"The International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD) assists developing countries to realise locally owned sustainable development by harnessing the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs). IICD works with its partner organisations in selected countries, helping local stakeholders to assess the potential uses of ICTs in development. Its headquarters are in The Hague, Netherlands.
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IICD has ICT4D or ICT4E projects in:
At the same time, the need for professional staff with essential ICT skills is growing exponentially worldwide, and the gap between the supply and demand of e-literate workers is an increasingly critical and urgent issue to address. Aiming to provide a platform and an opportunity to share experiences and insights on where the urgent issues to tackle are around e-capacity and key ICT skills, IICD and GKPF hosted a thematic workshop as part of the World Summit on the Information Society Forum 2013. The objective was to generate a common understanding of what needs to be done in 2013 and looking to post-2015, and how. The session kicked off with a video message from European Commission VP, Mrs Neelie Kroes, to the WSIS audience, wherein she talked about the role that digital skills play in Europe’s twin challenges of restoring opportunities to all at a time of crisis, and to increase Europe’s competitiveness on the world stage. She discussed how the European Commission’s Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs is addressing this important task in collaboration with many different European stakeholders. Following on, Oliver Bell from Microsoft shed light on two of their programmes designed to support and strengthen ICT skills capacity. YouthSpark focuses on building skills with three different youth sectors - working with kids, teens and young adults. Microsoft’s 4Afrika initiative is specifically focused on the African continent and is designed to help build economic value through the delivery of a combination of improved ICT skills and infrastructure. Michelle Gauthier from Motorola Solutions talked about Motorola’s longstanding track record in emergency and crisis management communications with several United Nations agencies, and their belief in the role that ICTs play in supporting human development. By discussing a few sample cases where ICT-based solutions have clearly helped to generate additional income for frontline sales workers, as well as enhance back-end sales force operations, Ms Gauthier clearly emphasised the need for ICT devices and services to directly relate, and add value, to the daily lives of the individual users. Both representatives from the large private sector technology companies are excited about these times in which technology providers can ship devices to consumers in Africa at the same price as to consumers in Europe, and where the focus has shifted from designing for necessity to designing for requirements. What becomes ever more important then, is the issue of identifying and supporting individuals and groups that are best placed to identify scenarios where technologies would be most useful. These actors are those that are able to understand and interface with local needs and communities, identify the right technologies for the right place at the right time, and appreciate how solutions can best be designed and introduced as a process that supports the desired change. A key skill set that was identified by the workshop as crucial for people and organisations introducing ICT is to know how to link to the intrinsic motivation of the intended technology users, to identify the uses that individuals may find valuable in their everyday lives, and to develop and introduce the technologies in ways that allow individuals to use the tools to shape their lives in ways that they find meaningful. The role which large international technology companies increasingly see for themselves is to act as a catalyst and not as providers of large scale programmes and finances; they are increasingly focused on using and reinforcing local expertise, and on identifying locally sustainable business models - roles which make them natural allies for organisations like IICD working to strengthen both civil society organisations as well as national capacity of technology companies to support social-economic development. Maggie de Jongh from the Blue Tree group brought the session’s attention to the large groups of individuals the world over that lack literacy and numeracy skills, and called on public, private and civil society actors to link e-literacy efforts to reinforcing initiatives that support the development of reading, writing and numeracy skills. Building on examples from the publishing and media industries in South Africa, Ms de Jongh emphasised the role that local private sector industries have to play in skills building of the professional workforce associated with those industries. Those IT solution designers that are able to effectively identify the information and communication opportunities and needs of all people involved in, for example, South African book publishing and distribution chains, have important skills that can be used to ICT-enable the value chains of many other industries and social sectors as