Tag: SMS

Solo Kota Kita: Empowering Citizen-led Service Delivery Improvements in Indonesia

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Indonesia has an annual participatory budgeting process (musrenbang) where residents can openly engage with local governments to highlight the community’s priorities for short-term improvements. Traditionally, musrenbang has been an exclusive process — only the older, elite individuals with access to limited public information partook in the discussions. This, however, is slowly changing due to one organization’s effort to advance civic engagement using SMS surveys and data visualization.

Kota Kita (an Indonesian NGO) emerged in 2009 out of John Taylor and his friends’ initiative, Solo Kota Kita. They were interested in improving the budgetary process in the city of Solo, but discovered that citizens lacked information about their city’s local service delivery. What was more, even the local government lacked fine-grained information on the services they offered. “We saw a need to change the status quo of the budgetary process, and create a culture where anyone can engage in musrenbang by having data about their communities to improve urban planning,” Taylor remarked.

Addressing this challenge required collecting data on key social and economic issues and visualizing the results. Taylor and his teammates received buy-in from then mayor of the area Joko Widodo (who is now the President of Indonesia), neighborhood elected leaders, and resident volunteers to gather information on sanitations, water, education, poverty and health care in 51 neighborhood districts within Solo.

During the pilot phase, Taylor and his teammates collected results using paper and pencil surveys. But this took five months just for gathering data, so in 2012 the team decided to use SMS gateway to collect data to make the process faster, cheaper, and more efficient. With SMS survey, the Kota Kita Solo team gathered data from all 51 districts in just two month.

“Digitizing the survey made the analysis process easier,” Taylor commented. “We were able to quickly map out the results because the data was organized better. We created posters or ‘mini-atlases’ that showed patterns of problems and opportunities, like which areas were not getting electricity, how many children were attending schools in certain districts, how much water citizens were getting, etc.” The Kota Kita Solo team posted the maps throughout the city where people come together (at kiosks and community centers) and also on solokotakita.org. These mini-atlases aided citizens visualize and understand what services needed the most attention.

As a result from distributing critical socio-economic information, more citizens- not just the older elites – can partake in the urban planning process. And now, increasingly more citiznes are attending musrenban in Solo to advocate for what they think are urgent areas to receive funding in their neighborhoods.

musrenbang

Having proven that this model works, the Kota Kita team has been replicating this survey-mapping approach to improve urban planning in other Indonesian cities as well. More recently, they applied the method to help the Municipality of Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia identify service needs of the rapidly growing population living in portable yurts in outskirts of the capitol.

The team used the same approach as Kota Kita Solo by surveying the socio-economic situations of yurt migrants, mapping out the survey results, and then using the data for the 2014 budgetary discussions for the city. The survey and mapping process was an eye-opening experience because it was the first the former Soviet Union country openly engaged in a dialogue between the citizens and the government.

So what makes the Kota Kita model so successful? Taylor noted that to implement an impactful, citizen-oriented urban planning program, three things must be kept in mind.

  • First, it should take a bottom-up approach that involves the community so that civic concerns are incorporated.
  • Second, having the community actively involved (by involving neighborhood leaders, for example) is imperative to make sure the results are accurate.
  • Lastly, endorsement and demand from top government level officials for the program is important. In the case of program in Solo, the then-mayor Joko Widodo’s buy-in and excitement for the civic mapping was critical for the success of the program.

Taylor remarked that advancement of ICT tools has definitely helped his organization do more work in transparency and civic engagement space. “Kota Kita hopes to continue creating opportunities for open dialogues between the government and the citizens, especially for young people. We’re now creating a budget implementation tracker using Facebook so that more youth can comment and participate in their community decision-making process.”

The tracker is still in its early phase, but it’ll be exciting to see how Kota Kita will continue using visual data tools to empower more citizens to democratically engage with their governments in Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia.

Maiko Nakagaki is a Program Officer at Center for International Private Enterprise

ECHO: Improving Organizational Communications in Indonesia with Automated SMS and Email

Echo_Infrastructure4

eHomemakers (eH), a Malaysian social enterprise with a vision to empower disadvantaged women, innovated and developed ECHO from the grassroot perspective. Necessity being the mother of invention, eHomemakers created the ECHO concept for non-profit organizations to save staff time and telecommunication resources as a means to overcome a lack of funding to market disadvantaged women’s ecobaskets.

