisions have to be made the old-fashioned way: with a heavy lift instead of a nudge.

Complex policy decisions like this require what we call active decision support….(More)”

Fifty Shades of Open

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Jeffrey Pomerantz and Robin Peek at First Monday: “Open source. Open access. Open society. Open knowledge. Open government. Even open food. Until quite recently, the word “open” had a fairly constant meaning. The over-use of the word “open” has led to its meaning becoming increasingly ambiguous. This presents a critical problem for this important word, as ambiguity leads to misinterpretation.

“Open” has been applied to a wide variety of words to create new terms, some of which make sense, and some not so much. When we started writing this essay, we thought our working title was simply amusing. But the working title became the actual title, as we found that there are at least 50 different terms in which the word “open” is used, encompassing nearly as many different criteria for openness. In this essay we will attempt to make sense of this open season on the word “open.”

Opening the door on open

The word “open” is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a very old one in the English language, harking back to Early Old English. Unlike some words in English, the definition of “open” has changed very little in the intervening thousand-plus years: the earliest recorded uses of the word are completely consistent with its modern usage as an adjective, indicating a passage through or an access into something (Oxford English Dictionary, 2016).

This meaning leads to the development in the fifteenth century of the phrases “open house,” meaning an establishment in which all are welcome, and “open air,” meaning unenclosed outdoor spaces. One such unenclosed outdoor space that figured large in the fifteenth century, and continues to do so today, is the Commons (Hardin, 1968): land or other resources that are not privately owned, but are available for use to all members of a community. The word “open” in these phrases indicates that all have access to a shared resource. All are welcome to visit an open house, but not to move in; all are welcome to walk in the open air or graze their sheep on the Commons, but not to fence the Commons as part of their backyard. (And the moment at which Commons land ceases to be open is precisely the moment it is fenced by an owner, which is in fact what happened in Great Britain during the Enclosure movement of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.)

Running against the grain of this cultural movement to enclosure, the nineteenth century saw the circulating library become the norm — rather than libraries in which massive tomes were literally chained to desks. The interpretation of the word “open” to mean a shared resource to which all had access, fit neatly into the philosophy of the modern library movement of the nineteenth century. The phrases “open shelves” and “open stacks” emerged at this time, referring to resources that were directly available to library users, without necessarily requiring intervention by a librarian. Naturally, however, not all library resources were made openly available, nor are they even today. Furthermore, resources are made openly available with the understanding that, like Commons land, they must be shared: library resources have a due date.

The twentieth century saw an increase in the use of the word “open,” as well as a hint of the confusion that was to come about the interpretation of the word. The term “open society” was coined prior to World War I, to indicate a society tolerant of religious diversity. The “open skies” policy enables a nation to allow other nations’ commercial aviation to fly through its airspace — though, importantly, without giving up control of its airspace. The Open University was founded in the United Kingdom in 1969, to provide a university education to all, with no formal entry requirements. The meaning of the word “open” is quite different across these three terms — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these terms use different shadings of the word.

But it has been the twenty-first century that has seen the most dramatic increase in the number of terms that use “open.” The story of this explosion in the use of the word “open” begins, however, with a different word entirely: the word “free.”….

Introduction
Opening the door on open
Speech, beer, and puppies
Open means rights
Open means access
Open means use
Open means transparent
Open means participatory
Open means enabling openness
Open means philosophically aligned with open principles
Openwashing and its discontents
Conclusion“

Is behavioural economics ready to save the world?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book review by Trenton G Smith of Behavioral Economics and Public Health : “Modern medicine has long doled out helpful advice to ailing patients about not only drug treatments, but also diet, exercise, alcohol abuse, and many other lifestyle decisions. And for just as long, patients have been failing to follow doctors’ orders. Many of today’s most pressing public health problems would disappear if people would just make better choices.

