wait... what?

I've moved to Wordpress!!

2010-02-10T14:50:00.001-01:00

Dearest anyone who reads my blog.

I decided to move over to Wordpress.

Please visit Wait... What? over there.

I am much happier with the layout and readibility. Let me know (over at my new set-up) what you think!

And if you happen to link to my blog from yours, I'd be forever grateful (and will buy you a beer or a cup of tea if I ever meet you!) if you'd be so kind as to redirect your link(s) to:

http://lindaraftree.wordpress.com or to the appropriate exact pages you are referring to....

thanks a million.

Linda

Fostering a New Political Consciousness on Violence against Children

2010-02-07T21:31:00.017-01:00

Next Sunday, I’m heading to Benin for a couple weeks to work on a project aimed at ending violence against children. I’ll be training colleagues from Benin and Togo on setting up an SMS based system of collecting incident reports on violence against children and mapping the incidents out...

Please continue reading this post at my new website!

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Breaking it Down: Violence against Children

Being a Girl in Cumbana

Revisiting the topic of Girls and ICTs: Tech Salon Discussions

2010-02-04T13:56:00.007-01:00

I recently had the honor of leading a group of tech, development and gender folks in a discussion around Girls and ICTs at the Technology Salon. The conversation revolved around 5 aspects I wrote about in an earlier blog post On Girls and ICTs:

Tension between participation and protection
Online behavior is an extension of, and a potential amplifier of offline behavior
Qualifying the digital divide
Girls' involvement in developing and designing ICT solutions for their own needs
Research on Girls and ICTs

Check out the Technology Salon's page for a round-up of our discussions!

Photo: Informal evening one-on-one ICT time at a Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media (YETAM) project workshop in Cameroon.

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Related posts on Wait... What? (I've moved to Wordpress - pls visit over there!)
On Girls and ICTs
Putting Cumbana on the Map: with Ethics
Being a Girl in Cumbana

Child Protection: from Emergency Response to a Sustainable Mechanism

2010-02-04T01:46:00.012-01:00

There is a lot of talk about “Child Protection” these days and an increased awareness of the vulnerability of children who are separated from their parents or who have lost them due to the Haiti earthquake But what exactly does “Child Protection” mean? What does a child protection system look like on the ground? How can child protection mechanisms be set up during an emergency phase, and how can they be turned into a sustainable mechanism post-crisis? .... Continue reading this post....

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On Girls and ICTs

2010-01-26T22:20:00.005-01:00

At the Technology Salon hosted by the UN Foundation's Technology Partnership with Vodafone Foundation on Jan 28, 2010, some folks from the DC area (and beyond) will gather to share experiences around girls and ICTs. This conversation is an important one, given that gaps exist around discussion, practice and research. Continue reading.....

Related posts:
An Example of Youth Led Community Change in Mali
Being a Girl in Cumbana
Putting Cumbana on the Map - with Ethics
Breaking it Down: Violence Against Children
Stories that Touch the Heart

Children in Emergencies: Applying What We Already Know to the Crisis in Haiti

2010-01-18T23:57:00.009-01:00

In early 2005, following the Tsunami, I collaborated with a cross-section of people at the organization where I work to put together a summary of lessons learned and some short guidelines for working with children and communities in emergencies. Continue reading at Wait... What's new website....

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Related post on Wait.... What?
Child Protection: from Emergency Response to a Sustainable Mechanism

Ushahidi in Haiti: What's Needed Now

2010-01-15T02:41:00.013-01:00

www.haiti.ushahidi.com

My main experience with disasters comes from working at an international development organization in El Salvador and happening to be the only senior manager who wasn't on annual vacation when a huge earthquake struck almost exactly 9 years ago, on January 13, 2001. The rush to act was immediate, and it was a lot of learning by doing. I got handed the responsibility by fate I suppose and didn't do such a bad job of it, if I do say so. At that time we were pretty unprepared; something that has certainly changed since then in the organization where I work. We now have country level disaster plans at hand and support a lot of disaster risk reduction and preparedness work with local communities and governments. Continue reading here at Wait... What's new home!

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Related posts on Wait... What?:
I saw the future of geovisualization... before lunch

I saw the future of geovisualization... after lunch

Is this map better than that map?

An Example of Youth-Led Community Change in Mali

2010-01-11T21:21:00.005-01:00

For the past couple years, I’ve been supporting the Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media (YETAM) project in 6 African countries. One of the best things about being involved in the project is the opportunity to work with some incredible people who are developing the program strategies and implementing YETAM on the ground. Bedo, the child media program coordinator in Plan Mali, is one of those people I've been lucky enough to work with. He's kind, gentle, thoughtful and soft spoken yet solid in his opinions and knowledge. His face totally lights up when he's working with the youth. He has clear vision and gets things done, writes excellent reports, and isn't afraid to clarify things if he's not sure he's understood correctly. It's been a real pleasure working with him. On Friday, Bedo told me about some of the short-term positive results that the Mali team is seeing in the YETAM program there.... continue reading at Wait... What's new website!

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Fostering a new political consciousness on violence against children

Thoughts on Avatar

2010-01-11T13:03:00.002-01:00

Last week I read a post called “When Will White People Stop Making Movies like Avatar”. So I went into the movie this past Friday with some preconceptions. Yesterday I read another post on this topic by David Brooks in the New York Times. Continue reading ....

It’s not a black and white photo

2009-12-28T13:23:00.005-01:00

Before I went to El Salvador in 1991 (read why in my earlier post here), I had never traveled outside the US. I had read lots of articles about the country’s Civil War and intense poverty in the LA Weekly, a lefty newspaper in Los Angeles where I went to school. I imagined El Salvador as a somber, high contrast black and white photo, with some thick red paint dripping down it to represent the bloodshed and suffering of a noble people being crushed by US Imperialism. (yeah, pretty dramatic)

To my surprise, El Salvador was more of a bright, animated 3-D movie with endless layers of depth and detail. Continue reading ....

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The real story involves anti-social entrepreneurs and anthropology

Is This Map Better than That Map?

2009-12-16T22:34:00.013-01:00

I come up against a nagging question when I’m thinking about mapping, when I'm talking about the projects I'm involved in, or when I'm working directly with staff and youth in rural communities using participatory mapping methodologies....

Why is this kind of map:

(source: MapKibera, on Wikipedia)

better than this kind of map?

(Source: Plan project in Kwale, Kenya)

Well... is it actually better? And if it is better, when is it better, for whom and why?

I understand how useful mapping information is for big picture decision making, trend spotting and knowledge sharing at different levels. Mapping in various forms is incredibly useful for program and advocacy work, and there are many examples of how crowd sourcing, digital mapping, and information geo-visualization can be done successfully (mapping stockouts, elections monitoring, human rights incident reporting, crisis management, public health). The potential is huge and exciting.

But when I’m sitting around with a group of people in a rural community without many services, it can be pretty hard to remember or to explain the benefits of digital mapping over low tech map making. Why should people make a digital map if they only have sporadic electricity and internet access (if at all) and not many smart phones. How will they access that digital map on a regular basis once they make it? Does the fact that they could make a digital map, necessarily mean that they should?

I guess my key concern is around how digital mapping is directly useful for the folks who are inputting the information, building the map. The "what's in it for them" question.

As I was pondering this nagging question, @NiJeL_mapping posted something on Twitter that caught my eye and helped spur along the idea of working through these thoughts. He was at the Mobile Data for Social Action in the MidEast conference, hosted by UNICEF Innovations and MobileActive.  He tweeted: "what data are we going to collect, how will we collect it, and from whom?" Then he tweeted: "Again, the push for technology w/o any knowledge of the intended outcome is frustrating" And a last tweet "overhearing whispers about how we need to focus on the technology, but impossible w/o knowing info to collect". This really reminded me that you need to have clear objectives and reasons for collecting data before you decide what cool new technology will be used to do it. A few days ago I read JD's blog post giving an overview of the whole conference. The key point for me was that the 'target' population delegation "felt overwhelmed by the host of tools and projects presented to them and were unsure how any of this could benefit them". Luckily, he said, the conference organizers realized this and quickly altered the course of the event.

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Well, if you have ever asked yourself a question, it's pretty likely that someone else has asked it too, and you can find some answers online. So I went digging around for thoughts from 4 initiatives that I've been following over the past year or so: Ushahidi, MapKibera, Wikimapa, and now NiJeL too.

In very quick summary, Ushahidi is often (but not exclusively) used as a crisis mapping tool for rapid crowd sourced information, decision making, and trend analysis. Map Kibera and Wikimapa both use mapping and user-generated media for social inclusion, community voice, community media and community planning. NiJeL works with participatory mapping, bringing it to the web for a variety of geo-visualization uses such as planning, resource allocation, impact visualization and advocacy.

Mine must be not be a unique query, because I found that Erica from Map Kibera answered it pretty directly a couple weeks ago in a blog post called Maps and the Media "...the question about benefit to those who aren’t online misses the point. The digital divide is a fact and needs to be addressed, but when it comes to community information there is also a need for expression outward and collaboration within Kibera. Something like the Kibera Journal or Pamoja FM allows Kibera to talk to itself, while putting facts and stories online allows it to speak to the rest of the world (including wired Nairobi, politicians, national press)."

The objectives of Map Kibera seem similar to those of the YETAM project, the initiative that has taken up most of my work hours over the past couple years. YETAM's main goals are engaging youth in the local development process and helping them develop the skills and tools to communicate and advocate for their rights and their ideas with local, national and global audiences. The project starts off with map making to visualize community profile, community history, community resources, and risks to child rights and protection. Group discussions ensue, issues are prioritized by the youth, and they then create art and media around those issues. The arts and media materials that youth produce throughout the project are shared with community members, district officials and national authorities to generate dialogue. They're also plotted onto a digital version of their map and uploaded to the web for the global audience.

Since the local audience is the main one for the media and arts that youth produce during YETAM project activities, followed by district, national and global audiences, it would seem then that the same is true for the map. It must first speak to the local audience, to the community. It should be first useful to users and producers of the information, as a learning/discussion tool and as a decision making tool, and secondly be useful to a national and then a global audience. Perhaps this will be the case for many of the initiatives that Plan supports and facilitates, given Plan's child-centered community develop approach and the fact that we use participatory mapping methodologies in our community work all the time. So we need to find a way for the hand-drawn map to be transformed into a digital map (this is what we've been doing up to now in the YETAM project), or find a way to make a digital map attractive and useful to local people. Or we could also keep doing both the low-tech and the digital versions.

[Update: "Paper rocks!" Mikel from Map Kibera (read his comment below) shared some additional tools that Map Kibera uses to ensure that information collected is available in the community. One is called Walking Papers. It is a paper based GPS where you print the map, re-draw it or add details, scan the new version and it automatically geo-rectifies the paper. They will also be printing and distributing paper maps, and considering forums around the paper maps to increase participation from people who don't use computers. Also Mikel commented that drawn maps like the one in the image above can be stored and/or made available to the community using Map Warper. Here you scan and upload a map, set control points, and then get a geo-rectified version for use online. Excellent. This gets better all the time. :-)]

The Wikimapa Brazil project (paraphrasing from their website) aims to promote social inclusion using virtual and mobile mapping in low-income areas and slums, since available mapping services have not offered information from these marginalized areas. The project aims to democratize access to information and raise low-income youth's social participation from simple consumers of information to providers of information and change agents promoting local development and broadening perspectives and creating new cultural and geographical reference points. In this case, the project goals are similar to YETAM and Map Kibera, but the project is primarily aimed at reducing marginalization and exclusion within available mapping services. Therefore it seems relevant that on-line mapping is chosen as the mapping methodology. It may also be the case that residents in the project area have easy access to internet, meaning they would be able to continually use and benefit from the on-line maps.

Patrick Meier from Ushahidi and the Harvard Humanitarian Institute talks specifically about the concepts of participatory mapping, social mapping and crowd feeding during this 30 min video. He comments that the information that's collected via "crowd sourcing" needs to go right back to ‘the crowd’ who provided it (crowd feeding).  One way that Ushahidi is doing this in communities that do not have regular access to internet is by allowing people to subscribe to SMS alerts when a crisis event hits a particular area where they have a special interest. Another way to ensure that map makers have information returned to them, he says, is to use transparencies in a manual approach to GIS where information is made more compelling by laying thematic transparent layers over a base map to show dynamic changes and trends.

Patrick points to Tactical Technology Collective's Maps for Advocacy booklet which documents a number of different mapping techniques and mapping projects and how they have been used for advocacy. So, I would conclude that in the case of Ushahidi and crisis mapping to see trends in time and space, to have immediate and up to date information, and to manage a broad set of information for crisis decision making, it also is logical that an online map is the primary mapping methodology. In this case, the information is crowd sourced, so it comes from many, and it's processed and aggregated on Ushahidi to go back to many. Because the information in a crisis situation is changing rapidly, it would be difficult to use a static map, a hand drawn map or one that is updated less frequently.

In the case of Plan, as part of the Violence Against Children (VAC) project we are planning to pilot incident reporting by SMS of violence against children and subsequent mapping of the situation in order to raise awareness among families and community members, and to advocate to local, national and global authorities to uphold their responsibilities and promises in this aspect. The question here will be how to make both crowd sourcing and crowd feeding something that is easily accessible by the participating youth and communities as well as to the other audiences in order to have the desired impact and reach the desired outcomes. The participating youth have already been trained on violence against children (VAC), its causes and effects, and ways to advocate around it. Now the key will be training them on the technology so that they can discover and design ways to use it to meet their goals. A key point will be evaluating whether the outcome is a reduction in VAC.

So in conclusion I would have to say that one map is not better than the other map. They are both amazing tools and need to be selected depending on the situation. There is no one size fits all. It goes back to the point of having defined objectives and outcomes for the initiative, knowing what information will be collected, why, with whom, by whom, and for whom first, analyzing the local context as part of that process, knowing about what tools exist and finding the right tool/technology/information management process for the goals that people want to reach based on the context. It's also about keeping the end-user in mind, and ensuring that those who are producing information have access to that information. I think I will have to keep my question in mind at all times, actually.

FLAP Power for the Basics: Illumination and Communication

2009-12-03T15:13:00.001-01:00

The FLAP Bag is a project that was initiated at PopTech, together with Portable Light and Timbuk2 (join the discussion on FLAP bags here) The FLAP is a messenger bag, designed by Timbuk2, which incorporates a removable flexible solar panel made by Portable Light. The solar panel can be left on the bag and charged on the go (i.e. while you walk around in the sun) or removed and laid out flat to absorb the sun. Connected to the solar panel is a battery that feeds into a small light, useful for walking/riding a bike at night, and a mobile phone charger.... continue reading...

