Blog | TechChange | The Institute for Technology and Social Change

TechChange courses are designed with busy working professionals in mind. In any of our courses you will find yourself engaging with a vast network of participants from all corners of the globe who bring with them unique experiences and perspectives.

Today, we are excited to chat with Amy Noreuil, a Technology Advisor working at USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives. Amy has taken seven TechChange courses to date, both on-demand and facilitated. We caught-up with her to chat about her overall experience with TechChange as well as how our courses have impacted her professional life.

How did you find out about TechChange, and what caught your attention about TechChange courses, or got you interested in taking them?

I’ve been following TechChange for a number of years, but I think the first time I ever heard about it was through a TechChange-hosted happy hour where I ran into Chris Neu, Chief Operating Officer of TechChange. My curiosity was piqued because I always want to know about other initiatives going on when it comes to the use of technology for social good. I love going out and hearing about new projects that are under way to figure out how they could support our work or how we could support them. I’m a contextualist at heart – I believe the impact of technology can vary widely depending on the context – so I’m always interested in learning from the experience of others. I found the sense of community and diversity of students participating in TechChange courses to be one of the biggest assets. Everyone brings a unique perspective to the ‘classroom.’

After completing your first course with TechChange, what made you decide to enroll in more?

The first course I took with TechChange was Mapping for Social Good. After that first class, what drew me in – and what has kept me coming back to TechChange – is the people. To me, virtual learning experiences are inherently more individual experiences, but TechChange courses provide the opportunity to connect with other students and take what started as a quick chat to a more nuanced conversation. The interaction can be customized to what you want and need – a quick exchange of resources (e.g. reports, toolkits, etc.) or a deeper discussion about intended and unintended impact. The user interface is easy to navigate and caters to different learning preferences, including visual learners like me. It provides a high-level survey of topics or applications, while also giving the user the option to dig into the technical details of specific tools.

You’ve now taken seven TechChange courses – how have they impacted your career as a technology advisor for USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives?

TechChange courses allow me to discover new tools as well as share experiences and insights with a wide range of people. I’m always looking for ways to break out of traditional silos.

The three major ways in which TechChange courses have impacted my work are:

Meeting people who are passionate about the intersection of technology, media & data
Finding tools and workshopping how they could support our partners and programs
Connecting with people who bring different perspectives, ideas and approaches

What is your advice for other students participating in TechChange courses? How can they get the most out of the experience?

Come into the course with an idea of what you want to learn. Set your intention early and be open to change. This learning objective will help you navigate course content and connect with students. The facilitators are very approachable and accessible. I also really encourage participants to meet up in-person and offline with students who live in the same geographic area. There’s no replacing that face-to-face connection. Developing a community of practice and creating an environment that facilitates learning takes time and commitment. I’m excited to see the TechChange community continue to grow and change.

Interested in learning more about TechChange courses? Check out our online course catalog here! We will be launching new sessions of several of our most popular courses in the New Year!

About Amy

Amy is the Technology Advisor at USAID Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) where she supports staff as they decide how to integrate the use of information and communication technologies into their programs. She loves supporting co-creation spaces, leading digital literacy efforts and working closely with local staff to provide an outside perspective on the design of small grants. OTI supports U.S. foreign policy objectives by helping local partners advance peace and democracy.

Featured image: water filling a metal pot, taken March 26, 2009

This article was written as part of the course “Mobiles for International Development” offered through George Washington University, taught by TechChange’s CEO and founder Nick Martin.

Over 650 million people in the world do not have access to safe water. In many cities in India, the water supply is intermittent and water utility customers only receive main-line water supply once every 2-10 days for roughly 2 hours at a time. In many cases, the customers have no advance notice prior to the valve being shut off. For some, this could be a minor annoyance but for many, this interruption can prove life threatening. NextDrop, a mobile application that works through text messaging, seeks to address these critical gaps in water provision by using locally sourced data to improve water supply networks and access to information.

