“We think the next 15 years will see major breakthroughs for most people in poor countries ... they will have unprecedented opportunities to get an education, eat nutritious food, and benefit from mobile banking. These breakthroughs will be driven by innovations in technology.” -- 2015 Gates Annual Letter
Imagine you are Shammi, a poor woman living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. A new NGO has arrived in your town, and is delivering fortified milk. However, you are not one of the beneficiaries even though you are as poor as Sitna, and poorer than Maliha, your neighbours who are receiving help from the NGO.
Imagine you are a field officer from the NGO, and you observe that Sitna’s children are not drinking the milk, as they complain about its taste. Furthermore, even in the households where mothers make their children drink it, you are not noticing any change in child nutrition -- they still look too small.
Additionally, a year after, when new babies are born, you do not have access to more milk to supply to these families. And every time you return to your office, you have already forgotten one or two of the things you observed, and even though you notice that the children are too thin, you do not have data on their height and weight to prove it to your manager.
Imagine you are a donor based in the UK. You have been allocating aid funds to the fortified milk NGO for the last couple of years. You don’t know it, but your money is not achieving the intended goals -- children are still malnourished.
The fortified milk NGO plays an important role in providing services and giving a voice to the most vulnerable. However, given the current situation, the NGO is unable to achieve its goal. The primary reason for the NGO’s failure is its inability to allocate its resources in the most efficient way due to lack of data.
How could things have been different if the NGO relied on timely and accurate data about individuals’ socio-economic characteristics and the program’s performance to make decisions?
Let’s rewind.
Imagine that the NGO you work for has introduced the use of ICTs to build a comprehensive information system. Therefore, once you arrive at the new village in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, you go house by house with your mobile phone, imputing information regarding each family’s income, diet, and level of schooling, among other things. When the NGO finally starts delivering the milk, both Shammi and Sitna receive it.
Now, every time you visit a household to follow up on their performance, you record the children’s height and weight, the comments of the beneficiaries, and your own observations, in your mobile phone. Thanks to this information, the NGO is able to change the flavour of the milk, notice that, besides milk, children need de-worming pills to be able to absorb the milk’s nutrients and provide more milk once new babies are born.
Finally, the NGO has the necessary data to show the UK donor that children are not being nourished and that de-worming pills are needed. Given this, the donor allocates more resources for the NGO to purchase them.
Using ICT for social development helps NGOs to have accessible, timely, relevant, and updated information to make on-time decisions and improve social policy. By utilising ICT, the fortified milk NGO was able to ensure that resources were reaching all people in need; it was able to follow up the implementation of the program and make the necessary changes to improve the program’s performance, and finally, through ICT, the NGO was able to assess its performance and report to its donors the results being achieved.
Thanks to the money from the UK donor, the constant follow-up from the field officer, the timely decisions made by the NGO managers, and the compliance of Sitna in giving the milk to her kids, the children were not malnourished anymore.
Like this story, many NGOs in Bangladesh have been using ICT to improve the performance of their programs. WaterAid was able to guarantee that water facilities were built in the right place; USAID, together with CARE and DAM, disseminated agricultural training to remote areas through mobile phones; mCARE, together with Johns Hopkins University, provided medical services for pregnant women where, through the use of mobile phones, they would send labour pain alarms in order to get assistance, and Shiree established a monthly monitoring system that allowed them to make timely decisions according to the beneficiaries’ needs.
mPower, a social enterprise committed to expanding the use of ICT to positively impact development programs, has been the technology partner in all of these cases.
Thanks to the use of ICT, many NGOs now have access to timely, relevant, and updated information to make evidence-based decisions in improving social policies. It would be difficult to overstate the impact that ICT has had on improving people’s lives, but if ICT is going to be a game-changer for mankind, there is no doubt it should be by helping the two billion human beings we have left behind.