Friday I delivered my first assignment at CDRN, a presentation on technology trends. They gave me an opportunity to contribute to their strategic planning offsite last week by doing what I love, immersing myself in technology strategy. There are a lot of different ways to approach strategy development, but the process I follow is one that hasn't varied since it was first taught to me years ago by a colleague. It's called creative visioning and I use it because it focuses on the promise of technology while also mitigating the risk of uncertainty that is inherent in the technology environment.
It also involves identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that comprise the cultural context of the technology environment, which for me was problematic because I'm new to Uganda and to CDRN. But over the course of last week's three day offsite I absorbed information. And on Friday I used what I'd learned to create contextual questions for the group that would help them decide which technologies to apply from the trends that I provided. What follows are both the trends and what I've learned so far about technology's role in Uganda and at CDRN. How they will apply this in the coming weeks I can't say, but I know that it will be a collaborative process because this is a core value of the organization. Normally I would call this teamwork, but CDRN seems to have elevated it to something more akin to family.
Cultural Context
In the baby boom race, Uganda leaves Ireland in the dust. The median age here is 15, and 75 percent of the population are under the age of 25. There are babies everywhere...three of the CDRN staff have children under the age of 6 months. So how is this accommodated at an offsite? Are moms excluded? Are they told to just be there and then left to figure out their family situation? For CDRN, the solution is to include the babies in the greater organizational family. When we climbed into the minibus to leave for the retreat, moms, babies and caregivers all travelled along. Over the course of the offsite, CDRN staff played with the babies, calmed them when they cried, took them to the doctor when they were sick, and in short, treated them as part of the extended family.
Another element of the extended family were the additional participants who attended the first two days. In my experience, technical experts, customers, and suppliers are generally invited to strategy sessions, but I've never seen former employees on the participant list unless they're paid consultants. At CDRN, however; the insight of former employees is not just welcomed, it's sought out.
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| John De Conick |
John De Conick is the founder of CDRN and ran the organization up until around 2008. His presentation provided perspective on the changing Ugandan environment, particularly what he saw to be trends of declining donor funding, a shift towards a larger government bureaucracy, and a greater priority given to self-determination within Uganda and national security outside of Uganda. He related these trends to Civil Society Organizations, specifically their proliferation, commercialization, and increased competition with for-profit consultancies and international NGOs doing CSO work.
Arthur Larok, formerly of CDRN and currently the leader of ActionAid, followed John with a slightly different perspective. Arthur discussed an activist approach to address the imbalance of power that exists between government and society, which of course makes sense given that the Black Monday movement is sponsored by ActionAid. CDRN's role is largely one of capacity building though, not activism, and so Arthur also discussed how important it was to understand what "capacity building" really means. It is not simply linear knowledge transfer - that model isn't sustainable because there is no community ownership of the solutions that are implemented. According to Arthur, capacity building is "helping people to recognize their own potential by creating the conditions under which empowerment happens".
Isn't that the very definition of leadership?
I can personally attest that leadership is what Joseph Ssuuna, the current Executive Director of CDRN embodies. Everyone at CDRN has welcomed me warmly, but from a professional perspective I'm a bit of a curiosity...until Friday nobody quite knew how I could help. Musanje Brian started the discovery process by giving me the opportunity to present technology trends. Joseph then, through the course of the offsite, repeatedly linked my expertise to potential benefit for the organization. He gave me confidence and he gave others an appreciation for the perspective that I bring to CDRN, and so by the morning of my presentation, he had created the very conditions under which empowerment happens.
Joseph Ssuuna
Following are the technology trends I presented that are emerging in a different way in Uganda than they emerged in Europe and the US, and the implications of this difference over the next few years here. For anyone reading this blog with an opinion on these trends, I would really appreciate it if you'd take a few minutes and lend CDRN your expertise though comments to the post.
Cloud Computing
If you use Skype, then you are already using cloud Voice Over IP to supplement or replace telephone, chat messaging, and virtual meeting services. A few years ago, cloud services emerged offering low cost, reliable, and scalable Internet-based applications and data storage. Now many organizations are eliminating their internal email, file storage, and business process applications in favor of commercially hosted alternatives provided by Google, Amazon, and others.
There are many advantages to these services, but there is one dependency, robust Internet access. In a previous post I talked about how the Internet connection at CDRN doesn't have the necessary speed or reliability to support cloud services, but robust Internet access does exist in Kampala and even in many parts of greater Uganda, and so it's just a matter of understanding the costs and weighing those against the potential benefits of having a company like Google as your IT service provider.
