UNESCO Request for Input on Guidelines for Digital Inclusion – Your Weekend Long Reads

In 2018 around half the world’s population will be online, which is a major achievement. It also means there is still much work to be done to include the other half.

The next four billion users look different to those already benefiting from digital opportunities for livelihoods, life and work. New and diverse strategies are needed for their digital inclusion. (As this becomes more recognised it may herald the golden age of ICT4D, which already practises inclusive strategies.)

Studies show that, in general, the offline population is disproportionately rural, poor, elderly and female. When it comes to digital skills, women are 1.6 times more likely than men to report it as a factor limiting their use of the internet. Offline people often have limited education, low literacy and typically hold informal sector jobs.

In an increasingly online world, people without the required digital skills and literacy – the 750 million people who cannot read or write and the many more who have low literacy – now face a double exclusion, not only from full participation in the real world but also from opportunities in the digital one.

There is a need to both develop the digital skills and literacy amongst this group, as well as create inclusive digital solutions that are suitable for the digital skills they have today in order to ensure inclusion and equal participation for all.

UNESCO Guidelines for Digital Inclusion for Low-skilled and Low-literate People

Recognising that apps and services, if designed appropriately, can provide an entry point for low-skilled and low-literate people into digital usage and can support improved livelihoods and skills development, UNESCO is currently drafting a set of guidelines for more inclusive design of digital solutions. The work is though UNESCO’s partnership with Pearson.

The draft guidelines have been developed in consultation with an international expert group, and are informed by a landscape review Digital Inclusion for Low- skilled and Low-literate People and a set of fourteen case studies.

There are many excellent guides to effective digital development and how to practise user-centred design. In a way that complements and extends existing resources, UNESCO aims to focus the lens on low-skilled and low-literate users as much as possible with the guidelines.

The Target Audience

The primary target audience for the guidelines are digital solution providers – from large providers such as Google and Facebook, to start-ups – as well as implementation and development partners, such as FAO, GIZ, UNICEF and USAID, who can shape the terms of reference for digital solution development.

The secondary audience includes policy makers – for using the guidelines to create inclusive policies and regulatory frameworks, and mobile network operators and technology providers – for creating enabling environments for greater digital inclusion for all.

Seeking Public Input

In order for UNESCO to create guidelines that are informed, valuable and balanced, it is seeking input from the public. So this week there is one long read — the draft guidelines.

Please review and provide input on the document. When reviewing the guidelines, consider these broad questions:

Is the language and messaging clear?
Is anything missing? Are there parts that should be further developed? Should anything be removed?
What would be the ideal way to raise awareness of the guidelines and have them implemented by as many organisations as possible?

UNESCO is also creating a list of external resources to accompany the guidelines. Please feel free to suggest additional resources to the draft document.

Feedback should be sent by email to ICTliteracy@unesco.org by 30 April 2018.

All input is valuable and will be reviewed by UNESCO. Please note, however, that it is not possible to include all input in the final version.

Drawing on the collective feedback from a range of stakeholders, UNESCO will release a final version of the guidelines on 7 September 2018 in celebration of World Literacy Day.

Thank you in advance for your valuable feedback!

Image © Jayalaxmi Agrotech/Anil Kumar

Six Practices for Digital Inclusion – Your Weekend Long Reads

UNESCO, in partnership with Pearson, has released the final batch of case studies of digital solutions that are inclusive for people with low skills and low literacy, helping them to participate in the knowledge society in innovative ways. The case studies, authored by Dr Nathan Castillo and myself, were released during UNESCO’s Mobile Learning Week.

The new case studies are:

MOPA: a citizen reporting and monitoring platform for solid waste management in Maputo, Mozambique.
Hello Hope / Merhaba Umut: a translation, language learning and essential information service for Syrian refugees living in Turkey.
Farmer Training App: a training tool for sustainable farming practices in Guatemala and 23 other countries.
ABALOBI: a digital self-management system for small-scale fishers in South Africa (coming in April).

The latest case studies affirm the six digital insights drawn from the earlier cases in the series. Each has an interesting story to tell and is well worth a read.

