From Silicon Savannah to Ushahidi: Technological Determinism or Real Opportunity?

At best, it could increase democratic participation, accountability, transparency, quality and speed of government delivery.

At worst, it is unaffordable, inaccessible, could be controlled or entirely hijacked by a central government and make everything quite a bit worse: e-governance or the application of electronic means in the interaction between the government and its citizens and internal government operations.

Ranging from G2C (Government to Citizens), G2B (Government to Businesses) and G2E (Government to Employees) to G2G (Government to Governments) and C2G (Citizens to Governments), this world of acronyms aims at informing, representing, consulting, involving and encouraging citizens. The United Nations—along with numerous other international organizations and governments—has embraced e-government. In 2012, for instance, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs proclaimed that “new technologies can be used to advance sustainable development for all people across the world while including them in the process” and ranked its 191 member states by its telecommunications infrastructure and human resource endowment in a so-called e-Government Readiness Index. The Republic of Korea ranked #1, while Kenya placed as #119 and Somalia at the very bottom.

At the risk of being named a technological determinist and victim of my tech-obsessed generation, I believe that in the case of Kenya, it would be a grave mistake to ignore Information and Communications Technologies when drafting any national policy, especially a National Slum Upgrading and Prevention Policy.

There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, the Kenyan government has launched several innovative projects or ideas, including a pilot project by the Information Technology Standards Association of Kenya. As one of the first e-governance programs and in an attempt to increase public awareness and participation in the fight against corruption, this program collected source points in form of corruption reports sent by citizens through an Internet hotline and routed those to the Electronic Graft management Center. The center, in turn, filtered the information before channelling it to the Anti-Corruption Authority for action. To increase participation, existing Internet cafes were made available free-of-charge to send corruption reports. Moreover, youth volunteers and news media outlets were recruited to raise awareness of the service.

Another noteworthy government initiative is the Connected Kenya 2017, a 5-year national ICT Masterplan, adopted earlier this year. As part of Vision 2030, this policy plan is supposed to turn Kenya into “Africa’s most globally respected knowledge economy” by 2017. Under three main pillars, the plan outlines the achievement of ambitious goals such as centralized affordable cloud services and the development of Konza Technology City that is supposed to promote Kenya as a Silicon Savannah over the course of the next 20 years.

An artist’s imagination of Konza City. Source: http://www.mwakilishi.com/sites/default/files/Konza4.jpg.

Finally, and possibly most exciting among government initiatives, is the Kenyan Government’s open data website, launched in 2011 by President Mwai Kibaki. This pretty comprehensive portal draws data from the Ministry of Finance, Planning, Health, Education and Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. While it does not yield too much information about informal settlements, it provides formal information on six main sectors: education, energy, health, water, sanitation, population and poverty.

Besides government initiatives, Kenya has also been at the forefront of alternative communications and value exchange platforms. Ushahidi, for example, is an open-source mapping system that resulted from a lack of information flow during Kenya’s 2007-2008 post-election violence. During a time period when Kenyans in certain parts of the country did not know whether it was safe or not to step outside their house, this alternative news platform mapped crime reports to assess the local situation better. This “politics of witnessing” has become notorious and has since spread as a crisis-mapping tool all over the world.

Mapping riots, deaths, property loss, government forces, civilians, looting, rape, peace efforts and internally displaced people during the 2007-2008 post-election violence in Kenya. Source: http://legacy.ushahidi.com/.

Kenya has also witnessed the world’s fastest uptake of mobile phone-enabled systems for value transfer and storage. According to the World Bank, 93% of Kenyans use mobile phones and 73% are M-PESA customers, a mobile banking application of local telecommunications company Safaricom. In 2011, an incredible 25% of Kenya’s GDP moved through M-PESA.