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The real story involves anti-social entrepreneurs and anthropology.

2009-11-28T10:30:00.005-01:00

People often ask me 2 questions. How did I end up spending the 90s in El Salvador and how did I get into NGO work? I usually give the 140 character verbal version. But the turning point was 20 years ago this week. So here is the longer story. continue reading....

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Mobiles to teach real-world statistics?

2009-11-26T15:23:00.001-01:00

Saturday, was the last day of the 2-week Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media (YETAM) workshop with the youth. Each of the sub-groups had the task of prioritizing 2-3 areas that they wanted to focus on over the next 6 months and developing a basic plan. Continue reading....

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On Girls and ICTs
Putting Cumbana on the Map

Being a Girl in Cumbana

2009-11-23T14:25:00.004-01:00

Sometimes being a girl is no piece of cake. For the Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media (YETAM) workshop we hoped to have 50% girls participating, and we ended up with about 15 girls and 40 boys. The boys raised this on the 3^rd day of the workshop (through no prompting by the facilitators). "Why aren't there more girls here? And the girls who are here, they never talk, they just sit there.” “They don’t have the ambition or the drive to improve themselves so they don’t even come to workshops like this when they have the opportunity”. Continue reading....

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Putting Cumbana on the Map--with Ethics

2009-11-14T19:16:00.003-01:00

We've completed our first week of arts and media training with around 55 youth in Cumbana, a coastal community some 450 kms north of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. If you ever tried to Google Cumbana, you’d find information about a photographer with the same last name or links to tourist hotels at the nearby beaches in Maxixe or Inhambane, and not much else. We actually did this as part of our Tuesday session on Internet with the youth. Googling New York was another story. But why? Continue reading....

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Being a Girl in Cumbana
Is this map better than that map?

It's a light, it's a bag, it's a charger! It's FLAP!

2009-11-08T18:57:00.003-01:00

When I was at PopTech in October, I saw the solar FLAP (Flexible Light and Power) bag, a joint project of Portable Light, Timbuk2, and PopTech. It seemed like something that could help make mobiles in program work more feasible for staff, community volunteers, or community health workers. One of the main challenges we find in our work is lack of electricity, to charge phones among other uses. Continue reading....

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Inhambane: land of palm trees and cellular networks

2009-11-03T16:46:00.005-01:00

Landing in Inhambane, Mozambique, the first thing you see is the blue Vodacom sign: ‘Welcome to Inhambane – a land covered by palm trees and the best cellular network’. I don't usually believe ads and this time was no exception. But I have to say, it seems to be true. My sim card is actually on mCel, not Vodacom, but the coverage is still damn good. And the two cell phone companies are everywhere. I’m not sure which I saw more of – yellow Frelimo t-shirts (elections were last week), yellow mCel kiosks or blue Vodacom kiosks. Continue reading....

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Feet back on the ground: Mozambique

2009-10-31T17:00:00.004-01:00

I got into Maputo (capital of Mozambique) around 3 on Friday and stopped by the Plan Mozambique office to meet the staff on the way to my hotel. The office here is small. Plan's only been working in Mozambique since 2007 and in one province only so far. Maputo is absolutely gorgeous. It's calm, not at all crowded, and on the coast. Continue reading...

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Inhambane: land of palm trees and cellular networks

Pop!Tech: Oh!

2009-10-28T20:13:00.006-01:00

I’m on the train to NYC on the first leg of my journey to Mozambique, toting my new solar FLAP bag and a suitcase full of gadgets. I seem to be somewhere in the middle of nowhere, the rain's pouring down outside and I'm surrounded by red and gold leaves. The best thing about my insane day so far is that the orange juice I spilled on my keyboard this morning seems not to have done much damage…. But now I have a few hours to stop and reabsorb PopTech. Continue reading....

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"It's All Part of the ICT Jigsaw" - Plan Mozambique ICT4D workshops

2009-10-20T13:41:00.003-01:00

Plan Mozambique's team has been discussing ICTs in their work using the distance learning packet that my colleague Mika (at Plan Finland) and I put together with lots of support from Hannah Beardon. This is part of our ICT4D research and training initiative in 8 countries (Senegal, Togo, Mali, Cameroon, Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda) that will conclude near the end of the year. Continue reading....

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I saw the future of geo-visualization... after lunch

2009-10-20T01:21:00.005-01:00

This is the 'after-lunch' part of my last blog about the cool geo-visualization tools I had the chance to learn about at the Google Partnership Exploration Workshop. Continue reading....

I saw the future of geo-visualization.... before lunch

2009-10-20T00:31:00.003-01:00

Last week some 40 people from more than 20 different organizations with national and global humanitarian and relief missions attended a Google Partnership Exploration Workshop in Washington, DC, to share information in an interactive setting and explore how the organizations and Google geo & data visualization technologies can further each others' missions. Continue reading....

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Breaking it Down: Violence Against Children

2009-09-27T13:52:00.008-01:00

How do you break down a high level UN study and connect children and youth with the information so that they can use it for their own purposes, engage others and push for a change? Continue reading....

Girl Power and the CGI!

2009-09-18T22:46:00.005-01:00

Next week I’ll have the honor of (wo)manning the expo table for Plan at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Exchange [the networking event after the actual CGI meeting]. It's Plan's first year at the CGI, which is exciting for us as an organization. The project that we’ve committed to is a convergence of many of the things that Plan has been getting deeper and deeper into in the past few years – youth engagement, youth employment, participatory media, social media, ICTs, youth voice, youth-led advocacy, and last but not least, girl power. Continue reading....

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An example of youth-led community change in Mali

I and C, then T

2009-09-13T15:14:00.003-01:00

Last week some Plan USA staff got together at Plan’s Washington, DC office as part of our ongoing discussions on how Plan globally could better use ICTs and social media as enablers in our work and to improve program outcomes. We had the honor of some amazing minds to support us, including Josh Nesbit (@joshnesbit) from FrontlineSMS: Medic, Dave Isaak from SixBlue Data (@sixblue_data), Michael Downey from Indiana University (@downeym), and Wayan Vota from Inveneo (@wayan_vota). Continue reading...

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Development Education - a relevant term?

2009-08-07T01:21:00.007-01:00

I recently participated in some research that an organization is doing to update its Development Education strategy. One of the questions during the interview was whether the term ‘development education’ is relevant anymore, and for whom. It made me think about a comment I recently came across asking if people in ‘developing’ countries use the term ICT4D or just call it ‘ICT.’

Development Education is often used to describe different activities that development organizations do ‘in the North’ to educate donors, students, and/or the public in general about the realities of the “developing” world. It aims to help people better understand ‘good development’ and to get them to make personal choices that would contribute to ‘good development’ overseas (eg., voting, purchasing or consuming differently, supporting policies that offer certain benefits to the developing world, volunteering, ‘spreading the word’, etc.).

Development Education can be used to prime or soften people up for advocacy campaigns and concrete actions. It can be directed at large donors when organizations are attempting to get them to change policies or funding habits. It can be part of the school curriculum, created in a way that maintains a middle ground, but prompts students to think about issues and choices faced in development or the global context (see Choices for the 21st Century Curriculum). And some governments give grants out under the category of 'development education' when they are funding organizations to ‘educate’ people overseas about how friendly and generous the donor country and their policies and people are.

In most cases, I think the concept of Development Education is a good one. It helps people understand the broader picture, the structural causes of poverty, cultural relevance, why hand-outs are not the way to go, why local ownership is important, and why the way people do things ‘here’ isn’t necessarily the way people should do things ‘there’. It helps scratch under the surface of advocacy campaigns so that people better understand why they are signing something or clicking on that email to their senators. It can be a way of bringing examples of good practices and real situations to large donors to change their perspectives on what they donate to based on concrete experiences rather than hyphotheses and theories or the latest trends.

Development Education seems especially important in the US where people often give out of a charity mindset or guilt; where they are bombarded daily with pathetic images of starving children who can be fed for just 50 cents a day; and where stories of American heroes who go off to 'solve' problems for those living in other places get more airtime than stories of capable people in other countries resolving things on their own. It has a place with US young people who don’t have access to much global education in the classroom because standardized tests focus on the 4 basics. (As opposed to the UK, for example, where schools are mandated and funded to offer topics that provide global perspective on global issues). Yes, in the US there is very likely a place for something along the lines of 'Development Education'.

But can a global organization talk about 'Development Education' in a way that is relevant across all countries where it’s working? And if so, what would be the common term? What constitutes Development Education 'in the South' and is it even a relevant concept? Can development education be separated from civic engagement, advocacy and political processes? I have some thoughts around this, but haven't hit on one that convinces me enough.... I'm sure I could just google it, but what would be the fun in that?

@MambeNanje and company

2009-08-05T19:31:00.007-01:00

I wrote last week about Mambe Churchill Nanje and his work with Village Diary in Cameroon. But Village Diary is not Churchill’s whole story. The other part is his company Afrovisiongroup.com and the company he was keeping when we met up for a Malta and some Castels. Photo: Churchill and Steveslil.

AfroVisioN is Churchill’s IT firm, based out of Buea, Cameroon. AfroVisioN helps local businesses build their on-line presence, and aims to help Cameroon in general realize the potential of the web. “I was in the process of trying to get a nice paying job in IT, and someone told me: ‘Don’t get a job, create jobs instead!' so that’s what I set out to do. I wanted to show people in Cameroon that there is more online than email.”

AfroVisioN invests in research and development to cut down costs of technology to serve the local markets. They provide affordable websites and web solutions, building software packages and automated operations to facilitate management and efficiency.

Although he can’t be more than 24 years old, this is not Churchill’s first venture. In 2006, at age 20 he invested all his time and money in building up a portal to allow students to see their GCE scores online. He purchased the GCE scores from the GCE board and published them for free on a site called passgce.com. The site was promptly shut down by the GCE board. Churchill recognized that there are potential disadvantages to having the scores on the internet (an error in programming logic could show the wrong results or someone could hack into the system and change the results), but that these are easily overcome with standard security measures. He's sure the site was closed for other reasons. “Imagine building all your hopes on something and it gets shut down….”

Not one to give up, Churchill moved on to doing small IT projects that led him to his current business model at AfroVisioN. “Our market and its people don’t have huge financial backings, but they need technology in order to make their businesses more profitable,” so the business model builds on making a web presence affordable.

But Churchill’s goal doesn’t end there. “I kept wondering, why am I exporting software and my schoolmates and family are exporting cocoa… and not earning any money through their hard work.” So Churchill’s broader goal is to make a name for himself, to earn trust and credibility so that he can attract investment to help others to progress. In addition, he’s looking for ways that IT, especially internet, can be used to gain access to information to improve farms and local businesses so that they can earn more.

As we sipped our drinks and then rode in a crowded taxi from one side of town to the other, Churchill’s friends Steveslil and Peter also talked about their aspirations. Photo: Steveslil, Peter and Churchill.

Steveslil is an up and coming R&B singer – check out his website (powered by AfroVisioN) at http://www.steveslil.com/flashsite.swf. He was appointed CEO of CoreSouth Records in 2005 and put out his debut album “Play my Tambourine,” fostered by Churchill, who also directed 2 of Steveslil’s videos. Steveslil is now on the BEI (Bebum Entertainment Industry) label out of Washington DC, founded in 2002 by Cameroonian-American businessman Esapa Sebastien.

Peter (@foch4T) studied at university with Churchill and they currently call on each other when there is work to be done on websites or other IT projects. Peter’s dream is to start a tour company to bring people to Cameroon. “Cameroon is the center of the world. It’s the heart of Africa. Here you have every climate, every type of thing that can be found in Africa, but all in one place.” Peter wants to bring people to Cameroon to experience the country’s beauty and culture in the most real way possible, giving them custom made tours.

Some impressive guys, to say the least. And to me, it was most heartening that not one of them talked about wanting to leave Cameroon to try to succeed elsewhere, but rather building up their country’s own potential and their own people.

ICT4D Ideas from Plan Cameroon

2009-07-28T15:38:00.009-01:00

I had a chance to meet with Plan Cameroon's Program Technical Team today (including those that look at Monitoring and Evaluation, Health, Education, Sponsorship, Child Protection, Water and Sanitation, Gender and the overall Program Support Manager) to give a quick brief on the ICT4D research and training that Plan Finland is supporting with Plan offices in 8 countries in Africa (Mali, Senegal, Cameroon, Ghana, Togo, Mozambique, Kenya and Uganda).

We are working with Hannah Beardon, who wrote Plan's Mobiles for Development guide (available in both English and French) and building on that towards some more focused and concrete ideas for ICT use in these 8 countries. We'll share the research with staff during 2-day workshops to brainstorm and gather ideas on information and communications needs, as well as available tools that could be used or adapted to local situations.

The 2-day workshops are planned for Aug and Sept. Hannah, Mika (Plan Finland) and I are developing the methodology and will make a training DVD to send ahead of time to each country (apparently complete with our selves doing presentations!) since we don't have funding to do face-to-face training. We'll have a staff person in each country as the main facilitator, and 10-12 key staff, from management to frontline, will attend. Mika or I will beam in by skype to support if needed. We'll use the Frontline SMS demo video that Mika and crew did also, (see my earlier post about this from a few months ago), show how Nokia Data Gathering Software works, share the Common Craft Social Media videos, among other things. Hannah's methodology will also come in for thinking about how ICTs could enhance existing efforts.

The idea is to both learn about new tools as well as look at current programs and see if there are ways to use ICTs to improve impact, and how to begin tailoring them to the programs and local settings. We're also doing research on government policies and how Plan's work links there. I hope that we can also look at partnering with local developers and ICT4D innovators in each country....

The idea of ICT4D was a bit new to some of the Plan Cameroon staff and not at all new to others. One interesting idea they shared was using SMS in anti-malaria programs to periodically remind people to retreat their bednets. There was some concern about literacy rates if one relies on SMS, and interest in using voice response, but given the number of languages in Cameroon, voice could also be a bit of a challenge. I'll have to try to find out if/how that's overcome in other places. Another concern was 'scamming' and how to avoid that happening. But it seemed that the issue of scamming is not something that Plan alone would face, but something in general that is faced with mobile phones.