Enter behavioural economics. A fairly recent offshoot of the dismal science, behavioural economics aims to take the coldly rational decision makers who normally populate economic theories, and instil in them a host of human foibles. Neoclassical (ie, conventional) economics, after all is the study of optimising behaviour in the presence of material constraints—why not add constraints on cognitive capacity, or self-control, or susceptibility to the formation of bad habits? The hope is that by incorporating insights from other behavioural sciences (most notably cognitive psychology and neuroscience) while retaining the methodological rigour of neoclassical economics, behavioural economics will yield a more richly descriptive theory of human behaviour, and generate new and important insights to better inform public policy.

Policy makers have taken notice. In an era in which free-market rhetoric dominates the political landscape, the idea that small changes to public health policies might serve to nudge consumers towards healthier behaviours holds great appeal. Even though some (irrational) consumers might be better off, the argument goes, if certain unhealthy food products were banned (or worse, taxed), this approach would infringe on the rights of the many consumers who want to indulge occasionally, and fully understand the consequences. If governments could instead use evidence from consumer science to make food labels more effective, or to improve the way that healthy foods are presented in school cafeterias, more politically unpalatable interventions in the marketplace might not be needed. This idea, dubbed “libertarian paternalism” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, has been pursued with gusto in both the UK (David Cameron’s Government formed the Behavioural Insights Team—unofficially described as the Nudge Unit) and the USA (where Sunstein spent time in the Obama administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs).

Whatever public health practitioners might think about these developments—or indeed, of economics as a discipline—this turn of events has rather suddenly given scholars at the cutting edge of consumer science an influential voice in the regulatory process, and some of the best and brightest have stepped up to contribute. Behavioral Economics & Public Health (edited by Christina Roberto and Ichiro Kawachi) is the product of a 2014 Harvard University exploratory workshop on applying social science insights to public health. As might be expected in a volume that aims to bring together two such inherently multidisciplinary fields, the book’s 11 chapters offer an eclectic mix of perspectives. The editors begin with an excellent overview of the field of behavioural economics and its applications to public health, and an economic perspective can also be found in four of the other chapters: Justin White and William Dow write about intertemporal choice, Kristina Lewis and Jason Block review the use of incentives to promote health, Michael Sanders and Michael Hallsworth describe their experience working within the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team, and Frederick Zimmerman concludes with a thoughtful critique of the field of behavioural economics. The other contributions are largely from the perspectives of psychology and marketing: Dennis Runger and Wendy Wood discuss habit formation, Rebecca Ferrer and colleagues emphasise the importance of emotion in decision making, Brent McFerran discusses social norms in the context of obesity, Jason Riis and Rebecca Ratner explain why some public health communication strategies are more effective than others, and Zoe Chance and colleagues and Brian Wansink offer frameworks for designing environments (eg, in schools and workplaces) that are conducive to healthy choices.

This collection of essays holds many hidden gems, but the one that surprised me the most was the attention given (by Runger and Wood briefly, and Zimmerman extensively) to a dirty little secret that behavioural economists rarely mention: once it is acknowledged that sometimes-irrational consumers can be manipulated into making healthy choices, it does not require much of a leap to conclude that business interests can—and do—use the same methods to push back in the other direction. This conclusion leads Zimmerman to a discussion of power in the marketplace and in our collective political economy, and to a call to action on these larger structural issues in society that neoclassical theory has long neglected….(More; Book)

Army looks to outsmart soldiers’ bad habits

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 at the Army Times: “You wouldn’t think that moving the salad bar to the front of the chow hall and moving the dessert bar back 10 feet would make the Army healthier. But at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, that bumped up salad sales about 24 percent and dessert sales down 10 percent, a nudge toward goals of soldiers eating, exercising and sleeping healthier.

That’s just an example of the kind of change Army Medical Command hopes to inspire and successes it hopes to share across installations through its first annual Health of the Force report.

