USAID Impact Photo Credit: Nancy Leahy/USAID

Archives for Innovation

Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention: Introducing Our 1st Round of Winners

Posted by  on Thursday, February 14th 2013     

This originally appeared on Humanity United. 

In the fall, Humanity United partnered with USAID to launch the Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention. The goal of the Tech Challenge is to bring technologists and the human rights community together, to facilitate the development of new tools and technologies to help the human rights movement.

The first round of the Challenge opened in late October, offering prizes for the most innovative solutions to two intractable problems: how better to document evidence of atrocities on the ground, and how better to identify third-party enablers of atrocities (i.e. those states, corporations or individuals that offer support to perpetrators).

We are incredibly excited to announce the winners. The first place prize for $5,000 on the documentation challenge went to a partnership between Physicians for Human Rights, DataDyne and InformaCam for developing the Kivu Link. This mobile app will equip doctors and nurses with critical tools for collecting, documenting and preserving court-admissible forensic evidence of mass atrocities including sexual violence and torture.

The second prize for $3,000 went to a mobile application that allows uses to covertly take pictures while simultaneously recording the location and time (EXIF) data during internet blackout situations in a hostile environment using an encrypted peer-to-peer Bluetooth network.

The third prize for $2,000 was split between two entries. Bonnie Feudinger, Brian Laning and Heather Vernon from the MCW Biotechnology and Bioengineering Center proposed the International Evidence Locker app, designed to collect relevant evidence, maintain a clear chain of custody of the evidence so that it’s admissible in judicial proceedings, and protect the witnesses collecting the evidence. The Signal Program Harvard Humanitarian Initiative proposed AMALGAM: Automated Mass Atrocity Algorithmic Analysis Methodology. This is a open-source platform to allow analysts to easily and systematically process and share remote sensing data specific to predetermined geospatial phenomena.

The first place prize for $5,000 for the enablers challenge went to Le-Marie Thompson of Nettadonna LLC, for her proposal for an Electronic Component Validation Tool for New Product Development, which address the challenge of companies unintentionally sourcing microelectronic components from suppliers that produce components using conflict materials.

The second prize for $3,000 went to Fiona Mati of Kenya for her app Conscious Vacations, which seeks to put pressure on state perpetrators (and those who commercial interests who support them) by helping tourists avoid countries whose leaders are implicated in human rights abuses.

The third prize for $2,000 went to the The Enough Project, for their proposal to combine front-line research with cutting-edge data mining technology to identify and stop enablers of mass atrocities.

We’re also very excited to announce that the next round of the Tech Challenge will open in late February! Stay tuned.

Michael Kleinman is a director of Investments, based in our San Francisco office.

Accelerating Innovation and Impact in Global Health

Posted by  on Monday, February 11th 2013     

This originally appeared on the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Sad examples abound of inexpensive, lifesaving health solutions failing to reach the most vulnerable in the developing world. Whether it is amoxicillin treatment that is out of reach for the 1.3 million children under five who die each year from childhood pneumonia, or a simple and effective $0.50 oral rehydration salts or Zinc treatment inaccessible to the 1.5 million kids dying each year from dehydration stemming from diarrhea, it is clear that new solutions and approaches are needed. Given this reality, global health practitioners are recognizing the need to look beyond their traditional operating models and seek new solutions to reach the world’s most vulnerable.

At the same time, the private sector, faced with slowing economies in the US and Europe, is increasing investment and experimentation in the more challenging emerging markets as a source for new growth. These firms—whether they are medical device, pharmaceutical, or consumer-packaged goods companies—stand to learn much from global health and development practitioners who have operated at the bottom of the pyramid for years. Similarly, global health practitioners can learn much from these private sector efforts by, for example, better leveraging the rigor and well-defined processes involved in designing, introducing, and scaling products. Given the increasingly aligned incentives, the time is right for more effective and consistent collaboration between these two groups.

A child peers around the corner in the waiting room of the HIV Comprehensive Care Clinic of Meru District Hospital in Kenya’s Eastern province as two pediatricians stand in the background. Photo credit: Mia Collis, Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation

The Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact in USAID’s Global Health Bureau launched last year with these shared incentives in mind; it aims to promote and reinforce innovative, business-minded approaches to bottlenecks in global health. An important piece of this strategy is bringing together thought leaders and frontline practitioners from both the public and private sectors to share proven and tested practices, and then collaboratively develop new global health models.

