Why This Founder is Tired of All the Debate

Has everything we could have said, been said? What has really changed? Aren’t we still looking at the same handful of challenges? How much progress has actually been made? It’s time to stop debating.

The fun is over. Time to get tough?
I’m all for discussion and debate. I’ve taken part in my fair share over the past eleven years. But I’m now beginning to wonder if, after all this time, everything we could have said has been said. I’m wondering if we are still looking at the same handful of challenges, what has changed, and how much progress has actually been made.

Can’t the m4d (Mobile 4 Development) community come together and fix some of this? Create a code of conduct, a directory of terms and meanings, a set of best practices? With the billions of dollars funding mobile projects the world over, can’t we siphon a little off and create an overarching set of guidelines that projects and donors adhere to? Almost everything we see out there has been funded by someone, so if only the donors seriously tried to grapple with the problem – and got strict with what they funded – we’d almost certainly make serious progress.

Recently, at the Guardian Activate conference, the scale of the problem settled over me. It’s worth mentioning that I didn’t attend the event this year, though made sure to follow from a distance. Much of the early conversation surrounding technology followed a similar pattern to many of the other technology-for-good conferences I’d attended over the years.

If, about a decade ago, we’d listed all of the questions, unknowns, problems and challenges faced by the ICT4D community (Information and Communication technologies for development), it would probably have looked something like this:

• How do we replicate and scale?
• How do we measure impact?
• How do we stop the reinventing of wheels?
• How do we avoid being ‘technology-lead’?
• How do we break out of our silos?
• What is our business/sustainability model?
• Is open source a help or a hindrance?
• How do we maximize the opportunity mobile brings?

If we made the same list today, it would probably look something like this:

• How do we replicate and scale?
• How do we measure impact?
• How do we stop the reinventing of wheels?
• How do we avoid being ‘technology-lead’?
• How do we break out of our silos?
• What is our business/sustainability model?
• Is open source a help or a hindrance?
• How do we make sense of the countless pilots taking place?

The lists are redundant except for the last question. We’ve gone from not really knowing what to do with mobile phones to a position of everyone everywhere trying to solve something with them, whether or not they’re the right tool for the job. It’s still a problem, but arguably a more serious one.

Among other things, this leads to confusion and unnecessary competition (yes, the non-profit world is competitive). I attempted to put a stop to some of this in a post called “Our social mobile line in the sand” way back in May 2009, without success. I wonder if the time is right for someone to try again?

None of us surely want to sit in yet another conference, gathering or workshop and hear the same things over and over again, but that’s often what we do. And more often than not we pay good money for the privilege. Messages I personally don’t want to hear again include:

Some of this stuff isn’t difficult. Take the problem of silos. Most of the events where this comes up are silos themselves. How can someone stand up at a mobile health conference packed with only people who use mobile phones and only for health, and say we should stop talking in silos? How about a mobile health practitioner attending an agriculture conference, instead? Or one focusing on human rights? Don’t tell me mobile health projects can’t learn something from non-mobile agriculture? If, as we constantly hear, innovation and opportunity happen in unexpected places, we need to put ourselves in them a little more, as Tim Smit suggested at the Emerge Conference in 2010.

Perhaps as a sign of things to come, mentions of mPesa are increasingly banned at meetings I attend. If we have to use the same example of a successful mobile money project over and over again, doesn’t that say something about the state of mobile money?

I was recently asked what progress I thought we’d made since I wrote “Technology’s new chance to make a difference” for the Guardian in January 2012. In the areas of best practice, adopting more appropriate technology and mainstreaming ICT4D, sadly I had to admit very little. As I wrote three years earlier:

“I spent the best part of my university years critiquing the efforts of those who went before me. Countless others have done the same. Looking to the future, how favorably will the students and academics of tomorrow reflect on our efforts? If the next thirty years aren’t to read like the last then we need to re-think our approach, and re-think it now.”

Burning Question

The development sector is hardly awash with success. The m4d community has a great chance to buck the trend. The big question is, will we?