In an ongoing collaboration with the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), an organization dedicated to strengthening democracy around the globe through private enterprise and market-oriented reform, Panoply Digital recently conducted a two day technology training workshop in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. This is the second training we have done in this regard, with the first being a recent event in Lagos, Nigeria which my colleague Lauren wrote about here.
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Situating Mobile in “The Jungle”: Thoughts from My 24 Hours in Calais (Part 1)
The tragedy of what is occurring in Calais can be read in various media outlets online, so I will not take time here to rehash the details. What I will do in these two blog posts on my 24 hours there is highlight some of the opportunities for mobile that I saw while volunteering. Firstly, I will focus on my experience working in the donation processing warehouse in support of the refugees. In my subsequent post in April 2016, I will share the power and potential of mobile for refugees based on my visit to “The Jungle.”
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Privacy and ICT4D: Mutually Exclusive for the Greater Good?
I was reading What's needed to put more people on the map? by Catherine Cheney from Devex and, having been a fan of mapping for development for years, found myself agreeing with much of it. Catherine documents initiatives around the world in the wake of disasters or emergencies, from Haiti, Tanzania, and beyond, across projects like Field Papers (for printing maps from OpenStreetMap), OpenMapKit, and beyond. Essentially, she is making the larger case for mapping as means of identifying the underrepresented or the non-existent, data-wise.
Read More4 ways to make IVR mobile learning services more user-friendly
February has been a busy travel month for the Panoply Digital team. My colleague Lauren Dawes was in Nigeria working with CIPE to roll out a training programme on using technology for advocacy, and you can read more about her trip here. As for me, I was in Bangladesh with the Praekelt Foundation and Girl Effect Mobile in early February building on the work we did together last year around reaching adolescent girls through mobile platforms. It’s always great to be back – I’ve worked for many years in Bangladesh building mobile education services for low-tech platforms, including IVR (voice) and SMS platforms, as well as in other countries such as Tanzania and Rwanda.
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ANWBN CIPE Panoply Digital
Promoting advocacy with technology - a Center for International Private Enterprise initiative
In a previous blog, Michael wrote about the work we have been doing with the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) for almost a year now - developing a training programme to teach partners of CIPE’s network how to better communicate and carry out their advocacy efforts via the use of technology.
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"There's an app for that!"... Or When UNESCO Jumped the Shark with Freedom of Expression Advocacy
As a student and practitioner of the capability approach, one of the first things that I read towards my PhD on the topic of gender and mobile learning was an article by Ingrid Robeyns titled Three Models of Education: Rights, Capabilities and Human Capital.
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Open Learning Campus: Theory + Pragmatism
Revisiting the world of education ahead of some workshops we are doing in Nigeria and Cambodia where we discuss using open learning as a professional development strategy, (along with some modules on secure communication, online research, and developing an online presence), I wanted to highlight an organization that has done some good work in this area.
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5 ways to include women in a mobile-enabled energy solution
One of the best things about working on M&E for mobile and ICT programmes is the way you get to work across many different sectors – while I am, like the rest of the wonderful Panoply Digital team, an mEducation specialist by training, I’ve been lucky enough to work across mHealth, mEducation, mAgri and mobile money, to name a few, getting to learn about these different areas and understand the mobile for development sector from a more holistic viewpoint.
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The World Bank's Digital Dividends
Almost 8 years ago I started working at the GSMA’s ‘Development Fund’, better known nowadays as Mobile for Development. We were a modest team at the time with only five of us based in the GSMA’s Kingsway office (affectionately known as Mumbai due to its lack of air-conditioning) although quickly grew to many more.
Read MoremHealth: Global Projects, Software & Critical Perspectives - An ICT4D Meetup
This Meetup is co-hosted by Ronda Zelezny-Green and Lauren Dawes of Panoply Digital, along with Chisenga Muyoya and Chris Foote. Occasionally, we will include additional event information on this site to make the e-invites more concise. We hope you will come out to the ICT4D Meetup to be hosted at the GSMA HQ in London on Tuesday 26 January from 6:30pm.
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Data Collection, Communication, and Campaigning Tools: Logic and Antecedents
This post is inspired an upcoming workshop we are running in Washington, D.C., along with additional installments in Phnom Penh, Lagos, and Caracas in the coming months. All of these workshops revolve around the use of free or inexpensive tools and technologies that can be used to conduct research, communicate that research efficiently, and develop advocacy campaigns as a result of that research.
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Happy New Year and a few things I'm watching in 2016!
Happy New Year one and all! I thought I would kick off the year with my ‘3 Things I’ll be watching in 2016’. Note – these are my things to watch! I’m not necessarily claiming them as new trends to watch (some more than a lot of coverage over the past years) but more what has piqued my interest recently and where I am seeing momentum gathering.
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Open Learning as Professional Development: Iterating on Organizational Culture
This post emerges from conversations we have been having with clients regarding partner networks, how best to serve them, how best to make use of their technological practices, freely available tools, etc. Several of our clients serve large networks of partner organizations surrounding a particular activity: literacy, public private partnerships, education, and so forth.
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How to improve M&E for mobile services: 5 questions
Here at Panoply Digital, we work with a number of different clients on the monitoring and evaluation of their mobile services: start-ups / clients from the private sector, clients from the development sector such as NGOs, or with mobile operators.
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From Unicorn to Unicorpse: How Africa Can Avoid Silicon Valley's Startup Pitfalls
If it is one thing that the great tech startup gold rush and eventual bust at the turn of the 21st century should have taught us, it is that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Another lesson it should have imparted is that having a cool idea doesn't automatically mean businesses or people will buy into that idea in the long run - or that it will make you money once the novelty fades away.
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Reversing the flow from the developing to the developed world: mobile learning lessons
The ICT4D field is proving mature enough in some instances to reverse the flow of informal technology transfer from developed to developing, so much so that it is forcing, at least in my mind, a reconsideration of the term developed and developing. The suggestion that any nation, at any point, has completed a process of development is absurd and antithetical to how Panoply Digital operates.
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Do we need radical change? Mobile and girls' education in Africa
Last week, I was honored to represent Panoply Digital as a panelist at a high-profile event hosted by the US Ambassador to UNESCO in Paris, looking at girls’ education in Africa. The event was part of the Idea Lab series, bringing stakeholders together to promote dialogue and creative thinking around UNESCO-related issues
Read MoreLet's talk about the 'other' sustainability
Sustainability is a term most of deal with or spout off on a daily basis and one which means different thing to different peoples. I approach it from two perspectives. Firstly, having worked within the space where the commercial interests of mobile network operators meet those of the donor community and then meet those of underserved populations, conversations around sustainability for me tended to focus more on how a project could continue beyond the finite project funding.
Read MoreBillion Dollar Baby: Bill Gates & Carlos Slim to use mHealth, open data to end neonatal deaths in LATAM
Although announced with somewhat muted fanfare, Bill Gates and Carlos Slim's second phase push for their Salud Mesoamerica initiative is kind of a big deal. First of all, the initiative, which was launched in 2010, has been pegged as a success story in terms of its goal to "to reduce health equity gaps in Mesoamerica faced by those living in extreme poverty."
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UReport and Citizen Engagement: Simplicity is effective
As the team from Panoply Digital is in the midst of a good project working specifically on citizen engagement, m-government tools and building capacity, it seems appropriate to focus our attention for this blog post specifically on a good project from that same field
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