IDEO’s work developing products and services in India and Africa, for example, has demonstrated an important relevant learning for the global health community and private sector alike: innovation needs to be holistic and strategic. It’s about evaluating and targeting specific gaps in the surrounding ecosystem, with a square focus on empathizing with all stakeholders. While new technologies and products are needed, often times re-evaluating (or evaluating for the first time) the true bottlenecks in the health ecosystem can uncover new opportunities for innovation in training and education, operating/business model design, demand generation, behavior change, and other areas.

An example: In Africa, IDEO worked on a project to develop a low-cost toilet but quickly realized that developing the toilet itself wasn’t enough. To be practical and to succeed, it had to be designed for the unique constraints that existed there, including the lack of centralized plumbing. As such, IDEO designed a system with a separate container to trap the waste. Most importantly, though, the toilets, instead of being sold directly to customers, are instead sold to franchisees that then rent the toilets to customers. The rental fee covers not only the toilet but also a fee to collect and dispose of the waste properly. This way everyone wins. Customers pay a lower amount per month rather than an expensive, one-time, fixed fee. Franchisees earn an attractive return on their investment, and the system ensures that waste is removed and disposed of properly—not on some street corner where it becomes a public nuisance and health hazard. Above all, the incentives are aligned to make the system sustainable.

Another often cited yet supremely relevant example is Jaipur Foot in India. Founded in 1975, Jaipur Foot has fitted more than 40,000 Indians with leg prostheses. To reach such massive numbers, in addition to innovating on a low-cost “product” (in this case, a $45 artificial lower limb), the organization developed an entirely new operating model. It has flipped the traditional healthcare service model on its head, and it now takes diagnoses and treatment to the patient. The organization regularly organizes health camps outside of its centers in more rural locations—where most Indians live—to help patients who have financial and physical difficulty traveling to larger cities. Jaipur Foot sends everything required for treatment to the camps, including doctors, assistants, and equipment. They can even fabricate, fit, and deliver limbs on the spot.

These are just two of a growing number of examples that both global health and private sector practitioners can learn from and collaboratively put into practice. USAID’s new Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact hopes to enable this best practice sharing as one avenue to more efficiently and effectively deliver healthcare to those at the bottom of the pyramid.

Dheeraj Batra is head of business design at IDEO Mumbai. Over the last three years, Dheeraj has worked extensively in the medical device industry in India having spent the majority of that time incubating businesses and piloting new initiatives for some of the largest companies in the sector. He was a key architect and led the on-the-ground implementation for Healthy Heart for All, a nationwide initiative by Medtronic in India.

David Milestone is senior advisor at USAID, Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact. In this role, David leads the Market Access team in the development and implementation of market-based strategies to accelerate the adoption of priority health solutions. Prior to joining USAID, David held various strategic marketing roles at Stryker, including innovation and strategy initiatives in India.

USAID Contest to Recognize Pioneers in Science and Technology for Development

Posted by  on Wednesday, February 6th 2013     

Many of the great development challenges – water, infectious diseases, food insecurity, energy, climate change, connectivity, and biodiversity loss – have at their origins or find their solutions through science, technology and innovation. Many of the biggest leaps forward in development over the last decades were possible because of major breakthroughs in science and technology (S&T). Today, through investments in S&T, USAID is harnessing the same forces that yielded the great breakthroughs of the past to transform more lives than ever before. S&T is now a core component of USAID Forward, the Agency’s ambitious reform agenda launched in 2010.

USAID-related science and technology programs create accessible solutions to global development challenges. Photo credit: Zahur Ramji (AKDN)

In USAID’s Office of Science and Technology, our goal is to use the transformative power of science and technology to deliver innovative, results driven, efficient, cost effective, and accessible solutions to global development challenges. To recognize and celebrate USAID-supported projects and activities that successfully apply S&T to the development challenges of our age, the USAID Office of Science and Technology (OST) is excited to announce the Agency’s first-ever Science and Technology Pioneers Prize contest (PDF).

