How the Internet can Impact Education in sub-Saharan Africa

Internet Penetration (% Population). Red indicates no statistics available. (As of Jan 2012) Photo credit: Wikipedia

Dalberg, the global strategic advisory firm focused on raising living standards in developing countries and addressing global challenges, has released the report Impact of the Internet in Africa.

The comprehensive, beautifully designed report and accompanying website highlights the Internet’s role in socioeconomic development in sub-Saharan Africa in the agriculture, health, education, government, finance, small business, and energy sectors.

Given my work in education technology, I found the education section of particular interest, as many of the issues affecting Internet use in education in sub-Saharan Africa are also relevant in India and other developing countries. In addition, access to quality education is a major problem in this region, with UNICEF reporting that more than 100 million school-age children in developing countries do not have access to education, with nearly half of them living in sub-Saharan Africa. The Internet has a huge role to play in bridging the education gap.

Through field research (including a survey of 191 education organizations across Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal) and secondary research, Dalberg found that while the Internet has high-potential for positive benefits in the classroom, its potential will only be reached with a sustained investment in broadband infrastructure. In the meantime, learning objectives can be achieved outside of the classroom with cheaper, high-quality, but low bandwidth Internet options, which will bring users online faster. The 100 million social networking accounts (including mobile-enabled networks like Mxit, Saya, 2Go, and Eskimi) introduce first time users to the Internet and will encourage more marketing, information sharing, and citizen engagement, and more sophisticated Internet use over time.

The report explores several success stories in Internet-enabled education. One success in Africa’s education sector is non-profit WorldReader’s partnership with Binu, which solves a problem of lack of access to books by delivering e-books via mobile phones. Binu’s application platform for feature and smartphones has allowed WorldReader to reach 200,000 new book readers, and their growth numbers are impressive.

While Internet solutions in education and information sharing have delivered some positive impact in Africa, to reach it’s full potential and allow for universal access to education, Dalberg argues that there needs to be a holistic approach to Internet that includes bandwidth, hardware, content, and training. Dalberg found that there are two key pillars that create the foundation for a strong Internet economy: “core infrastructure” and “conditions for usage.” They explain:

“Core infrastructure includes aspects of the enabling environment – both physical infrastructure and characteristics of the business environment, such as mobile and Internet coverage, electricity, availability of skills, education levels, and perceptions of corruption. Conditions for usage include those that influence access, awareness, availability and attractiveness. They include a range of drivers, from the cost of devices and price of packages to factors affecting citizen awareness, such as education levels, usage and relevance of services.”

Of note, this isn’t Dalberg’s first interesting report on the Internet in the developing world. Several months ago they released a report with Intel, Women and the Web, which explores women access to Internet in developing countries. Dalberg’s study looked closely at Indian women, whom are less likely to have Internet access, at 8%, than the women in any of their other focus countries. In our own research into education technology in India, as we share in our report and in our blog post about Dalberg’s study, we found boys much more likely than girls to have used the Internet. Only 14% of 9^th grade girls in Hyderabad’s low-cost schools have access to the Internet, 40% less than the number of their 9^th grade male counterparts. Dalberg found that a major barrier to Internet access for women, and especially young girls, is that they believe the Internet is inappropriate for them, a sentiment also echoed among stakeholders we interviewed at the low-cost schools.

Dalberg’s findings about conditions for success for Internet use in Africa, combined with their previous research on women and the Internet, provides policymakers and the global, multi-sector development community with strong data-points and insights to take action to help the Internet play a more impactful role in education and socioeconomic development.

On Measuring Impact

Two recent articles on measuring impact of social enterprises deserve close attention.

One article was in the Guardian, co-authored by Dr. Pathik Pathak and Zoe Schlag. Citing research they conducted in India, the authors explain that:

“Conventional social impact frameworks emphasise the need to isolate impact (what have you changed that you can prove you did alone?) but fail to ask how social entrepreneurs might scale impact through partnership. The whole notion of attribution is irredeemably flawed when it comes to making sense of the social economy and needs to be ditched in favour of something more attune to the dynamics of collaboration, partnership and exchange.”

To scale impact, they argue that social entrepreneurs need to test their models and theories of change fast and often, and they need to become less attached to a model and more attached to whether that model meets the needs they are trying to address.

