millennium development goals

With 1,000 Days Left to Reach MDGs, A Look Back and Forward

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Blog originally posted on the Millennium Villages website.

The 1,000-day milestone to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was on the minds of presenters and audience alike at the Earth Institute’s Sustainable Development Seminar. The seminar gathered professors Jeffrey Sachs, Prabhjot Singh, and Vijay Modi to take a critical look at how far the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) has come in the eight years since its founding and analyze what still needs to be accomplished.

Sachs kicked off the seminar with an overview of the MVP, which he described as showing a pathway to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in very poor settings in sub-Saharan Africa.

Given the time-bound nature of the goals, Sachs noted, “part of our self-assignment in this project is to run, to hurry, to try to meet a timetable, to try and promote action.” In a project like the MVP, where the goal is to break the cycle of extreme poverty, Sachs argued, “it’s better to try and miss than to slow down and not try.”

The MVP built off the epistemic community knowledge of development best practices, and initially started with the implementation of quick-wins – which include long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets and improved agricultural inputs to boost crop yield. The quick wins, however, while important are only part of the equation. As the project moved forward, ideas about how to meet the MDGs evolved along with the Millennium Villages themselves.

Sachs described the next phase of the MVP as falling into four categories: moving from demonstration to design, expanding beyond interventions to systems-based approaches, harnessing the unprecedented expansion of information and communications technology, and integrating public investments with business.

This next phase can create an environment of innovation in the MVP that has fostered the creation of new approaches to development. The health sector, in particular, has experienced a sea change.

Singh explained that moving to a design and systems-based approach forced the MVP to rethink the delivery of healthcare in poor, rural settings. Improved primary health facilities, the project realized, only get you about half the way to achieving better health outcomes due to constraints on access.

Community health workers (CHWs) extend the reach of primary healthcare systems expanding access for the rural poor. The growth of mobile telecommunication has allowed the MVP to develop platforms to enable managers to monitor the CHWs they oversee in real-time. Actionable data not only empowers managers and health workers, it provides critical information on how to improve the health system and make it more adaptive.

CHW programs have been implemented across the Millennium Villages, but the CHWs must be scaled across Africa in order to have a measurable impact on global development. The One Million Community Health Worker campaign aims to do just that.

With the 1,000-day MDG countdown underway, many countries are still far from achieving the MDGs, but new approaches to development born from the MVP have put ending extreme poverty within reach.

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.