Knowing when not to say “no”

Posted by jfrant

View of Manhattan from Brooklyn…it’s not all work.

Last semester I took only four classes and had few extracurricular activities, but that was more than enough. Endless group project meetings and Stats/Econ problem sets kept me beyond busy and struggling to keep my head above water. You would think that when planning my activities for this semester I would have taken into account my trials and tribulations from last semester and paired back my responsibilities. I did the opposite.

I kept my course load to 13 credit-hours, but instead of one massive semester-long project (Sustainable New York City ) I now have two (Business Plan Social Enterprise in Senegal; Implementation Plan for Scaling Up Community Health Workers in Mozambique). I am now the president of the New Media Task Force, a student organization whose mission is to educate SIPA students about the importance new media for international development. I took a part-time work-study job with the Earth Institute managing the social media for the Millennium Villages Project. Oh, and I joined a group of students selected (from 8-15 other student groups*) to represent Columbia at the National Invitational Public Policy Challenge. The competition is the weekend before spring break in Philadelphia and a 10-15 page proposal (I should probably be writing that instead of writing this blog post…positive procrastination?) is due on Monday.

Despite the workload, I’m having a blast. Still, I’m looking forward to an uneventful spring break (after the Public Policy Challenge, of course) and the long bike ride I plan to take on March 18…eight days and counting.

*Don’t ask.

mDATA: New Media Taskforce app competition submission

Posted by jfrant

I, along with two of my colleagues at SIPA (Ashish and Swami), submitted the following application to the New Media Taskforce’s first mobile app competition. Today, we had the chance to present our idea in front of an expert panel. There was some stiff competition and, unfortunately, we did not make the top three, but I’m encouraged by the positive feedback that we got…If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Feel free to take a look at our submission and let me know what you think in the comments section below. Also, check out the blog post I wrote (and didn’t immediately publish) that was the genesis of this idea.

[scribd id=111970094 key=key-222knpprk2d2cra6ygrx mode=scroll]

Canvassing for development

Posted by jfrant

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 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.