The program support manager was really keen on using mobiles for program monitoring as that is something that can always improve and be more efficient with ICT, he said, and wants to test some ideas. The ICT manager also said he wanted to write something up. The sponsorship manager suggested trying out some data collection or quicker communications tools for linking with community volunteers. And as mentioned earlier, child media and child protection are areas that can be greatly enhanced and supported via ICTs (help lines, SMS incident reporting, social media and mobile reporting).

After the 2-day workshop, we should have something really nice to go forward with.

Mambenanje and the Village Diary Project

2009-07-27T13:17:00.010-01:00

Before I left for Cameroon, I had started doing a little of my own research via blogs and Twitter to learn a bit more about ICT4D in the Cameroonian setting. I wanted to get a feel for what the situation was so I'd be more in tune and also to see if there were any potential partners or people on the ground who I could learn from or link with Plan Cameroon. In the end, I was able to meet with Mambe Churchill Nanje the founder of http://www.afrovisiongroup.com/ and a partner on http://www.villagediary.org/, a project of the LINK-UP development group. Photo: Mambe Churchill Nanje of AfroVisioNgroup.

Since I'm coming from a non-profit and child rights background (at Plan International), and since we are looking into ICT4D as an enabler and facilitator for existing program work, and since much of our work centers on HIV/AIDS, memory books, birth registration, participation and child protection, I especially like the idea behind village diaries. This is some really interesting stuff on several fronts. The mission of the Village Diary project (summarizing from their website here) is "to enhance access to legal, social and health services for orphans, vulnerable children and widows experiencing different forms of abuses. It also serves as a platform to track the cultural and historical background of families and villages."

By supporting the establishment of marriage licenses, birth certificates and last wills and testaments and providing secure access to digital backups of these documents to authorized case workers, Village Diary aims to alleviate the problems that arise after the death of a leading family member. Village Diary also collects stories by women and children to provide a forum for making change and at the same time offers a window into community life.

Village Diary does this by operating an online database that documents and shares cases of abuse of women and children for education, research and advocacy purposes, establishing institutional partnerships to enhance legal, social and health services and facilitate access of such services to orphans and women, strengthening existing support networks for women in the community, and recording cultural, environmental and historical changes of the people and villages involved in the project.

So on top of being involved in some very cool projects, Churchill is also a very cool guy and it was great to have the chance to hang out with him and a few friends on Saturday in Yaounde. Thanks, Twitter (and ourman, billzimmerman, and downeym!). I'm looking forward to seeing where this guy is in a few years, as he has some fantastic ideas for IT in Cameroon.

Powerful stuff

2009-07-25T22:00:00.002-01:00

Mid week the first week of the community youth training, the youth chose what they wanted to do: arts or video/photos, and they split into groups for more focused training. The media group further split into 6 small groups of 4-5 people (one for each set of equipment) to then develop their interviews and ideas for their short films, based on the list of topics that had been created earlier by the youth and community members. The arts group chose topics from the list also to develop out. Photo: Some of the arts group.

The first Saturday (after 4 days of theory and practice) we did a community field visit to get a better sense of what to film and to make appointments with resource people for interviews. The arts groups did rough sketches of the things they wanted to draw. On Sunday the groups started filming and working more closely on their chosen drawings. We filmed for about 3 days in small groups, and by the 2nd day had some groups stay back to learn editing, then switching and going to film in the afternoons while another group stayed back to edit. The arts group worked in watercolor and gauche to finalize their works. By the end of the week we had 15 films and about 12 really nice drawings! Photo: Filming on Birth Registration

The films that we finished included:
· Meeting Places/Community Resources
· Alcohol Abuse
· A quick trip around the rural areas
· Forest resources
· Universal Birth Registration (and issue of not declaring births)
· History of Mva’a
· Installation of the church in Mva’a
· Water
· How mud houses are constructed
· The market
· Raising pigs
· The long walk to school
· Relationships between parents and children
· Agriculture

The drawings were really powerful, touching on themes that went deeper than the films, due to the nature of the two media. Drawing topics included Alcohol Abuse, A family losing their home to high winds/storms, Church, Long walk to school, Education, Hunting, Distance to health centers, People working on Sundays instead of attending church, Water, People not using latrines, Dangers of transport means, Recreation, Well/water sources, and Child abuse/Child labor

We closed out with a community film showing where the Mayor and community members and parents were invited to see the work of the youth. The youth, teachers and community members worked on an action plan to determine how they will follow up via concrete activities in the coming 6 months. Plan Cameroon is hoping to expand the program to additional communities, so it was important that the Mayor’s office attended as maybe they would have funds to support project expansion….

Hands on, hands on, hands on

2009-07-24T12:23:00.000-01:00

We started the YETAM training with the youth on Tuesday morning, after an official launch. The mayor of Okola attended as well as some of the Plan staff from the Country Office in Yaounde.

Since the youth had already had training via Plan and IRONDEL on the Rights of the Child, and some had worked with Plan’s Kids Waves radio show, they were really well equipped for moving onto video and arts work. They started with their community map where they had detailed, along with the community organization members, everything in their community.

The youth presented the map and everyone worked in groups to organize and flesh out the information from the map in 4 categories: community history, community description, community resources, and the situation of child rights and protection. Photo: youth presenting the map.

They wrote their ideas on note cards which were posted on flipcharts and then sorted to come up with final categories. These formed the basis for all the upcoming work. Photos: flipcharts with the different topics for filming and arts work.

After the map work, we went into introductions to the different things that we'd be doing: photography, film and drawing/painting. We had a bit of a struggle within the team getting facilitators to move from too much theory onto practical work. They kept going back to presentations and lots of long flipcharts and technical descriptions. Photo: The arts group re-drew a nicer version of the community map later in the week.

We realized later in the week that we didn’t all have the same understanding of the project methodology. Some thought that we were doing 1 week of theory, and 1 week of practice, and then afterwards would start making some videos, when in reality the idea is that we would not focus too much on theory because the media equipment is very simple to use, and we can use practical, hands-on exercises to build the technical skills.

The idea is to quickly get hands on during the first week, and then start making a first round of arts and videos near the end of the first week, continuing through the second week, and then getting into editing by the middle of the 2nd week. In the evenings we’d look at the footage as a whole group, and participants would talk about what looked good, what didn’t and how to improve. Once that got cleared up things moved on splendidly. Photo: Practice and group reflection is the best teacher.

People can make their own media

2009-07-11T10:30:00.009-01:00

The Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media project (YETAM) kicked off on Wednesday with a press event, and then a training of trainers until Friday. At the press launch, I had to give an overview of social media and the YETAM project. The focus was on how social media can serve as a tool for community development, social change and augmenting participation, because it is based on some of the same principles and approaches as good community development work: partnership, ownership, collaboration, sharing, openness, communication, voice, power sharing, accountability, transparency, and democratic processes. I was bit afraid to use any examples of human rights/election monitoring or mention how social media is forcing the media business to change and impacting on social ‘revolutions’, not knowing if it could be threatening to the government and media attending, so it seemed better not to bring it up! Photo: YETAM launch announcement hanging in the lobby at Plan Cameroon.

For me the most interesting part of the 3-day workshop was listening to the participants debate about whether arts/media are tools or products. People said that they really learned something from the debate, that it really sparked their thinking about what is art and what is media and what both are for. They concluded (as I had hoped) that arts and media can be tools that help youth (in our case) research and deepen their understanding of themselves and their communities during the creation process. Yet arts and media are also products that are 'consumed' afterwards, catalyzing more debate and dialogue (sometimes via more arts and media) and if successful, eventually lead to some kind of positive social change. And the cycle goes around and around. Photo: Press event for the closing of the training of trainers.

The idea of tool vs product can be a struggle sometimes when we start work on YETAM and the concept of participatory video or social media for social change and working with rural communities. Sometimes people think that we want fancy commercials or television spots or 30 minute professional documentaries or fiction films, or they don’t believe children/youth will have the capacity to make their own videos or edit their own films, or that people from rural communities can learn to use the equipment. It can be hard to explain that we don’t need to write long scripts and set up scenes with lights and big media teams with large expensive cameras, and that if we bring the technology down to simple language and hand over the camera, it’s very doable. We don’t need a week of theory before we allow the kids to touch the cameras or to paint something, that the media and the art are the means for having the discussions and theorizing about the issues as well as the end for continuing on with the discussions. And we don’t need to disrupt the community and or have 'outsiders' doing it for the media or art to matter. Local people can make their own media and it can be even more meaningful that way. Photo: Plan and partner staff working on the agenda for the youth training that starts on Monday.

Mobiles Increase Reach at Childline Kenya

2009-07-05T11:37:00.007-01:00

Childline Kenya is about child protection. “We run at 24 hour children’s helpline which is both an emergency response service for abused children who need someone to help and an information line where children who have difficulties or questions that are bothering them can call us, we can talk to them, have a chat, do counseling on line, deal with abuse.” Irene Nyamu is the Deputy Director of Childline Kenya. She also worked at Plan for about 3 years before moving to her new post. Photo: Irene during a community visit in Kwale.

At Childline, Irene is constantly looking at new issues and situations because the field of child rights and child protection is vast. Childine works with everything from adoption issues to drug addiction to child abuse within the family and juvenile justice. “I wasn’t too versed in legislation, laws that relate to children and I’ve had to learn so much,” she says.

Before Childline, there was a government line, but it wasn’t a 24-hour line and it wasn’t free. If a child wanted help they had to have money to call. “What we’ve done as Childline is try very much to leverage support from the government’s Dept. of Children’s services.” For the last 3 years children have known that they can call to get the service. But Childline has involved government of Kenya along the way. “We’ve helped build government capacity and have proven that it’s possible to have a child helpline without a heavy cost. We’ve demonstrated its usefulness.”

When Childline first started, they had a fixed line with a free call number and got around 600 calls per month. “Since we’ve moved to mobiles, we get about 20,000 calls per month and we are still not meeting the needs of the population.” Childline Kenya’s has 9 counselors during the day and about 6 at night. To optimally operate, Irene estimates needing around 15 during day and 10 at night or more. “When we were on a landline, we had a long phone number that was difficult to remember, and most people don’t have access to fixed line. So now with the 116 short code, it’s quite easy to remember and very accessible on mobile."

As for concerns that children cannot access a phone to report in, people should not assume children do not have access to phones. Childline confronted this and has proven that if the information is out there, children will find someone that is willing to help them make a call. “Many children now call us even without a fixed line. They have a teacher, an auntie, a big sister who will allow them to borrow the phone. I’ve seen that almost everybody in the community has a SIM card. They do not have a handset, but when they need to make a call they just borrow a handset for a few minutes and somehow they do it. We can’t make the argument that children can’t use technology. There are innovative ways of using the technology so let’s put the technology out there and stop assuming that people can’t access it.”

What about credit? This is a very important issue. “If organizations or institutions want to use SMS, then there is an investment cost unless you are able to acquire a short code.

Childline tracks how many people have dialed in and how many calls they actually receive, and they currently receive many more calls than they are able to manage. Irene thinks that one way of extending the service out to more children might be an increased use of SMS, which is extremely common and accessible in Kenya. “To meet the needs of our population, I think this FrontlineSMS training was really useful. We can now go in to explore how to use SMS for child helpline work in order to offer more alternatives to children. If you can’t call, can you SMS? And how do those numbers compare?” Photo: Learning to set up Frontline SMS for mobile data gathering, SMS outreach and auto-responses.

“I love working at Childline because every new day is different. Every new call that comes in, you can anticipate a new challenge.” One way to meet some of these challenges is via new technologies such as mobile outreach and mobile data gathering.

ICT4D Kenya: "ICT and Community Development Is Real"

2009-07-05T11:07:00.009-01:00

Jonathan Mativo, whom I first met in Kenya in December at our Social Media for Social Change workshop was one of our core FrontlineSMS trainers last month. In January, Mativo left Plan to found his own organization called ICT4D Kenya which operates in the Kilifi and Machakos districts in the Southern Coast of Kenya. He was motivated to move beyond the commercial ICT sector to ICT4 community development by his 4 years of work at Plan. “Previously I didn’t have any background on ICT4D. I only looked at ICT from the operational point of view but Plan really inspired me to work with children to see them realize their full potential.” ICT4D Kenya envisions young children confident in participatory media, children that see ICTs as enablers for development rather than just tools to perform work. “We also foresee a changed community – people who are socially together.”
Photo: Mativo is the founder of ICT4D.

ICT4D Kenya targets communities and schools, with the aim of building the capacity of youth, men and women through community ICT resource centers to introduce them to new ways of learning. ICT4D Kenya is also experimenting with interactive learning. "Normally students learn by rote. They basically take notes extracted from text books.” In their free time children expected to study, but “they are just revising materials from textbooks that have been copied into their notebooks…. They are hardly concentrating on what they are doing.” Mativo wants to introduce interactive learning materials in schools so children will be more attentive in class. He’s also planning some school linking projects where students in different districts can communicate to share culture and motive each other to improve school performance. Photo: Wajuhi and Mativo at Plan's training on mobile data gathering in Kwale, Kenya

We're not talking old, slow computers though. “One thing about Africa is that we are used to free things. That’s why we are congesting our country with refurbished things.” Mativo believes that to take ICT ahead in Africa, schools need access to the technology that they would get in the real market. “Often we get old computers, slow, hard to maintain and without proper e-waste solutions. We should be looking at affordable technology and ways to get ICTs to Africa rather than just dumping refurbished equipment.” So what about refurbished/donated phones? “Small gadgets are a different story. If you look at the features of a mobile, as long as it can send an SMS, it’s fine. SMS is one thing we are really looking at for social change.”

Mativo has worked with one school to install FrontlineSMS (http://www.frontlinesms.com/) in order to communicate with parents. This year there was a teachers strike. Most schools sent their children home. But this school got all the parent/caretaker contact information. “Within 2 days we had all the mobile numbers.” They keyed them into FrontlineSMS and the head teacher used the software to send an SMS to all the parents and asked if they should send the children home or not. “We got 237 out of around 400 messages back from parents on the first day saying ‘don’t send our children home’ and the rest said to send them home.’” So the head teacher kept the children at school, and when a parent questioned the decision at a parents’ meeting later in the year, he used the SMS he had saved to explain the reasons.

Now the school is using the software for all kinds of things. On annual Prize Day instead of the normal low turn-out, they had 75% turnout for the first time this year. “Parents said you communicated with us in due time by SMS and kept communicating with us over time to remind us.” Normally students are given newsletters during holiday times and parents don’t remember key dates when they finally roll around.