From an integrated tool for middle class volunteers to use email to coordinate activities at the least cost possible to a message recipient platform for the poor, ECHO has developed into a cloud-based organizational management system using internet-mobile. ECHO enables organization to reach out to large groups of people in diverse locations through email and SMS via a centralized database. Its latest technical feature enhancement provides user friendliness to the visually impaired persons in full compliance with international guidelines.

With the help of a few national and international funders, 35 non-government organizations (NGOs) in Malaysia are now able to utilize ECHO and make substantial cost savings on their communications resources. Recent ECHO developments include deployment in Indonesia through HomeNet Indonesia (HI) for the purpose of increasing homeworkers’ fair wages. In alignment with Fair Trade concepts, HI uses its business center to bring homeworker members’ products directly to the market without recourse to middlemen.

ECHO Technology

ECHO technology involves 3 components –

  1. An application server (Web server)
  2. Mobile app causing phones to act as SMS gateways
  3. Target recipient’s mobile phones to receive and reply SMS.

    4. The mobile app was developed to allow android phones to act as SMS modems and thereby overcome the expense of renting SMS gateways from national telecoms providers. It represents a minimal cost solution to NGOs.

    ECHO Functionality

    The ability of this powerful planning and organizing tool to send either email or SMS in bulk, as well as auto-summarizing replies with reports, provides a proven means for increased productivity (instant replies) and substantial savings on total admin staff costs. ECHO can be utilized for activities such as, but not limited to:

    • Invitation and confirmations from members for upcoming events, meetings, trainings, seminars, volunteer activity placements
    • Conducting surveys on groups and target segments
    • Group sourcing of raw materials
    • Organizing production chains
    • Consolidation of sales items from marketing networks
    • Bulk marketing of goods and services produced by beneficiaries and members

    ECHO and HI Indonesia

    HomeNet Indonesia (HI), also known as Mitra Wanita Pekerja Rumahan Indonesia (MWPRI), is a national network of NGOs that addresses concerns regarding the welfare and socio-economic well being of home-based working members. These workers generally are poor women with low education or literacy levels, live in rural and urban areas, and struggle to earn a livelihood through jobs issued from sub-contractors, middlemen or brokers. HI, in collaboration with eH, is currently paving the way for poverty alleviation through Fair Trade with the use of ECHO.

    In order for HI to pay a Fair Trade wage to its members, there must be cost reductions in administration, marketing, and procurement of raw materials. The use of ECHO allows for savings of up to 98% in costs associated with organizing. As an example situation, an HI business center staff member receives an Internet order of a product. This staff member then distributes a single ECHO message to 100 makers, whereby they are requested to each provide their own production number for this product. These makers revert to confirm their production amount, and the staff member next checks the cumulative total of quoted units against the number required in the order. The staff member can subsequently revert to the customer with a very fast turnaround to accept or decline his/her order, and initiate production activities. Admin costs without ECHO are much higher due to the necessity of phone calls, one-to-one SMS, or face-to-face meeting.

    The business center method provides efficiency gains that effectively enable Fair Wage (under Fair Trade principles), which allows the poor to receive better remuneration and lessen the trappings of poverty.

    Hurdles

    Hurdles in deploying ECHO in HI can be categorized into either 1) technological, or 2) human aspects.

    Technological hurdles within Indonesia include unstable mobile signal coverage, latency in sending and receiving SMS (5 mins to 12 hours), and unstable Internet that delays SMS response. These drawbacks will be increasingly diminished in coming years, as Indonesia’s high economic growth spurs greater investment in telco infrastructure and a consequent better technology performance.

    Resistance to change is commonly found during organizational development phases. The ease of acceptance of ICT is far higher for younger home workers than for the older generation. Women home workers who have limited education often feel that they are too old to learn new technology, and some of them cite difficulty as the reason behind their reluctance to use SMS (send and reply). Calling from a phone kiosk is much faster for them, albeit at a far higher cost.