For me, MOPA is particularly interesting because it demonstrates how a user-centred design approach and the inclusion of different stakeholder groups can empower citizens and strengthen accountability for public service delivery. It demonstrates six digital practices that are instructive for ICT4D practitioners.

Citizen Monitoring of Municipal Services

Maputo has a serious solid waste management problem. Many of its 1.2 million residents live in informal settlements, hard to reach because of poor road infrastructure and dangerous during flooding because of drains and rivers blocked by trash.

The Maputo Municipality attempted to address the solid waste challenge by outsourcing waste collection to private companies which used waste removal trucks in the urban sectors, and micro-operators using pushcarts for suburban neighbourhoods. Overseeing and quality controlling such a decentralised network of 45 operators proved to be very difficult.

Today, through the participatory digital reporting and monitoring MOPA platform, citizens are encouraged to report waste issues and monitor the public waste management service in the Maputo Municipality via USSD, website and, most recently, via Android app. After a year, 3,500 registered users have contributed almost 7,000 sanitation reports to the MOPA digital system, 96% via USSD.

It’s a really cool project, basically what happens when a UX company – UX Information Technologies – teams up with city government – the Maputo Municipal Council – and gets support from the World Bank. The development process followed is thorough and the solution is wonderfully pragmatic.

Understand the Problem, Engage All the Users

Good product development means we should design with the user and understand the existing ecosystem. The MOPA team decided to do this through four types of workshops to gather user-oriented design insights, validate workflow systems, and collect ideas for improving the service.

Insight workshops helped unpack the complex system of solid waste management in the city and the roles of the three main groups: residents (the ones reporting), municipal workers (the ones managing) and private waste collection operators (the ones responding).
Collection (data) workshops emphasized functioning sources of data and gaps that needed to be filled for service optimization. These workshops led to a campaign of mapping physical collection sites in Maputo.
Validation workshops tested design iterations of the platform with an emphasis on suitability for the skills of the intended user base.
Events workshops promoted the MOPA prototype across Maputo to attract local software developers to take an interest in enhancing the software design and features – more on this below.

Talk the User’s Language

Citizens can report on particular rubbish containers to say, for example, it is full or burning. Containers have physical locations, but residents don’t identify containers by address. MOPA found out that they rather refer to them in relation to something, for example, the receptacle in front of the Custodio warehouse is the ‘Custodio’ container.

The MOPA team mapped the city with these peoples’ labels, which improves the reporting quality and better fits the residents’ language. In the background the system can match the peoples’ label with the official address.

Make it Super Easy

To submit a report, the MOPA platform requires three data points for location identification: municipal district, neighbourhood and place. But how do you get citizens to report based on location when they don’t have GPS? Keep it old school with paper and USSD.

As part of its awareness-raising campaign, the UX team produced posters that were distributed in all neighbourhoods with a unique USSD string for each container. Each string captured the essential location data.

By storing the USSD string as a contact under ‘MOPA’, whenever residents want to register a report the key location data is already captured and they go straight to specifying the type of incident.

Use Soft Power

While disruptive innovation is the rallying cry of today, the MOPA team did not try to become the “Uber of” waste management. Instead they decided to work within the current parameters, but bring efficiency to the process. We could call this “soft power innovation”. Soft power is “the ability to attract and co-opt, rather than by coercion (hard power) … to shape the preferences of others through appeal and attraction”.

Local service providers are still contracted to collect the waste and the City still manages the process. Everyone keeps their jobs, but they need to do them better. The residents and the data management tool empowering the City bring an efficiency to the process using simple tools already in their lives.

Open the Platform and Data

The UX team organized Mozambique’s first e-Government hackathon – #apps4maputo – challenging local developers to produce the most innovative digital solution utilising an API into the MOPA platform. MOPA is built on open source software and generates open data.

The winner developed an app called OurMoz, which submits reports to the MOPA platform from any Android-enabled device.

The hackathon allowed the UX team to expand its user base to include smartphone users and practice being collaborative and open in textbook style. It also set the tone for the underlying platform to be used for other civic participation use cases.