“The best way to do this is start testing from day one. There’s no guarantee that your impact indicators will be the right ones on day one, but then again, there’s no guarantee that your impact model will be the right one either. So if social entrepreneurs don’t set out with that mentality to question from the outset, they’ll quickly find themselves in the position so many later stage social entrepreneurs find themselves in today: with a model they believe in, insufficient evidence to factually back it up, but too limited resources to bring on a consultant to introduce an entirely new (impact) accounting system that their current financial and human capital didn’t evolve to handle.”

Meanwhile, Acumen published a post in response to an HBR article by Endeavor Global.

Endeavor, citing evidence from their global work and research they conducted, argued that when deciding between social and financial goals, social entrepreneurs should prioritize financial goals to maximize impact.

Acumen responded with a note of caution against relying solely on output data.

“Output-based, scale-based metrics are an outstanding way to give confidence about whether one is having impact.  But when one wants to get to conclusions about what are the best ways to maximize impact, and where there are and aren’t tradeoffs, we need a less blunt instrument. Outputs are, after all, only proxies for impact.  It is only when they are coupled with high-quality research on the linkages between the output and the outcome that one can have higher confidence about what social impact has been made and why.

…

It is great to see Endeavor asking such questions, and one day we might indeed conclude that they were right. I’d welcome such a day, since that would make the job of maximizing impact a more straightforward task: a singular maximization problem with finance at his heart. My hunch is that the challenge is far more complex, especially when we start considering some of the knottier social issues such as the value of dignity and empowerment, or even when we stop to consider that who you serve is almost as important as the service you deliver in determining impact.”

Conversations like these are important for the space, especially as the trend of launching social enterprises continues. We need to encourage what Pathak and Schlag term a “testing mentality,” and think more creatively about what impact means, how we approach it, and how we measure it.

Failure Fireside Potluck

Photo via Kevin Adler from a Fireside Potluck

A few weeks ago I had the wonderful opportunity to attend a Fireside Potluck, hosted by my StartingBloc friend and founder of inthis, Kevin Adler. The topic was one familiar to this blog–failure. (You may remember that Kevin participated in SocialStory’s Celebrating Failure series.)

With nearly 40 strangers cramped into a lovely San Francisco living room, we had a two-hour, open, honest, and insightful discussion on what failure means personally, professionally, and in society. Here are some highlights from our discussion:

Failure is:

• Not doing what you should have done and losing a bit of yourself in the process
• Taking too long to learn how to fail
• Not taking a risk or opportunity you thought you would fail at

“A lot of us are afraid of success–of biting off more than we can chew and not being able to attain our goal. Maybe it’s not that we are afraid of failure, but we’re afraid of success.”

• Failing to think of a failure because you live in a comfort zone
• Defined by what success means to you, because without failure you wouldn’t know what success is
• Not moving on after a failure
• Failing to deal with failure

Someone asked for raised hands from people who feel the weight of the world on their shoulders and feel like they have to change the world–that if they don’t fix a problem, then they’ve failed. A lot of hands in the room shot up.

Reactions to failure: 

• Failure can dampen your ambitions
• Some people take failure very personally and as a reflection of their self-worth
• Failure is more accepted in the Bay Area, where entrepreneurial failures are common, and even encouraged

“And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” – J.K. Rowling

• If you view failure in a self-focused way–oriented towards your goal and as a statement about you–then that’s when failure becomes painful

Learning from failure:

• Learning how to fail and push yourself further is important, as is learning how to fail at the beginning of your life and career

Some in the room believe we should learn to fail and fail fast–a common concept in the start-up world; others wish that people would stop failing so fast and stop celebrating it so much, and instead commit more thought to something.

• Learn that you are not your work
• It’s okay to take failure personally, as many do, but also learn that you need to let go
• Fail on a regular basis in small ways to become more comfortable with failure

The bottom line at the end of the conversation was that failure is all about how you define it, and it will mean something different to everyone. We also noted the position of privilege we had to have this type of discussion in the first place.

While failure was the topic of conversation for the evening, everyone agreed that the discussion was a success!

iPads for All?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tablets have huge potential to revolutionize education in the classroom. In fact, the Ed-Tech in India report I co-authored looks in-depth at their potential to do just that for schools in the developing world. And they are getting smarter every day–India’s $40 tablet, the cheapest in the world, is about to become a “phablet” with a phone feature.

But just because we think tablets are awesome, it doesn’t mean we should send them into classrooms with no thought or planning. Over at VentureBeat, there’s a great guest post by the CEO of NOMAD, that explains a few reasons why educators should think twice before implementing tablets.

