philanthropy & aid

Nominet Trust – celebrating 100 life-changing applications of digital technology

Curated on December 7, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Charles Leadbeater in the Financial Times: “The Nominet Trust, the corporate foundation of Nominet, the organisation which looks after the UK’s system of website addresses, has been scouring the world for innovations in which people use digital technologies to tackle social challenges. The Trust wants to inspire and back UK innovators to realise the still largely untapped social potential of digital technologies, to provide new ways for people to learn, look after their health, find cleaner forms of energy and create new economic activity.

We have just announced the second year of the Nominet Trust 100, our annual celebration of such global digital social innovation. This showcases the incessant, unfolding waves of innovation rippling around the world as cheaper and more reliable digital technologies cross-fertilise and multiply. Such innovation waves build from far off before rushing forward with immense power. One prime example is 3D printing, which is about to become a practical tool rather than an esoteric toy of the rich or hip….
Citizen science
Last year’s NT100 featured Cell Slider, an app from Cancer Research UK that harnessed the power of “citizen scientists” to classify images of cells, helping researchers move more quickly towards finding a cure for cancer. Cellslider’s citizen-science approach meant that in just three months, one million images were classified by people using the app. Reverse the Odds reached that milestone in just two weeks.
Combining state-of-the-art game design, expertise in data analysis and remarkable production values, Reverse the Odds is a mobile puzzle where players are challenged to save a race of adorable minions within a magical world. The mini-puzzles are enough to engage thousands of players but in helping these colourful creatures, players are actually analysing real cancer data, which helps the scientists at Cancer Research UK to move more quickly to finding cures. The charity has terabytes of images of cells that can only be analysed by humans — computers can’t identify the patterns required.
Fighting harassment
HarassMap is an Egyptian innovation to crowd-map sexual harassment, in a country where 83 per cent of women, and 98 per cent of foreign women, have experienced sexual abuse and assault.
The NGO, founded by Rebecca Chiao and three other women in 2010, uses the same technology as Ushahidi did in mapping violence in Kenya’s 2007 elections. Anyone can report and detail each instance of an attack, filed by category, from ogling and catcalling, to indecent exposure and rape, using their mobile phone to upload information to a database which then generates the map.
Victims get an instant, automated message of support including where to get legal aid, psychological counselling, learn self-defence and how to make a police report. The data generated allows the NGO to properly measure the problem of sexual harassment for the first time and help engineer a shift in how the Egyptian media reports sexual attacks. It also gives their network of 1,500 trained volunteers the ammunition to make sexual abuse socially unacceptable by challenging community norms, using hard facts.
HarassMap has a distressingly large potential market. The group has given training and technical assistance to activists from 28 other countries to run similar projects, everywhere from Palestine and Yemen to Bangladesh, Pakistan, Syria, India and the UK….”