“I’m pretty proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish with this inaugural report,” said Col. Deydre Teyhen during a recent roundtable at Defense Health Agency headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia.  “I think we can’t get to a better state of health unless we inform people of what’s working out there in the field.”

The Army hopes to reduce the figure of 17 percent of soldiers not medically deployable within 72 hours. …The overarching philosophy of these recent MEDCOM efforts is to improve overall health rather than play whack-a-mole with problems as they arise. Teyhen pointed out that the average soldier is a patient at a health care facility for about 100 minutes per year, and the trick is to influence soldier health choices over the other 525,500 minutes, extending influence outside of brick-and-mortar health facilities.It dovetails with the Army’s Performance Triad, the plan to improve readiness through sleep, nutrition and exercise….(More)”

A New Dark Age Looms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

William B. Gail in the New York Times: “Imagine a future in which humanity’s accumulated wisdom about Earth — our vast experience with weather trends, fish spawning and migration patterns, plant pollination and much more — turns increasingly obsolete. As each decade passes, knowledge of Earth’s past becomes progressively less effective as a guide to the future. Civilization enters a dark age in its practical understanding of our planet.

To comprehend how this could occur, picture yourself in our grandchildren’s time, a century hence. Significant global warming has occurred, as scientists predicted. Nature’s longstanding, repeatable patterns — relied on for millenniums by humanity to plan everything from infrastructure to agriculture — are no longer so reliable. Cycles that have been largely unwavering during modern human history are disrupted by substantial changes in temperature and precipitation….

Our foundation of Earth knowledge, largely derived from historically observed patterns, has been central to society’s progress. Early cultures kept track of nature’s ebb and flow, passing improved knowledge about hunting and agriculture to each new generation. Science has accelerated this learning process through advanced observation methods and pattern discovery techniques. These allow us to anticipate the future with a consistency unimaginable to our ancestors.

But as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected, though it will be difficult to say what will change, by how much, and when.

The list of possible disruptions is long and alarming. We could see changes to the prevalence of crop and human pests, like locust plagues set off by drought conditions; forest fire frequency; the dynamics of the predator-prey food chain; the identification and productivity of reliably arable land, and the predictability of agriculture output.

Historians of the next century will grasp the importance of this decline in our ability to predict the future. They may mark the coming decades of this century as the period during which humanity, despite rapid technological and scientific advances, achieved “peak knowledge” about the planet it occupies. They will note that many decades may pass before society again attains the same level.

One exception to this pattern-based knowledge is the weather, whose underlying physics governs how the atmosphere moves and adjusts. Because we understand the physics, we can replicate the atmosphere with computer models. Monitoring by weather stations and satellites provides the starting point for the models, which compute a forecast for how the weather will evolve. Today, forecast accuracy based on such models is generally good out to a week, sometimes even two.

But farmers need to think a season or more ahead. So do infrastructure planners as they design new energy and water systems. It may be feasible to develop the science and make the observations necessary to forecast weather a month or even a season in advance. We are also coming to understand enough of the physics to make useful global and regional climate projections a decade or more ahead.

The intermediate time period is our big challenge. Without substantial scientific breakthroughs, we will remain reliant on pattern-based methods for time periods between a month and a decade. … Our best knowledge is built on what we have seen in the past, like how fish populations respond to El Niño’s cycle. Climate change will further undermine our already limited ability to make these predictions. Anticipating ocean resources from one year to the next will become harder.

Civilization’s understanding of Earth has expanded enormously in recent decades, making humanity safer and more prosperous. As the patterns that we have come to expect are disrupted by warming temperatures, we will face huge challenges feeding a growing population and prospering within our planet’s finite resources. New developments in science offer our best hope for keeping up, but this is by no means guaranteed….(More)”

Six of the Government’s Best Mobile Apps

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USA Gov: “There’s an app for everything in this digital age, including hundredsdeveloped by the federal government. Here are six apps that we foundespecially useful.