We know that throughout the world, many projects and activities funded by USAID are demonstrating a commitment to achieving results through the successful application of science and technology. This prize will champion the excellent S&T work already being done in the field by USAID and our partners.

We recognize that some of the best and most innovative ideas come from our development partners – from host country governments to local NGOs, to innovators on the ground. If your organization is working on a USAID-supported project that uses S&T to advance development, we want to hear about it! We are particularly looking for new and technologically sophisticated ways of delivering services and achieving development outcomes – and then celebrating and recognizing them.

Winning projects will receive special recognition from USAID and public visibility through USAID platforms. Both the project or activity and the team of people responsible for the design and implementation of the S&T innovation (including USAID personnel, staff from implementing partners, government counterparts, and private sector organizations, both local and international) will be recognized for the achievement.

Submissions will be judged using the following criteria:

Effective application of Science and Technology: What specific development problem was the intervention designed to address, and how?

Evaluation and learning:  What evidence, reports, or assessments was the project design based on? Was there a systematic effort to understand the extent to which the project/activity was effective?

Alignment with USAID and Mission Strategy: How did science and technology play a direct role in achieving the development objectives?

Replicability: Could this approach (or elements of it) be implemented in other regions or countries?

Leveraging funding:  How has the project leveraged funding from other donors, governments, and/or the private sector?

If you have an eligible project, work with your counterparts at USAID to submit an application by March 22.

For contest details and eligibility, please email: STpioneers@usaid.gov

Better Than Cash: Project Update

Posted by  on Tuesday, February 5th 2013     

Through foreign aid, the United States helps to lift millions out of poverty, creating a path to prosperity through education and training, and supporting American interests here at home. But because half of the world operates without a formal banking system, assistance often reaches farmers, employees, and families as cash-in-hand. Cash is messy. It puts people at risk of theft, enables graft, and takes time (and additional money) to transport. We can do better.

We need to find ways to help the 2.5 billion adults who manage their money primarily as cash to leapfrog into a cashless marketplace.

Afghan men listen as a representative from M-Paisa, or mobile money, describes how mobile bill pay works. Photo credit: FAIDA

To accelerate the replacement of cash with inclusive electronic payments, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) created the Better Than Cash Alliance, a group of countries and private companies all over the world committed to solving the “messy cash” problem. In keeping with this effort to accelerate the replacement of cash with inclusive electronic payments, our White House-supported Presidential Innovation Fellow (PIF) decided to focus on Afghanistan; a country dominated by a cash economy.  In Afghanistan, the cost of building out a traditional banking structure is prohibitive in the largely rural, often insecure country. But almost all Afghans now have cell phones. The near-ubiquity of mobile phone coverage offers a tantalizing opportunity to connect millions of Afghans to the economy and move both public and private sector payments into efficient, transparent “cash” channels.

However, expansion of mobile money was running into two problems. One was getting critical mass adoption. Think about the early days when few had cell phones and there was no one to call. And the second problem was interoperability. Mobile money would catch on like wildfire, if only you could send or receive cash electronically no matter which mobile operator you subscribed to.

Mobile payment services were first introduced to the Afghan market in 2009 by the largest mobile network operator, Roshan, who launched a product that essentially tried to replicate Safaricom’s phenomenally successful M-Pesa mobile money transfer service in Kenya.  Though operationally successful and a proven tool for reducing corruption (as demonstrated by a pilot program to pay police by mobile instead of cash that netted a 30% increase in received salary for the officers), getting more government ministries to pay their employees was proving too slow.

USAID, through an innovation fund of public-private partnerships, addressed the adoption problem; we decided to simultaneously take on the interoperability problem. Today, phone companies in Afghanistan don’t typically function cooperatively—they don’t provide “roaming” services, for example— and aren’t equipped to share user minutes across networks. The same problem will hinder the growth of the broader mobile money sector if each phone company’s mobile money service develops in a silo, and customers are unable to transact with peers and businesses using other networks. We also know that a mobile-money ecosystem can only grow if managers on the ground can effectively track and evaluate cash-flow to employees. In the United States, Federal employees are paid electronically every month, in full, and on time. We want to work with our Afghan government partners to ensure that Afghan public employees receive the same—and this will require tools to better evaluate and manage information.