The case against human rights

Curated on December 6, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Posner in the Guardian: “We live in an age in which most of the major human rights treaties – there are nine “core” treaties – have been ratified by the vast majority of countries. Yet it seems that the human rights agenda has fallen on hard times. In much of the Islamic world, women lack equality, religious dissenters are persecuted and political freedoms are curtailed. The Chinese model of development, which combines political repression and economic liberalism, has attracted numerous admirers in the developing world. Political authoritarianism has gained ground in Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Venezuela. Backlashes against LGBT rights have taken place in countries as diverse as Russia and Nigeria. The traditional champions of human rights – Europe and the United States – have floundered. Europe has turned inward as it has struggled with a sovereign debt crisis, xenophobia towards its Muslim communities and disillusionment with Brussels. The United States, which used torture in the years after 9/11 and continues to kill civilians with drone strikes, has lost much of its moral authority. Even age-old scourges such as slavery continue to exist. A recent report estimates that nearly 30 million people are forced against their will to work. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
At a time when human rights violations remain widespread, the discourse of human rights continues to flourish…
And yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that governments continue to violate human rights with impunity. Why, for example, do more than 150 countries (out of 193 countries that belong to the UN) engage in torture? Why has the number of authoritarian countries increased in the last several years? Why do women remain a subordinate class in nearly all countries of the world? Why do children continue to work in mines and factories in so many countries?
The truth is that human rights law has failed to accomplish its objectives. There is little evidence that human rights treaties, on the whole, have improved the wellbeing of people. The reason is that human rights were never as universal as people hoped, and the belief that they could be forced upon countries as a matter of international law was shot through with misguided assumptions from the very beginning. The human rights movement shares something in common with the hubris of development economics, which in previous decades tried (and failed) to alleviate poverty by imposing top-down solutions on developing countries. But where development economists have reformed their approach, the human rights movement has yet to acknowledge its failures. It is time for a reckoning….
It is time to start over with an approach to promoting wellbeing in foreign countries that is empirical rather than ideological. Human rights advocates can learn a lot from the experiences of development economists – not only about the flaws of top-down, coercive styles of forcing people living in other countries to be free, but about how one can actually help those people if one really wants to. Wealthy countries can and should provide foreign aid to developing countries, but with the understanding that helping other countries is not the same as forcing them to adopt western institutions, modes of governance, dispute-resolution systems and rights. Helping other countries means giving them cash, technical assistance and credit where there is reason to believe that these forms of aid will raise the living standards of the poorest people. Resources currently used in fruitless efforts to compel foreign countries to comply with the byzantine, amorphous treaty regime would be better used in this way.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the human rights treaties were not so much an act of idealism as an act of hubris, with more than a passing resemblance to the civilising efforts undertaken by western governments and missionary groups in the 19th century, which did little good for native populations while entangling European powers in the affairs of countries they did not understand. A humbler approach is long overdue.”
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Look to Government—Yes, Government—for New Social Innovations

Curated on November 24, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Christian Bason and Philip Colligan: “If asked to identify the hotbed of social innovation right now, many people would likely point to the new philanthropy of Silicon Valley or the social entrepreneurship efforts supported by Ashoka, Echoing Green, and Skoll Foundation. Very few people, if any, would mention their state capital or Capitol Hill. While local and national governments may have promulgated some of the greatest advances in human history — from public education to putting a man on the moon — public bureaucracies are more commonly known to stifle innovation.
Yet, around the world, there are local, regional, and national government innovators who are challenging this paradigm. They are pioneering a new form of experimental government — bringing new knowledge and practices to the craft of governing and policy making; drawing on human-centered design, user engagement, open innovation, and cross-sector collaboration; and using data, evidence, and insights in new ways.
Earlier this year, Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation (which Philip helps run), teamed up with Bloomberg Philanthropies to publish i-teams, the first global review of public innovation teams set up by national and city governments. The study profiled 20 of the most established i-teams from around the world, including:

French Experimental Fund for Youth, which has supported more than 554 experimental projects (such as one that reduces school drop-out rates) that have benefited over 480,000 young people;
Nesta’s Innovation Lab, which has run 70 open innovation challenges and programs supporting over 750 innovators working in fields as diverse as energy efficiency, healthcare, and digital education;
New Orleans’ Innovation and Delivery team, which achieved a 19% reduction in the number of murders in the city in 2013 compared to the previous year.