well. The session’s last panellist, Caroline Figueres from IICD, talked about the critical importance of filling the gap that exists between the large international ICT consultancy organisations on the one hand, and the many well-intentioned IT-savvy individuals on the other. She discussed IICD’s experience that strong smaller ICT companies located close to the intended user groups (in terms of identity and geography) are often the best players to offer attractive, locally developed solutions for a low cost. IICD’s work over the last 15 years has allowed it to develop a unique network of small ICT-related organisations that have built up exactly such experience. The discussions at the workshop made clear that a key requirement, if we are to achieve an information society accessible to all, is to support the emergence and growth of individuals and groups that can meaningfully interface between the needs of the currently excluded communities and those that can provide technological devices, skills and relevant solutions – there is need for a larger cadre of local facilitators the world over capable of bringing people, technology and socio-economic development closer together. Paraphrasing the words of Neelie Kroes, our efforts will not succeed or fail on our words, but on our actions. Photo: ITU/ J.M. Planche Goal is to use the patient feedback that comes from the questionnaires to improve the service in health facilities. This is part of a larger project of IICD, Akvo, Text to Change, Cordaid and local partner The Diocese of Jinja to contribute to timely, complete and accurate management of health information and to strengthen performance based financing through the use of computers and other information and communication technology (ICT). Goal is to to use the patient feedback to improve the service in health facilities. This is part of a larger project of IICD, Akvo, Text to Change, Cordaid and local partner The Diocese of Jinja to contribute to timely, complete and accurate management of health information and to strengthen performance based financing through the use of computers and other information and communication technology (ICT). The recently graduated social sciences student Cleofas Mbulishe holds a Samsung Galaxy phone and is quickly moving his fingers on the screen while standing in a field in Jinja, Uganda. This could be yet another story of how mobile phones and mobile gaming are increasingly popular amongst young Africans, but that wouldn’t do Mbulishe justice. He is standing next to a woman who recently went to a health centre and asks her about her age, how much she paid for her treatment and if she is satisfied and enters her answers in a mobile system on his phone. Mbulishe is one of 30 voluntary health workers that go out every day to communities around Jinja to collect information from patients that recently went to health clinics to get treated. And while some of his colleagues use pen and paper, Cleofas and about ten others mainly use mobile phones to easily enter and send data. The mobile app was developed by IICD’s Connect4Change consortium partner organisation Akvo. The app ‘Akvo Flow’ was originally designed for water related development projects but is now also be used for gathering other data. “It’s very easy to use,” says Mbulishe who never used a smartphone before. He enters the final information that the women gives him and hits ‘send.’ A popup screen says ‘survey submitted’. In addition to using pen and paper and the mobile app, Connect4Change-partner Text to Change introduced a call centre approach where volunteers call patients after a few days after they have visited the health facility to ask them the same questions over the phone. IICD, Cordaid (IICD’s main health partner in the Connect4Change consortium), Akvo, Text to Change and the Diocese have tested these three tools to take an informed decision on the way to collect and process patient satisfaction data. In the test phase, it was also assessed whether the moment and location of interviews with patients as well as the background of the person who collects the data influences the outcomes of the satisfaction survey. The data collection tools were also compared in terms of user-friendliness, reliability, sustainability and (cost) efficiency. The diocese of Jinja already has much experience with collecting patient satisfaction data, but patients were often questioned while still being in the hospital. This could lead to patients not feeling safe to tell the truth. The new method only yields some minor changes in results. ““Before using the new system, about 80 percent of our patients were satisfied, this is now about 65 to 70 percent,” says Dorcus Atieno of the Jinja Diocese. And although this seems a little strange to be positive about less happy patients, this is probably closer to how patients actually feel, says Atieno. This is because the answers to questions about waiting time and whether a patient received sufficient information about a disease differ slightly when a patient is interviewed in their homes. This might be related to the location of the interview, but more probably to the fact that there is some time between the interview and the actual visit to the health center. There is also an indication that patients may be hesitant to complain