Today, 100,000 Afghan teachers still receive their salaries in cash, a cumbersome process that often results in delayed and incomplete payments. That’s why we created a text-message survey tool which ministries and program officers can use to ask employees whether they have been paid correctly, and begin building a database of phone numbers as employees transition to mobile paychecks. We’ve also worked on solutions to drive broad adoption of mobile phone-based financial services. Getting paid by mobile phone is great, but if basic life necessities can only be bought with cash—then a cashless marketplace will not flourish. USAID’s on-the-ground mission in Afghanistan enables Afghans to sign up to pay their electric bills via mobile phone, vastly improving convenience for customers and beginning to improve revenue collection, a critical requirement for maintain and expanding access to the electrical grid. So far, more than 100,000 individuals have joined the program.

Many countries around the world could benefit from an enhanced mobile-money marketplace.  In fact, Tanzania and Indonesia (PDF) are already working to build their own electronic payment ecosystems. There is much more work to be done. As we continue to lay a framework and accelerate progress in Afghanistan, we plan to share lessons learned with other countries and work toward a more efficient foreign aid system that is, in many ways, better than cash.

Karl Mehta is a Presidential Innovation Fellow working on Better Than Cash at USAID.

Seth Wainer is a Program Analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Learn more about or apply for the Presidential Innovation Fellows program. 

The Story Behind the Headline: Investments in Implementation Science Tackle HIV Prevention in Swaziland

Posted by  on Wednesday, January 30th 2013     

The incidence of HIV in Swaziland has stabilized, but the country continues to have the world’s highest estimated prevalence rate of HIV-infected adults. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 26 percent of adults aged 15 to 49-years old in Swaziland are HIV-positive. USAID, through PEPFAR, is partnering with ICAP, a global health center at Columbia University, to evaluate an innovative approach to HIV prevention in countries like Swaziland. The study is one of three pilots in the country described in The Lancet article ”HIV prevention: new pilots for beleaguered Swaziland,” published on January 12.

The article describes Swaziland’s efforts to answer a critical HIV prevention question: How can the high efficacy of antiretroviral-based prevention found in clinical trials be translated into effective programs? In other words, how can we turn science into practice? By evaluating different approaches to providing HIV treatment for HIV+ women, USAID’s partnership with ICAP will help answer this question for one of the groups made most vulnerable by the epidemic: pregnant women living with HIV.

The story behind the headline? USAID’s partnership with ICAP is part of an over $20 million investment in implementation science made by the Agency and as part of outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s vision for an AIDS-free generation. Through the Annual Program Statement (APS) “Implementation Science Research to Support Programs under PEPFAR,” USAID supports eight studies in eight of the African countries hardest hit by HIV/AIDS. In addition to addressing the critical HIV prevention question posed in The Lancet article, the scope of the APS provides a unique opportunity to fund cutting-edge research in a wide range of HIV-specific program areas. These studies aim to improve programs across the prevention, care, and treatment continuum. Data gathered will support efforts to prevent new infections and save lives.

As stated in the recent PEPFAR Blueprint (PDF), “Science must continue to guide our efforts” and “it is science that will underpin all our efforts to achieve the goal [of an AIDS-free generation] and save even more lives.” USAID’s commitment and investments in implementation science are a driving force in these efforts.

Learn more about USAID’s investments in implementation science in the Issue Brief “Implementation Science Research to Support Programs under PEPFAR.”

Contribute to the search for innovations to address key implementation science questions. The second round of the APS solicitation is public and the deadline for concept paper submissions is January 30, 2013. USAID anticipates awarding up to an additional $11 million of funding through the second round, with the maximum for a single application set at $1.8 million over three years.

Call for Video Submissions: Social Media + Development

Posted by  on Friday, January 25th 2013     

We are pleased to participate in Social Media Week 2013, scheduled February 17-22 in Washington to showcase our use of digital space for development. USAID will host several events during the week to contribute to the conversation and highlight how we rely on technology for a multitude of reasons, including program management and reporting, and general educational purposes for a range of projects, funded by USAID.