How are i-teams achieving these results? The most effective ones are explicit about the goal they seek – be it creating a solution to a specific policy challenge, engaging citizenry in behaviors that help the commonweal, or transforming the way government behaves. Importantly, these teams are also able to deploy the right skills, capabilities, and methods for the job.
In addition, i-teams have a strong bias toward action. They apply academic research in behavioral economics and psychology to public policy and services, focusing on rapid experimentation and iteration. The approach stands in stark contrast to the normal routines of government.
Take for example, The UK’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), often called the Nudge Unit. It sets clear goals, engages the right expertise to prototype means to the end, and tests innovations rapidly in the field, to learn what’s not working and rapidly scales what is.
One of BIT’s most famous projects changed taxpayer behavior. BIT’s team of economists, behavioral psychologists, and seasoned government staffers came up with minor changes to tax letters, sent out by the UK Government, that subtlety introduced positive peer pressure. By simply altering the letters to say that most people in their local area had already paid their taxes, BIT was able to boost repayment rates by around 5%. This trial was part of a range of interventions, which have helped forward over £200 million in additional tax revenue to HM Revenue & Customs, the UK’s tax authority.
The Danish government’s internal i-team, MindLab (which Christian ran for 8 years) has likewise influenced citizen behavior….”

Co-operation

Curated on November 22, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Patrick Bateson at Kings Review: “I wrote this piece nearly 30 years ago and delivered it as a secular address in King’s College Chapel. I unearthed it and brought it up to date because the issues are as relevant today as they were then.

I am disturbed by the way we have created a social environment in which so much emphasis is laid on competition – on forging ahead while trampling on others. The ideal of social cooperation has come to be treated as high-sounding flabbiness, while individual selfishness is regarded as the natural and sole basis for a realistic approach to life. The image of the struggle for existence lies at the back of it, seriously distorting the view we have of ourselves and wrecking mutual trust.
The fashionable philosophy of individualism draws its respectability in part from an appeal to biology and specifically to the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. Now, Darwin’s theory remains the most powerful explanation for the way that each plant and animal evolved so that it is exquisitely adapted to its environment. The theory works just as well for behaviour as it does for anatomy. Individual animals differ in the way they behave. Those that behave in a manner that is better suited to the conditions in which they live are more likely to survive. Finally, if their descendants resemble them in terms of behaviour, then in the course of evolution, the better adapted forms of behaviour will replace those that are not so effective in keeping the individual alive.
It is the Darwinian concept of differential survival that has been picked up and used so insistently in political rhetoric. Biology is thought to be all about competition – and that supposedly means constant struggle. This emphasis has had an insidious effect on the public mind and has encouraged the belief in individual selfishness and in confrontation. Competition is now widely seen as the mainspring of human activity, at least in Western countries. Excellence in the universities and in the arts is thought to be driven by the same ruthless process that supposedly works so well on the sportsfield or the market place, and they all have a lot in common with what supposedly happens in the jungle. The image of selfish genes, competing with each other in the course of evolution has fused imperceptibly with the notion of selfish individuals competing with each other in the course of their life-times. Individuals only thrive by winning. The argument has become so much a part of conventional belief that it is hard at first to see what is wrong with it.
To put it bluntly, thought has been led seriously astray by the rhetoric. Beginning where the argument starts in biology, genes do not operate in a vacuum. The survival of each gene obviously depends on the characteristics of the whole gene “team” that makes up the total genetic complement of an individual. A similar point can be made above the level of the individual when symbiosis occurs between different species.
Take, for instance, lichens which are found from the Arctic to the tropics – and on virtually every surface from rocks and old roofs to tree trunks. They look like single organisms. However, they represent the fusing of algae and fungi working together in symbiotic partnership. The partners depend utterly on each other and the characteristics of the whole entity provide the adaptations to the environment.
Similarly, cooperation among social animals belies the myth of constant struggle. Many birds and mammals huddle to conserve warmth or reduce the surface exposed to biting insects. Males in a pride of lions help each other to defend the females from other males. Mutual assistance is frequently offered in hunting; for instance, cooperating members of a wolf pack will often split into those that drive the deer and those that lie in ambush. Each wolf gets more to eat as a result. In highly complex animals aid may be reciprocated on a subsequent occasion. So, if one male baboon helps another to fend off competition for a female today, the favour will be returned at a later date. What is obvious about such cases is that each of the participating individuals benefits by working together with the others. Moreover, some things can be done by a group that cannot be done by the individual. It takes two to put up a tent.
The joint action of cooperating individuals can also be a well-adapted character in its own right. The pattern generated by cooperative behaviour could distinguish one social group from another and could make the difference between group survival and communal death. Clearly, a cheat could sometimes obtain the benefits of the others’ cooperation without joining in itself. However, such actions would not be retained if individuals were unable to survive outside their own social group and the groups containing cheats were less likely to survive than those without. This logic does have some bearing on the way we think about ourselves.
At the turn of the 20^th century an exiled Russian aristocrat and anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, wrote a classic book called Mutual Aid. He complained that, in the widespread acceptance of Darwin’s ideas, heavy emphasis had been laid on the cleansing role of social conflict and far too little attention given to the remarkable examples of cooperation. Even now, biological knowledge of symbiosis, reciprocity and mutualism has not yet percolated extensively into public discussions of human social behaviour.
As things stand, the appeal to biology is not to the coherent body of scientific thought that does exist but to a confused myth. It is a travesty of Darwinism to suggest that all that matters in social life is conflict. One individual may be more likely to survive because it is better suited to making its way about its environment and not because it is fiercer than others. Individuals may survive better when they join forces with others. By their joint actions they can frequently do things that one individual cannot do. Consequently, those that team up are more likely to survive than those that do not. Above all, social cohesion may become a critical condition for the survival of the society.
A straightforward message is, then, that each of us may live happier and, in the main, more successful lives, if we treat our fellow human beings as individuals with whom we can readily work. This is a rational rather than a moral argument. It should appeal to all those pragmatists who want to look after themselves. Cooperation is good business practice. However, another matter impinges on rampant individualism, which cannot be treated in a way that so readily generates agreement….”

