When I'm not too busy flying around the world (if only it were as glamorous as it seems!), my favorite thing to do is to get out of the office and go see what's happening "in the field," where our staff interact with clients.
One of the recent areas where I've been focused a lot is on technology, and specifically giving our frontline staff technology to either capture information from their interactions or even aid them in providing better services.
There's a constant discussion about whether technology reduces "the human touch" of service delivery. Anyone who has been to the doctor and felt that he spent more time trying to enter information into the system than actually examine you will understand why this is a risk!
But what I've been hearing recently from several different visits around Bangladesh is that technology is extremely empowering. Mastering technology builds confidence!
My colleagues and I took a tablet out the other day with a household survey in Bangla. We showed it to some community health workers to get their feedback on the system. While none of them had used a tablet before, after a few minutes of initial fear, they were pretty excited and already able to navigate the survey fairly easily.
Last week I went to visit Safesave, a very interesting organization set up on the basis on financial diary research, finding that the poor often did quite a bit of financial management but lacked good savings options. Recently Safesave came under the BRAC umbrella, but its operations have remained largely the same. Several years ago Safesave went digital--clients kept a passbook for their records, but Safesave's collectors did all their data entry into a smart phone during their door to door visits. It's worked very well for them--it's brought an additional level of transparency and built-in monitoring that keeps operations running very smoothly.
I followed one of the collectors around a Dhaka slum in the afternoon. She visits over 200 households a day to see if any want to deposit savings or make a payment on a loan. The system is like second nature to her; she's able to navigate it rapidly. At the end of the transaction, a Bangla screen pops up with the text, "You have made a deposit of X taka. Your new balance is Y." Theoretically, the client sees this screen and agrees with it.
In practice, many of the clients don't understand the technology, and some of the older clients have vision problems that make it difficult to read the numbers on the screen. But the younger ones, like the young woman pictured above, study it carefully. The Safesave collector when through the system with her, asking her to read the final page carefully. The girl is already trusted with some of the family's finances because she's the most literate member of the family. Now she's seeing technology everyday and learning about how to use it.
Technology is creating many new helpful tools for development, but one of its greatest potentials is to change how people see themselves and what they think is possible. We shouldn't forget that in our calculations on the cost/benefits to bringing technology further and further into the grassroots.
Glad to see that some are getting started already; development partners need to get on board! Big kudos to Google for taking a bus around Bangladesh to literally bring the internet to 500,000 students across the country!! Hope we can find ways to take this beyond university students in urban centers.
One of the recent areas where I've been focused a lot is on technology, and specifically giving our frontline staff technology to either capture information from their interactions or even aid them in providing better services.
There's a constant discussion about whether technology reduces "the human touch" of service delivery. Anyone who has been to the doctor and felt that he spent more time trying to enter information into the system than actually examine you will understand why this is a risk!
But what I've been hearing recently from several different visits around Bangladesh is that technology is extremely empowering. Mastering technology builds confidence!
Certainly there are a lot of technical considerations, but I think it's also worth thinking about the significant non-technical impact. How does it change a woman's life to be one of the first in her community to use and understand a tablet? How does it affect her children to see their mother mastering technology? And how do these skills, which obviously then make it easier to imagine other uses of a tablet, such as online applications, open up new worlds of information?
Last week I went to visit Safesave, a very interesting organization set up on the basis on financial diary research, finding that the poor often did quite a bit of financial management but lacked good savings options. Recently Safesave came under the BRAC umbrella, but its operations have remained largely the same. Several years ago Safesave went digital--clients kept a passbook for their records, but Safesave's collectors did all their data entry into a smart phone during their door to door visits. It's worked very well for them--it's brought an additional level of transparency and built-in monitoring that keeps operations running very smoothly.
I followed one of the collectors around a Dhaka slum in the afternoon. She visits over 200 households a day to see if any want to deposit savings or make a payment on a loan. The system is like second nature to her; she's able to navigate it rapidly. At the end of the transaction, a Bangla screen pops up with the text, "You have made a deposit of X taka. Your new balance is Y." Theoretically, the client sees this screen and agrees with it.
In practice, many of the clients don't understand the technology, and some of the older clients have vision problems that make it difficult to read the numbers on the screen. But the younger ones, like the young woman pictured above, study it carefully. The Safesave collector when through the system with her, asking her to read the final page carefully. The girl is already trusted with some of the family's finances because she's the most literate member of the family. Now she's seeing technology everyday and learning about how to use it.
Technology is creating many new helpful tools for development, but one of its greatest potentials is to change how people see themselves and what they think is possible. We shouldn't forget that in our calculations on the cost/benefits to bringing technology further and further into the grassroots.
Glad to see that some are getting started already; development partners need to get on board! Big kudos to Google for taking a bus around Bangladesh to literally bring the internet to 500,000 students across the country!! Hope we can find ways to take this beyond university students in urban centers.
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