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Discussion: Mapping infrastructures in Africa to create the most comprehensive data warehouse on ICT & improve international aid coordination http://www.imentors.eu/map.html

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Mapping infrastructures in Africa to create the most comprehensive data warehouse on ICT & improve international aid coordination http://www.imentors.eu/map.html Athina Vrakatseli Head of Policy Development Unit at GOV2U What is iMENTORS? imentors.eu iMENTORS is a one-stop-shop data warehouse on all e-infrastructure development projects of Sub-Saharan Africa. By mapping e-infrastructure initiatives, our aim is to help scientists, universities, research and education networks as well as... Like Comment (3) Share Unfollow Reply Privately1 month ago Comments 3 comments Gatana Gatana Kariuki ICT Advisor Great tool for researchers and policy makers. Like (1) Reply privately Flag as inappropriate 1 month ago Athina V. likes this Peter Burgess Peter Burgess Founder/CEO at TrueValueMetrics

I hope this is successful, but I am not optimistic for a variety of reasons. I will not write a thesis on what might go wrong and what it is that makes the thing look good but do nothing, but simply try to make my point by picking on one paragraph from the website which has has the following text:

'What’s in it for me? Are you a researcher? A donor agency? A student? Are you a policy maker? A telecommunications company or internet service provider? Are you part of a National or Regional research and education network? Are you a research centre or a NGO looking for partners and grants to implement a project in this field?'

Well ... no ... I am none of these things, but someone very much interested on impact that will deliver meaningful progress to people in poverty who deserve better.

I am a fairly experienced older person who has watched the 'top down' official development assistance community spend its money (well not actually its money ... money donated from various sources, mainly taxpayers) on projects that look good but do rather little for the poor people in developing countries that are ostensibly intended to be the beneficiaries of ODA funding. I have been involved in these matters since the 1970s, and what I have seen does not impress me.

So my question is 'What is in it for the poor people around Africa?' Most of what will find its way into this database is already known by people who are trying to do something about things on the ground, and they probably have much more useful data for action than another 'at the top' database is going to provide. Maybe I am wrong ... but in five years time, my guess is that this initiative will have come and gone, and the situation for poor people around Africa will be unchanged.

Sorry to be negative ... but this looks like a modern version of the same old same old. We really do need something that will change the game, and I don't think this initiative in its present form changes anything. Maybe I am wrong. I hope so.

Peter Burgess TrueValueMetrics Delete 1 month ago

Dear Peter,

I apologize for not replying sooner. thank you very much for your interest in iMENTORS, and even more so, for taking the time to express such invaluable feedback and your concerns about the sustainability of our project.

You are very right to point out that many similar initiatives, regardless of their form, have been rather unsuccessful in spurring into becoming sustainable and meaningful in the long-run. In fact, we believe so too. Our initial observation when starting this project was that most donor funded initiatives, despite their potentially high impact, failed to develop the synergetic potential to make them sustainable in the long run. And this is precisely why we are implementing this project.

Our aim is to facilitate more cooperation in international development initiative, first by identifying what has been funded to date in order to facilitate discoverability; second, to increase the visibility of high-impact projects (via the evaluation framework developed via iMENTORS) to create synergies amongst past, ongoing and prospective projects; and thirdly, to encourage knowledge-sharing amongst all stakeholders and, especially (albeit indirectly) amongst the main benefactors in international cooperation.

The facet of the project that is more relevant to your concerns however, is our on-going work to connect scientists together. By identifying all e-infrastructures on the ground, and linking them to the people that are related to these (either as administrators or as potential users), we are able to connect isolated pool of scientists with the resources (data or instruments) they require to conduct their research. The desired outcome is to enhance cooperation in science, amongst African scientists (south-south) but also with scientist across the world (south-north). We think that by improving the opportunities for conducting research in Africa, in tandem with the projects designed to build the required infrastructure to perform such research, we are bridging a part of the gap that currently exists in research.