Keep the User Informed

SMS notifications allow residents to receive confirmations of their submitted
reports, and update them on the status of the report. In the City’s offices the reports are published on an online map, which the municipality uses along with a dashboard to track, validate and verify with the waste removal companies when each issue has been resolved. The resident is then notified via an SMS sent through the platform. Such a feedback loop shows that the municipality is transparent and responsive.

Overall, the results are impressive: more than 88% of reported issues are resolved, with an average response time of 2.7 days. 186 informal dump sites across the city have also been eradicated. MOPA is an exciting example of simple innovation using the tools that people have. Aside from moving towards a cleaner city, perhaps the biggest impact is the empowerment residents feel by playing their part in this process. That is a key foundation of digital inclusion.

Image: (C) by Municipal Council of Maputo

Why Digital Skills Really Matter for ICT4D – Your Weekend Long Reads

In an increasingly online world, people need digital skills to work and live productively. One of the major barriers to digital uptake is a lack of these skills.

Across Africa, seven in ten people who don’t use the Internet say they just don’t know how to use it. This is not only a developing country problem: 44% of the European Union population has low or no (19%) digital skills!

It is no surprise, therefore, that the theme for this year’s UNESCO Mobile Learning Week is “Skills for a connected world”. (It runs from 26-30 March in Paris — don’t miss it!)

Global Target for Digital Skills

At Davos last month, the UN Broadband Commission set global broadband targets to bring online the 3.8 billion people not yet connected to the Internet. Goal 4 is that by 2025: 60% of youth and adults should have achieved at least a minimum level of proficiency in sustainable digital skills.

(I’m not quite sure what the difference is between digital skills and sustainable digital skills.) Having a target such as this is good for focusing global efforts towards skilling up.

The Spectrum of Digital Skills

Digital skills is a broad term. While definitions vary, the Broadband Commission report proposes seeing digital skills and competences on a spectrum, including:

Basic functional digital skills, which allow users to access and conduct basic operations on digital technologies;
Generic digital skills, which include using digital technologies in meaningful and beneficial ways, such as content creation and online collaboration; and
Higher-level skills, which mean using digital technology in empowering and transformative ways, for example for software development. These skills include 21^st century skills and critical digital literacies.

Beyond skills, digital competences include awareness and attitudes concerning technology use. Most of the people served in ICT4D projects fall into the first and second categories. Understanding where your users are and need to be is important, and a spectrum lens helps in that exercise.

Why Skills Really Matter

Beyond the global stats, goals and definitions, why should you really care about the digital skills of your users, other than that they know enough to navigate your IVR menu or your app?

The answers come from the GSMA’s recent pilot evaluation of its Mobile Internet Skills Training Toolkit (MISTT), implemented last year in Rwanda.

Over 300 sales agents from Tigo, the mobile network operator, were trained on MISTT, and they in turn trained over 83,000 customers. The evaluation found that MISTT training:

Gives users confidence and helps them overcome the belief that “the Internet is not for me”;
Has the potential to help customers move beyond application “islands” — and get them using more applications/services;
Has a ripple effect, as customers are training other people on what they have learned (a study in Cape Town also found this); and
Increased data usage among trained customers, which led to increased data revenues for Tigo.

In short, more digital skills (beyond just what you need from your users) presents the opportunity for increased engagement, higher numbers of users and, if services are paid-for or data drives revenue, greater earnings. Now those are compelling ICT4D motivators.

Skills as Strategy

Therefore, we need to see skills development as one of the core components of our:

Product development strategy (leveraging users who can interact more deeply with features);
Growth strategy (leveraging users who train and recruit other users);
Revenue strategy (leveraging users who click, share, and maybe even buy).

But what about the cost, you might wonder? As Alex Smith of the GSMA points out, with the data revenues, for Tigo the MISTT pilot returned the investment within a month and saw an ROI of 240% within a quarter. That’s for a mobile operator — it would be fascinating to measure ROI for non-profits.

To get training, the Mobile Information Literacy Curriculum from TASCHA is also work checking out, as is the older GSMA Mobile Literacy Toolkit.

Image: CC by Lau Rey