    An entrenched manual-based organizational work culture presents a barrier in implementing ICT, wherein a considerable amount of time is typically required for workers to internalize training session information and apply new ICT basic skills. This gap of understanding was found to exist among office workers above 40 years of age who were familiar with a paper-laden office culture, wherein decision-making was centralized and dictated by the top management. In such environments, lower level staff would print emails for senior staff to read, and transcript electronic replies on behalf of these senior staff.

    Changing from an NGO management style into one more suited to a social enterprise resulted in HI coming under considerable pressure to deliver: HI needed to get the business center moving as soon as possible and adequately organize homeworkers to produce quality products for sale. The staff of HI found themselves pushing to improve the prevalent mentality towards work and communication efficiency.

    Engagement and future

    Many ICT-based social development projects are experimental, and therefore new to the providers as well as the end-users. At this point, 300 out of 10000 HI members were selected to participate in the ECHO training course. Deploying ECHO in HI has led to change momentum being initiated, whereby participants recognized the inherent advantages and loosened their embrace of the old style.

    The use of ECHO for HI enabled the organization to realize the extent of their learning curve in order to cope with office ICT. A few key personnel have learnt additional IT-based project management skills and awareness of hitherto unknown tools such as online photo storage for products.

    HI members are becoming more aware of utilizing ICT and SMS, and are thus able to achieve greater reach with less cost and more effectiveness. Campaigns on issues related to women homeworkers are distributed through social media, and so become a source of information for cases, problems, and the needs of women homeworkers in Indonesia.

    It is acknowledged that HI requires more time to increase the capacity and spread the habit of using ICT, since HI staff and its members are not familiar with technology in their daily lives. Nevertheless, positive signs have emerged since the key phase of change momentum has been initiated. As such, the next step of reaching out to the remaining 9700 HI members is anticipated with a sense of optimism to match the altruistic vision of the founders.

    By Yeo Lee Chin, Usability Coordinator (ECHO), eHomemakers

How NextDrop is Mixing Water, Data and ICT in India

NEXTDROP

In many homes with piped in the developing world, piped water is only available a few hours at a time, and in some cases, they can go up to ten days without it. If they miss the water supply window, then the opportunity to collect and store the water has passed for the next 2-10 days. To ensure receiving water for their families, many low-income families must have someone waiting at home at all times. So a lack of water also becomes a lack of freedom for many women and children.

As a solution, social business NextDrop was founded , and it began by sending messages to about 15,000 households in the southern Indian twin cities of Hubli-Dharwad. The service informs subscribers via SMS about 60 minutes in advance of when the water service will be switched on, switched off, and whether it is contaminated or affected by low pressure. The information is gathered the same way: Through the use of mobile phones, the service workers who manually open and close valves provide them with real time information on the water delivery.

NextDrop’s young staff do not know whether to call themselves a social enterprise, or a tech start up, since they have received funding for both types of ventures. The startup built upon a novel team project that won University of California Berkeley’s Big Ideas competition. They work in conjunction with the local government, while at the same time gathering data that shows the structural problems with water delivery. It is an exercise in openness on behalf of a public delivery service. NextDrop has now expanded to Bangalore, where they have partnered with the Water Supply and Sewerage Board to supply city-wide services.

To sign up, customers have to give NextDrop a missed call on a dedicated phone number. The system allows them to track the customer’s location via GPS, narrowing it down to three valve areas. They will register the user to the first one, send them their first delivery message, and ask for feedback to whether they received the water or not. That way they have them correctly allocated within three text messages. A simpler solution may have seemed to ask new customers for their address, but in many suburbs and settlements in India post codes are rarely used, so, NextDrop says, GPS is the best option.

Is it a solution or just a plug in the leak?

There are two types of payments that the poor must make to obtain their water supply. First there is the actual cash payment in exchange for an ideally reliable water supply. The second ones are called “coping costs”, which are “payments that are outside the system and that ought not to be required,” but that the poor must pay in order to gain access to water.