Making All Voices Count (MAVC) supports innovative solutions and harness new technologies to help grow the global movement for open government, transparency and accountability. Photo credit: USAID

As our development partners, we’d like to invite you to showcase your work in using social media for development through video at our #Popcorn + International Development event on February 22. This is a special opportunity for you to amplify a program you are proud of, or one which you feel deserves a louder voice in the public.

Submission Regulations:
1. Only one submission per organization is allowed.
2. Videos must be two minutes in length or less.
3. You must email the YouTube link to socialmedia@usaid.gov  by February 13 at 23:59 EST, including your organization’s name and point of contact.
4. Your video must highlight a project/s, that uses social media to further our collective development goals.
5. All videos must be 508 compliant and include captions (in English) for our participants with disabilities.
6. Videos, of course, should be child-friendly.

The top videos will be previewed at “#Popcorn + International Development”, followed by a short Q&A. We hope you will join us!

Non-selected videos may be compiled to a video stream and made available to the public through USAID’s YouTube channel, to encourage ongoing dialogue about social media and its role in international development.

Please note that USAID reserves the right to use and reuse, in whole or in part, all video submissions for purposes outside of this event. Your submission serves as a “silent” agreement between your organization and USAID of the aforementioned.

Learn More:
To learn more about Social Media Week, please visit their website.

For questions regarding video submissions, please email socialmedia@usaid.gov or Tweet to us using #smwUSAID.

RSVP:
Reserve your space at “#Popcorn + International Development”!

 

Video of the Week: Crowdsourcing at USAID: An Example for Aid Transparency & Open Data

Posted by  on Monday, January 14th 2013     

Shadrock Roberts from USAID’s GeoCenter describes how crowdsourced data was leveraged for the Development Credit Authority at the 4th International Conference of Crisis Mapping (ICCM), offering important lessons learned for government institutions who want to work with crowdsourced information.

FrontLines Year in Review: Apps for Afghanistan

Posted by  on Friday, January 4th 2013     

This is part of our FrontLines Year in Review series. This originally appeared in FrontLines September/October 2012 issue.

With a recent explosion in mobile phones, USAID engages Afghanistan’s best and brightest to grow mobile money.

Just a decade ago, Afghans had to travel to Pakistan to make international calls. The landline phone infrastructure had completely fallen into disarray during the civil war, and there were no mobile phone operators. The first American diplomats and U.N. workers to return to Kabul after the fall of the Taliban carried backpacks full of costly satellite phones for the new Afghan emergency government.

But smart, early regulatory decisions by Afghan lawmakers, based on technical assistance from USAID and other donors, engendered the rapid growth of a profitable and competitive sector, pushing down airtime prices well within reach of normal Afghans. Today, Afghanistan is awash in mobile phones, with more than 18 million active subscriptions in a country of 28 million.

This explosion of mobile users has created a network that bridges the country’s formidable urban-rural divide while transcending gaps in physical infrastructure, low literacy rates and pervasive insecurity.

An Afghan youth uses his mobile phone to take pictures in Musa Qala. Photo credit: Dmitry Kostyukov, AFP

The near-ubiquity of mobile phone coverage has allowed Afghanistan to join the vanguard of countries experimenting with innovative new uses for the mobile channel, using the networks to extend services and information cheaply to populations lacking access through other means. Among the most promising is mobile money—the ability to safely store and transfer “e-money” via SMS, avoiding the expense and danger associated with moving cash, while extending the reach of basic financial services from the 5 percent of the population with accounts in brick-and-mortar banks to the 65 percent of Afghans who use mobile phones.

Already, m-money trials facilitated by the U.S. Government, such as paying government salaries by mobile instead of cash, are demonstrating startling benefits: In Wardak province, police deployed in unbanked communities report “raises” of 30 percent when paid via mobile; cash payments of salaries in Afghanistan are exceedingly vulnerable to corruption. Equally promising applications to extend and repay micro loans and pay household electricity bills are beginning to roll out, delivering dramatic increases in efficiency.