Mativo sees his role as demystifying ICTs and finding the best way possible to ensure people understand ICTs from a non technical point of view. “When I have to explain what a computer is, I always refer it as ‘that box there’ so that people don’t look at it as too delicate. In most cases I open the CPU for people to understand that it’s just an empty box that they shouldn’t be too afraid of.” Mativo says that many people believe it’s not possible to change their communities’ way of thinking, especially people who are working in commercial ICTs. "They need to internalize what community development is all about and that ICT can be downgraded to reach out to people in communities regardless of their skills, their background and their exposure. ICT and community development is real.”

Photo: Simplifying ICTs for people.

What are you doing?

2009-07-04T14:53:00.004-01:00

Ha, my daughter knows me better than anyone.

Modernizing Birth Registration with Mobile Technology

2009-06-28T14:13:00.007-01:00

As part of our mobiles for outreach and data gathering training last week, we went out to a community about 20 minutes away from the hotel today to hear Silla, the district civil registrar, talk about a project that Plan Kenya is supporting that aims to modernize the birth registration process. Plan Kenya is looking incorporating mobile data gathering and outreach into the project, so it was a good opportunity to test data gathering. We tested the Nokia Data Gathering Software using a form that the team had created earlier in the week based on the paper forms that the District Registrars office uses. It all worked just fine. Photo: Silas from Kwale District, and Petri, Director of the Nokia Research Center in Manaus, Brazil.

Silla is really an expert on birth registration and anything that has to do with it. He can quote you just about any law related to the subject in great detail. Currently, for registering births, people have to go to the sub-registrar/assistant chief’s office which can be quite far. Once there, sometimes there are not enough actual registration forms and they just give the registration information to someone who writes it in a school notebook. Later when they have more forms, the information is transposed to the official form, and sent along for processing. It can take awhile for processing, and people have to return to the sub-registrar’s office personally if they want to find out if it’s ready. The district is quite large, so they may have to travel up to 100 kms sometimes to go into check, and the certificate may not even be ready yet. Photo: Silla schools us on civil registration and explains why the district wants to modernize the process.

I talked to Ali M and Ali K (‘the Ali’s’ as we call them, since they are pretty much inseparable) who both work with Community Based Organizations (CBOs) that are participating in the birth registration project. (They were both at the video training with me last month here also). They explained some of the main reasons that not having a birth certificate makes life difficult:

If children don’t have birth certificates, they cannot get passports obviously, but that is the least of the issues. They cannot attend secondary school without one, nor can they benefit from any type of social service or insurance. Kwale district has a very high incidence of child marriages, yet if there is no birth certificate there is no way to prove in court that a girl is too young to be married. Other kinds of abuse also cannot be proved as child abuse. Without proper registration, the district does not get its fair share of the national budget because it’s not clear how many people are actually there. Photo: Ali K and Ali M - real leaders and innovators in community development.

As the Ali’s explained, if Kwale District is successful in incorporating SMS’s, mobile data gathering, and mobile outreach into the birth registration process, not only will they be the first district in Kenya to do it, but Kwale will be the first to even computerize the birth registration process. A couple ways they want to use mobiles are to provide a phone number that people could SMS their registration number to and find out if their certificates are ready or not, thus avoiding a long trip into the district office for nothing. They are also thinking of shifting the actual data gathering from hand written (carbon paper with several copies) to mobile data gathering and computerized data storage. In any case, a full project is being developed and piloted that will automate much of the current time consuming processes.

I remember when I lived in El Salvador and the municipality changed from hand written logs to computers. You used to have to go really early in the morning and wait in a huge line to get a number. Then you waited again till they called your number, went up and gave someone your information. That person would give your information to someone else who would look up the name/date, etc. and after an hour or 2, they’d call you and give you a little piece of paper with your record number on it. From there you would go wait in the cashier line to pay a fee for the copy of the certificate. Then you would go to another line at another window and give that number to someone else and sit down again for another few hours while that person would go into the archives books (bound books of hundreds of records) and find your certificate for you (birth, death, marriage, etc.). They’d make a copy and then it had to go to an official somewhere to authorize the copy before they’d give it to you. So basically you had to get there around 7 a.m. if you wanted to get it the same day, and it was a whole day affair.

Around 2000, they got a computer system in and modernized the process. I went in to get a copy of a document, and I clearly remember the security guard laughing at me because I looked at the certificate twice in shock when I paid my fee and was handed the actual certificate after about 30 minutes.

If the Ali’s and the Kwale District are able to get the equipment and set the project up, it could mean huge time savings for people and translate into greatly increased numbers of parents getting birth certificates for their children. The Ali’s have already taken the idea to a national level meeting and have other districts interested in their idea. Hopefully Kwale pulls it off and the model can be nationalized once any kinks are worked out! Photo: Mwenda and Ali, Kwale district CBO members.

SMS in Program Outreach

2009-06-26T10:42:00.015-01:00

Building on the last post, I wanted to share also some of the discussion at last week's Kenya workshop about incorporating mobiles into our work. People in general were pretty excited. Even those people who were skeptical seemed to see mobiles as tools that could improve work we are already doing if well incorporated and done from ‘the bottom up’ in sustainable ways, based on program information and communication needs. Some great discussions came up and participants shared some potential solutions and good practices.

Issue: Access

We are working with children. How many children have phones? How do we get information from children? We work with communities who are the “poorest of the poor” – so how do we get info from them using FLSMS – do we expect them to have phones? Or people may have phones but no credit? How do you handle such circumstances?

Use a short code if you can get one

Credit is a very important issue. If organizations or institutions want to use SMS, then there is an investment cost unless you can acquire a short code. If you have a short code you deposit money to make this free or much lower cost for people.

Don't assume that children don't have access to mobiles

We should not assume children do not have access to phones. If the information is out there, children will find someone that is willing to help them make a call or text. Many children now call us (at the Child Help Line) even without a fixed line. They have a teacher, an auntie, a big sister who will allow them to borrow the phone. I’ve seen that almost everybody in the community has a SIM card. They do not have a handset, but when they need to make a call they borrow the handset for a few minutes and somehow they do it. We can’t make the argument that children can’t use technology. There are innovative ways of using the technology so let’s put the technology out there and stop assuming that people can’t access it. The issue is how can we make the technology reach as many as possible?

Give out SIM cards with a few minutes on them to protect privacy and confidentiality

We had a similar situation with a reproductive health project that was offering out information that most girls wanted to remain confidential. What we did was gave out 10 bo SIM cards. We passed them out in little boxes. Many of the girls had phones but wanted to send in anonymous questions so they used the SIM cards to send the SMS in, and then removed the card from the phone, put it in their pockets, and replaced their original SIM. It only costs 1 shilling via Orange. We found that normally the SMS conversation lasts for around 6 shillings. They can maintain anonymity this way. It’s cheap and they can just keep these SIMs in their pockets.

Issue: If mobiles begin to replace face-to-face contact and relationships with partner communities.

Using Frontline SMS for community outreach and communications has many advantages, particularly in terms of the information that we constantly need to gather. However, we should be careful though that it doesn’t substitute field visits. If people get used to getting information quickly they are likely to avoid going out and getting in touch with communities to see what is happening. If you just sit and wait for an SMS you will lose this face-to-face contact with the community.

Mobiles can be a tool, but must be integrated with other communication means

This point reminds us that we should not totally substitute it but use it as an additional tool in the toolbox to improve, cut costs, reduce, etc.

Issue: A text does not give enough space for full and clear information in health or other cases

We talked about using Frontline SMS for radio. In our participatory youth media programs, children bring out issues in video, in radio, etc. We are not always able to respond immediately to their concerns and issues. FLSMS could be a way to respond to these issues. Are there examples of how to pass on this type of technical information? If I’m a midwife and am too far from hospital, I need very clear information. How could this be done with SMS via an auto reply and only a short amount of text?

Use SMS to bring face to face help more quickly and to track/record incidents

SMS isn't a solution for everything, but I know of an example of how that can work. There is another program called Ushahidi that is about crisis mapping. It’s a digitized map. Sometimes when a situation becomes extreme people are asked to share their locations using GPS and then you can send local people to these places on bicycles or through other means to help. This allows the professional help to arrive more quickly. Maybe SMS can’t solve it but it can bring help more quickly.

Use SMS as a supplement, not a replacement for human contact and long-term work

In the case of trying to change harmful practices and traditions, we need time and eye contact. If we are working with trying to make cultural changes, such as in the case of infanticide or something, you can’t just send a text that says “this is a bad practice”. You need to come close to people. I believe FLSMS can offer a secondary way or a supplement to a given community meeting, to strengthen a rapport with the community, but it's not a replacement for our long term work and ongoing relationships with people.

In Kenya, Brainstorming on Mobiles

2009-06-26T01:31:00.005-01:00

I spent last week in Kwale, Kenya in the company of several colleagues learning about and discussing the use of mobiles in community development, both for outreach and communications and for mobile data gathering. There was a variety of people -- from frontline staff to members of Community Based Organizations (CBO) in Kwale, to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) staff from Plan Kenya’s districts and central offices and Plan’s West Africa Regional office, to IT staff, to youth and those working with youth media, to partner organizations working on child help lines and social media outreach.

Photo: Anthony from Plan along with Mativo, a former Plan colleague, trained us on FLSMS

We looked closely at Frontline SMS (FLSMS) and Nokia’s new Data Gathering Software (NDGS) and brainstormed on ways that this type of tool might support the work that people are already doing. Really an interesting week!

In addition to the more common ideas of using mobiles for health campaigns, disaster/crisis situations and general communications and monitoring, people mentioned:

For youth media programs:

-Organizing weekly radio contests via Frontline SMS and allowing many more youth to participate in the radio program that way. Now for contests, they have to write a letter with their answer and bring it to radio station by foot. Using SMS many more could participate, increasing listeners and engagement.

-Assessing the radio show right after the recording. The youth and children could go in the audience and gather the data they normally do by hand using mobile data gathering software, thus easing the processing time and analysis of the information.

-Monitoring progress and changes made in relation to the show at a broader level -- the participating youth could use mobile data gathering to monitor change related to the issues they are targeting in the radio shows and to see if youth organization and awareness building is impacting on the community over time.

Photo: people got really excited when their first forms appeared on their phones to be filled in!

For Child/Human Rights work and Global Child Rights Campaigns:

-Assessing the knowledge/awareness of the communities about rights issues and/or our global campaigns

-Receiving reports and sharing information about violations of rights (gathering info on whether children are being registered at birth, the incidence of school violence, girl’s or women’s rights violations, cases of child abuse) and offer short information on where to go for help.

-Monitoring child abuse cases, e.g. community members could text in key words such as ABUSE or MARRIAGE to report and track child abuse cases and early marriages happening in the community:

Birth Registration (UBR) implementation

-Tracking birth registration certificates and sharing information on the steps of the registration process. With auto SMS replies we could enhance information accessibility 24/7. We could provide instant feedback to people on the status of their birth registration. It would be a very quick way of sending information to many.

-Using mobile data gathering software, the birth registration process could be made paperless and computerized, thus saving time and effort for the population and increasing the number of children who are registered at birth.

Photo: Jackson and 3 other colleagues from Brazil trained us on the NDGS.

Monitor services

-Running a mobile survey or a rapid assessment to find out whether a service like Childline is reaching people and whether the service is known and being utilized in the field.

Communicating among Plan staff, CBOs, Communities

-Passing along information such as training dates, schedules, meetings, etc., to avoid making a trip out to the community to get information

-Surveying on health, school attendance, and school enrollment through a network of teachers

Communities communicating amongst themselves

-Communities have a lot of information they want to share among themselves, among the Community Health Workers (CHWs), with the other communities and other leaders – they could do this with FLSMS.

Managing Meetings and Decisions

-Inviting participants, confirming attendance, updating on the absentees when you’ve reached a decision they could be contacted this way. You could even involve those who are absent in voting by SMS if you don’t have quorum; eg., text in 1 for this candidate, 2 for this other one, or vote yes/no on something.

Photo: SMS was seen as a great way for communities and CBOs to communicate and organize.

Chickens and Eggs and ICTs

2009-06-01T18:35:00.006-01:00

We've been thinking and discussing the best way to follow up on the Social Media for Social Change workshop that we had in December in Kenya. Ideas have been going back and forth about the best way to really find out what the Information and Communication needs are in the countries where we are working, and then how to support the different offices and staff to find the best and most appropriate Technology solutions.

We ended up with a chicken and egg situation in a way.... if ICT4D is not your top priority, and you don't spend your life trying to figure out what is happening with ICT4D, you may not know what all is out there. (Ha, even if you do spend your life doing it, you don't know what all is out there). So it can be hard to imagine tools and solutions if you've not seen them in action, used them yourself, or heard about how others are using them. At the same time, each local situation is different, so one size doesn't fit all, so in order to find a tool or a solution, the situation analysis must come from those who would use that 'solution.' So what do you do first -- learn about different tools and potential solutions so that the lightbulb goes off on ways to incorporate/adapt the existing tools to your needs, or discuss your 'needs' and design something that works -- sometimes re-inventing the wheel. We thought that the best way we could manage the situation was to try to do both at once.

What we want to do is to activate our knowledge and study more about the concrete information and communications needs at the community level as well as in Plan's program work that could be supported by ICTs. So we are hoping that we can produce a document which offers specific recommendations about utilizing ICTs in our work in the participating countries in Africa. And we then hope that we can identify areas to be developed further including successful initiatives currently being implemented by Plan itself and also those areas where we can build on existing synergy with governmental strategies. We are also hoping to better understand the capacity building needs among Plan and its partners.

It should be interesting research/training and hopefully will take us one step further towards incorporating appropriate technology to improve our communications and management of information so that we can have greater impact in our existing programs or even develop new programs that we didn't think were possible before....

FLSMS Tutorial Videos - Yippee!!!!

2009-05-17T13:28:00.004-01:00

Yippee!!! Mika and his colleague Ville at Plan Finland have been working on a tutorial video for using Frontline SMS since our Social Media for Social Change (SM4SC) workshop in December. They just posted it and it's really helpful to better understand how mobile data gathering works in general.

http://frontlinesms.ning.com/video/video/show?id=2052630%3AVideo%3A11014

We'll be having a workshop coming up in June in Kenya to see how to use Nokia's Mobile Data Gathering Software, so soon I hope I'll have a good understanding of how this whoe thing works so that we can train others to use it.