The first coping costs is what are known as “informal payments,” which can vary from burdensome hospitality to outright bribes. The second coping cost is the time lost waiting for water since it has “the same impact of reducing poor peoples’ incomes, since time spent collecting water, or lying ill in bed cannot be spent earning money elsewhere” (UNDP, World Bank). NextDrop eliminates many of the coping costs that come with having to stay at home to wait for the water; the time and energy that could be spent in a wage-earning job.

Yet the third type of coping cost is the one created by coping mechanisms such as NextDrop itself. The service creates a newer, albeit much smaller, cost. As the UNDP study suggests, theses emerging new costs are “cash payments that are not contemplated in the original design of the water scheme, but which pay for real services that are made necessary by the scheme’s inadequacies” NextDrop would not be needed if there were a 100% reliability of water delivery to the different areas of the city.

Improving services through direct feedback

NextDrop allows citizens to report whether the information the government provided is correct. So, after the initial SMS saying that water will arrive in an hour, they send you a follow-up message to see if that was indeed the case. If a lot of people in the same area report not receiving water, then the government knows there is a problem.

Anu Sridharan, co-founder and CEO told Forbes that they are “seeing feedback work firsthand within the water utility company… People lower in the organization finally have the data to back up the fact that their job is hard, and that they are being put in an impossible situation. And now they are coming together at meetings, and they are able to tell their superiors, hey, there are all these issues, let’s work on fixing them… the utility companies themselves are asking us for citizen feedback, so they can keep track of their direct reports.”

When Hubli-Dharwad’s water utility used NextDrop’s monitoring tools across a three-month period, over 17,500 families got water when they otherwise would not. These families were at the end of their area’s supply cycle and wouldn’t receive sufficient water if the system lacked proper pressure. By engaging valvemen to report water pressure when they turned water on, and relaying this to utility engineers responsible for decision-making about those areas, NextDrop enables real-time adjustments to ensure equitable supply.

A water data bank

NextDrop wishes to collect as much data as possible in order to develop a predictive system, which could potentially have a big impact on quality of service. A lot of this data is gained from field visits by the team, who map new areas to inform these models. Much of the data is already within the knowledge of the utility companies, but is not yet aggregated. As this system is fed with more information by customer and engineer feedback, and by previous lessons and historical trends, it will become increasingly effective and will enable the network to surpass its current efficiency levels of 60-80 per cent.

Andrea Alarcón Sojet is a journalist and online media consultant in Bogota, Colombia.

Pakistani Farmers Need Better Agriculture Content to Increase Productivity with ICTs

farmer

Pakistan’s agriculture sector employs over 40% of the population and contributes to 21% of the GDP. Other sectors are directly dependent, with the textile industry including raw cotton, contributing 11% of the GDP. Despite this importance, the sector has been struggling due to underdevelopment. Land rights and irrigation issues are clear policy and community issues. However, proper soil maintenance and low crop yields can be solved through working with farmers.

What are the main challenges that farmers face?

Crop yields have been low with stagnant growth since 1999. Pakistan’s production is 40% behind its neighboring countries. The harvest often goes to waste due to weak storage and transportation methods. Farmers are competing with large-scale agribusinesses that have access to resources, education and information. While extension programs send workers to educate farmers, most farmers view the programs as ineffective in disseminating information. The extension workers are often poorly trained and it is expensive for the workers to access many villages.

What current solutions are available?

USAID has partnered with Telenor, a telecom service provider, to provide mobile banking, information on weather and market prices to 1,700 farmers. mAgricorner is one of the first mobile apps focused on Pakistani farmers. It provides market prices, farm advisory and trading. 4 out of 5 telecom providers in Punjab have agriculture services using interactive voice response (IVR). Also the government began using satellite imagery to predict crop yields in the upcoming seasons.

What are the attitudes toward technology solutions?

A research study by CABI surveyed farmers in Punjab Province, one of the most fertile and populated regions in Pakistan. The farmers proved most interested in receiving voice calls and text messaging. Despite the stereotypes of most farmers, they are eager for more experimentation with ICT and agriculture.

What are the concerns moving forward?