One major point to consider:

The iPad is primarily a consumption device. A major buzzword in US education circles for the past few years has been STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). We lament that we are losing so many prominent U.S. tech jobs to foreign-born scientists, engineers, and programmers. There is essentially universal agreement that we need to invest heavily in STEM education, particularly from a human resource standpoint. Well, guess what: Handing a student an iPad won’t inspire them to build it or program it. You’d be better off giving them a graphing calculator or a cheap computer and teaching them to code.

If you think the device is inspirational in and of itself, walk into a school that has a BYOD policy, then lift any content or usage restrictions and see how students spend their time. A few exceptional kids might surprise you, but for the most part, you’ll find a gaggle of Facebook and Twitter posts and some really high Temple Run scores.

Teach a man to fish, eh? Give a kid an app and you inspire her for a day; teach a kid to make apps and you inspire her for a lifetime.

I agree! The post also mentions the need for extensive planning, allocation of financial resources where they are most needed, and teaching students to be “mobile multilingual.” His advice applies to all schools–whether it’s one of the most expensive high schools in the US or a low-cost private school in Kenya.

Read the whole article at Why most K-12 schools aren’t ready for the iPad revolution.

What I’ve Learned from Blogging

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Just over one year ago, I wrote my first blog post. I was very nervous about it, and wasn’t even sure I’d stay committed to the endeavor. But starting a blog has been one of the most beneficial decisions for me–personally and professionally.

It all started when a few colleagues finally convinced me to join Twitter in Fall 2011. Twitter was an amazing gateway into the online ideas and information market. After learning so many new things through Twitter, I started to find my own voice and opinions about the issues I followed. This realization, coupled with my move to India, encouraged me to start a Tumblr to share interesting articles I was reading and videos I was watching.

My blogging has evolved since last year, away from only sharing articles and quotes; I’ve become more comfortable expressing my opinions and sharing my experiences. I’ve also published in various online publications (two of my blog posts were even published in an e-book!), interviewed amazing entrepreneurs about their work and their failures, and shared some of my own ideas as well as critiques about the space I work in. Because of blogging, people reach out to me more for advice, to write articles for their site, for employment opportunities, or to otherwise connect over shared interests. And I’ve improved my writing skills! Professionally–new doors have opened. Personally–I’ve learned to think more critically and express my opinions better.

It’s easy to look down upon blogging–there’s a lot of noise out there and it can be, at times, very self-indulgent. But we shouldn’t ignore the professional and personal growth opportunities blogging provides, and how it can connect readers globally over shared interests. And nothing is more gratifying as a blogger than hearing from someone who learned something new or appreciated something I wrote. What started out as an activity has evolved into an opportunity to connect with, teach, and learn from others.

If you are interested in getting more involved in the issues you care about–whether it’s social enterprise or women’s right or baking or music–I highly recommend giving blogging a chance.

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Here is the first blog post I wrote on my Tumblr, April 14, 2012 at 1 am:

Starting

I have long been hesitant to start a blog. In an age of information and social media overload, the value of yet another blog is negligible. Anonymity—to the degree it exists in the internet-age—also remained a factor. But as someone who strongly believes in the power of collaboration, I’ve realized that I must also contribute to the conversation.

The goal of this blog is to highlight articles and discussions on the topics that I am passionate about, which include social enterprise, leadership, and collaboration.

We live in a time of complex, cross-cutting, global challenges. Many are leading noble efforts to create much-needed change, to improve the world we live in, and tackle the challenges we face. But I believe that the type of change we need—systemic change—requires honest collaboration among both our institutions and our leaders. This is a concept I will often repeat and hope to discuss more in-depth in future posts.

The world of today and tomorrow does not need everyone moving in the same direction and thinking the same way. We need many new ideas in many different directions. But we need to be thinking in new and different ways together, through cross-sector collaboration, shared value, strong personal relationships, and creative pairings of challenges, problem solvers, and solutions. Real systemic global change will come when we work together in new and innovative ways with a deep sense of shared purpose.

None of this is new, or easily accomplished, and many more knowledgeable and experienced than me have expressed these views for years. But this is also what I have come to believe and experience, and I hope that this blog can provide a forum for showing how that is possible.

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I hope that in the past year I’ve been able to provide the type of forum I endeavored to start. Now there is much more learning and writing and thinking to do.

 

Vipin Thek: Changing Mindsets on Failure to Help Everyone Become a Changemaker (SocialStory)

One of my last pieces for SocialStory’s Celebrating Failure Series. 