  1. Smart Traveler – Planning a trip out of the country this year? SmartTraveler by the State Department is great for all your trips abroad. Getthe latest travel alerts and information on every country, includinghow to find and contact each U.S. Embassy.
  2. FoodKeeper – Ever wonder how long you should cook chicken or howlong food can sit in the fridge before it goes bad? The U.S. Departmentof Agriculture’s FoodKeeper is the tool for you. Not only can you findresources on food safety and post reminders of how long food willremain safe to eat, you can also ask a food safety specialist questions 24/7.
  3. FEMA App – The FEMA app helps you learn how to prepare for and respond to disasters. It includes weather alerts, tipsfor building a basic emergency supply kit, and contact information for applying for assistance and finding local sheltersand disaster recovery centers. Stay safe and know what to do when disasters happen.
  4. IRS2GO – Tax season is here. This IRS app can help you track the status of your refund, make a payment, or find taxpreparation assistance, sometimes for free.
  5. CDC Influenza App-Stay on top of the flu this season and get the latest updates from this official Centers for DiseaseControl and Prevention app. It’s great for health practitioners, teachers, and parents, and includes tips for avoiding the fluand maps of influenza activity.
  6. Dwellr– Have you ever wondered what U.S. city might best suit you? Then the Dwellr app is just for you. When you firstopen the app, you’re guided through an interactive survey, to better understand your ideal places to live based on datagathered by the Census Bureau….(More)”

The era of development mutants

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Guilo Quaggiotto at Nesta: “If you were looking for the cutting edge of the development sector, where would you go these days? You would probably look at startups like Premise who have predicted food trends 25 days faster than national statistics in Brazil, or GiveDirectly who are pushing the boundaries on evidence – from RCTs to new ways of mapping poverty – to fast track the adoption of cash transfers.

Or perhaps you might draw your attention to PetaJakarta who are experimenting with new responses to crises by harnessing human sensor networks. You might be tempted to consider Airbnb’s Disaster Response programme as an indicator of an emerging alternative infrastructure for disaster response (and perhaps raising questions about the political economy of this all).

And could Bitnation’s Refugee Emergency programme in response to the European refugee crisis be the possible precursor of future solutions for transnational issues – among the development sector’s hardest challenges? Are the business models of One Acre Fund, which provides services for smallholder farmers, or Floodtags, which analyses citizen data during floods for water and disaster managers, an indicator of future pathways to scale – that elusive development unicorn?

If you want to look at the future of procuring solutions for the development sector, should you be looking at initiatives like Citymart, which works with municipalities across the world to rethink traditional procurement and unleash the expertise and innovation capabilities of their citizens? By the same token, projects like Pathogen Box, Poverty Stoplight or Patient Innovation point to a brave new world where lead-user innovation and harnessing ‘sticky’ local knowledge becomes the norm, rather than the exception. You would also be forgiven for thinking that social movements across the world are the place to look for signs of future mechanisms for harnessing collective intelligence – Kawal Pamilu’s “citizen experts” self-organising around the Indonesian elections in 2014 is a textbook case study in this department.

The list could go on and on: welcome to the era of development mutants. While established players in the development sector are engrossed in soul-searching and their fitness for purpose is being scrutinised from all quarters, a whole new set of players is emerging, unfettered by legacy and borrowing from a variety of different disciplines. They point to a potentially different future – indeed, many potentially different futures – for the sector…..

But what if we wanted to invert this paradigm? How could we move from denial to fruitful collaboration with the ‘edgeryders’ of the development sector and accelerate its transformation?