How Does NextDrop Work?
After paying a fee of between 5 to 10 rupees, the resident of a locality registers for the service by calling NextDrop. NextDrop will log the caller’s location and identify his or her closest water valve. When an engineer next examines the valve, he can send an interactive voice response (IVR) message to NextDrop. The message is then forwarded to both the local residents and to the water utility, allowing residents real real-time updates regarding when they will be receiving water and for how long. The valve-man can also record where there may be a water supply cancelation on a particular day so that residents can prepare accordingly.

Although NextDrop had its fair share of challenges, such as working with existing private contractors and the government providers, and training poorly paid and undereducated valvemen, the product has been endorsed by the Gates Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, and Google. First launched in Bangalore, NextDrop now has about 70,000 users across India, with the majority in Hubli, Dharwad, Mysore and Bangalore, all of which now boast nearly 90% coverage.

The Implications of NextDrop on Development Efforts
NextDrop has significant implications for the development field. In a country that is still plagued by corruption, NextDrop signifies a move toward crowd-sourced service delivery, eliminating the typical asymmetric information that often defines utilities in India. With NextDrop, residents don’t have to rely solely on the word of utility employees who may or may not have the community’s best interests in mind. Residents are involved from the ground up, empowering and enabling them to force transparency in service delivery.

One limitation to these mobile-based services is access to cell phones for the poorest citizens in a community. While programs like NextDrop base their services on their consumers having cell phones, this does not necessarily alienate citizens without phones. In future applications of mobile-based programs, organizations can partner with mobile phone providers to try and source used phones from wealthier citizens, creating an integrated community of providers and beneficiaries, potentially fostering a spirit of inclusion.

As part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) passed during the U.N. General Assembly in 2015, Goal 6 specifically addresses the need to ensure clean water and adequate sanitation for everyone, everywhere. As individuals and organizations alike work to address this goal, innovations such as NextDrop will get us one step closer to equitable access to this life-sustaining resource.

Featured image credit: Wonderlane Creative Commons License

About Sreya

Sreya Panuganti has an MA in International Politics and Human Rights from City University London. She is currently pursuing her MA in International Development Studies at the George Washington University where she concentrates on water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). Ms. Panuganti has a background in a variety of capacities in both the private and public sectors, leveraging skills in research, analysis and cross-cultural communication – most recently, with the U.S. Department of State and the NGO WaterAid. She continues to pursue opportunities that allow her to further her understanding of the development field.

Featured image: A journalist takes a snapshot of the December 3, 2015 Black Lives Matter rally at Minneapolis City Hall.

Today, on Human Rights Day, we focus on the importance of digital safety for human rights defenders around the world. In an increasingly digitally connected world, it is even more crucial for human rights defenders – whether activists, journalists or aid workers, to be safe online as they fight for the rights of marginalized and oppressed groups.

One of the organizations working to keep human rights defenders safe online is Security First. Established in 2013, Security First aims to make it easier for human rights defenders (HRDs) to work safely. We spoke to the co-founder, Holly Kilroy to learn about their work and their latest app, Umbrella.

What led to Security First?

My co-founder, Rory Byrne and I have both worked in the human rights sector for over ten years and, unsurprisingly, faced many challenges, but the primary one was always security.

Both of us have been thinking about the problem of simplifying security for human rights defenders for the past 7 years, since our work in Sub-Saharan Africa establishing and running human rights video organization, Videre, altered us to the gap between need and existing tools when trying to secure our partners.

As well as building the app, Umbrella, we also provide security training to groups ranging from the largest human rights, media and aid NGOs in the world to individual LGBT activists on the ground.

Why the need for an app like Umbrella?

While there are a number of instrumental tools for the security of HRDs, collectively, they face a number of problems.