A main issue is quality of content. Many farmers haven’t used the existing tools because the content quality is low. They often find the information too general and not relevant to their region and type of farm. Also, there is low market penetration of such tools even in Punjab. Although the government is launching satellite data initiative, the focus is to prevent food shortage through better import estimates not increasing crop yields. While there is significant research being done by the government and NGOs, there needs to be stronger focus on ensuring that research is utilized to increase agricultural productivity.

Angelina Nonye-John is a researcher and writer with Mansa Colabs

Fighting Maternal and Infant Mortality in India Through Community SMS Text Reporting

Adivasi-mm

The state of Assam leads the country with the highest maternal mortality ratio (MMR), and one of the highest infant mortality ratios (IMR) in India. These health indicators persist despite the right to safe motherhood protected by the Indian Constitution and guaranteed under national laws and policies. The lack of data on the Adivasi community makes it particularly difficult to address some of the gaps in the implementation of maternal and infant health policies.

For this reason, Nazdeek, PAJHRA and ICAAD have developed the Project “End Maternal Mortality Now” (End MM Now). Launched in April 2014, the Project trained a group of 40 women volunteers living in Balipara and Dhekiajuli Blocks in the Sonitpur District of Assam to identify and report cases of health violations in their communities through SMS. The project has been implemented with the generous support of ISIF Asia.

A major outcome is the report, No Time to Lose: Fighting Maternal and Infant Mortality through Community Reporting. The report brings to light the obstacles that Adivasi women face in obtaining maternal health care in Assam – a state with the highest maternal mortality rate in India.

No Time to Lose is the first attempt in India to collect and map cases of maternal and infant health violations reported by women living in tea gardens through SMS technology. Based on nearly 70 cases reported by community members who participated in the Project, the report offers tangible recommendations for Block and District level health authorities and tea garden management to improve service delivery and save mothers’ and infants’ lives.

“For the first time, civil society in Assam can rely on solid data on the lack of access to maternal health services. Thanks to this data, we have formulated key recommendations to curb the appalling number of maternal deaths among Adivasi women.” – says Barnabas Kindo, from Pajhra.

No Time to Lose identified a significant gap between patients and healthcare providers. Key recommendations include the immediate appointment of a hematologist for the Dhekiajuli Community Health Centre, and the establishment of a more efficient referral system.

“End MM Now has proven to be an invaluable platform for women to monitor and claim access to basic rights and entitlements. Community members have already noted initial positive changes in the delivery of health services”, says Francesca Feruglio, from Nazdeek.

“Shaped by the idea of crowdsourcing, End MM Now maps and visualizes ground-level data, which is verified and made available to the public and the government. This way, the platform bridges an existing information gap and increases transparency in the delivery of health services,” says Jaspreet K. Singh, from ICAAD.

How Mobile Reporting is Reducing Maternal Mortality in India

maternamortality

Women in the Indian state of Assam are routinely denied access to adequate health services and Assam’s health facilities often lack the resources necessary to ensure safe motherhood. As a result, Assam has the highest maternal mortality rate in India, with most of the deaths occurring among Adivasi (tribal) communities who live and work in the tea gardens.

These violations of the rights to health, life and equality are neither reported nor addressed. Basic tools to communicate, inform, and document violations are virtually non-existent, and women lack access to mechanisms to hold public and private entities accountable for the failure to provide life-saving treatment as required by law.

The End Maternal Mortality Now project launched an interactive website built on Ushahidi, to map failures in the health system in the State of Assam. Over 40 women in the District of Sonitpur have been trained to report violations of health and food benefits provided under the Government welfare schemes through codified SMS texts, which are then mapped to detect patterns of violations. The project is supported in its pilot phase by the Information Society Innovation Fund.

Jaspreet Singh from the International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination (ICAAD), an organization that combats structural discrimination, says:

“The SMS system allows for the tracking of multiple health rights violations, including the lack of resources at health centers. It is also acting as a community empowerment tool by engaging local women to collect data that will be used to hold the government accountable.”

The data received is gathered on endmmnow.org, which maps patterns of violations as well as individual cases across the District. The nine-month pilot project will be used to demand better health infrastructure by local activists and lawyers through administrative complaints and court litigation so that tea garden women workers be treated with dignity and have guaranteed access to lifesaving healthcare.