For the next edition of our series on lessons from failure, SocialStory spoke with Vipin Thek, who works for the Global Office at Ashoka. He previously led the Youth Venture program in India and co-founded an organization in Chennai that works to prevent child sexual abuse.

Here is his excellent advice for changemakers everywhere:

1. There is no failure, only growth

“I don’t follow the concept of failure,” says Vipin. “I believe that if you really look at life, there is no failure, only growth. When we do something that doesn’t go as planned, we need to learn from those experiences and grow from there, and not view it as a failure.”

Nine Months of Learning and Failing in India

When I moved to India in July 2012, I expected to come away having left a demonstrable, long-term impact at the affordable private school I would work with.

As soon as I settled down in my job, I realized that the work would be a lot more challenging, complicated, and slower than I could have ever imagined. Yet, I didn’t want to settle for what I thought were more unsustainable, easier, or smaller-scale projects. I have ideals about social enterprise work that is sustainable, well planned, and intentional, and that addresses the root causes of problems as opposed to just surface issues. Even though I was primarily responsible for work at just one school, I still wanted to think big.

In addition to these social enterprise ideals, I strongly believe that we shouldn’t fear failure in our work, and that we should talk openly about failure and learn from it. So I decided to approach my time in India as a safe time to fail. I committed myself to exploring my bigger ideas and ideals. But my acceptance of failure and pursuit of the bigger ideas meant I ignored smaller-scale projects at my school that could have also had an impact, even if an “unsustainable” one. That ultimately made me feel bad that I wasn’t supporting the school more. And was it really fair to use an approach of failure when dealing with the education of children, and when you have limited time to complete the work?

Even with an attitude of accepting the chance of failure, it’s difficult to commit yourself to spending time, away from your home country and comforts, to a cause you care deeply about, and to feel like you’ve failed. That you’ve failed the cause, and that you’ve failed yourself and your own potential to impact change.

I also spent a lot of time thinking about the inherently unsustainable nature of our work as fellows. Are we ultimately causing more harm than good by our short-term presence and lack of local knowledge? Some argue that our mere presence as Americans and outsiders helps the school with parent satisfaction and marketing, and for cultural exchange purposes. But that’s not why I chose to do this work, and I hate the idea of the “American coming to save the day.” That perception, which has been perpetrated over many years by various international development efforts, actually harmed a lot of my efforts at the school, such as when they expected me to pay for programs I suggested or asked me to take them shopping or buy them computers.

Ultimately, I accomplished very little this year in terms of programs for my school. I implemented a few smaller projects at the school; spent a lot of time researching some of my bigger ideas and partnerships but failed to implement any of them; and failed to fully implement one project that I spent six months working on, due to timeline and partnership problems mostly outside of my control. Beyond the failure to help the school, it’s incredibly frustrating to have done so little as someone who prides herself on being a “doer.”

There were a number of reasons why I believe I was unsuccessful at implementing programs at the school. It took me a long time to learn about the realities on the ground and figure out what root issues I wanted to address and how. There are complex, systemic issues facing low-income education in India, and I wanted to try to understand the issues as much as possible before I did anything, in order to minimize potential harm from approaching a problem in a less ideal way. I decided that some of my ideas seemed just too complicated to implement sustainably and well with limited time and financial resources. And I found the slower pace and unstructured nature of the work difficult to get accustomed to after several years of a fast-paced, slightly more structured work environment.

Outside of my work directly with the school, I feel I was more successful. I joined a team to research ed-tech for APS in India. We published a comprehensive report, and I’m very proud of it. I also launched a series for SocialStory exploring failure in social enterprise, wrote more regularly for this and other blogs, and fostered great relationships at my school and in the education and social enterprise community in India.

Even though I feel like I failed in terms helping the school, I still accomplished so much in terms of learning. I learned about the realities of low-income communities and low-income education in this part of India. I learned how to manage new cultural interactions. I learned more about what type of work and team environment I prefer. I learned a ton about education technology in the low-income school context. I learned I was more of an entrepreneurial thinker than I ever thought. I learned to think more critically about all the issues facing this type of work. And that only scratches the surface of what I learned this year.

I’m still wondering though, if I had to do it over again, would I do it differently? Would I remain committed to my ideal of addressing bigger, root cause problems at the expense of other programs, and would I keep the attitude of accepting failure? It’s difficult to say. I still believe ideals about social enterprise are important, as is a respect for failure, but such an approach probably requires much more time than nine months allows. It also may take many more years of work in social enterprise before I am able to find that right mix of ideals and action.