Dispersed: It is difficult for HRDs to keep on top of all the various tools and advice available and to know what to use/do when.
Complex: Many are designed for users who are adept at IT.
Fail to address digital and physical security holistically: Existing tools and resources focus on either digital or physical security, but fail to link them together in a cohesive strategy.
Unavailable on mobile devices: The many tools or content available only on websites or in PDFs mean they often remain inaccessible to the growing numbers of people in the developing world accessing the Internet solely via mobile devices. (e.g. 70% of the internet users in Egypt, 60% in India)

So we wanted to build a simple, easily-accessible tool that brought together digital and physical security, and helped human rights activists implement it in a really user-friendly way. We’re basically building the tool we wish we had ourselves.

Tell us a little more about Umbrella

If you’ve got a security problem, Umbrella will help you find the solution.

Umbrella’s content has been sourced from best practice security manuals and digital security guides, and provides practical advice for everything — from how to make a secure phone call or protect files, to counter-surveillance or what to do in case of arrest.

Lessons give simple step-by-step actions of what to do in any given security situation, and show the best tools for it.

Levels allow users to choose their level of ability and also get answers that reflect the level of risk or the type of protection needed.

Checklists help mark the user’s progress and share with colleagues what actions have been implemented or have yet to be done.

Tools recommended in the lessons can be tricky, so a tool-guide gives step-by-step help on how to set up and use the tools suggested.

A dashboard provides real-time updates on possible security threats, and alerts the user if there is anything in the vicinity that she/he should be aware of – from physical security risks like protests or kidnappings, to environmental or health security risks like floods or disease outbreaks.

Umbrella is free, open-source, and has cleared a security code-audit – it doesn’t track users’ location or take any personal data on them. Once the app is downloaded it can be used without data – the only feature that needs Internet access is the dashboard.

What has been the response to Umbrella?

This iteration of the app launched into public Beta stage testing in October 2015. After just a few weeks, Umbrella has 800 users and growing, and 96% of reviews on Google Play are five star.

A preview of Umbrella

The response from the human rights and tech communities has been brilliant. They’ve been so welcoming and supportive.

One Iranian journalist and trainer who must remain anonymous for security reasons said,

“Umbrella is very useful for my work. It really helps me as an individual and a trainer. It keeps me to up to date on the go. It also keeps me updated with the newest tools, which is hard to do with my busy job. Based on my own experience it can help my students effectively learn how to protect themselves – from whatever may threaten them.”

Matt Timblin, who is Director of Security at Human Rights Watch, said,

“Managing the safety of staff and collaborators in insecure environments, across multiple locations and facing an array of threats can be challenging. The prospect of an easily accessible ‘one stop shop’ app, such as Umbrella, that allows quick access to security advice is an exciting and innovative development in helping improve the security of those working as human rights activists, humanitarians and journalists around the world.”

What are you hoping to see Umbrella achieve in the next year?

Security First is now looking to improve and build upon Umbrella in a number of ways. We want to:

1. Increase Umbrella’s functionality
We want to add several functions to Umbrella: We want to help users streamline the process of preventative planning through sharable planning forms; We want to improve users’ awareness of the specific risks they face by improving the dashboard functionality; We want to integrate existing tools where practical and safe to do so; and we want to allow for greater tailoring and customisation throughout the app.

2. Broaden Umbrella’s access
Clearly, at-risk human rights defenders reside in more than English-speaking countries – we want to broaden access to as many languages as possible. We have already had requests for translation into many languages, but for practicality’s sake, we will begin with Arabic and Spanish before considering other languages. We also want to make sure that those with using desktops can also use Umbrella. We plan to create an iPhone version of the app once Umbrella 2.0 is complete.

3. Improve content and usability of Umbrella
We want to ensure that each how-to guide is as clear, concise, intuitive and tailored to users in the field as possible. While the existing app is highly functional, we want to make sure it is a pleasure to use, so as to encourage retention. We obviously need to ensure that content remains up-to-date and relevant. We also want to improve the system for users contributing to and collaborating on content.

Have you tried out Umbrella yet, what did you think? You can let Security First know by tweeting @_SecurityFirst. If not, you can test out Umbrella on Google Play. If you know of other tech tools for the digital safety of human rights defenders, comment below or tweet at us @TechChange.