about health staff members, when they are being questionned at a health clinic. When they are interviewed by Cleofas or one of the other health workers at home, patients feel honoured that someone takes the effort to visit them at home and may feel more free to speak out. With the questionnaires being done with mobile phones and sent straight to the computers of hospitals and health clinics, there is also a lesser chance that surveys will get lost, says health worker Cleofas Mbulishe. This is also shown in preliminary results that show that both interviewers and data users found it easier and quicker to work with data on a mobile phone rather than entering data by hand. Data reliability is an issue for all tools. The mobile phone survey has two functions to enhance reliability of the data collection. Because the mobile phone surveys are geotagged, it means that it can be easily identified where the survey was done. This allows to cross-check the data and to see where the patients who responded come from. In this way it could also be observed for example that representation of male clients and clients that live far from the health facility is not optimal. The mobile survey tool asks for considerable investments in comparison to the other tools, because smartphones have to be purchased and data collectors have to be trained. On the other hand, when the smartphones are now bought and data collectors are trained, scaling up to other facilities can be organised without high additional investments. The phones can also be used for multiple purposes as Voluntary Health Teams also need up-to-date information about for example maternal health for which many apps are available for learning purposes. The use of the mobile phone tool might enhance sustainability of the client satisfaction surveys. On the longer term the tool can take away some of the workload involved in data entry and data analysis. After interviewing the woman about her experience in the health clinic, Cleofas visits another former patient. A little child of about half a year old. The father of the child answers the questions of the health worker, who enters them into his phone easily. After the interview, Mbulishe explains that the health workers that conduct the surveys receive a small financial compensation for each patient that they ask questions to. Although he says he gladly does the work for free (Mbulishe and his colleagues are volunteers), it means that he can dedicate more time to the patient questionnaires and less time to his current job as a groundnut vendor. In the coming months, IICD, Cordaid, Akvo, UCMB and the Diocese of Jinja will expand the smart phone solution for collecting patient satisfaction data to more districts and health facilities. A good technical support structure will be set up to support this. As a result of the pilot and with the support of IICD and Akvo, the Jinja Diocese now plans to also develop mobile-phone based surveys for other data collection purposes. The objective of this session is to generate a common understanding of what needs to be done and how. Over the past decade, ICTs have become an essential ingredient in effective supply chains, have allowed for new growth opportunities to emerge and have challenged traditional employment paradigms. The need for professional staff with essential ICT skills is growing exponentially worldwide, and the gap between the supply and demand of e-literate workers is an increasingly critical and urgent issue to address. Many stakeholders are not yet able to take full advantage of the available ICT tools and solutions, and a huge majority of those with a role to play in a country’s socio-economic development are not ICT-ready and lack appropriate skills. This is true across the spectrum from IT pioneers/solution creators (supply side) to the many levels of solution users. Without foundational e-literacy and suitable competences to use the myriad of ICT tools and services, the opportunities for value creation offered by productive use of ICTs will be lost to many public, private and civil society organisations across the globe. Some questions that emerge and that need to be answered to guide our individual and collective action, as well as the WSIS Action Line C4: Capacity Building, include: Our goals for the session are to intensify a collective sense of urgency around the issue of e-capacity and ICT skills, by collectively mapping actors/organisations, initiatives, and materials working to address the gaps. By doing so, we aim to stimulate diverse players to forge relevant partnerships and commit to collectively accelerating the widespread availability of key ICT capacities. The session will kick off with an interactive panel of speakers with complementary experiences in nurturing ICT capacity, followed by a collective discussion and mapping of existing work and priority areas for action. The speakers that will kick off the discussions are: This thematic Workshop: 'Speed up! Towards a Generation of e-Literacy for All' is organised by IICD and GKPF on Wednesday May 15th, 11:15 – 13:00, as part of the WSIS Forum 2013. For more information contact: Saskia Harmsen (IICD's Community Relations Officer) Some of the key responsibilities of this position are to develop, coordinate and implement IICD’s monitoring and