For YETAM we are looking at how we can use mobile data gathering software to do follow up monitoring in the communities following the YETAM workshops. The idea is that during the arts and media workshops, the kids are discussing issues most important to them. Then they make videos, photos, arts, etc. to investigate the issues, and bring them out, and to generate dialogue in their communities on the issues in order to try to bring about positive change by engaging peers, community at large, decision makers, and Plan (in case Plan hasn't been aware of the particular issues the youth are looking at). But how are we monitoring afterwards to see what is happening at the individual youth level, and at other levels? How are the youth able to measure their impact on the issues they've chosen?

So we are planning to work with them to develop mobile surveys related to the changes they hope to create in the communities, and then they could monitor their progress on the issues through the surveys. They would also make videos/photos, etc. to show their progress, but in addition now they would have some data as well to help them shape their approach and measure their impact.

Sounds cool to me!

Jetlagged

2009-05-09T15:01:00.006-01:00

Ali K, Ali M, Rama, Wajuhi and I went to a second hotel to work for the last 3 days on editing final versions and translating from local languages (Digo, Duruma) into Swahili. We didn't have enough time to get them into English so I have to follow up on that from home. We worked from 9 a.m. till sometimes 2 a.m. and eventually finished 9 short videos on the themes of:

Coconut as an economic activity
Disability and traditions part 1 and 2
Overcoming disability to succeed
Traditional healer
Poor performance in school
Amina's Story
Women's group
Tuff Gong Town Cleaners

My favorite surreal night was sitting in a lounge area near the hotel bar with our laptops and headphones, etc. Outside near the pool was a tourist show of Maasai comedians, leading into Maasai singing/dancing. Amazing music, but not sure how I felt about the location of it -- not quite the same as it might have been in situ. Following that, they put on 80s German techno music. When that was over, we watched Wrestlemania's 25th anniversary in the background until around 2, slapping mosquitoes and yawning while Ali M and Ali K transcribed videos. Ali K asked me if it was real.

The flights home were uneventful but long.... and I'm so jetlagged! I was supposed to go to a capoeira event Friday night and then all day Saturday but forget it! Am hanging out with the kids and getting caught up on housework instead!

Getting near the end!

2009-05-04T04:49:00.004-01:00

We ended up taking a nice break Saturday afternoon to go to the beach. Really nice. Took tons of photos. Ended up trading acrobatic tricks with the guys so that was fun – everyone showing different moves and people trying it out. I only had like 2 things I could do – this one capoeira move – queda de rins and a headstand where you push up into a handstand -- but it was fun showing them how to do it. I think we all needed a break.

Anthony and some of the guys stayed up till like 4 a.m. getting rough cuts of 12 videos done since that was the goal for the week. I stayed up sorting photos, but not till 4!

Sunday we had a light morning. We did the evaluation by asking what was the most significant change they had experienced at the personal level during the workshop, and what change did they want to see in the community. This led into a selection of the issues that the kids want to address in the community going forward. What really came out was poor performance in school – especially for girls, early marriages/early pregnancies, disabilities/the community attitude towards those people with special needs (the community still practices exposure and infanticide if children are born with any type of disability), and youth participation/youth action to make these changes in the community. They will work on their action plan this coming week including how they will use these and other videos they will make, along with any skills they’ve learned this week to bring about some changes in the community in those areas.

Summary of some expressions during the evaluation:

“I’ve learned that change comes from within and not from outside.” Community Chairman

“I would like to work on the issue of disability because the community needs to know that every child has a right to life and disability is not inability.” Ali

“Now I’m viewing arts and media in a very different perspective – as a vital tool in sharing and disseminating ideas/issues thereby transforming the lives of people around the world” Ali K

“The workshop has changed my attitude so I feel that I can do something better for my community.” Vincent

“I’ll make a change of early pregnancy in the community and I will stay with all girls and discuss the way girls get pregnant when they are at school and how they get it easily.” Violet

“Before I joined the workshop I didn’t have an ambition, but after I joined I was taught how to use camera, to edit, to interview people and now my ambition is to become a journalist.” Samira
“I discovered my responsibilities as a youth and a technique that I can use to convince people in the community towards positive attitudes. As a youthI will make sure that the young generation is given a chance to participate in the community.” Dickson

“I would like to work on the issue of early pregnancies. It really touches my heart as it makes most of the girls in my community not fully acquire the right to education.” Chimoche

“I have come to know how to sort out problems from the community through friendly negotiation and I have developed empathy to some things.” Bomaz

“It has helped me to look at things from a broader perspective and I am in a better position to reflect on the different situations that I come across and make necessary adjustments… I would like to use of the skills I have acquired to help the community reflect on their situation so that it changes for the better.” Rama

“I’ve been introduced to the method of looking at things/issues at different levels hence identifying the consequences and impact they may have in the community.” Zainab (teacher)

We all got on the bus around 2.30 to drive everyone back to their communities, including the 2-3 kids who lived in other communities. The door fell off the bus last night as we were coming back from the beach, so the bus was really breezy. We drove around through really lush green areas where the national park and elephant sanctuary is first (and saw a herd of 4 elephants!) and then through a very arid place, and then back to a different hotel right on the beach where Wajuhi, Ali K and Ali M, and Rama and I will put the finishing touches on the videos, do the transcriptions and translations, and wrap it all up before we go home on Wednesday. There was Arabic music playing in the bus and the guys got going singing all these songs in Swahili on top of it. Maybe some of it will be nice for background music on the videos?

We got to our hotel around 6.30. It’s really nice – gorgeous floors and wood staircases, white washed, beautiful gardens, right on the beach. Since it’s low season Plan Kenya gets a good discount price. But I guess it’s geared to the older tourist. They were having bingo at 9.15 last night! I checked out the beach this morning and it’s not that great of a beach because it’s not flat and there is a lot of seaweed washing up, but nice for a solitary walk in the early morning.

Into the Groove Now

2009-05-02T07:52:00.006-01:00

The kids are doing such an awesome job with the cameras – taking great shots. And the film quality from the little cameras is so nice – it really picks up the light well and you can even film inside a hut. (Just wish there wasn’t this glitch with having to convert all the Flip films before using with Adobe….)

We have stories in production by now on several topics – change of attitude towards religion, use of coconuts and their byproducts, the local dispensary (clinic), early marriage, games children play, the Kaya ceremony and traditional dances, poor performance in school, water, economic activities, child pregnancies, town cleaners, and disability from the angle of tradition and from the angle of a disabled man who’s gotten ahead in life. You can hear the kids analyzing, looking at things in a broader way, thinking through their stories and how they will show different angles of the situation/issue/story. It’s so cool to see them building up those analysis and communications skills.

We’ve been trying to do both filming and editing, splitting into groups to make the most of the equipment and space, transportation, etc., and it’s been flowing really nicely! The power outages have been a small issue but we’ve got great laptop batteries – extra batteries for each laptop, which means we can work without power for up to 6-8 hours on each laptop. So power is not such a problem with editing if we do it in small groups. Yesterday the water went off too, and we got a little nervous that the training center staff would go home for the weekend and leave us without water, but it came back on again around 9. Relief!

As for internet access, there is this amazing little modem that you can get for like $40 and you just buy minutes for it like you would for a mobile phone. Connect it up to your computer and run internet off the 3G network. I’m wondering why I don’t have one! And if it’s possible to get one that works in multiple countries with local sim cards. I’m sure I should already know this, but I don’t so will investigate…..

We’ll finish up filming and editing at least the rough cuts today. Tomorrow we’ll do the follow up planning with the youth and the evaluation. They will go home and I’ll stay here till Wednesday night with 3 of the older community members/youth to make the final edits and do the transcriptions and translation, as well as ensure all the photos are captioned and everything is organized. Lots to do still, but we are getting near to the end and we’re on track. It’s cool to see how much discussion goes on when they kids are editing about what to put in, what to take out, what makes the story and what angle. Really feel that it’s important that they do the process from beginning to end. We can polish their videos after if necessary, but it’s important that they put them together from their own point of view.

Burani!

2009-04-29T18:27:00.005-01:00

Today we actually made it out to the community. Yay! The kids went around and did several interviews and filmed background shots. They covered the topics of disabilities and traditional beliefs linked to them, dance traditions and their links to marriage and development issues, and started stories on the town cleaners (the group that helps keep the town clean), and economic activities in the community.

We visited the office of the Community Based Organization (CBO) where the Chairman (who's participating in the workshop) is heading up the work of some 64 organized groups, including women's groups, youth groups, and others. I hadn't realized the extent of the work that he's managing. Pretty major thing.

I spent a little time hanging out in front of a house where a lady has a little sewing shop. The kids were playing out front and it was cool to see that they played similar games to other places -- dodge ball, marbles, etc. Pretty universal I guess.

The power was out in the afternoon so the youth worked on storyboards to use during editing, and started some storyboards for tomorrow. I'm excited to see how the edited films come out!

Darn Bus!

2009-04-28T22:24:00.002-01:00

Mimi, the project liaison, came from Plan Finland yesterday afternoon, and we ventured out for a beer last night. It was really warm, so not quite the beer I was imagining…. I’m giving up!

We tried to go to the community this morning but the bus broke down and we never made it! We spent most of the morning getting half way there and back…. After lunch we started doing some technical and practical training with the cameras. The youth always love getting their hands on the cameras. And they did a really good job for not having held cameras before! We’ll try to go back to the community again tomorrow….

Had some great tips and conversation with Mimi that will help improve the project. She is also going to film some testimonials and take some photos of the kids, which should be really helpful for the reporting.

Stories that Touch the Heart

2009-04-27T21:10:00.000-01:00

The main thing that we did today was to go back to the map to see what the different issues in the community are, and what kind of stories could be told about the issues. How can we tell stories that touch the heart? That move people to action? That are real and relevant and educational? The personal examples that went behind the stories were super interesting. I hope the youth will capture a lot of these stories in their videos… I also hope that we're able to produce videos that work to stimulate dialogue in the community, and that also are interesting to an external audience. That is one of the big challenges in this project.

Some stories that came out:

“There is a story about old men that go to the farms w/their tools but they don’t actually have to work, the spirits come to do the work for them; so a woman wanted to see the ghosts and she came up with a scheme to watch. When the spirits discovered the woman had seen them they stopped working and the men were angry and made women work tilling the fields ever since.”

“There is the story of witchcraft in the community. If people see someone progressing they perform some witchcraft rituals that make them go crazy or take them down.”

“Girls are being targeted for harassment; it’s a real story. It happens often. Even beyond this harassment there are threats of physical harm and sometimes charms/witchcraft. But the community is responding and these people are being arrested now.”

“A story about the way girls are married. They are married very early and marriage is an obligation. They stop attending school. Because girls are not allowed to inherit anything, they don't see a purpose in education or in community development because they never have any decision making power. Bride price contributes to harassment. If you get married and get 12 cows as a dowry, then the family just equates you to that – 12 cows.”

“Sometimes girls come to school on opening day for boarding school, parents say that school is supposed to be free, so they haven’t even provided the girls with anything. The matatu (public transportation minibuses) drivers take advantage of them and then deny that they’ve had anything to do with them.”

“There is a belief that only basic education is important and that anything beyond is not necessary. So even if a girl/boy qualify for university, parents won’t support them. Some parents don’t believe in white collar jobs, if you aren’t a soldier or watchman which is something they can understand, if you don’t have a practical skill like carpentry, the parents don’t feel it’s a job. They are only willing to pay for an education for a skill that they can understand.”

"There is a belief the disabled children should not be allowed to live. Sometimes they are killed or they are kept out of sight and in bad conditions. Sometimes if someone has a disabled child, it's seen to be related to the fact that they have some wealth and they've traded their family for wealth."

Kids Arrive, Technology Fails

2009-04-26T21:05:00.000-01:00

The Adobe-Flip solution doesn’t work, so looks like we will have to open all the files with movie maker, put them on the editing timeline, and then export them, then re-import from moviemaker to adobe for editing. What a pain!

The kids came around 10 and we started with small groups moving around, meeting people we didn’t know. Asking each other questions to get to know each other. One of the groups was really interested in why I’m no longer married, why did the marriage break up, where are my children, and I could tell they felt really sorry for me. It was hard to explain that it wasn’t a big deal…. And that it’s really common in the US and other places. I showed them some pictures of Clare and some of the guys got really interested. One of them said he was going to send her a present.

The youth worked on making a map of the community to lay out the community boundaries and the different places in the community, including assets like water, infrastructure, crops, people, organizations, etc. The map is basically a tool to stimulate discussion around what resources the community has, which are not being tapped into, which are good things yet could be improved, etc. The kids added things to the map as they discussed. They tried also to capture any social structures within the community on the map.

And speaking of maps - here's where I actually am!

Kaya Celebration in Kwale Town

2009-04-25T18:58:00.005-01:00

So I’m sitting in my new 4th floor room. There are no flying termites in the bathroom! Yay. And the view off the balcony is gorgeous. It looks out over green fields and hills to the sea. The group that was here last week has gone and they’ve moved us up to the top floor. I’m reading on Twitter about swine flu and wondering if it’s something I should be worried about at some point…. Maybe later.

We went this morning around 9 on a rickety microbus, like the ones you see pretty much everywhere in the world, to Kwale Town to the Kaya Ceremony. There were 9 tents set up around a center stage, one for the elders and clan from each of the 9 ethnic groups making up the coastal area. The place was a big tree covered park with a central clearing. It was pretty empty but filled up as the morning went on. The team went around in pairs to do the interviews that they’d planned out yesterday. I just roamed around filming what seemed like good background shots with the Nokia N-82, and the others used the Flip cameras supported by small Sony recorders since sound can be a bit iffy with the Flip cams.

The coolest thing was each different ethnic group had a dance group. We filmed a few of them and Anthony did some interviews. Around 1.30 or so the new Kaya came in surrounded by the other elders, chanting “kaya! kaya! “ He had been in another ceremony last night that was private and today was the public one.

The dances started and soon after speeches – and I rather lost interest as did most of our team, saying that the whole tradition had become political and it was not much about culture anymore, but politics. The main story that the team is agreed to focus on yesterday is that most youth don’t really know what the kaya is all about, yet the kaya holds lots of power, and the youth hope to access that power someday, yet how will the access it if they don’t know anything about it. Another story that they want to do is related to women and power. The whole group is really gender sensitive which I’m finding really interesting because lots of gender issues are coming up and their insights are really profound as related to culture, tradition, and today’s world.