Holly Kilroy

Holly Kilroy is the co-founder & Head of Org Development at Security First. She has spent the past eight years building projects that leverage technology and civil society coordination to address issues of human rights and conflict. Holly previously worked as the Emerging Powers Coordinator at Crisis Action where she launched and led the emerging powers program, providing direction for both organizational growth and campaign traction across the BRICS. Prior to this she helped set up Videre, where she spent four years as Head of Development, framing the need for safer, more effective video documentation and helping to launch projects around the world. Holly has also served as the International Officer for Irish Labour Youth and worked in communications for CSOs in Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and the UK.

Featured image credit: Tony Webster Flickr Creative Commons License

In international development, we all love to talk about our successes, but we need to celebrate our failures too. And failures are exactly what we will be celebrating at Fail Fest on Thursday!

As a celebration of failures, the Fail Festival looks at failures as a mark of leadership and innovation, risk-taking and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in scaling ideas from pilots to global programs.

Last year at the Fail Fest, we presented our failures with the TechChange band. We had members across our team perform with vocals, guitar, drums, oboe, and – of course, PowerPoint. We celebrated our failures, from connectivity issues when doing online training sessions on Ebola to unanticipated challenges of moving into a new office.

TechChange at Fail Fest 2014

We are excited to share our experiences in providing interactive training for social change with all the hurdles that come with it. We had a blast celebrating our failures last year, and we hope to see you at the Fail Fest on Thursday!

Today is International Day of Persons with Disabilities.

Persons with disabilities constitute the world’s largest minority, 80% of whom live in developing countries – an estimated 800 million people. Approximately 20% of the world’s poorest people have a disability. In response to this reality, the United Nations (U.N.) adopted seven disability-related targets (e.g. Targets 4.5, 11.2, 11.7) as part of the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) developed in October 2015. (UN Enable)

Persons with disabilities should therefore be key stakeholders and beneficiaries of any development or humanitarian initiative, and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems should be capturing how programs impact them. Below are some resources that outline how technology can act as a tool to facilitate the inclusion of this largely marginalized population in M&E processes.

Core Data
Valuable program or country-specific data about persons with disabilities to collect during M&E may include:

Disability prevalence, disaggregated by type of disability, age and gender
Definitions of disabilities to compare to World Health Organization (WHO) and other definitions
Legal framework
Policies on segregation, institutionalization or community-based rehabilitation in health, education or penal systems
Education and employment rates
Representatives in government and civil society
Program administration data (i.e. rates and modes of inclusion in an activity, program or organization)

Early and consistent collection of this data is needed to determine where and how M&E can best occur in collaboration with persons with disabilities.

Using global datasets can increase the efficiency of data collection and facilitate comparative analysis. See:

UN Disability Statistics Database (DISTAT)
Repository of Disability Surveys and Censuses
Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (both qualitative and quantitative data – see state party reports, shadow reports and committee responses)
The Washington Group on Disability Statistics (provides guidelines for interpretation of disability statistics)

E-accessibility
E-accessibility is a measure of the extent to which a product or service can be used by a person with a disability as effectively as it can be used by a person without that disability.

E-accessibility should be among the criteria for choosing a device for data collection or dissemination. Consulting with local Disabled Persons Organizations (DPOs) can help determine if a tech tool will create barriers or enhance participation.

For example, mobile phones with hands-free, voice command features (think “Siri”) can enhance accessibility. Large print and screen reader compatible formats should be used to collect and provide information electronically to persons with impaired vision, blindness or dyslexia. Visual elements of documents, like photos, should have captions that can be read aloud. Radio or audio recordings deposited with a DPO can make evaluation results accessible across a range of disabilities. Real time captioning, or printing hard copies of the main script of a video or lecture, can increase inclusion of the hearing impaired. Braille printers (often available through a local DPO) can produce reports or surveys for the blind. These technologies enable persons with disabilities to participate independently and confidentially in surveys and other feedback mechanisms.