Looking back, while it feels like aspects of my work failed, the overall experience was far from a failure. My time in India has been valuable beyond measure. I’m extremely grateful for the experience, the relationships, and all the things I learned. I’m looking forward to building upon everything I learned in my next position and into the future.

Ed-Tech Report Published!

The report on how to better design ed-tech interventions in APS in India is published. You can view it here.

Ideas for Improving APS

I was fortunate to spend the majority of these nine months in India working with friends and colleagues to explore “solutions” to problems I saw with affordable private schools.

I’m sharing some of these ideas here. For a variety of reasons, these ideas were not implemented, though we were able to explore the feasibility of many of them and speak with potential partner organizations and schools. Some of these ideas are untested and complex, and require significant time, human capital, and financial support beyond the scope of my resources. And ideally they should be school and locally-driven initiatives.

I’m not  sharing these ideas because I think they are novel, game changing, or will necessarily even work, but because perhaps you know of someone working on a similar concept, or can tell me why these ideas would or wouldn’t work. Or maybe you would like to try them out yourself. For whatever reasons, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

On Systemic Change

“I could talk about reducing the price of malaria nets,” she says, “but I think we need to get away from ‘$10 will save a life’ and other slogans that fit on a T-shirt. Instead, we need to build lasting solutions that fundamentally change the system, so that everyone can thrive without having to be dependent forever on charity.”

Jacqueline Novogratz quote in SSIR

Question of the Day: Exploitation in Social Enterprise?

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about exploitation. How do we end exploitation in the workforce? In society? How do we build social good models that don’t continue to exploit individuals in a new way? How do we advertise and raise awareness about social missions without creating “poverty porn?”  Is exploitation in some form or another inevitable?

I came across this blog post that encapsulates some of my many questions and concerns quite well.

“Though we didn’t reach an agreement, this conversation did bring up very important ethical issues for social entrepreneurs. When creating a sustainable organization for BoP populations, are we creating a social enterprise or have we created a way to legalize social exploitation? As Talent would ask, “when you employ people from impoverish communities are you simply utilizing your access to cheap labor?” When financing poor entrepreneurs are you simply exploiting debtors? When providing micro-insurance to underserved populations are you simply exploiting the poor?”

Perhaps this is over thinking the issue too much. But I have many questions and doubts, and no answers.

What do you think? 

What Affordable Private Schools Teach Us About Social Enterprise

The hype around social enterprises often trumps a deeper investigation and critique of the challenges facing those organizations.

After spending nine months exploring affordable private schools (APS) and social enterprise in India, I’ve noticed a number of challenges with APS that also apply to social enterprises more broadly. Below, I discuss three critiques and myths about affordable private schools, and offer some lessons that those working in the social enterprise ecosystem can take into consideration for their own work.

Five Lessons From a Retail Failure (SocialStory)

Another Celebrating Failure piece. 

This edition of SocialStory’s Celebrate Failure Series is a story of a retail store that achieved early success but eventual failure. Though it wasn’t an organization with an outright social mission, it’s important to remember that businesses such as retail stores also have a social impact by creating jobs and impacting the local economy. And any lessons about failure can apply to both the social and private sector.

Sucre Blue: Empowering Low-Income Communities to Tackle Diabetes (SocialStory)

I spoke with my friend Erin about her new non-profit, Sucre Blue, for SocialStory. 

Erin Little was 10 years old at a church camp in rural Missouri when was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. She had no access to hospitals or specialist doctors, and didn’t meet another diabetic until she was almost 21. Her experience is not unlike that of the 60 million diagnosed with diabetes in India.

Diabetes affects 8% of the world population. If India’s diabetic population reaches80 million as projected, it will have the largest diabetes population in the world.

Networking Tips: Making an Ask

Making an ask of someone, whether for work, fundraising, your job search, or a friend, is difficult to say the least. But I’ve found again and again that it’s always better to take a risk and ask. As Deborah Mills-Scofield writes in HBR:

“When we don’t use the “Power of the Ask” we are in essence saying “no” before the question has even been asked — saying no to opportunities that change our businesses, our organizations, ourselves…and actual lives. So even if it feels uncomfortable, look for even just a small way can you use the “Power of the Ask” in your network — for someone you work for, with or manage. Make this your year of the Law of Accelerating Returns.”

I’m always working to make my asks better. So instead of giving my own advice, I thought I’d share some of my favorite articles about making asks.