How to use the Internet to end corrupt deals between companies and governments

Curated on November 19, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stella Dawson at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: “Every year governments worldwide spend more than $9.5 trillion on public goods and services, but finding out who won those contracts, why and whether they deliver as promised is largely invisible.
Enter the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS).
Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica and Paraguay became the first countries to announce on Tuesday that they have adopted the new global standards for publishing contracts online as part of a project to shine a light on how public money is spent and to combat massive corruption in public procurement.
“The mission is to end secret deals between companies and governments,” said Gavin Hayman, the incoming executive director for Open Contracting Partnership.
The concept is simple. Under Open Contracting, the government publishes online the projects it is putting out for bid and the terms; companies submit bids online; the winning contract is published including the reasons why; and then citizens can monitor performance according to the terms of the contract.
The Open Contracting initiative, developed by the World Wide Web Foundation with the support of the World Bank and Omidyar Network, has been several years in the making and is part of a broader global movement to increase the accountability of governments by using Internet technologies to make them more transparent.
A pioneer in data transparency was the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a global coalition of governments, companies and civil society that works on improving accountability by publishing the revenues received in 35 member countries for their natural resources.
Publish What You Fund is a similar initiative for the aid industry. It delivered a common open standards in 2011 for donor countries to publish how much money they gave in development aid and details of what projects that money funded and where.
There’s also the Open Government Partnership, an international forum of 65 countries, each of which adopts an action plan laying out how it will improve the quality of government through collaboration with civil society, frequently using new technologies.
All of these initiatives have helped crack open the door of government.
What’s important about Open Contracting is the sheer scale of impact it could have. Public procurement accounts for about 15 percent of global GDP and according to Anne Jellema, CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation which seeks to expand free access to the web worldwide and backed the OCDS project, corruption adds an estimated $2.3 trillion to the cost of those contracts every year.
A study by the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think tank, looked at four countries already publishing their contracts online — the United Kingdom, Georgia, Colombia and Slovakia. It found open contracting increased visibility and encouraged more companies to submit bids, the quality and price competitiveness improved and citizen monitoring meant better service delivery….”