evaluation strategy; design and implement data collection and analysis; and coordinate and implement country impact studies and sector evaluations. IICD is offering a competent work environment with room for personal development and initiative in an international and dynamic organisation. If you have the skills and drive you can find more information about this and other vacancies at IICD's vacancies section. IICD is a non-profit foundation that specialises in information and communication technology (ICT) as a tool for development. IICD is active in Africa and Latin America where we bring about technical and social innovations that create and enhance development opportunities in education, economic development, health and the environment. Speaking at the ESA-ARTES applications workshop, IICD’s managing director Caroline Figuères said that in technology driven projects the importance of the human component is often underestimated. “Even if we are at the ESA-ARTES applications workshop to share recent success stories, again successful development is not about technologies but about people's acceptation and use.” “Make your consumers smart by building their capacities and they will become co-creators of your projects and solutions, then the future will be bright for satellite applications,” added Figuères. The European Space Agency’s ARTES Applications Workshop, which took place in Rome on 18-19 April, showcased the achievements in the field in an effort to raise awareness of the potential benefits space-based services offer to user communities in their business. “Our experience is that any development programmes should be developed and implemented on a demand-driven basis by involving local stakeholders at different stages to ensure maximum local ownership of the tools and services from the start.” During the school assessment, DOT ET’s communications officer and training facilitator Biruk Yosef discovered that all the teachers in the schools plan, record, report and produce teaching-learning materials and documents manually. “The pedagogy centres of all schools were filled with hand-made teaching aids and the walls of the offices were decorated with hand-made charts and graphs”, recalls Yosef. Furthermore, registering student records, preparing exams and managing the school administration are also done manually. These activities are not only time consuming and tiresome, they also hinder the teachers from being better prepared for the classroom hampering the improvement of teaching and learning processes. Moreover a poor learning environment with large classes also decreases the quality of teaching. With the project “Quality primary school teaching through ICT in rural Ethiopia”, the two partners aim to improve the school management for eight primary schools in the Oromia region. The school management information system (SMIS), being developed by DOT ET, will be accompanied by training, support and advice to the teachers and school principles to equip them with knowledge and skills on how to use computers and information systems to increase the quality of the education in their schools. Since October 2012, the partners have provided ICT equipment and computer training to three schools in Nekemte, Konchi and Gimbi. The first six months of the project focused on building partnerships and a trust relationship among the schools and the technical and training provider with the aim to ensure continuity and an effective project implementation in a sustainable manner. The implementation plan of this project was developed in close collaboration with the schools during an assessment and kick-off workshop. This enabled the project partners to define a plan that caters to the schools’ needs. The project will be completed by 2014, and with the SMIS connecting the head office and school staff trained, a total of 150 primary school teachers will be able to use the system to enhance the quality of their lessons. The video shows Doctor Bon, who works at Nyakato Health Clinic and explains how his health clinic managed to reduce waiting lines for patients and how the clinic manages to reach specialists via internet to help with complicated cases. In Bon’s health clinic, it is now also easier for doctors to digitally send the in-hospital pharmacy information about which drugs need to be prescribed to a patient. In the health clinic, administrative workers can now also do their work better because they can access patient billing information throughout the health clinic thanks to a Heath Management Information System that was put in place in the health clinic thanks to IICD and its partner Cordaid via the Connect4Change Consortium. Ï a patient now loses his or her patient card, we can easily search the computer to find the records," says cashier Mariam Mihayo. The health clinic in Tanzania is just one of the many examples of how IICD successfully uses ICT to support healthcare in Africa. The video also shows IICD’s work in healthcare other African countries and its results. IICD for instance also helps mothers who get better information about malaria or HIV/Aids via their mobile phone. With the support of local partners and by training other nurses, doctors and health workers, IICD: The young professionals are financially supported by Vodafone Foundation Netherlands