There are many nonprofit and for-profit organizations that contract with USAID on development projects. The Academy for Educational Development (aed.org) has worked on many ICT project over the years, and I have consulted with them off and on since 1998 in Paraguay, Guatemala, Uganda, and served on an advisory group which held its last meeting yesterday in Washington.
The purpose was to reflect on the past five years of projects known collectively as the dot com alliance (www.dot-com-alliance.org). It included presentations on policy reform, educational projects, telecenters, with a strong emphasis on public private partnerships.
Those present included all sorts of people from the development industry: academics, consultants, project managers, and policy analysts. In policy sector, Sarah Tisch of InterNews talked about the importance of working with regulators, ministries, private sector, media and 'civil society' She had a good list of why policy is so important and how it relates to the daily lives of citizens and consumers.
The education (dot-edu) organizations, led by EDC, talked about the 25 countries where they worked. One of the most successful has been Macedonia where all the schools now have connectivity (460 schools) and with 5000 computers donated by the Chinese who rewarded the Macedonian government for not recognizing Taiwan, more than 2500 teachers have received training. I was pleased that they are also using IRI --interactive radio instruction--in places like Sudan and Somalia, and cell phones in Zambia to support a distance learning program. Most places have critical problems of electricity, and in Uganda a battery run thin client lab was set up because the main grid is so unreliable. They frequently referred to the ineffectiveness of 'equipment dumps' where vast number of machines are deployed without support or training.
the dot-org projects were in 23 countries. Mike Tetelman talked about one failure, a smart card project for tourists entering Kenya national parks. the smart card code programmer left the country , and with the code left unmaintained, a cracker began making fake smart cards and sold them to tourist agencies in the country at a steep discount. He talked about the Mali CLIC projects (essentially telecenters) where the U.S. embassy chose the sites, many of which probably don't have the resources to keep the centers going, but others have proved to be sustainable. In Mongolia they are using voip wi-fi phones to provide phone service in underserved areas. UPS is working with AID in building a training center on the Polish/Ukraine border in order to facilitate cross border trade in that area.
Of course the eternal problem is replication of successful pilots, and most agreed that this was a problem that was 'profound and still unsolved.'
I said I had not heard much discussion of how to work with other bilateral or intl. agencies or foundations, and some said it was a time constraint while others replied that there were some collaborative projects in education.
Eliot Maxwell, an advisory group member, said that the issues of openness (in more than software) was a useful way to look at problems and solutions. He has written a paper on this topic.
Bernie Mazer who heads the USAID office of infrastructure and engineering--the internal IT shop which now handles the ICT programs as well--spoke about the new direction for USAID. Sec. of State Rice has announced big changes in her department, and besides reassigning a lot of diplomats to large cities in Asia, there will now be a closer alignment of goals and program with USAID and Department of Defense. This article details some of the problems--which are easy to imagine if you have been trying to run "soft" projects to use a military term.
The goal now is not 'sustainable development' but 'transformational development' Mazer was very critical of what he observed at wsis in Tunis, but he was not specific.
In a dot-org breakout session Nancy Hafkin talked about the problem of dealing with 'externalities' in a project: a coup, drought, electricity, civil unrest, and others said some problems you could plan for but not something like a tsunami.
There was a great deal of discussion about how hard it is to share information and what I called lessons not-learned. Mike Nelson of IBM said you needed an array of artifacts: from white papers, videos, sound bites on down to a bumper sticker with a couple of key words (but not too many syllables!) In spite of the Internet it does amaze me how much people in this industry don't seem to have the bandwidth to absorb all the info/knowledge/hype being disseminated from all these projects.
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