Ali K was talking at dinner about inheritance, and that in his community/culture, women cannot inherit. If their husband passes away, they must return to their parents’ home and be cared for by a father or brother. Ali’s father passed away several years ago and this was his situation. “I became aware of this as a problem because of my own situation, and since then I’ve become very supportive of girls and women.” Anthony translated for me the discussion that ensued about how girls often don’t feel there is any point in being involved in the development process or in school because they can never own or make any decisions, so what is the point.

The kids come tomorrow late morning. We’re trying to get ready for that, and also figure out an issue with the Flip Cams because they won’t import into Adobe Elements. I’m trying to download a possible solution…. Internet is great for problem solving. Let’s hope the solution works!

Second Day - Practice

2009-04-24T19:50:00.002-01:00

Today we worked out the whole rest of the media training plan and who would facilitate what parts. Everyone is taking on different roles according to their strengths and knowledge, and we’ll facilitate in pairs or teams. We spent the afternoon trying out the cameras, testing mics, etc., and then Anthony took us through the editing process in the evening.

Mercy told us that there will be an induction ceremony in Kwale Town for a man who will become an elder. There are both cultural and political connotations to his induction and the whole area will turn out for the celebration and ceremony. Wajuhi suggested that we film it as practice, so we took the afternoon to plan out how we would do that, what stories we would catch from which perspectives, and who would interview and film whom/what. We worked together on the interview questions for men, women, youth, children. It should be pretty interesting.

The manager from the center where we’re staying stopped in and hooked up the internet so that is great!

YETAM Kenya - Facilitator's Training 1st Day

2009-04-23T22:46:00.000-01:00

The first day of training went by pretty smoothly. We had present Mwendar, the Community Based Organization (CBO) Chairman of Mwangaza, the community we’ll be working in, Ali a local artist and CBO secretary from Msambweni, Mercy the district information officer who’s also studied participatory video, Rama a university student from the area who’s studying media and communications, Madzo, who is involved with a youth environmental organization, and Anthony, Wajuhi and me from Plan. In the evening, Ali K, another youth also joined us.

It’s been really interesting seeing how Anthony and the Plan Kenya team have worked hard to ensure that the project is really fully integrated and tied into the existing work and programs so that it’s not seen as a parallel project. It is being integrated into the community planning process, and grounded by the recent child rights based situation analysis that was done in all the Plan Kenya work areas. It’s also linked in with the community radio project and informed by the existing community ICT programs.

We spent the morning getting set up and trying to get a generator since Thursday’s is “no power” day in Kwale. The generator came but it didn’t work, so we had to manage without electricity. It wasn’t too big of a deal since both laptops we are using have good battery life. The main things we covered were introductions, expectations, a project overview, and child protection and ethics. Merci also gave an explanation of participatory video.

We discussed with the community chairman how to manage/handle any issues of potential conflict if they came up. Having the CBO chairman is really valuable because working together, youth and CBO, will limit potential conflicts around topics that might be addressed. Wajuhi and Anthony are really stressing the importance of community ownership, the ways that video and photos and art can be used to catalyze discussions in the community, and the importance of the follow up and documentation process. We discussed ethics, and the use of the community’s name in case possible difficult subjects, and child protection in terms of possible implications of discussion particular topics. The chairman said that it would be fine to use the community name, but that in the case of sensitive or taboo topics, it would not be right to identify certain persons. He suggested that those types of issues be dealt with using drama instead so that the topics would still be raised by in a less conflictive way. In the end, he also said, this is a joint project with the youth and the community, so the topics would be agreed upon by all, even if they were addressed from the youth’s own perspective.

Wajuhi told today about a video project she had worked on in the past where one of the participating children was orphaned and had been mistreated in the community, stigmatized, called names, etc. The youth did a drama film based on her story. It was shown to several CBOs at once. The CBOs from other communities began asking, “is that how you treat orphans in your community?” And the discussion led to “What about us? Do we treat orphans any differently?” On that came the question “Why are there orphans in our communities” and the answer: because of HIV/AIDS. So the community began planning efforts to deal with HIV as well as the situation of orphans.

The first step in the project process is mapping the community. Since Ali had experience doing community mapping, he led us through a practice mapping exercise at the end of the day to get a concrete idea of how community mapping can be a tool for identifying resources and assets, talking about community history and the community’s uniqueness, bringing up child rights issues (both where rights are being realized and where not), and making plans for what to film and photograph. Ali, the artist, is also a CBO member in his own community. It was great to hear him really focus in on ownership of the community’s challenges and not expecting others to come in to resolve things.

Someone mentioned that there was a dye factory that used to provide jobs, but that had closed. Ali asked if it was in the community, and said that if not, then we shouldn’t be putting it on the map. That we should deal with things in the community. Wajuhi added that because this project is about empowerment and advocacy, that when the youth had built up all the skills that we hope to strengthen within the project, that they could then look at issues that had causes outside the community, and get the support of the community as a whole to address them with anyone outside the community with power to make change on a particular issue.

YETAM Kenya

2009-04-20T16:12:00.002-01:00

So I'm off to Kenya tonight - just about ready to head to the airport.... We'll be training in the Kwale Program Unit district with about 20 high school aged youth from one of the nearby communities. They have to go back to school on May 3, and we weren't able to negotiate any additional time with them, so we will have to fit the 2 week training into just about 9 days -- we'll see how that goes. I'm pretty stressed right now about it actually... but normally it all works out.

I'll fly from Boston to Nairobi and then take a short flight to Mombasa, stay over night there, and then will be picked up in the morning to go to the training center. I'll meet with the Plan Kenya staff to prepare, and then Thurs-Sat we'll have the facilitator's training and work out all the details for the following week with the youth. We have a basic outline that just needs fleshing out. We'll also check over all the equipment, etc. and be sure we're ready. We'll start the training with the youth on Sunday Apr 26 and run through May 3, and then I'll stay a few extra days to finish up.

I'm going to try tweeting from there to see how that goes.... could be interesting to use the YETAM twitter account for the youth to post what is going on during the training and the project, but we'll see if they are interested and if we have a good enough connection....

Home Again Home Again

2009-02-15T10:49:00.000-01:00

Whew. Got home yesterday right on time with no hitches. I’m soooo tired though. I spent the whole day today cleaning and catching up on housework. Well, and I also did my taxes, so my tax refund is that much closer and that’s a relief. Tomorrow back to catching up on all my work stuff that was pending last week. I know that I have a lot to do because I was checking email last week, just not able to reply or manage any real work because the internet was not reliable…. It will be a busy week now!

Communications Team Meeting

2009-02-13T22:30:00.001-01:00

Our meeting started on Tuesday. Our challenge for the week was to pull together a regional communications strategy. We had lots of presentations on the different aspects and did all kinds of group work and analyses to come up with a good strategy that works for each individual office and then also builds up into a cohesive regional strategy. We looked both at the PR aspect of communications as well as the program/social communications aspect, at the different child and youth media programs, and also at advocacy and our different campaigns. I did a presentation on social media to stimulate thoughts on how we could use it in Plan both at the office level and in our work with youth and communities. The workshop and the whole week was really educational for me, and also exhausting. I leave tonight around 11.45 and will be home tomorrow around 5 p.m.

Why you shouldn't mess with media on jetlag

2009-02-11T19:14:00.000-01:00

OK so I took all this video when I visited the YETAM project. Went back to the hotel, opened it and looked at it all. It was going to be turned into an amazing few testimonials about the project and its impact on the kids and community, to go with the annual report.

Then I was at the second community and my phone was full, so I figured, I'll just delete the footage from yesterday since I already copied it to my laptop. WRONG. I looked at it but never moved it to the laptop. As I was deleting it I had this funny feeling, which I talked myself out of. But that feeling was right. I ended up deleting all the footage from the YETAM project!! Argh.

So I guess the lesson is - never try to manage stuff like that when you've had no sleep and are jetlagged! wah. :-(

Child Friendly Communities

2009-02-09T21:45:00.001-01:00

I had dinner last night with those who had arrived for the meeting and then crashed. My luggage came around 3 a.m. so I had to go down to the lobby half asleep to get it! But yay!

Today we went out to the community were we had dropped the radio equipment off yesterday. First we went to a meeting at the Plan office. It was really interesting to hear their strategy which is centered around the concept of Child Friendly Communities. The cool thing is that they work with the community to define a set of indicators that the community is in agreement with. Then they measure where the community is at currently (baseline). Then they work with the community to improve their indicators. The interesting thing is that I have never seen it where the community is involved with setting and tracking indicators of their own development. Really really cool. We heard all the theory about it in the morning when the country director and program manager gave us an overview.

Then we all drove out to the village where the community representatives went through all their community indicators and explained where they were with them. So things like how many mothers are exclusively breastfeeding. How many kids are attending school. Percentage that have good hygiene habits. Etc. etc. We saw a few projects in the community – the early childhood care and development center, the nutrition center, and the women’s village savings and loan project. It was really interesting to see how they work, the impact the projects are having on the health and education of the kids, and also all the work that the women are doing to improve their community.

Photo: Community nutrition center where they weigh children to track their growth. They also work with the mothers to show them how to use locally available ingredients like sorghum, peanuts, herbs that grow in the area, to make high protein, high calorie porridge. The program is based on the concept of positive deviance -- where the mothers who manage to have well nourished children are studied to find out how they do it, and then their habits are replicated/taught to the other mothers.

Stefanie asked the women in the savings and loan group what the men did, because she had seen mostly women doing all the work in all the projects. That really got a good laugh out of the women. The way the development process seems to work is that the men make the decisions about which projects and initiatives that their wives can participate in. Custom allows multiple wives. The men see the advantage of the improved health and education of their children, and the improved financial status of their wives. Mostly the men work in the fields and do the heavy work for project that require manual labor. Interesting dynamic though – when Stefanie asked her question there was a super long and animated conversation among several of the women and the men from the partner local organization that manages the project. None of this was translated for us! Then Thiekoro from Plan Mali just made a very quick summary. Stefanie asked for clarification later….and I’m not sure the real story was revealed then either.

After we talked with all the project groups, the radio project crew – Kids Waves – did a live radio show. The radio project moves from community to community, training the kids and then the develop a half-hour radio show on different topics. They were covering the issue of Violence in Schools. They had invited the local mayor and the director of the school to ask them about the issue and what they planned to do about it. When will children stop being beaten in schools? The officials assured them that they would not beat children any more. Many of the children laughed at that. I didn’t understand much of what was happening because the radio show is conducted in Bambara, the local language. But the kids and the community really really got a kick out of it, and the kids were great. Self assured and really professional.

Photo: Kids Waves radio program.

We stayed until around 4 and then drove back. We arrived quite late due to traffic and I was soooo tired by then. I went out for pizza with a few of the others, Messan from Togo, Carmen from Benin and Francoise from Burkina. Messan and Francoise had participated in the Kenya Social Media for Social Change workshop, and it was great to see them again. One of the best things about working for Plan is when you have a chance to see colleagues again and develop nice friendships and working relationships.

YETAM Mali visit!

2009-02-08T22:00:00.000-01:00

I got myself up around 7 and showered. Put my same clothes back on and called Bedo. He and the guys from the Kids Waves radio program came to get me about 8 and we drove about an hour and a half out to the community. We dropped the radio guys off first in one community where we will visit tomorrow and where they will do a live Kids Waves show. The YETAM community was a decent drive down a pretty dusty road, but not really too bad. The kids were all in the school house. They had a whole program planned where they showed the theater and songs that they had made up during the project and since then. They also showed me the photos that they’d taken as part of the project. I took a bunch of video with my phone so that I could make some short testimonials for Nokia about the project. I was really impressed with the kids and the topics they chose – they did one play about female genital cutting, one about the dangers of selling bad meat in the community, and had a song motivating people to go out and vote. Really relevant stuff for community awareness and motivation.

Photo: kids who are participating in the YETAM project.

About 2 we finished the community program and they served lunch. It was rice with meat – goat I think. So as usual I was faced with the vegetarian’s dilemma (as opposed to the omnivore’s dilemma, ha) of how to avoid being rude. In the end I just ended up eating the rice with all the goat ‘juice’ on it. People crowd up and share a big platter of food. They wash up and then each person squats around the platter and uses their right hand to scoop out some rice and form a ball with it, and then eat it along with some of the meat and vegetables. It’s nice to have a communal plate like that. I’ve seen it in many countries and it really feels more like you are sharing the meal rather than each eating from your own private space. I just wasn’t sure how the meat juices and grease would settle since I haven’t eaten meat for so many years…. I was feeling a big woozy by the time we got back, but mainly due to lack of sleep and water since I didn’t drink any water all day and it was pretty hot. (Didn’t want to have to go to the toilet!)

Travel Snafu. Ugh.

2009-02-08T00:44:00.000-01:00

After pizza we tried to watch Madagascar 2, which Clare’s husband had brought back from Morocco, but Dalila and I were falling asleep so we crashed early and slept for what seemed like forever… but which was actually about 8 a.m.! Had a morning coffee with the girls and took off for the airport for my 2.30 flight. Was sorry to leave. Maybe someday I'll move to Amsterdam.

My flight out was delayed because of snow in Paris, and then the Paris flight was delayed too. We sat on the runway for 4 hours waiting to leave! Argh. So I didn’t get into Bamako (Mali) until about 3.00 in the morning. My luggage was lost of course (Air France seems to be notorious for that) so I had to report it, so I didn't get to the hotel even until about 4. Bedo from the YETAM project is coming to get me tomorrow at 8…. Thinking twice about actually going. I kind of have to, but right now it seems like an impossible feat…. I'm just sooo exhausted.

Clare and Dalila

2009-02-06T22:30:00.002-01:00

I went over to the Plan office by bus/train this morning. I love the public transportation system in Holland and all the bicycles. Such a difference from most places that are all about cars! I met first with Chris and Klaas about the “Sponsorship 2.0” or now know as “Plan Live” concept. Klaas is really into coffee and had bought a new coffee maker, which was really noisy….

At 11 I met with this great youth group called Child Rights Watch that Plan Netherlands supports. They’ve made a quiz for organizations and elected officials that determines, according to the Convention on Child Rights (CRC), what their child friendliness is by how they assign budget and attention to children’s issues. They are really geared up and want to help re-connect with the different youth groups and child/youth advisory boards within Plan. I’m going to link them up with the team at Plan US so that they can get something going together.

In the afternoon I met with Maud from the grants team to talk about potential youth media projects we’re working on in West Africa to see if they may be interested in working on any funding for the region.