via its World of Difference programme and are located in Tamale for a year to provide hands on support to a sexual reproductive health project by IICD and its local partner ACDEP. Each of the four team members has its own specialisation and keeps track of the progress of the project via a blog that can be read on Vodafone’s World of Difference website and in Dutch national newspaper Sp!ts. Photo: Kim Nooij In one of her first blogs, communications specialist Nieke Kempen describes what the four have been doing so far. IICD's local partner ACDEP took the Dutch advisors to several locations to give them a general idea of how sexual education in Northern Ghana takes place. "In the Upper East, we had conversations with club members of so called youth clubs," Kempen writes. "These clubs are accessible for both boys and girls from secondary schools, but the number of girls is usually higher. Clubs are chaired by one or two 'peer educators' and they come together about twice per month. They talk about health and the prevention of STDs, HIV and teen pregnancy, but also about more general social issues. Teenagers are very confident here and ask questions such as how can I browse on the internet' and ask questions about menstruation and STDs. The knowledge level of most of the students is low and there is a lack of training material. The design and the content of the material that is available is not up to date. A nice challenge challenge could be to create attractive teaching material such as games and videos." Social media expert Kim Nooij also wrote about the visits to the various youth clubs. The four young professionals also visited health centres. "Aim this year is to implement Health Management Information Systems (HIMS) in all these clinics and to start a campaign about sexual reproductive health using mobile technology." Nooij also uploaded a video with the first impressions of the work of her and the three others: In the coming months, the four Dutch professionals will use the knowledge that they gained from their field visits to help ACDEP in the creation of new digital teaching material that’s also available on mobile phones, but also by providing advice on the digitalisation of handwritten patient files in health clinics, for instance. They will also provide advice about communicating the results of the project better and how to reach more people. All four young professionals work according to IICD’s social innovation principles that ensure that the project continues after the young professionals leave. More information about the activities of the advisors can be found on the English website youngprofessionalsghana.nl or via their (Dutch) columns on the website of World of Difference. In Lima, Peru a small group of entrepreneurs with a long-standing relationship with IICD reflected on IICD’s role as an incubator in the region, which allows ICT businesses to grow both in turnover and content and which, over the years, has helped them to become experts on ICT for Development (ICT4D) in their own right. “They were outspoken about their commitment to collaborate with IICD and other private partners in order to meet the growing international need for expertise on ICT4D”, says IICD’s country manager Anne-Marijke Podt, “at the same time, partners acknowledged that, in order to continue to cater to the market with quality products and services that have a social value and a viable business model, we will need to look at new ways to collaborate.” The first round of talks has taken place in Peru and there will be soon similar meetings in Ethiopia and Burkina Faso. This support involves boosting capacities of existing businesses to provide training and advise, it involves setting up pools of local ICT consultants with various skills, bringing them together for networking and knowledge exchange and it involves on-the-job training and joint seminars for young ICT officers working at the various project sites. As a result of the programme build-up, IICD boosts the demand for ICT services in areas where there previously was none. Partner organizations need advice, training and equipment for their projects and this demand increases when ICT gets further embedded in the partner organizations and the community at large, where new markets are developed beyond the immediate markets of the capitals and larger cities. “In late 2012, IICD decided to build more explicitly on the existing partnerships with private partners in Africa and Latin America,” says IICD's managing director Caroline Figuères. “As a result of this new commitment, several consultation workshops are now organized to engage with the ICT entrepreneurs in talks about how IICD has contributed to ICT business, personal development, markets and client focus and how they view the future of their collaboration with IICD and their peers.” The first consultation has taken place on March 25-26 in Lima, Peru with partners from ICT companies in the Andean region. The next consultation workshop will take place in Addis Ababa in April, with private sector partners from English speaking countries in Africa that IICD has worked with for many years. A final consultation is planned for May in Ouagadougou. Based on the meetings, IICD will prepare a publication on how investing in capacities of the private