Adopting new programming principles

Based on our experience working with development organisations, we believe that partnering with the mutants involves two types of shifts for traditional players: at the programmatic and the operational level. At the programmatic level, our work on the ground led us to articulate the following emerging principles:

  1. Mapping what people have, not what they need: even though approaches like jugaad and positive deviance have been around for a long time, unfortunately the default starting point for many development projects is still mapping needs, not assets. Inverting this paradigm allows for potentially disruptive project design and partnerships to emerge. (Signs of the future: Patient Innovation, Edgeryders, Community Mirror, Premise)

  2. Getting ready for multiple futures: When distributed across an organisation and not limited to a centralised function, the discipline of scanning the horizon for emergent solutions that contradict the dominant paradigm can help move beyond the denial phase and develop new interfaces to collaborate with the mutants. Here the link between analysis (to understand not only what is probable, but also what is possible) and action is critical – otherwise this remains purely an academic exercise. (Signs of the future: OpenCare, Improstuctures, Seeds of Good Anthropocene, Museum of the Future)

  3. Running multiple parallel experiments: According to Dave Snowden, in order to intervene in a complex system “you need multiple parallel experiments and they should be based on different and competing theories/hypotheses”. Unfortunately, many development projects are still based on linear narratives and assumptions such as “if only we run an awareness raising campaign citizens will change their behaviour”. Turning linear narratives into hypotheses to be tested (without becoming religious on a specific approach) opens up the possibility to explore the solution landscape and collaborate with non-obvious partners that bring new approaches to the table. (Signs of the future: Chukua Hakua, GiveDirectly, Finnish PM’s Office of Experiments, Ideas42, Cognitive Edge)

  4. Embracing obliquity: A deep, granular understanding of local assets and dynamics along with system mapping (see point 5 below) and pairing behavioural experts with development practitioners can help identify entry points for exploring new types of intervention based on obliquity principles. Mutants are often faster in adopting this approach and partnering with them is a way to bypass organisational inertia and explore nonlinear interventions. (Signs of the future: Sardex, social prescriptions, forensic architecture)

  5. From projects to systems: development organisations genuinely interested in developing new partnerships need to make the shift from the project logic to system investments. This involves, among other things, shifting the focus from providing solutions to helping every actor in the system to develop a higher level of consciousness about the issues they are facing and to take better decisions over time. It also entails partnering with mutants to explore entirely new financial mechanisms. (Signs of the future: Lankelly Chase, Indonesia waste banks, Dark Matter Labs)

Adopting new interfaces for working with the mutants

Harvard Business School professor Carliss Baldwin argued that most bureaucracies these days have a ‘non-contractible’ problem: they don’t know where smart people are, or how to evaluate how good they are. Most importantly, most smart people don’t want to work for them because they find them either too callous, unrewarding or slow (or a combination of all of these)….(More)”

How Big Data Harms Poor Communities

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Kaveh Waddell in the Atlantic: “Big data can help solve problems that are too big for one person to wrap their head around. It’s helped businesses cut costs, cities plan new developments, intelligence agencies discover connections between terrorists, health officials predict outbreaks, and police forces get ahead of crime. Decision-makers are increasingly told to “listen to the data,” and make choices informed by the outputs of complex algorithms.

But when the data is about humans—especially those who lack a strong voice—those algorithms can become oppressive rather than liberating. For many poor people in the U.S., the data that’s gathered about them at every turn can obstruct attempts to escape poverty.

Low-income communities are among the most surveilled communities in America. And it’s not just the police that are watching, says Michele Gilman, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a former civil-rights attorney at the Department of Justice. Public-benefits programs, child-welfare systems, and monitoring programs for domestic-abuse offenders all gather large amounts of data on their users, who are disproportionately poor.
In certain places, in order to qualify for public benefits like food stamps, applicants have to undergo fingerprinting and drug testing. Once people start receiving the benefits, officials regularly monitor them to see how they spend the money, and sometimes check in on them in their homes.

Data gathered from those sources can end up feeding back into police systems, leading to a cycle of surveillance. “It becomes part of these big-data information flows that most people aren’t aware they’re captured in, but that can have really concrete impacts on opportunities,” Gilman says.