Around 4 I took the train over to War Child where my friend Clare works. War Child’s office is in this totally cool part of Amsterdam in an old church. I met Clare in Brazil at the World Congress on Child Sexual Exploitation (WC3) when we worked together on the Child and Adolescent Participation Commission. She’s totally cool and we really bonded. Clare gave me a quick tour and we walked over to pick up her daughter Dalila who is around 7, and Dalila’s friend Sammy. From there we walked to Clare’s little apartment, freshened up and went out for pizza. Such a great neighborhood! And I love that we could walk everywhere.

Photo: Clare and Dalila on this cool blue and white steep staircase

Amsterdam, Voices of Africa

2009-02-05T22:00:00.002-01:00

I left for Bamako on Feb 4th in the evening with a stopover in Amsterdam to meet with colleagues there, and also to meet with the Voices of Africa Media Foundation (VoAMF) to see about possible collaboration. The flight was easy and I got in to Amsterdam Central Station around 9 a.m., checked into the hotel Terminus, and then Klaas, Plan’s Innovations Manager, came by to meet me around 11.30. We had some coffee and went out to Harlaam to VoAMF.

There we met with Pim the founder, and Henri, the co-founder. They run a mobile reporters training program for young Africans. They give them a mobile phone and a training on how to do good, short reporting with it. Then they pay them a sum if they complete 8 reporting assignments a month. 4 are specific, and 4 are assignments where the reporters can choose their topics. They also train them on how to manage assignments from Western journalist. The main point behind the VoAMF is that Africans should be reporting on Africa rather than foreigners, and they try to build up capacity of young Africans to do just that. Their training package goes for about 6 months, with the participants sending in their stories, which are critiqued, re-edited and the published on Africa News Network. (www.africanews.org). We are talking about various scenarios where we might partner together on some different types of training.

I had dinner with Nanneke from the Dutch Plan office. We worked together in the past on the Global Youth Engagement Framework and on Development Education. There are lots of cool links between our work both with youth and youth boards in the US and with the youth media work in W. Africa. One topic of conversation tonight, and it seems everywhere I go, is Obama and what it means that he’s been elected, and what he will do for the world.

On my way to A'dam & Mali

2009-02-01T01:38:00.008-01:00

It's been a bit of a crazy month, spent doing some budget scenarios for different projects. For this year it looks like we'll be doing YETAM in Kenya (April) and Cameroon (July). I've been working with the countries on getting our reports from last year in as well as our forward planning for 2009. We have the project point persons selected now for Kenya and Cameroon. They are both really excited about the project. We'll continue to seek funds for Mozambique and Ghana.

My next big challenge will be to put together a training pack for the new countries. We weren't able to include a face-to-face meeting in the budget for the YETAM coordinators, so I'll plan to arrive in each country a little ahead of time to work with the staff and partners, and we'll do as much by email and skype as possible.

The past month I've been trying to get a feel for Twitter and how it could be useful to us. It seems to be a great tool for sharing ideas and learning, sharing links and initiatives. Hopefully I can keep it to a manageable level so that I can keep up with all the stuff being shared! The 'follow me on twitter' function on blogger is nice too.

So it's been a pretty cool and exciting month learning and tech wise. I'll meet with Plan's Innovations Manager in Amsterdam next week, and then all the regional communications people and some from headquarters will be in Bamako (Mali) for the meeting starting Tuesday. I'll get a chance to visit the YETAM Mali project on Sunday and another one on Monday before we start the meeting on Tuesday.... looking forward to this year. :-)

Whose Media? Which Media? Media for What?

2009-01-10T11:28:00.010-01:00

So back to work for a whole week. Someone told me about Techcrunch. How did I not know about that before?!

Yesterday I met with a very very old friend -- Renato -- whom I worked with in El Salvador. I pretty much cut my teeth on children's media work with Renato so it was really cool to meet back up with him. He's now working as Plan's Latin American coordinator for Child Media projects. We shared visions and seem to be on the same track even though we haven't worked together for almost 10 years.

We agreed that he'd put some of the stuff they are doing into the same framework (Global Youth Engagement framework) that we are using so that we can begin to harmonize. They can feed into the YETAM project easily since they are also doing a lot of video in 12 countries there.

The interesting point though, and where I see the field changing and evolving, is on this question: Whose Media? When I upload something to YouTube, do I title it "Plan" i.e. Plan Rwanda Videos, or is it media that belongs to the community where we supported the project and should be titled Gatsibo, Rwanda Videos. Something I struggle with. I'm struggling a bit with this concept of ownership of the media. Is it the organization or funder's media or are they the community's videos? Are we mainly supporting kids with access to ICTs and media tools, or is our main goal for them to engage around certain topics and create videos to promote behavior change around those topics? I hope with time that we can look more at this and unpack it a little as social media becomes more widespread.

With Renato we talked about that issue. We talked about how he can incorporate more social media and mobile technology into the Latin American work. I shared with him about Frontline SMS and Ushahidi and Citizen Journalism and all the things we covered in the SM4SC workshop and he was super excited about building that in and having a similar approach in Latin America to what we've been exploring in African countries. Many organizations keep saying that children don't have a space in media, but I was thinking, space in Which Media? If you look at internet, isn't it more that since participation in traditional media is owned by corporations/governments and closed off to kids and most adults as well, that kids and young people have pretty much taken over new media? So basically if they have access to the tools (mobiles, internet, etc.), they DO have space in media, just not television, radio, newspapers. So how do we support that access then. Of course that isn't everywhere, there are huge access issues, but at some point maybe it will be....

And also as regards Which Media -- how, based on the goals we are trying to achieve, do we select the best form of media? Sometimes organizations make the mistake of starting a project from the point of view of which media form -- . Let's do a children's radio project. Let's start a video project. Let's use social media. Let's train them on theater. Etc. But more and more it's clear that organizations could start with a broader framework. Such as our Global Youth Engagement (GYE) framework, which we pulled out from consultations with youth who told us that they are basically working in 4 areas and reaching out/trying to influence 4 populations: other organized youth, their families and communities, decision makers, and Plan itself. And they want to do it at the local-district-national-regional-and global levels. So for each group that they want to influence, we could start from the point of which media is the most appropriate based on the audience (other youth, families/ communities, etc.) and also based on whether it's local, national, global, etc. So that could become a way for the youth media programs to evolve. Maybe the best media for local/families is theater. Maybe for youth/national influence it's cartoons or large events, maybe for global it's internet, etc.

And then we talked also about the other main question for me: Media for What? I first started thinking about that after I heard this amazing child media guru (pardon the word) guy from India named Shonu Chandra talking at a child media conference. "So kids can make media. So What!? It's what they DO with that media that matters." So then with all the media being done in our projects, the next step is that. What social change are we able to support kids to create with their media. There are some great examples of this. I hope we can also be really strong on this with YETAM as it continues.

So that leads us back to the idea of Social Media for Social Change. I know this has all been thought about before, but it's becoming more clear each time I think it through.

Renato and I agreed that we'd follow up on 3 main points. 1) We'd try to have a small meeting of the minds to develop out some of these ideas somewhere. We'd use open space technology to make the agenda upon arrival. 2) he will see if they have funds to do a SM4SC workshop in Latin America 3) We will see how to collaborate on the YETAM idea across regions.

Now the one thing we forgot to do was get the standard photo of him and me so that I could post it into this blog!!

YETAM Senegal almost set

2008-12-26T15:32:00.005-01:00

Not really working, since I'm on vacation, but almost done with the translations for the YETAM Senegal videos. Just about 5 more to go. They are finishing up 2 of the videos with scenes from school when school starts, and there are 2 more to upload to dotsub, about 4 to translate, and we're done with the first set. After dotsub, then I just upload the translations to the closed caption program on YouTube so now you can watch them in French and English. We still need to upload some of the videos to YouTube, but Ayla's going to get that done starting Jan 5. Photo: Alex, me, Mike at Laguna Beach on Wednesday.

www.youtube.com/user/planyetam

The website creation is also moving. AK the web company is building it with a bunch of the recommendations that people gave during the SM4SC workshop and other ideas we had awhile ago.

I'm in Los Angeles still and we're off today to visit UCLA and USC, my favorite Mexican restaurant, La Barca, and Griffith Park. I'm going to meet up with my college roommate while the kids and my brothers go to the zoo. Then we're meeting some extended family -- the kids' only cousins, whom we haven't seen for about 10 years. Should be a good day!

vacation!

2008-12-22T09:24:00.005-01:00

Whew. It's 5.25 a.m. and I am just about off the the airport to go to Los Angeles with my kids to see my 2 brothers who live there, the one who doesn't, and the parents. We have tons of snow here so I got to enjoy 3 days of it and now can escape it to warmer climates. It should be fun! Just kinda hoping it rains on Christmas as my mom wants to spend it at Disneyland, and I'm not too keen on that. Christmas is commercial enough without spending it at the mecca of commercialism! (Sorry mom if you still read this!) But yeah, if we go it will still be good since my family is great...

I spent the weekend subtitling the Senegal films so there are several up on YouTube now. The rest I'm either missing translations or the actual video files, but I think Ayla (our intern) and I will resolve that after Jan 5. The films are quite good, so I'll be happy to finally see them up on the website when it's ready.

Last week I cleared through my last emails and only have 5 in my inbox! I had to update the Nokia proposal and budget and get going on some of the prep work for next year so we can get started on time. It should be a good year and I'm excited about it.

Over vacation I am determined to figure out my new YETAM mobile phone. After the SM4SC workshop, I decided I needed to become a real mobile user and stop just using the phone for texting and calls. So I purchased the N-82 that we had in the project budget and plan to figure it all out over the break. I figured out the camera already, how to access my gmail and get Twitter updates, but can't get into Yahoo. And there is all kinds of software linked to my laptop and 'home network' that I need to figure out so I can pass photos, music, etc back and forth. It should be fun to master....

Nicolaas just sent me my first YouTube music video by email to the phone, so it's looking promising....

Happy Holidays and here's to a fun-filled New Year full of new and exciting projects!

Almost vacation time...

2008-12-18T09:27:00.005-01:00

Only 2 days left and I will take my first real vacation since over a year ago. Strangely enough this is a real challenge for me. I've become such a work and laptop addict that the idea of not working for 2 weeks is pretty stressful. I need it though to come back fresh and relaxed for what will be another packed year.

Mika and I worked on the workshop follow up yesterday morning and we are thinking that instead of doing a long workshop report, we could make the whole report a blog. We will go back and post a day-by-day summary of it with links to the presentations and where hopefully people can comment. Then we can use the blog as a follow up and sharing/discussion tool as people more forward with their ideas and implementation. Hopefully we can develop some readership within Plan for the blog and it can become a platform for active (and interactive) sharing and learning. Of course we'll make traditional report too for those that may want it...

Since the workshop, just in the 3 days this week, we've seen a lot of stuff happening within Plan. I think the week really motivated people. A few people started their own blogs. We've been getting the personal action plans back from participants saying how they will incorporate social media/new technology/mobiles into their work plans this year. I also shared the idea of using Frontline/ Ushahidi for humanitarian organizations with a few people inside Plan in terms of how we could be more organized after a disaster.

In the US office, I heard that the health advisor is looking into incorporating mobile applications into a new group of proposals on child survival.

I am working hard on proposals for this calendar year and all that goes along with that... budget, action plan, program planning, etc. Plus we are trying our hardest to get the website up and running. Let's see what I can get accomplished in 2 days still!

Much to be done, but all fulfilling!

Exactly 12 years ago

2008-12-14T08:01:00.003-01:00

Ha. Clare set her alarm for 4.00 a.m. so she could wake up and see me at the time she was born exactly 12 years ago. What a sweetie. Gotta get cleaning for her birthday party today...

ooof SM4SC and what next!

2008-12-14T07:15:00.012-01:00

Wow what a week. My head is spinning from all the discussions and possibilities from our workshop in Kenya. So it's 3 a.m. and I'm back home, and here I am again at the computer. My New Year's resolution is to work less, but it's not New Year's yet... and I'm still on Kenya time, so fell asleep at 6 and woke up at 1.30. So why not grab my coffee and get going. Photo: one of the 'take aways' on the last day.

I have a zillion ideas and things to think about. How to support the different people and offices present at our workshop to build in more social media and technology to improve our programs and reach/impact.

The last couple days were amazing, with presentations by/about youth and how they are using blogging, mobiles and other technology for health and learning. We talked about citizen journalism and thought about how to apply it to our programs and communications. And there was a LOT of discussion about how organizations need to open up to embrace new kinds of media or they will become irrelevant.

One key thought (originally stated by Ken Banks from FrontlineSMS.com and then taken up by everyone) was that it's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. That people should just do it, just try things, instead of asking for permission to innovate and be creative.

We learned from one participant how blue tooth was used during the Kenya election crisis to get information out to the public... and at the airport on the way home heard about arrests of activists in Nairobi and increasing media censorship.

We talked about how organizations need to modernize and open up new ways to engage the public in their work based on concepts of social media. We used SMS to send messages and talked through specific ways we could use Frontline SMS (http://www.frontlinesms.org/) to make it easier for children to get birth certificates and access their rights at citizens. Imagine instead of having to trek miles to the district capital if mobiles could help communicate and ease that process. We looked at specific existing projects and thought about how to use SMS and other social media to improve them.

We presented and discussed the YETAM project, and heard things like "every country should do this" and got great feedback for making the project more relevant and to increase its impact from the local level upwards. I had a lot of time to brainstorm with Mimi (the link between YETAM and Nokia via Plan Finland) for once about the project and to start working out the action plan for next year. Photo: Me and Mimi

We heard so many opinions from everyone, and the French translation and bi-lingual nature of the workshop meant that we heard from everyone there, whereas often those who speak French keep quiet since English is the 'official working language'. Photo: PapaSidy and Bedo.

Our external experts stayed with us the whole week and added so much to the conversation.

Really an amazing time. We tracked the workshop on a collective blog (http://sm4sc.maneno.org/eng/) so people could practice, and posted photos on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/whiteafrican/sets/72157610896848364/.

Now Mika and I will do the report. We asked people to state a few concrete ways they will follow up on the workshop and then our job along with the different offices involved is to support their work and help address any challenges or obstacles that come up. Photo: the fearless Mika!

(And we had a "Bush Dinner" with a fire and music the last night")

So our work is cut out for us next year.... and it's about 90% sure that I'll get to extend my secondment for another year to focus on YETAM's next countries and SM4SC follow up.

Yippeee!