sector in Africa and Latin America helped both our programmes and the ICT sector and how we, together with these entrepreneurs, intend to move forward. For more information contact: Caroline Figuères (IICD Managing Director) or Anne-Marijke Podt (IICD Country Manager) "Let's start with a simple example," says medical informatics specialist Mohamed Sangaré. "Not long ago, every time if a woman in rural Mali wanted to go to a regional hospital for a breast cancer screening, she couldn't. She would then have to travel 1000 kilometers to go to Bamako for a mammography and then stay in Bamako to wait for the results." Thanks to a digital system and training that were done via Sangaré and his colleagues with the support of IICD, now doctors at regional hospitals can also perform a mammogram, send it to a specialist digitally and then ask a radiologist in the city for help to interpret the mammogram. But it's not just mammograms. Thanks to the system, doctors in regional hospitals were trained on how to make x-rays and how they could digitally contact radiologists in Bamako. Sangaré:"We often found that even if x-ray equipment was available, doctors outside of Bamako were unable to operate it. But via online training, specialists helped doctors to understand how to make an x-ray and helped them how to interpret the results better. We sometimes also use drawings to clarify how to make a good x-ray and we provide tips. A tip that we gave for instance was such that if you take an x-ray of the side of someone's body, it is easier to turn the equipment 30 degrees." The digital learning and digital specialist approach is so successful, that Sangaré and his team at CERTES (Centre d’Expertise et de Recherche sur la Télémédecine et l’E-Santé) helped to set up a similar system in Burkina Faso, Gabon and Ivory Coast. The biggest change for patients is that they have a radiologist who is there for them, even when there's no radiologist," says Sangaré. And yes, people who need cancer treatment still need to go to the city, he admits, but it does make it easier for them to get an early scan. That means that it saves patients that do not have cancer the expensive trip to a medical specialist in the city. Sangaré became interested in telemedicine and teleradiology when he studied medicine around 1998. "The topic of my thesis was teleradiology in Mali. After my thesis, I was so intrigued by the topic that I decided not to treat patients, but to focus on medical informatics. When I then worked on my dissertation, I also saw that there was not just a problem with x-rays in Mali, but that there was also a continuous training problem." That's when the medical informatics specialist and a group of other doctors formed a centre which ran teleradiology and distance training programmes. At that time, the International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD) also started supporting the medical informatics specialist and his projects. IICD supported the telemedicine programme in Mali financially but also by providing strategic and operational advice and by linking the project and the project team to other potentially interested parties such as TNO, the European Space Agency and UNGAID. The teleradiology programme now runs completely without any financial support from international aid organisations, says medical informatics specialist Sangaré: "In Mopti for example, an x-ray for lungs costs 4000 CFA Francs (approximately 8 US Dollars). Part of this goes to an account that is used for radiology. When a physician then needs to consult a radiologist digitally, it can be paid from the account." Another way of increasing the sustainability of the system is by working with the business world. Sangaré:"We now also work with mining companies and other companies who pay for health checks of their employees. Money of those check-ups also partially goes to the teleradiology programme." The interview with Mohamed Sangaré was held during his visit to Europe for an e-health expert consult organised by IICD as part of the 8th Africa-EU Strategic Partnership. A more detailed interview with Sangaré about the future of e-health can be found on the Euro-Africa P8 website.RSS feed from/de : News
Tackling the Critical Gaps in ICT Skills and e-Literacy
Service in Ugandan Health Clinics Improves thanks to Digital Patient Feedback
Choosing a context-appropriate tool
Pros and cons of different survey tools
Compensation per survey
Speed Up! Towards a Generation of e-Literacy for All
Speakers
Are You a Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist?
Smart Technologies for Smart Citizens
Better School Management Systems Increase Quality of Teaching in Rural Ethiopia
Designing ‘tailor-made’ ICT solutions
Video Shows How ICT Can Improve Healthcare in Africa
Dutch Young Professionals Give Advice to Ghanaian Youth Health Project
IICD Engages Entrepreneurs in Talks on Private Sector Development
IICD’s strong tie with the private sector
Developing emerging markets
ICT entrepreneurs paving the new ‘development’ path
?Thanks to Online Consults, Breast Cancer Can Be Treated Earlier in Rural Mali?
Digital medical advice for Burkina Faso, Gabon and Ivory Coast
Distance training programmes for Malian doctors
No financial support needed
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