As the mobile network operators increasingly focus on scaling their mobile money products and agent networks, USAID is working in partnership with the private sector to aggregate demand and provide consumer education to Afghans, most of whom are unfamiliar with or mistrustful of the formal banking system. In one novel approach, the Agency is working with the Association of Mobile Money Operators of Afghanistan to harness the creativity and energy of Afghanistan’s best and brightest to develop mobile money applications to address pressing problems faced daily by Afghans.

An Afghan Avalanche of Ideas

The overwhelming response to an app design competition this year among Afghan university students illustrated just how compelling up-and-coming young Afghans find mobile money—more than 5,000 students across the country submitted ideas, many of which focused on how mobile money on how mobile money could improve the Afghan Government’s ability to provide basic services transparently and efficiently.

Others put forward ways in which mobile money could help empower individuals by giving them tools to manage their own finances, a particular boon for women, who often rely on male relatives to conduct financial transactions on their behalf.

Such competitions can trigger a network effect, drawing students into the design process and drawing in new mobile money users—and expanding the mobile technology sector.

Afghan officials say the enthusiasm generated by the contest and subsequent avalanche of ideas bodes well for future uptake of mobile money in Afghanistan given the country’s demographics. With two-thirds of Afghans age 25 years or younger, Afghanistan is truly a land of potential early adopters…[continued]

Read the rest of the article in FrontLines.

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Communication is Aid: Old and New Technologies Make Aid More Effective

Posted by  on Friday, January 4th 2013     

Communication can and should be seen as aid. People rely on communication to find out what’s happening, where to go for assistance and who to call for help. Research and projects, such as infoasaid, give evidence that communication is crucial to survival and recovery. In fact, the Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities (CDAC) Network positions two-way communication with affected people at the heart of resilience-building, preparedness and response.

If communication is aid, what does that mean in practice? And how do we get better at doing it? These are some of the questions that participants of the ‘Communication is Aid: Humanitarian, Media and Technology Collaboration’ event*, held in Nairobi on December 6, tried to answer.

In her opening remarks, Gabriella Waaijman, Officer in Charge of UNOCHA Eastern Africa, explained, “Gone are the days when humanitarian agencies can provide assistance without asking what the needs are in the communities where they are working.” There is no doubt in my mind that we need to listen to communities because they are the only ones who know what’s happening on the ground and can suggest what would improve their day-to-day lives. We need to empower them with the tools to communicate their needs to us, and we need to effectively respond. Modern development requires two-way communication and listening.

Are we there yet? That’s for debate, but we are certainly getting closer. Adeso is implementing a USAID project in northern Kenya, working with pastoral and transitional communities to reduce hunger and poverty, increase social stability, and build strong foundations for economic growth and environmental resilience, and we are looking at ways to use communication to enhance these objectives. USAID also helped jumpstart SokoShambani, a free SMS platform that allows small-scale potato farmers in Kenya to connect directly with buyers. “It takes the farmer to the market, and the market to the farm,” as Stephen Kimiri of ZEVAN explains.

Shujaaz.FM main character DJ Boyie pirates airtime to talk about what's important to Kenyan youth. Photo credit: Riccardo Gangale/USAID.

Other examples include the Praekelt Foundation’s development of the Young Africa Live mobile platform that provides young people in Africa with information about HIV/AIDS and other sexual health issues. Since 2009, the platform has been used by more than a million people in South Africa, Tanzania and Kenya. The Danish Refugee Council has for its part adapted the Ushahidi platform – a free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping that was first used following Kenya’s disputed 2007 elections to collect eyewitness reports of violence and place them on a Google Maps – to monitor humanitarian aid in Somalia. Through this system, DRC’s beneficiaries can use their mobile phone to provide feedback on the aid they received from DRC, and make complaints.

So, how do we use the right technologies in the right context? As Rob Burnet from Well Told Story underlined, “Push won’t work – it must be pull.” We need to understand our audience and really listen to what they want. For example, USAID invested in Well Told Story’s innovative Shujaaz.FM multi-media project aimed to engage Kenya’s youth in promoting peace for the March 2013 elections. The project includes fictional Kenyan youth who grapple with real social and political challenges in a monthly comic book and through daily radio spots. The project gained popularity and 20,000 Kenyan youth now interact with the characters on Facebook.