Social Media for Social Change Workshop

2008-12-08T13:55:00.014-01:00

I’m back from Brazil and in Kenya now for the Social Change for Social Media workshop. There are about 25 of us here and the first day was really really good. I learned tons of stuff from everyone here. It’s about 6:00 and most everyone is still here in the workshop room, doing email and stuff. We are going into “Bar Chats” in a few minutes – where people can just suggest topics that they want to discuss and form groups to do it. Photo: Lukenya Getaway

We have tried live broadcasting some of the talks – some worked some didn’t. And we’re testing a blog on a site called Maneno. The link is http://www.maneno.org/. Under SM4SC workshop you can find it.... I couldn't get my photos to post there so I thought I'd revert to here to put some up. Photo: Tonee from Wazimba blogging. Erik from White African/Ushahidi and Mativo and Anthony from Plan Kenya.

Will post more this week.

Photo: Erik starting his talk.

YETAM on YouTube now!

2008-11-10T22:50:00.005-01:00

I'm so excited because now YouTube has captions now. And I have a GREAT intern named Ayla who is doing all the subtitling for the Rwanda videos. She's posted several of them on dotsub.com and done the subtitles from Kinyarwandan and from English (using the documents that Joseph and Baptiste did). Chrystel from Plan Rwanda will send us the French versions soon, and so all 3 planned languages will be done.

We were getting some comments that the videos were not loading quickly so we are testing with YouTube and now will be posting in both places. Basically it's really simple. We take the videos and compress them into flash (.flv) files, and upload them to dotsub.com to do the subtitling. Then we upload them also to YouTube and we download the subtitle files from YouTube and re-upload/attach them to the YouTube file. And it's working super well. I started a PlanYETAM channel so as the videos get loaded they will be available there.

http://www.youtube.com/user/PlanYETAM

Once Ayla finishes uploading Rwanda films, we should have the Mali and the Senegal ones in hand to start uploading. I'm hoping that the web company can the just embed the videos from YouTube and they will come complete with the captions. You can also use geo-location from YouTube, which is cool since I've been wanting to do a google earth overlay for quite awhile, and now with the videos on YouTube it will be a snap. Ayla is already figuring it out -- she's great!

I am dying to see the Senegal and Mali films since I wasn't at the training. Mali sent a really cool attachment with their quarterly report. They used an evaluation methodology called Most Significant Change where you use storytelling to identify the most significant change from the training. So there are some amazing stories and quotes from the kids in there. I hope that we can use this for the upcoming YETAM projects in the next countries.

I had to do a presentation today at our office because it's already been 6 months that I've been on this 'secondment' or special assignment with the West Africa office. I can't believe it's gone by so fast. I think I've enjoyed almost every minute of it.

Swamped but still alive

2008-10-28T20:23:00.005-01:00

Wah, even more than a month this time. I'm absolutely swamped with work these days. The 3rd World Congress preparations are taking soooo much time up -- way more than I anticipated. But hopefully things will be on track for the actual Congress in November. There are lots of difficulties as we still are trying to get everything funded. Hope we succeed.... I went to Brasilia last month for a 2-day meeting with the other cooperating partners and we got a lot done, but there are so many details related to putting on a conference for 3000 people and 300 kids. The commission I'm participating on is more related to child participation and child protection during the Congress and that is a huge undertaking. I think it will go well though.

The other big thing - the Kenya workshop for December - is also going really well. I went up to Maine this weekend to meet with some of the speakers/presenters from the different organizations that are going to be there and it was great. They were all up there attending a big conference called PopTech. (Which I couldn't afford! But they were on a fellowship). The guys are all super nice and really knowledgeable, so I think the workshop is going to be great. We're working out the agenda right now, trying to make sure that we are making it fun and informal, interactive, and also the most relevant possible for the situations that people are working in within Africa. So, how can we use social media and new technology in places where there is no electricity or no broadband? We need to be sure that we're not talking the whole week about stuff that can't happen. And that is the challenge we're posing ourselves -- what social media and new technology is relevant and useful to achieve greater impact in our existing work. I'm really excited for it.

One of the other things that I got finished was the proposal for the 6th World Summit on Media for Children. I have to wait for internal approval, and then we can submit it to the 6WSMC to see if we will partner on the child participation/child protection/social media & youth outreach aspects. That would be a really interesting partnership that we're really well suited for, so I hope it goes through. It took me forever to write the proposal with everything else going on.

The YETAM trainings are all complete, and I got the Rwanda videos on the external hard drive last week and we have a great intern names Ayla working with us to upload them and subtitle them on dotsub.com. The other things we're working on for YETAM are getting the dummy website going with AK our web company in Dakar, and then working on a curriculum for Africa and then one for 'western' or 'the north'. We're also looking at the follow up with the different groups and partners in the 3 countries. Julie resigned to spend more time with her son Noe, and her last day is on Friday, so I'm inheriting her workload! ahhhh. Once the Rio Congress and the Kenya meeting are over, I will then just focus on YETAM and a couple other things, but not so many big projects at the same time. If we are successful with the funding for the next year, then very soon we'll get going to plan next year with Ghana, Cameroon, Mozambique and Kenya.

OK well more later when there is something more interesting with photos and videos -- like maybe from the Brazil Congress!?

YETAM, WCIII and Kenya coming up

2008-09-23T18:57:00.008-01:00

OK almost another month has gone by already since I got back from Rwanda, and I've been bad at blogging.... things are chugging along with YETAM. I'm still waiting on the external drive with all the materials on it from Rwanda, but Julie's gone to Mali to start the training there, and the Senegal films are all finished now also. They need translation still though.

We have selected the YETAM website provider and they are going to start working on designing the new pages. In the meantime we finally finished the 4 virtual visits at www.planusa.org/maps so now Togo, the DR and El Salvador are up there. We're waiting on the DVD that will be sent out to schools to be finalized -- it has the 4 virtual visits that are ready along with the curricula that we developed around them. We sent a mailing out to 9000 current events teachers about the virtual visits and DVD/curriculum and got about 500 responses back - which is quite good!

I also sent an email out to people about the 4 completed ones and we had really good feedback. More and more countries want to do something similar or to post them on their home office websites, so that is cool.

On top of the YETAM project, the main things I've been doing are working on the Child and Adolescent Participation Commission for the World Congress against Child Sexual Exploitation happening in Brazil in November. I'm going to Brasilia next week to meet with UNICEF, ECPAT, Save the Children, etc. to plan for that, and then will go back in November to Rio for the actual Congress.

The other thing, which is really exciting, is the workshop we've been planning for in Kenya Dec 8-12. We've been thinking, dreaming, planning and now it's all really coming together. All the funding came through, and in the past week our list of external speakers has become an amazing group of minds. We will have Ken Banks from Frontline SMS http://www.frontlinesms.com/, Daudi Were from MentalAcrobatics http://www.mentalacrobatics.com/think/, Juliana Rodich from GlobalVoicesOnline http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/ and Ushahidi http://www.ushahidi.com/, and Erik Hersman from White African http://www.whiteafrican.com/ and Ushahidi. We're also trying to see if we can visit Google Kenya and have a speaker from there as well. There will be about 25 Plan staffers/partners and 2-4 Kenyan youth as well. So I'm really looking forward to the week. I think we are going to learn and plan so much.... really excited.

In the process, we are going to work with Ushahidi to pilot some of their technology and use it for our programs. Their platform combines SMS with mapping and they created it during the election violence in Kenya last year. There are lots of uses for it in the work that we do that we can begin to explore, and I think it will be really amazing!

Another project that is coming along is Plan's participation in the 6th World Summit on Media for Children www http://www.wskarlstad2010.se/. I wrote a proposal outlining how the child and youth participation and protection could be managed at the Summit, and they liked it a lot. So we are in negotiations now about how we can make it happen and secure the necessary funding and human resources to do it. In the proposal, I also submitted ideas together with Media Snackers on how to build in the whole social media angle of the Summit and they liked that too. I'm going to meet with DK from Media Snackers http://www.mediasnackers.com/ in New York this Saturday on my way to Brazil to discuss more and then we'll talk again with the chairman of the 6WSMC to see how to move it along.

So once again I think I have too much on my plate, but it's all tasting very good.

the strangeness of the familiar

2008-09-03T15:01:00.003-01:00

Being home again has been really strange. Like that feeling you get when you step off a roller coaster.....

I'm back in the office today after clearing out my inbox from home yesterday, well almost clearing it out. I have about 25 major things to deal with still sitting there, but all the smaller, easier stuff is cleared through.

My flight back was easy and on time, but getting in a cab and arriving home is always really weird for me after being away for a few weeks. Things seem so flat here. Even if there was no hot water and we ate the same starchy food for 3 weeks, I think I prefer Rwanda to Providence, Rhode Island. Maybe I was born to live somewhere outside the US? hmmm. Someday.....

I've been getting emails from the team there in Gatsibo and should have an update from them today or tomorrow on how things are going. They will have the community event tomorrow where the kids will show what they've been doing over the past week, do a debate, and talk about what will happen next (commitment to follow up).

more later when I hear back from the Rwanda team!

YETAM Day 10: my last day in Kiramuruzi

2008-08-30T23:00:00.004-01:00

The groups all worked again today finishing things up. The IT person from the Program Unit office is still here trying to resolve the issues with the computers. He fixed the USB port on the one and is going to purchase a CD player for each computer so that the software can be installed.

The Program Support manager visited today with the advocacy coordinator from Plan Canada. It’s very clear that there will be good follow up from the Rwanda office on everything coming out of the project. The Program manager was quite keen on the ideas that the kids and partners have come up with and commited to building Plan’s interventions around the topics/issues coming out from the kids’ work.

We worked until 3 and then I said goodbye to the kids. They gave me some really sweet drawings and letters to take home with me. Chrystel and I stayed at the hotel until around 6:30 and then we drove back to Kigali where I checked back into the Ninzi Hill Hotel and took my first hot shower with running water in the past 2 weeks - that sure felt good!

I got online to check in on my other life, and almost immediately Julie Skyped in and said that she was having trouble getting passports and visas sorted out for Noe (her small son who was supposed to come with her for the last week of training). It sounded like a big hassle for her to try to sort it out, so we agreed that she would not come. I felt that the team was really on track anyway, and didn't require us anymore. I think the important thing is the first week or 2 and by then things just roll along. Julie said the same thing happened with the Senegal training, so we agreed she'd cancel her trip. Though she was disappointed, I think it will be OK.

Around 10:30 Jacques and Olivier came to pick me up to go hear some live reggae at the KBC (Kigali Business Club). Really nice place and good music. We stayed pretty late and then walked back to the hotel and I crashed. Photo: Kigali by night.

Olivier, Joseph and Tony came in the morning to say goodbye. Chrystel took me to the airport around 2:30, (stopping on the way to pick up some Waragi to take home as a souvenir)!

My flights home were uneventful. I think I slept for about 16 hours! Picked up some coffee in Ethiopia airport and made it home to my house around noon on Sunday. I'm still exhausted, and with such lovely memories of the trip. One of my favorites of all time....

And now back to the grind!

YETAM Day 9: reaching the end of my time.... :-(

2008-08-28T23:00:00.008-01:00

The groups continued working today on their different ‘products’. Chaka’s group will be ready with the community map by Wednesday. I spent a little time going over the maps that other groups had done in the smaller group so that the kids could see more how the computer works and what the virtual visit set up is and how the map will play into it. They are doing something more symbolic with the map that looks really interesting. They will make representations of the 3 kinds of lifestyle found in the district – the most ‘pure’, the medium developed, and the city type life. These will be combined into one map and they’ll also add drawings of the different things they saw out when they were surveying to prepare to draw the map. Originally we had worried about letting the kids join other groups but now it doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. Each group has solidified and they all feel proud to be in the group they are in. Photo: the rainstorm flooded my hotel room!

The theater group practiced with a dress rehearsal and we planned to film it but there was a huge rainstorm in the afternoon and we couldn’t go out to film. The video guys continued editing and filming, but we are still having some computer issues and the kids were not able to learn much editing today.

Tomorrow we will go over the ‘list’ of things that we need to accomplish by the end of the training to see where we are and so that next week Julie can ensure that we produce everything. This includes:

1 community map
15 community videos
5 drama videos
30 drawings/paintings
3 sets of 12 photos each by theme
3-5 music recordings/music videos of the kids singing
1 ‘making of’ video
25 ‘making of’ photos
5 testimonials for Nokia (30 seconds each)
1 follow up plan which can then be turned into a project to be funded by the website donations (i.e., the training center?)
Media coverage (local media when we have the parents/community presentation, and national media coverage plan via television, print and film festivals, etc.)
Report
Face photos/names/ages of all participants and partners/facilitators

Tomorrow is my last day here…. Photo with Chrystel, the Rwanda project coordinator.

We set up the sound system in the hotel courtyard and had a big farewell party in the evening. Photo: Bernard and Chaka setting up the music for the evening.

People went around and said good things to each other about how great it was to work together, etc. It was a really nice time. I'm really sad to leave! Photo: Joseph, my faithful friend and translator, and Patrick saying lovely things about me....

YETAM Day 8: visit from the Country Director

2008-08-27T23:00:00.008-01:00

We arrived a bit late this morning. We brought over the desktops and set them up in the training center so that they could start editing today. The Country Director (CD) arrived around 10 and visited each one of the groups and talked to each of the partners. He seems quite happy with the project and open to the necessary follow up with the kids and through the partners. I was really happy about that. We relaxed most of the rest of the morning and after lunch I worked on some reporting. The arts group went back out to do some more community surveying. Photo: Mamadou Kante, the Plan Rwanda Country Director.

The main issue today is that the electricity was coming on and off which made it hard to work. The country office will send us a UPS that we'd accidentally left there for each computer for tomorrow morning. Photo: Saide, Jacques, Lauben and Bernard.

The monitoring and evaluation coordinator visited along with the CD and had a chance to talk with the different partners about sustainability of the project and follow up. Some good ideas came out such as how to respond to the kids requests for forming an association and how to offer them other kinds of training or good follow up and more depth on the skills they are learning in this workshop. One idea that is coming up from different sides is that it could be possible to open some kind of training center in the area, managed by partner organizations, to house the equipment and conduct further training in the 3 areas plus areas that the youth identify during follow up planning. Photo: the theater group getting ready show their work to the CD.

It was quite a good day and I feel like the follow up with all the partners will really happen.

At the debrief, people were happy with the results of the day. Amina said that the theater group had stepped it up somehow and all the issues with the play were resolved.