Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What Can and Should be Brought to Scale?

[Joe McCannon]

I agree strongly with much of what Stella Hughes says, and am especially
supportive of the idea that local ownership and capacity-building has to
be a cornerstone of any development initiative that does not perpetuate
dependency.

In response to the question on what specific critical factors lead to
successful scalability, Stella suggests there is not much to go on in
the world of ICT. This may be the case but I would point out that there
are lessons from other sectors (e.g. military, industry, health care)
that might be instructive. For instance, the work done by BRAC in
Bangladesh to expand their Oral Therapy Extension Programme (OTEP) -
oral rehydration therapy for diarrhea - was a great success that was
spread nationwide. Likewise, major bottlers and franchises (e.g. Coke,
Heineken, McDonald's) probably have something to teach in this respect.

Having looked at a variety of industries, several scientists from my
organization - the Institute for Healthcare Improvement - have
generalized the following principles of scaling up (which may or may not
have relevance to ICT):

* You must understand full scale before you start the scale-up work
(i.e. what is the growth goal);
* Successful scale-up comes when a project or program is expanded in
phases of roughly 5x-10x per phase;
* It is important to list all of the factors involved in the system to
be scaled and then design for maximum leanness in every area;
* It is important to be aware of constraint changes as you expand (i.e.
which factors scale arithmetically, which scale negatively and which
scale positively)
* It is important to be aware of the oversight requirements and
information systems requirements once full scale is attained;
* It is important to be aware of which factors have to be scaled up
structurally and which can be scaled up though replication.

As for creating a context for successful scale-up, Stella is quite right
to point out that a supportive policy environment (political will) and
cooperation of donors and NGO's are necessary; to this I would add that
successful scale-up also requires:

1. A robust delivery system backbone (e.g. a mechanism for delivering
supplies, maintenance)
2. A collaborative methodology and communications network to facilitate
exchange of data, innovation and best practices between sites.

I know this is somewhat abstract but hope it adds value. This thinking
is presently informing our work on scaling up HIV-AIDS treatment in
collaboration with WHO, a key part of which will be a communications
network to support scale-up (what I am studying in the Reuters Digital
Vision Program at Stanford this year.)

Best,
Joe McCannon
---
Institute for Healthcare Improvement
Reuters Digital Vision Fellow, Stanford University, 2003-4
617-359-6320





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Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What Can and Should be Brought to Scale?

[Stephen Tournas]

One of our USAID-funded activities that turned out to be an excellent
example of scaling up was the US/Brazil Learning Technologies Network
(LTNet). Former country project manager Eric Rusten, whose contact
information is on the contractor's web site
, provided me with this
summary a while back:

Signed in October 1999, LTNet was initially designed to be a simple
on-line clearinghouse for static information (reports, case studies, web
sites, etc.) on the use of information and communication technology
(ICT) in education to enhance teaching and learning in primary and
secondary schools in Brazil. In addition, LTNet was charged to organize
and carryout workshop and seminars on an opportunistic basis. LTNet's
primary partner in Brazil was the ProInfo program at Brazil's Ministry
of Education.

Over the course of three years, LTNet grew and transformed itself in a
variety of ways. These transformations enabled LTNet to move from
serving a very few information and technology elites in the major cities
to meeting the ICT and education needs of thousands of teachers across
Brazil from urban to rural communities. Together the processes of
scaling-up and transformation created a synergistic mutually reinforcing
cycle that continues to push and pull LTNet forward. This complex
interactive process of scaling-up and transformation that occurred in
the LTNet project can be categorized in the following ways:

Static-to-Dynamic / Passive-to-proactive scaling: The LTNet web site
changed from only passively providing static information (most of which
was in English with Portuguese abstracts) to being a proactive provider
of active and interactive content much of which is generated and managed
by educators across Brazil.

Supply-Driven to Demand-Driven: At the start, LTNet was largely a
supply-driven initiative from Washington DC. Although staff made efforts
to learn what information was needed and desired by Brazilian educators,
most of the project actions were driven by Washington, DC staff. Toward
the end of the first year LTNet started becoming a much more
demand-driven effort with Brazilians providing significant input into
decisions about what useful services LTNet would provide. This change
resulted in a scaling up in the degree of local ownership of LTNet.

Limited Scope to Broad Scope: LTNet started with a rather narrow scope
of activity that proved to have had very little demand among Brazilian
educators and rather quickly scaled-up its scope to provide: a broad
spectrum of training and professional development activity; virtual
environments for collaborative learning among schools within Brazil and
between Brazilian schools and those in the US; enabling local
experimentation and innovation via user driven pilot activities; and
creating opportunities for Brazilian educators to test out their new
skills with integrating technologies into teaching and learning.