Once an arrest crops up on a person’s record, for example, it becomes much more difficult for that person to find a job, secure a loan, or rent a home. And that’s not necessarily because loan officers or hiring managers pass over applicants with arrest records—computer systems that whittle down tall stacks of resumes or loan applications will often weed some out based on run-ins with the police.

When big-data systems make predictions that cut people off from meaningful opportunities like these, they can violate the legal principle of presumed innocence, according to Ian Kerr, a professor and researcher of ethics, law, and technology at the University of Ottawa.

Outside the court system, “innocent until proven guilty” is upheld by people’s due-process rights, Kerr says: “A right to be heard, a right to participate in one’s hearing, a right to know what information is collected about me, and a right to challenge that information.” But when opaque data-driven decision-making takes over—what Kerr calls “algorithmic justice”—some of those rights begin to erode….(More)”

Technology for Transparency: Cases from Sub-Saharan Africa

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 at Havard Political Review: “Over the last decade, Africa has experienced previously unseen levels of economic growth and market vibrancy. Developing countries can only achieve equitable growth and reduce poverty rates, however, if they are able to make the most of their available resources. To do this, they must maximize the impact of aid from donor governments and NGOs and ensure that domestic markets continue to diversify, add jobs, and generate tax revenues. Yet, in most developing countries, there is a dearth of information available about industry profits, government spending, and policy outcomes that prevents efficient action.

ONE, an international advocacy organization, has estimated that $68.6 billion was lost in sub-Saharan Africa in 2012 due to a lack of transparency in government budgeting….

The Importance of Technology

Increased visibility of problems exerts pressure on politicians and other public sector actors to adjust their actions. This process is known as social monitoring, and it relies on citizens or public agencies using digital tools, such as mobile phones, Facebook, and other social media sites to spot public problems. In sub-Saharan Africa, however, traditional media companies and governments have not shown consistency in reporting on transparency issues.

New technologies offer a solution to this problem. Philip Thigo, the creator of an online and SMS platform that monitors government spending, said in an interview with Technology for Transparency, “All we are trying to do is enhance the work that [governments] do. We thought that if we could create a clear channel where communities could actually access data, then the work of government would be easier.” Networked citizen media platforms that rely on the volunteer contributions of citizens have become increasingly popular. Given that in most African countries less than 10 percent of the population has Internet access, mobile-device-based programs have proven the logical solution. About 30 percent of the population continent-wide has access to cell phones.

Lova Rakotomalala, a co-founder of an NGO in Madagascar that promotes online exposure of social grassroots projects, told the HPR, “most Malagasies will have a mobile phone and an FM radio because it helps them in their daily lives.” Rakotomalala works to provide workshops and IT training to people in regions of Madagascar where Internet access has been recently introduced. According to him, “the amount of data that we can collect from social monitoring and transparency projects will only grow in the near future. There is much room for improvement.”

Kenyan Budget Tracking Tool

The Kenyan Budget Tracking Tool is a prominent example of how social media technology can help obviate traditional transparency issues. Despite increased development assistance and foreign aid, the number of Kenyans classified as poor grew from 29 percent in the 1970s to almost 60 percent in 2000. Noticing this trend, Philip Thigo created an online and SMS platform called the Kenyan Budget Tracking Tool. The platform specifically focuses on the Constituencies Development Fund, through which members of the Kenyan parliament are able to allocate resources towards various projects, such as physical infrastructure, government offices, or new schools.

This social monitoring technology has exposed real government abuses. …

Another mobile tool, Question Box, allows Ugandans to call or message operators who have access to a database full of information on health, agriculture, and education.

But tools like Medic Mobile and the Kenyan Budget Tracking Tool are only the first steps in solving the problems that plague corrupt governments and underdeveloped communities. Improved access to information is no substitute for good leadership. However, as Rakotomalala argued, it is an important stepping-stone. “While legally binding actions are the hammer to the nail, you need to put the proverbial nail in the right place first. That nail is transparency.”…(More)