Whilst we don’t really know the full extent of the outcome of Brexit yet, a lot has come to the surface about its impact on foreign aid. Not least of the all the devaluation of the pound reducing the value of aid by roughly $1.9 billion, with the combined cost of loss to developing countries through aid, trade and remittances estimated to be $3.8 billion.
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Why 2016 Could Be a Turning Point for Youth Employment in Kenya - And the Role of ICTs
With all of the very disappointing news that has happened in the past month globally, I thought I'd write about a topic that is something to cheer: 2016 is shaping up to be a turning point for youth employment in Kenya.
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ICT4D and Micro and Small Enterprises
In my final months before moving on from the GSMA to start-up Panoply Digital, I had been working closely with Ronda Zelezny-Green and Ernst & Young scoping out new areas of programmatic focus for M4D under the umbrella ‘Economic Inclusion’. The mandate was to identify innovative ways that technology could be used to enable inclusive and productive participation in the digital economy for micro and small enterprises (MSMEs).
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Teaching Coding to Kids: Caveats and Initiatives from Africa and Asia
Teaching coding to children is, if press reports are to be believed, an educational imperative, some sort of literacy that children can’t live without in the 21st century. We see initiatives throughout the world in the UK (with the express goal of creating a ‘code-literate’ society), the EU, and elsewhere, all presenting the imperative of CODE.org that “leaders and trend-setters all agree on one thing.” Coding=core literacy.
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Digital Bangladesh? Are we really connecting the unconnected?
Work-wise, our team at Panoply Digital is working on two mobile services aimed at women in Bangladesh: one with South Africa-based Praekelt Foundation, the Girl Effect and BRAC, and the other with BBC Media Action Bangladesh. So we’ve been looking again at the more recent evidence around mobile and mobile Internet in Bangladesh. Who are the haves and the have-nots?
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June 2016 London ICT4D Meetup: Smart Cities Workshop - (Future) Solutions for the UK & Beyond
Resilience. Urban Expansion. Internet of Things. Climate Change. Green Energy. Big Data. Sustainability. Inclusion.
These are all buzzwords associated with the Smart Cities concept, but what do they all mean and what is the relevance to ICT4D? Please join us at the London ICT4D Meetup on Tuesday 28 June 2016 at 6:30pm at the GSMA HQ to find out more. We're even hosting an IoT Design Workshop you will not want to miss!
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Conducting a government mobile tech policy workshop in Rwanda
Career Post: Transitioning to Tech - How It Worked for Me
When I tell most people that my first profession was in the field of education, I am often greeted with disbelief. Questions such as “How did you go from teaching to technology?” often follow the initial shock, and increasingly I am beginning to understand why this happens. Before I discuss these reasons, I will first give a brief overview of my professional background.
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Adolescent Girls’ Access to Education in Conflict-Affected Settings: Report and Takeaways
In this post, I wanted to pick up on some of the excellent review offered by Melanne Verveer and draw some further attention to the recent report titled “Closing the Gap: Adolescent Girls’ Access to Education in Conflict-Affected Settings” from the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. The report itself is well worth a read as it provides a necessary context for truly understanding the scale of the problem and why current efforts are falling short.
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3 great reasons to attend the ICT4D London Meetup on 31st May
Panoply Digital’s Lauren Dawes and Ronda Zelezny-Green are co-organisers of the London ICT4D group, which organizes regular events and ICT4D meetups for London’s ICT4D and digital development community. This month's event, held at the GSMA office on Tuesday 31st May, is a pretty special one - and we have three great reasons for you to attend.
Something is different....
If this is not your first visit here, you might notice something different. And for those who are coming here for the first time, let me save you the suspense, Panoply Digital have had a website makeover. With much thanks to our colleague Michael Gallagher who has worked tirelessly on the transition, we have refreshed our look and feel and also built up our ever-growing portfolio of work. The past 12 months have been incredibly busy for us here at Panoply Digital
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Woman in Mobile Spotlight: Amone Gbedemah
In my last Woman in Mobile Spotlight, I featured an edtech teacherpreneur who has devoted the past few years to making mobile learning products with research-based impacts in Ireland and beyond. In this edition, I will share highlights from Amone Gbedemah, a qualified engineer and senior executive in a London-based mobile network operator.
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No more pink phones: getting more women in tech
International Girls in ICT Day, organized by the ITU, is an annual event held on the fourth Thursday of every April. This global event aims to raise awareness and highlight the need to empower and encourage girls and young women to consider studies and careers in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). There is a massive gender divide around the numbers of women in tech: women only hold around 17% of jobs in tech companies globally, with numbers of women particularly low at the tech giants like Apple and Microsoft, but also much more exacerbated in emerging markets in parts of Africa and Asia.
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Rhetoric, Neoliberalism, and Edtech in Liberia, Ethiopia, and South Africa
The allure of educational technology in serving those who have remain underserved for so long is tough to resist. It drives us in the educational community towards totalizing terms: the seamless, ubiquitous, and evidence-based results of technological interventions. The end-to-end solution, the driving of test scores, the tables and rankings, the address of the digital divide, the stock photos of children gleaming over tablets in otherwise modest classrooms. I understand why we adopt the neoliberal, totalizing rhetoric put forth by the private community in providing these services. It makes sense. It is a vision, however hollow, of a better future. And it continues to miss the mark. We see evidence of this throughout the developing world (and developed as well) most recently manifest in Liberia as it has been announced that “the entire pre-primary and primary education system would be outsourced to Bridge International Academies to manage.”
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Care about WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption? Then try these….
With WhatsApp’s recent move to implement end-to-end encryption, the topic of security has received a fresh new injection of debate and discussion. In fact, the team here at Panoply Digital have spoken about the topic in recent weeks here and here. ICTworks have also just posted an excellent article on practical applications for privacy protection and digital security in development here. I have always taken a fairly liberal approach to people’s rights and online security. I supported the mission of WikiLeaks to ‘bring important news and information to the public’ (although perhaps not my fellow Australian’s seemingly narcissistic motivations); I cheered Edward Snowden along (whilst incredulously observing his naivety); I abhorred the NSA spying scandal; and was pleasantly surprised by Apple’s recent stand against the FBI. What I hadn’t spent a lot of time doing however, was securing myself!
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Gender, mobile learning, M&E and ethics: Panoply Digital at the Bond T4D event
This week, Panoply Digital were invited to speak at the Bond Technology for Development group meeting. The Bond T4D group is a London-based group who hold regular meetings and sessions to discuss aspects around ICT4D, including developments, information on emerging trends, and sharing best and worst practices.
Ronda Zelezny-Green and Alexandra Tyers were two of three speakers at this month’s event, speaking about our experiences with gender, mobile learning, international development and research.
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Promoting advocacy with technology Part 2: Two days in Phnom Penh, Cambodia
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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