Humanitarian and development players can learn a lot from private sector entities who are developing new technological solutions to address some the challenges faced when delivering aid. At the same time, we must keep in mind that while technology is part of the solution, it is not the solution in and of itself. It needs to be used in the right context, by the right people and for the right audience. Improving how we communicate will therefore require resources, training and commitment. My hope is that we continue to seek modern communication methods to provide more opportunities for learning, exchange and future collaborations for all audiences around the globe.

*Adeso and UNOCHA Eastern Africa jointly organized this one-day event, in partnership with the CDAC Network and Internews, and with financial support from BBC Media Action and Microsoft. Presentations and video from the event will be available on the Adeso website in the coming weeks, and in the meantime, have a look at this Storify.

At Datajam, Innovators and Entrepreneurs Unleash Open Data for Global Development

Posted by  on Thursday, January 3rd 2013     

Rajiv Shah (left) serves as administrator of USAID. Todd Park is U.S. Chief Technology Officer. Photo Credit: USAID, White House.

A remarkable new tool is becoming increasingly available to help end extreme poverty and ensure dignity and opportunity for people around the world—a tool that few people think about when they consider how to bolster international development efforts. That tool is data, and in particular “open data“—data freely available in formats that are easy to use in new and innovative ways, while rigorously protecting privacy.

The possibilities are truly endless—it could be regional epidemiological statistics being made available to community health workers; or real-time weather information being made available to small-holder farmers; or loan information being made accessible to first-time borrowers. In these and countless other arenas, open data has the potential to not only improve transparency and coordination, but also dramatically accelerate progress in development.

In order to explore new ways of leveragingopen data for development and to help strengthen our commitment to open data with others inside and outside of government, we joined with colleagues from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on December 10 for a DataJam at the White House.

Administrator Shah and CTO Park discuss open data's impact in development. Photo Credit: USAID.

This unprecedented event brought world-class innovators and entrepreneurs together with U.S. government leaders and decision-makers to discuss the impact that open development data has already had on strengthening entrepreneurship in the United States and in developing countries—and the additional impact that can be had going forward. We also brainstormed about new partnerships we could form to facilitate the opening of new pockets of data that many of us deal with in our work every day and that have potential added value across the development domain. For USAID, this effort reflects our increasing focus on throwing open the doors of development to problem-solvers everywhere.

The Datajam showcased some of the groundbreaking work that innovators and entrepreneurs have accomplished with open data in the development sphere—from tracking election transparency in Kenya with the non-profit Ushahidi; to the State Department’s Tech@State and TechCamp conference and workshop platforms that bring in-country technologists and entrepreneurs together to solve local—and global—problems; to the exciting announcement that FEWSnet, USAID’s Famine Early Warning System Network, is launching a competition to analyze USAID data to better inform and improve our own decision-making. As Presidential Innovation Fellow Dmitry Kachaev, explained, “Technology is not the hard part.  The hard part is getting the information.”

That’s where we all come in, and that’s why we are issuing a call to action for open data. There are data sets and information resources across the government that could serve a greater good and be effective tools for change if they were made more accessible and usable, while ensuring that privacy and confidentiality are always rigorously protected. We want to collect these data—these potential change agents—and present them in their most creative and effective forms. We want to engage students and volunteers to help us clean and organize the data to make this information accessible and useful, just as USAID’s Development Credit Authority did with its crowdsourcing project to clean up and map loan data records. We want these same data to be available to entrepreneurs and innovators who are building new organizations and creating local and lasting change.

Although we often talk about our business-like focus on data and the importance of delivering concrete results, the reality is that the open data movement has been inspired not only by analytical logic but also in large part by a shared passion to help change the world. When you apply your vision and expertise to this task—when you add to the growing stores of data for use in new and creative ways—you are helping an infant take its first easy breath and live to celebrate her fifth birthday. You are helping farmers grow more nutritious foods, fostering healthy families and prosperous communities. You are helping end the enduring outrage of human trafficking. This is the power of open data.

We’re excited and think you should be too.

Watch a video of the Datajam event.

Visit our website for more information about open data and learn more about the Presidential Innovation Fellows.

Rajiv Shah is the Administrator of USAID.

Todd Park is Assistant to the President and U.S. Chief Technology Officer.

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