Month: September 2012

Speeding through Yonkers with Columbia Cycling

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The Columbia Cycling Team has been holding no-drop group rides every weekend to encourage new-commers to join the team. Today, I took advantage of that opportunity and went out on my first long ride in NYC: across the Washington Bridge and all the way up to Nyack, an over 50 mile roundtrip. Check out my route. It was nice to learn a new ride…one can only go around Central Park so many times.

My legs felt good most of the way, but things got tougher on the way back when the the group split up and I joined the faster pack. We screamed down Hillside Drive in a drafting echelon. I pedaled furiously at the back of the draft-line, letting others take charge of pulling at the front. Then, toward the end of the ride, I decided to take my turn at the front…bad idea. After only 15 seconds of effort, I was spent and the team dropped me. Luckily they slowed down and I was able to catch up.

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Canvassing for development

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The New Media Taskforce here at SIPA is holding an “Innovating Mobile Tech for Development Competition,” where students are given the chance to pitch their idea for innovative mobile applications that seek to address specific political, economic, or social needs in international development to a panel of industry judges. Here is the idea that I may submit:

Village Well, Jombo village, Malawi

Village Well, Jombo village, Malawi by Flickr user Bread for the World

One of the major failures of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is a lack of timeliness and completeness of data measuring progress towards achieving the goals. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Lancet:

One of the biggest drawbacks of the MDGs is that the data are often years out of date. Accurate published information from the past 12 months is still not available for most low-income countries. This timelag was inevitable when data were obtained by hand in household surveys, but in the age of the mobile phone, wireless broadband, and remote sensing, data collection should be vastly quicker.

Dr. Sachs is spot-on in suggesting that mobile technology will make data collection more rapid, but I would also contend that mobile-technology-enabled crowdsourcing will increasingly make traditional statistical surveys irrelevant. This is already happening in the arena of American politics. President Obama’s canvassing app enables citizens to volunteer their time to help register voters, build a massive database of registered voters, and ultimately organize voters out to the polls on election day. The app uses information about your location to suggest nearby households that you should visit and questions you should ask when you get there. I believe same model can be applied to the realm of international development.

Let’s say you have a database of 1,000 water projects spread across Malawi. You know the location of the water projects but do not have the resources to send an employee to monitor them on a regular basis. Water For People has built a platform called FLOW that enables field workers monitor water projects using a mobile app. While replacing pen and paper with a smartphone and Internet connection is a significant step forward, I believe that FLOW still doesn’t take the concept far enough because its capacity limited by its reliance on paid professionals to conduct the surveys.

The next-best thing to a trained monitoring professional would be a citizen armed with a smartphone. Bringing up the app, the citizen would be given a map of water projects in their immediate vicinity. They would then “check-in” at the water project and complete a simple survey about the state of the project. If the idea is expanded even further, this app could potentially supplement or replace the statistical surveys currently used to track progress toward achieving the MDG. And because the data would have no time lag it could be used to identify regions that require intervention in real-time, such as a village with an abnormally high maternal mortality rate.

Effectively, crowdsourced development data could turn the MDGs from an out-of-date snapshot of past development status into a tool for development practitioners and governments to detect issues with development while they are still relevant and actionable.

Skipping Consumer Theory and going straight to Complexity Theory (Am I getting ahead of myself?)

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After listening to this lecture by Owen Barder of the Center for Global Development, I think I’ve developed a better understanding of the rational behind many of the initiatives sponsored by Jeffrey Sachs (most notably the Millennium Villages Project).

According to Complexity Theory, Barder argues, traditional economic models fail to anticipate why some countries have been able to benefit from convergent economic growth, while others are stuck in a poverty trap. In other words, interventions in developing countries that focus on the one “missing ingredient which will enable poor countries to grow,” as Barder puts it, are doomed to failure. No one intervention (whether in access capital, modern technology, improved economic efficiency, better institutions or reformed politics) is able to influence the “complex adaptive systems” that make up a society.

The upshot of Complexity Theory for international development (as I understood it) is that development practitioners should not focus on individual interventions or impose their preconceived ideas on how societies develop. Instead, they should look for opportunities to sponsor innovation and encourage adaptation that will contribute to positive feedback loops.

Development can therefore be redefined as “the emergence of self-organizing complexity.”

Wow, that was a mouthful and I’m not sure I did it justice…I only just started studying Consumer Theory in my grad-level economics class. Anyway, you should watch the lecture, it will blow your mind: http://www.cgdev.org/doc/CGDPresentations/complexity/player.html.