For this project to be sustainable however, implies that users utilise the platform and that they feed it with data themselves. There are implications: first, our platform must serve the needs of the stakeholder community. To this end we are collecting as much feedback as we can to ensure that the tool we are developing is useful to those who will potentially use it. Second, it must be populated with a significant amount data to start with, to be able to demonstrate the potential of this tool. We believe that once people experience what can be done with it, they will be very inclined to share as much data as they can.

Fortunately, we are currently in a stage in the project where we have collected the majority of the data required to do so. What we need now, is for people to give us feedback on the platform so that we incorporate their suggestions. We still have a long way to go, but if we achieve the above mentioned objectives, hopefully we will be successful in turning iMENTORS in one of the biggest crowdsourcing initiatives for e-infrastructures in Africa.

Again, we very much welcome comments like yours Peter, as it facilitates discussions and generate interest around the platform, which is critical to our objectives. I hope that I have shed some light on what we are doing and on our objectives towards sustainability. If not, feel free to contact us directly at communication@imentors.eu, we would be delighted to continue the discussion by email or schedule a conference call if desired.

Best wishes,

Athina Like Reply privately Flag as inappropriate 17 days ago

Thank you for your response to my observations.

My observations were very negative ... in large part because in terms of development, over a very long time, the relationship between money disbursed for development in Africa and amount of benefit actually received by Africa is very poor. I am bothered by the fact that nobody seems interested in trying to figure out exactly why this is.

For a good number of years UNDP assisted countries around the world to prepare an annual report called the Development Cooperation Report (DCR). This was a listing of all the projects being funded by international organizations, public and private, in all the sectors in the country. It was a very useful report because it was sufficiently detailed to be meaningful. It also showed where the international community was ignoring issues both in geographic terms and in sector terms. Eventually it was discontinued, in large part, I believe, because the donor countries hated it.

Several times I tried to reconcile what the DCR was reporting and what OECD was reporting and could not. OECD used data from the donor countries. DCR was data about what actually was happening in the beneficiary countries. Donor misrepresentation was huge.

From a technical point of view the iMentors platform looks like 2013, while what I have been talking about was pretty old fashioned. DCR started as a typewritten report, then became spreadsheet based and eventually was a PC FoxPro database system (called DCAS ... Development Cooperation Analysis System). The nice thing about DCAS was that it was easy to make inquiries using SQL and learn a lot about what was going on.

I developed my own version of a database development planning tool in 1991 when I worked on the first development plan for Namibia after independence. It was FoxPro based like the DCAS. I referred to it as DBSDA ... Data-Base-System-for-Development-Analysis. This worked very well for its day in a standalone PC mode. It was never upgraded for network use ... and this was way before the Internet.

Looking at iMentors, I don't see much of an ability to analyze. Maybe I am missing something, but it seems to me it is a huge electronic filing cabinet in the cloud.

So the question is, exactly what is the PURPOSE of iMentors?

The follow up questions my be things like:
...Who are the beneficiaries of the iMentor initiative?
...How do these beneficiaries benefit?
...Are other systems doing something similar already?
...Who will be funding iMentors in 20 years time?
...etc

My rule for any data based work is that the cost of the data must be very low compared to the value of the data for progress and performance improvement.

The good news is that it is now possible to have data that are much lower cost than ever before (if the data architecture is done right).

The bad news is that there is more and more data about not very much ... the same sets of rather superficial data over and over again ... and hardly anything that really helps change progress and performance for the better.

I am trying to think through how data might be best used to change state, progress and performance for the economy and society. What is emerging is something I call Multi Dimension Impact Accounting (MDIA). A short (2 page) PDF is accessible via this URL:
http://www.truevaluemetrics.org/DBadmin/DBtxt001.php?vv1=txt20080001
There is also a longer (32 page) paper and some slide decks. MDIA is a work in progress but the concepts are solid.

Technology is amazing, and crowdsourcing is possible because of it.

Crowdsourcing pulls data from a remote place to the center very efficiently. Now the question is how do you use data to change behavior (of all the actors) in remote places so there is progress (improved quality of life).

There are exciting possibilities

Peter Burgess - TrueValueMetrics
Multi Dimension Impact Accounting
http://www.truevaluemetrics.org/DBadmin/DBtxt001.php?vv1=txt20080001