Centralized decision-making to a network of collaborative partners:
LTNet started as an initiative under the US/Brazil Partnership for
Education with ProInfo as the principal institutional partner. During
the first year of the project the partnership relationships started to
scale-up and evolve to include actors from other parts of the Ministry
of Education, for example the TVEscola project, State and Municipal
Secretaries of education across the country, NGOs, corporations, and the
US Embassy. This scaled-up complex of partnership relationships enables
LTNet to achieve results and impacts far beyond the limited financial
and staff resources of the LTNet project.

Serving a few ICT elites to meeting the needs of thousands of public
school teachers across Brazil. As a passive web based clearinghouse full
of static documents, LTNet would have never reached many educators or
had any significant impact on the use of technology in teaching and
learning. The processes of transformation and the resulting scaling-up
in scope, outreach and responsiveness is enabling LTNet to directly and
indirectly impact education in Brazil in a variety of significant ways.
The continued growth of LTNet is being driven by an ever-expanding
network of teachers who are making LTNet into their own on-line learning
environments.

LTNet later became a registered NGO when the project ended!

Stephen Tournas
CTO, LearnLink and dot-EDU
USAID
Washington, DC




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Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] What Can and Should be Brought to Scale?

[Cornelio Hopmann]

Dear Stella,

May I start with a critical remark to your remark:

> We discussed the issue of whether local communities should determine
> what pilots go to scale at the Dakar symposium. The general conclusion
> was that you don't need baseline studies or focus groups to know there
> is a huge deficit of information and communication at community level in
> developing countries. You and I were never asked whether we wanted
> access to radio, TV, newspapers or the Internet before these things were
> made available to us. The CMC was seen as a basic tool that communities
> could use for their needs. It is also true that there is great demand
> for CMCs in Africa.

May I note that you weren't asked, either less obliged, to pay for
radio, TV, newspaper before they were made available to you.

Yet under the slogan "sustainability" many -- from the comunity level
upwards to state-level -- are obliged to pay (or you intend to oblige
them) as you yourself wrote:

> We have no model to go on here, but we believe that as well as the
> essential local leadership, there has to be genuine top level political
> committment to facilitate the supportive public policy and regulatory
> environment that is required - hence the mobilisation of Heads of State.
> The also has to be real conviction on the part of donors and a
> multistakeholder approach. At present, we are preparing the launch of
> the initiative. The next stage will be the formation of consortia of
> partners in the 3 countries to plan the project strategy in detail.

Which -- taking into account the lack of democratic culture and
consensus building in many, if not most, developing countries -- boils
down to making top-level arrangements instead of an offer in an open
marketplace -- an offer which can be accepted or rejected individually.
Rather you make the leaders commit themselves such that the respective
communities (and states) as such pay without choice. Not very honest.

Let me add some observations: scaling up is not as simple as just to
repeat the same example (pilot) over and over again. If it were, I
suspect including  all the initial "hidden" costs of foreign expertise,
donor-institution support etc., etc. into the repeat-budgets would kill
any project scale-up as "economically not feasible", therefore the
key-question is not if the root (or pilot) -project may be repeated but
rather if the way it was done permitted upscaling at lower costs (or by
extended leverage of the initial investment) using local resources.
(Which by the way makes it obvious that any pilot that does not include
local capacity building beyond the needs of the pilot itself can not be
upscaled).

Second: upscaling itself -- even more, upscaling ICT -- normally adds
complexity (and hence costs) to the whole system. As an example, it
poses different situations whether you have to feed by a central hub 20
VSAT-receptors or you have to feed 1000.

As known from enterprise-development-histories, many enterprises
successful on one level of scale, went broke just because they didn't
succeed in adopting management and organization on time when they
entered the next level of scale.  And it's known that there are negative
thresholds, which means a required initial investment in organization,
tools and equipment, which doesn't pay off unless a certain minimal
market-position with respect to the next scale is obtained. (Upscaling
implies discontinuous steps unlike simple growth that fills up a
existing potential).


Cornelio Hopmann
niDG Coordinator and in ICT4D since 1983





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Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Improving Access Via Mobile Telephony

[Pam McLean]

William Lester wrote:

> Congratulations! Fola Odufuwa has got it exactly right, IMHO. As we look
> for what was referred to in some previous posts as 'narrowband'
> solutions, the evolution of the mobile phone from a simple audio
> communication device to an internet gateway may prove to be the answer.

Yes.but my concern is with Oke-Ogun, where there aren't any mobile
phone networks. Its an area that is normally neglected and at the end
of the queue when it comes to development, so there could be a long
wait. (To illustrate how far behind it is, we can look at "wireless",
and its old meaning of "radio". At Ago-Are and the surrounding area in
Oke-Ogun, there is no radio reception at all during the day, although
some programmes, such as Voice of America, can be picked up in the
evening and the early morning.)