Off the map

Curated on November 14, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “Rich countries are deluged with data; developing ones are suffering from drought…
AFRICA is the continent of missing data. Fewer than half of births are recorded; some countries have not taken a census in several decades. On maps only big cities and main streets are identified; the rest looks as empty as the Sahara. Lack of data afflicts other developing regions, too. The self-built slums that ring many Latin American cities are poorly mapped, and even estimates of their population are vague. Afghanistan is still using census figures from 1979—and that count was cut short after census-takers were killed by mujahideen.
As rich countries collect and analyse data from as many objects and activities as possible—including thermostats, fitness trackers and location-based services such as Foursquare—a data divide has opened up. The lack of reliable data in poor countries thwarts both development and disaster-relief. When Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), a charity, moved into Liberia to combat Ebola earlier this year, maps of the capital, Monrovia, fell far short of what was needed to provide aid or track the disease’s spread. Major roads were marked, but not minor ones or individual buildings.
Poor data afflict even the highest-profile international development effort: the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The targets, which include ending extreme poverty, cutting infant mortality and getting all children into primary school, were set by UN members in 2000, to be achieved by 2015. But, according to a report by an independent UN advisory group published on November 6th, as the deadline approaches, the figures used to track progress are shaky. The availability of data on 55 core indicators for 157 countries has never exceeded 70%, it found (see chart)….
Some of the data gaps are now starting to be filled from non-government sources. A volunteer effort called Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) improves maps with information from locals and hosts “mapathons” to identify objects shown in satellite images. Spurred by pleas from those fighting Ebola, the group has intensified its efforts in Monrovia since August; most of the city’s roads and many buildings have now been filled in (see maps). Identifying individual buildings is essential, since in dense slums without formal roads they are the landmarks by which outbreaks can be tracked and assistance targeted.
On November 7th a group of charities including MSF, Red Cross and HOT unveiled MissingMaps.org, a joint initiative to produce free, detailed maps of cities across the developing world—before humanitarian crises erupt, not during them. The co-ordinated effort is needed, says Ivan Gayton of MSF: aid workers will not use a map with too little detail, and are unlikely, without a reason, to put work into improving a map they do not use. The hope is that the backing of large charities means the locals they work with will help.
In Kenya and Namibia mobile-phone operators have made call-data records available to researchers, who have used them to combat malaria. By comparing users’ movements with data on outbreaks, epidemiologists are better able to predict where the disease might spread. mTrac, a Ugandan programme that replaces paper reports from health workers with texts sent from their mobile phones, has made data on medical cases and supplies more complete and timely. The share of facilities that have run out of malaria treatments has fallen from 80% to 15% since it was introduced.
Private-sector data are also being used to spot trends before official sources become aware of them. Premise, a startup in Silicon Valley that compiles economics data in emerging markets, has found that as the number of cases of Ebola rose in Liberia, the price of staple foods soared: a health crisis risked becoming a hunger crisis. In recent weeks, as the number of new cases fell, prices did, too. The authorities already knew that travel restrictions and closed borders would push up food prices; they now have a way to measure and track price shifts as they happen….”

Research Handbook On Transparency

Curated on October 31, 2014October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Padideh Ala’i and Robert G. Vaughn: ‘”Transparency” has multiple, contested meanings. This broad-ranging volume accepts that complexity and thoughtfully contrasts alternative views through conceptual pieces, country cases, and assessments of policies–such as freedom of information laws, whistleblower protections, financial disclosure, and participatory policymaking procedures.’
– Susan Rose-Ackerman, Yale University Law School, US
In the last two decades transparency has become a ubiquitous and stubbornly ambiguous term. Typically understood to promote rule of law, democratic participation, anti-corruption initiatives, human rights, and economic efficiency, transparency can also legitimate bureaucratic power, advance undemocratic forms of governance, and aid in global centralization of power. This path-breaking volume, comprising original contributions on a range of countries and environments, exposes the many faces of transparency by allowing readers to see the uncertainties, inconsistencies and surprises contained within the current conceptions and applications of the term….
The expert contributors identify the goals, purposes and ramifications of transparency while presenting both its advantages and shortcomings. Through this framework, they explore transparency from a number of international and comparative perspectives. Some chapters emphasize cultural and national aspects of the issue, with country-specific examples from China, Mexico, the US and the UK, while others focus on transparency within global organizations such as the World Bank and the WTO. A number of relevant legal considerations are also discussed, including freedom of information laws, financial disclosure of public officials and whistleblower protection…”