Open Data (e-Gov)
Open data has three core elements:
- Government-provided data for social services, budgets, etc, hosted on a public platform in an accessible format
- The ability to extract and transform that data into information
- Summarizing that information and communicating it in a meaningful way to interested parties
Open data initiatives rely on cooperation between the data provider (the government) and those who want to turn that data into meaningful information. At the trade-show I attended recently I got a reality check on open data in Uganda. We were told that due to security concerns, the Ugandan government is hesitant to "expose" the raw data to the public. That said, the Ministry of Finance has provided a large quantity of data in an accessible format. Other ministries have provided data as well in .pdf which isn't accessible, but it's a start.
And interestingly, Civil Society Organizations have responded to the data availability problem by leading their own open data initiative called the OpenDev partnership. CSOs collect a lot of monitoring data on social services and in the absence of government leadership, are carrying the initiative forward on their own. At the trade-show the leaders of the initiative asked CSOs to contribute their data and work together to influence the government to do the same. It will be interesting to see how successful this model will be without leadership from of one of the key players. Perhaps through their absence though, they will ultimately reduce dependency on government-provided data, which in the end may be a more sustainable model.
Mobile Technologies
You probably already know about the exponential growth of mobile technologies, specifically cell phones in Africa. You may also know that this growth is enabled by a good cellular infrastructure and the privatization of cellular companies which creates competition and drives down prices. Growth is also fuelled by mobile applications like M-Pesa in Kenya and MTN mobile money here in Uganda. But in Africa, extracting the next level of mobile value (Internet access and mobile applications) is problematic.
One issue is the high cost of smartphones. For example, the iPhone 5 costs about $600 US when it's not purchased as part of a contract. Other out of contract smartphones can be as inexpensive as $200, but that's still way beyond the reach of most Ugandans. In the US and increasingly in Europe, smartphone hardware cost is spread over the life of a multi-year usage contract, but here "pay as you go" minutes are purchased instead of contracts so consumers pay the full price of the mobile phone as an up-front cost. In other countries, people are purchasing used smartphones, but Ugandans don't have access to these because of the import ban on used electronics. In general I'm against import bans, but I support the one on used mobile phones and the Ugandan government's efforts to crack down on the black market, because the entire system relies on mobile phone theft. Overall, it's a difficult situation that likely means smartphone adoption will continue to lag in Uganda.
Even if most Ugandans could afford smartphones there's yet another problem. Mobile data gathering projects are breeding like rabbits here in Uganda without any coordination. Increasingly CSOs are using SMS and automated call centers to gather data from communities, and because even the cheapest mobile phones here have radio, they're using this channel to deliver information back to society. This would be great if it were part of a planned approach to improve social services, but it's not. Every NGO or CSO with funding is implementing their project without regard to the projects that have gone before. A community is asked to gather school attendance data, for example, by one NGO using one mobile technology platform, and then asked by another to gather perhaps slightly different data using another mobile technology platform for a different NGO. People wonder why mobile data gathering adoption is so low but it seems pretty simple, it's too much of a good thing.
The Ugandan government is injecting some sense into this chaos by curtailing some mobile projects until a coordinated plan can be put in place. For CSOs I think the lesson is to stop being so distracted by technology and think about the meaning of capacity building as Arthur defined it. Within that context a sensible approach can be designed.
Social Media
Social media is hardly an upcoming trend in many parts of the world, but it is in Uganda. According to SocialBakers there are only about 500,000 Ugandan Facebook users. That's less than 2 percent of the population using what is unarguably the most popular social media platform in the world. And given the previously mentioned barriers to Internet and smartphone adoption, it may not take off anytime soon.
But many other people around the world are using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media applications and so I would argue that while it may not be a way to connect with Ugandan society, it is certainly a way to engage with others outside of Uganda. And perhaps, by building that capacity, it may reduce some of the barriers that exist today in the previously mentioned trends. Black Monday is using social media, the Mabira Rainforest campaign relied heavily on social media, perhaps those 500,000 Facebook users are the influencers needed to drive this technology forward for Uganda.
In Conclusion
After wading through this lengthy post filled with technical jargon you may be just as exhausted and overwhelmed as I was at the end of CDRN's offsite. It was like learning a year's worth of information in three days, but it was extremely valuable information that will benefit both my research and CDRN's strategic direction. Note that there is one key contextual element missing from this post, CDRN's business strategy. As I mentioned, the new five year strategy is currently drafted and the presentations and discussion at the offsite will be incorporated into the final version. Because the strategy is an internal document, it's not appropriate to share the details here, but the strategy informed both the trends that I chose to delve into and the potential application of those trends.
In conclusion I'd like to leave you with this thought. An organization's strategy is, at its heart, a reflection of the culture. If the culture is healthy, if stakeholders have a say, if the organization's actions are aligned with its values, if there is good communication and an overall sense of "we're in this together fulfilling an important mission" then the foundation is there for good strategic planning. And that foundation is the place where transformation begins.
Musanje Brian and the CDRN team engaged in transformation.
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