When I visited Ago-Are in Oke-Ogun a local teacher pointed up to the
sparkling African night sky and asked me to show him once again the
satellite we had looked at together on a previous occasion - but I
didn't know where to look either. He was thinking back to when Solo
field trials were taking place. One evening, as we all sat out under the
stars (no electricity), sipping our appropriately named Star beers,
Paul, who was conducting the Solo trials, had pointed out the satellite
he was using for his email demonstrations. The teacher wanted to see
again this visible sign of a communication system that is in reach of
Ago-Are. Its been there for years. All that the Oke-Ogun project needs
is the resources to link to it. We don't *have* to wait for a mobile
phone network to make its way through Oke-Ogun. We only need a computer,
and power to drive it, and someone to help us find the money up front so
we can make the link to the satellite and check out in practice how best
to make it pay its way.

Regarding broadband and narrowband and all that, I'm no techie. We were
impressed by all the details that Paul and his team had worked out
regarding using Solos to set up email bureaux, so I am confident that he
had worked out the most cost effective way for us to connect - and I
know it was going to be just for email initially. I don't know exactly
how he was going to arrange it, or if we'd be able to arrange something
as advantageous outside of a Solo one-stop shop solution.

I just know we need to communicate into and out of and across Oke-Ogun,
and we don't want to wait until someone provides a mobile phone network.


Pam McLean
CAWD UK Volunteer on behalf of OOCD 2000+ (Oke-Ogun Community
Development Agenda 2000 Plus)





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Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Bringing Connectivity to Under-Served Communities

[Aaron Sundsmo]

Sudhakar Chandra wrote:

> This brings to mind something that the satellite radio outfit WorldSpace
> is doing. The idea is brilliant, in my opinion. You basically buy this
> satellite radio (approx. $70-100 depending on model). You also buy a
> computer card to interface with the radio. For a fee (that includes the
> card free) of approx. $40, you get unmetered limited internet access.
> The access is limited in the sense that you are restricted to a few
> WorldSpace "approved" websites. This would work great if WorldSpace
> expanded the list of approved sites to include those like Yahoo mail and
> Hotmail. Unfortunately, they don't. For most people, getting cheap
> access to a web-based email system like Yahoo mail is a good start.


I have greatly appreciated this thread of the conversation and the
insight that so many of you have given me. I would like to respond to
the mention of WorldSpace technology and to the benefits of being able
to provide some level of information to those who are not soon to
receive the benefits of WiFi, VSAT or new emerging technologies because
of either high cost or government regulation. I work at an organization
called First Voice International , a small NGO
based in Washington, DC, which was given 5% of the WorldSpace satellite
network that covers the entire continent of Africa and much of Asia and
the Pacific. This satellite network is able to broadcast digital radio
and data to small hand held receivers that cost between $70-$150. At
First Voice International, we have used this 5% capacity to develop a
24-hour audio service called the Africa Learning Channel, which deals
with pan-African issues such as HIV/AIDS, poverty alleviation, youth
leadership, gender issues, food security and others. First Voice also
has a data service that allows one to connect their digital radio to a
PC or laptop using a $90 adapter anywhere under the footprint to
download content at 64kbps. First Voice then partners with NGOs, CBOs,
government agencies and community radio stations who can use this
equipment and content to impact the maximum number of people through
organized listening groups, informing intermediary service providers or
through rebroadcast on one of the 194 partner community radio stations
in Africa.

This is not a two-way system and one cannot send emails, but what First
Voice has done is to partner with organizations that have relevant
web-based content that they currently cannot get to remote users because
of lack of or the high cost of connectivity. One example of how this
system has had actual impact on the ground throughout Africa is the
RANET Project. This project, honored at the WSSD last year, is an
international collaboration funded by USAID-OFDA and is partnering with
US NOAA and African Meteorological Agencies continent wide and is now
expanding into Asia and the Pacific. The RANET Project was designed to
make weather, climate, and related environmental information more
accessible to remote and resource poor populations. Initially, this was
attempted through the Internet, but it soon became clear that sending
digital images, animation and other memory intensive files simply was
not possible even to capital city offices, not to mention more remote
extension workers. Now through a partnership with First Voice
International the RANET Project is now sending all of its content on a
reliable, low-cost dedicated line to partners in 35 African countries in
the capital cities, secondary towns and rural areas. Additionally, every
site that has the equipment also receives the content from all of First
Voice's other projects including medical journals articles, agricultural
best practice information, news, community radio support materials and
much more.

I completely agree that there always needs to be a feedback loop built
into any project. What we are currently doing is using a hub and spokes
model where one site has a connection to the Internet (usually dial-up)
and can email feedback, but this has generally been very expensive and
unreliable. Where this is not available, First Voice is also using
telephone, snail mail or face-to-face communications as appropriate. 
However, we are always looking for a low-cost low-bandwidth connection
primarily for email use that can be used in remote areas throughout
Africa and Asia and will not require excessive government licensing. If
anyone has any suggestions of these technologies I would greatly
appreciate it.


Aaron Sundsmo 


-- 
Aaron Sundsmo 
Director 
International Programs 
First Voice International 
(formerly WorldSpace Foundation) 

Tel: 202-861-2261 
Fax: 202-861-6407





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