Ambulance Drone is a flying first aid kit that could save lives

Curated on October 31, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “When a medical emergency takes place, the response time can make all the difference between a life saved and a life lost. Unfortunately, ambulances can get stuck in traffic and on average they arrive 10 minutes after the emergency call has been made, in which time a cardiac arrest victim may have already succumbed to a lack of oxygen to the brain. We’ve already seen Germany’s Defikopter use drones to ensure defibrillators are on scene by the time a medical professional arrives, but now the Ambulance Drone is an all-purpose medical toolkit that can be automatically flown to any emergency situation and used to guide citizens to make non-technical lifesaving procedures.
Created by Alex Monton, a graduate of the Delft University of Technology, the drone is custom designed to deliver in the event of an emergency. Inside, it houses a compact defibrillator, medication and CPR aids, as well as other essential supplies for the layperson to use while they wait for a medical professional. The idea is that those at the scene can phone emergency services as normal, giving their location. An ambulance and the Ambulance Drone are despatched immediately, with the drone capable of arriving in around 1 minute.
Once it’s there, the call can be transferred to the drone, which has in-built speakers. This frees the caller’s hands to perform tasks such as placing the victim in the recovery position and preparing the defibrillator, with vocal guidance from the emergency response team. The team can see live video of the event to make sure that any procedures are completed correctly, as well as passing on relevant info to the approaching ambulance…”

Ebola and big data: Call for help

Curated on October 26, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “WITH at least 4,500 people dead, public-health authorities in west Africa and worldwide are struggling to contain Ebola. Borders have been closed, air passengers screened, schools suspended. But a promising tool for epidemiologists lies unused: mobile-phone data.
When people make mobile-phone calls, the network generates a call data record (CDR) containing such information as the phone numbers of the caller and receiver, the time of the call and the tower that handled it—which gives a rough indication of the device’s location. This information provides researchers with an insight into mobility patterns. Indeed phone companies use these data to decide where to build base stations and thus improve their networks, and city planners use them to identify places to extend public transport.
But perhaps the most exciting use of CDRs is in the field of epidemiology. Until recently the standard way to model the spread of a disease relied on extrapolating trends from census data and surveys. CDRs, by contrast, are empirical, immediate and updated in real time. You do not have to guess where people will flee to or move. Researchers have used them to map malaria outbreaks in Kenya and Namibia and to monitor the public response to government health warnings during Mexico’s swine-flu epidemic in 2009. Models of population movements during a cholera outbreak in Haiti following the earthquake in 2010 used CDRs and provided the best estimates of where aid was most needed.
Doing the same with Ebola would be hard: in west Africa most people do not own a phone. But CDRs are nevertheless better than simulations based on stale, unreliable statistics. If researchers could track population flows from an area where an outbreak had occurred, they could see where it would be likeliest to break out next—and therefore where they should deploy their limited resources. Yet despite months of talks, and the efforts of the mobile-network operators’ trade association and several smaller UN agencies, telecoms firms have not let researchers use the data (see article).
One excuse is privacy, which is certainly a legitimate worry, particularly in countries fresh from civil war, or where tribal tensions exist. But the phone data can be anonymised and aggregated in a way that alleviates these concerns. A bigger problem is institutional inertia. Big data is a new field. The people who grasp the benefits of examining mobile-phone usage tend to be young, and lack the clout to free them for research use.”