It is true that technology and open data offers opportunity for citizens’ input and feedback. So-called “big data” could also increase the state’s power to track taxes and criminal and terrorist activity for law enforcement purposes. But—and this is a big but—given the centralized power node of mobile banking and associated data, it is also possible that autocratic leaderships with access to “big data” could easily cease control over a population. Kenya’s post-election period, for example, witnessed political mobilization organized through text messages. After blocking services that could send large volumes of messages, the Kenyan unity government worked in close cooperation of mobile phone operators to compile a prosecution list of 1,700 phone users who had written or forwarded inciting text messages. They did not “use it;” nobody was harmed for sending text messages. But the list exists–somewhere.

So can citizens be users and co-producers of public services and should we include technology in Kenya’s National Slum Upgrading and Prevention Policy?

I could answer with a straight “yes” and out myself, yet again, as a hopeless idealist.

Or I could answer this question with another one: If technology does not contribute to a better life in some way, why do some of the poorest individuals in the world pay large sums of money—at times up to 50% of their disposable income—for a mobile phone?

The Good Kind of Bribe: Increasing Monetary Accountability with Debt-for-Development

Whenever the economy is in a crunch and budget cuts become necessary, fingers often point at foreign aid. A Gallup survey from 2011, for instance, reveals that almost 60% of Americans voted foreign aid as the #1 area for spending cuts.

Source: http://www.gallup.com/poll/145790/Americans-Oppose-Cuts-Education-Social-Security-Defense.aspx.

While I am not interested in reiterating economist Jeffrey Sachs’ well-known “The End of Poverty” mantra of the possibility to overcome global poverty (caused by a “poverty trap”) by increasing the slim foreign aid:GDP ratio of rich Western countries to 0.7%, I would like to instead propose another idea: People get foreign aid wrong. Foreign aid isn’t money given to developing countries for free. Instead, foreign aid is almost always administered as a mix of grant and loan–and under strict conditions. So, even though Kenya is the United States’ top recipient of foreign aid in Sub-Saharan Africa, this funding does not come without obligations.

There are several reasons for giving foreign aid in form of a loan instead of a grant. And vice versa.

To illustrate, let’s dream a little bit (as in this World Bank report). Imagine this hypothetical world, a world where developing countries do not have access to private capital markets. In this world, all investments are smart and yield a high return, so that all loans are repaid. (I know, but just bear with me for a moment.) If we let ourselves delve into this ideal scenario, we will find that loans are preferable to grants. Borrowing countries would repay their loans and lending countries could lend out those funds to the next needy country that would (smartly!) re-invest the money into worthy and high-yielding projects. Everyone would be absolutely delighted.

Now, this is of course not what happens in the real foreign aid market. The reality is that because not all projects are successful, borrowing countries are often unable to repay loans. This leads to accumulated debt which in turn results in even worse living conditions than before the foreign aid (see Latin America’s “lost decade” for a tragic illustration). On the other hand, research has shown that an excessive amount of grants suppresses domestic tax revenues and, as opposed to loans, conditions associated with grants do not have as much purchasing power as loan conditions do (once you got the money, it’s yours, right?). Nevertheless, over the course of the 2000s, a number of experts have called for a shift away from foreign aid loans–towards grants.

These grants come from actors within the nation and international community and are awarded and implemented at different levels. An interesting example of a grant still associated with conditionality is so-called “debt-for-development.” Debt-for-development exchanges were first undertaken in 1987 and by 2007, they have resulted in the cancellation of US$5.7 billion of debt and the application of US$3.6 billion to development projects. Under this model, the lender county will only award debt relief in exchange for having a say where the released money goes–essentially a good bribe. At times, development projects are mutually determined and they often benefit the poor.

In Kenya, a debt-for-development exchange took place not too long ago, in October 2006, when Italy’s development institution agreed to write off half of Kenya’s long-term debt (Sh4 billion or 44 million Euro) under a Debt-for-Development Swap scheme. The funds, meant to go to pro-poor development projects in health, education, water and sanitation, will be spent over the course of ten years and are supervised by a steering committee composed of representatives of the Kenyan Ministry of Finance, the Kenyan Ministry of Planning and National Development and the Italian Embassy.

To me, this compromise of a grant/debt foreign aid situation sounds promising. But only if the developing project implementation actually takes place—in the real world, not in our imagination.