E-accessible technologies not only enhance M&E processes, but also can be low cost. Some operating systems have built-in automated voice read or Assistive Touch technologies. Software to read aloud or translate documents into Braille on-screen is often free (to read DAISY books, download here). Self-captioning software, such as Overstream and MAGpie, is also widely available for free. Training sessions for DPOs or enumerators on how to use these features or software may be necessary.

The following provide more information on e-accessible tools, methods and procurement:

Teach ICT: an introduction to how technology can assist participation and key assistive devices
Information and Communication Technologies for Development: a clearinghouse for resources and commentary on tech tools related to disability and development
Source: International Online Resource Center on Disability and Inclusion
Global Initiative for Inclusive ICTs: includes an e-accessibility toolkit

Technology can change an environment that is disabling into one that is empowering by creating channels for persons with disabilities to have an equal voice in the programs that affect them.

About Leigh-Ashley

Leigh-Ashley Lipscomb is an independent analyst and Adjunct Research Fellow with the WSD Handa Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University.

It’s not every day that you get up from your desk, walk out of your office, and travel 8,353 miles to check in on a project. But in October that’s exactly what Delanie, Emily, and I did when we went to visit Malaria Consortium in Uganda.

As we walked out the office in Washington D.C., I started a timer on my phone to see what the door-to-door travel time would be. 26 hours later we were in the back of a hired car, dodging the mini-buses that barrel down the road between Entebbe and Kampala.

Why we returned to Kampala
We were in Uganda to check in on one of TechChange’s biggest projects: the “Diagnose and Treat Febrile Illnesses” eLearning course. Last year, we built a course for Malaria Consortium, one of the world’s leading non-profit organizations specializing in the prevention, control, and treatment of malaria. The course was meant to train private sector health workers and Rapid Diagnostic Testing sales representatives in Uganda and Nigeria.

In many malaria-endemic countries like Uganda and Nigeria, the disease has been prevalent for so long that pharmacists and doctors would give malaria treatment to any patient presenting symptoms of fever. Not only is this false diagnosis harmful for the patient, it also leads to the waste of costly treatments that don’t help the patient get better – in fact, their condition could become even more serious. Incorrect diagnoses can even be fatal: pneumonia is the leading cause of death for children under 5 in Sub-Saharan Africa, but it is often misdiagnosed as malaria.

An e-learning solution to train health workers
The goal of the elearning training is to reach roughly 5000 health professionals in both Uganda and Nigeria and provide in-depth training on how to diagnose diseases that can present fever-like symptoms, like malaria, pneumonia, typhoid, and others. The two-day training provides a hybrid learning experience with off-line elearning modules and in-person trainings, created with local content to make the training as culturally-relevant as possible.

The training teaches healthcare workers the basics of how the malaria parasite works, how to conduct a malaria Rapid Diagnostic Test (RDT), how to diagnose patients for other illnesses, and how to provide treatment depending on the results they find.

It’s been a year since the training was implemented, so we were curious to see how the training fared. Was a computer-based training actually useful to trainers? Did students enjoy the training? Were there better learning outcomes?

So, how is the training going so far?
We found that even with minor technical considerations, the training was a stunning success! Yes, there were certain drawbacks to having a computer-based training compared to a traditional lecture format. Among the biggest disadvantages were the possibility of power-outages, finding computers with adequate RAM and processing power to play the training, and also updating Adobe Flash (one of the requirements to run the training). However, with the help of an in-country technical setup team, these issues were controllable.

What do the trainers think?
Most importantly, trainers told us that the benefits of the blended learning style far outweighed any drawbacks caused by being dependent on computers. Students and trainers alike told us that the format allowed students to learn the content at their own pace, compared to a lecture where the instructor may move too quickly or slowly through content.

What do the students think?
Students also told us that the interactive format made the learning experience much better than a lecture accompanied by slides. The visual nature of the training came up again and again as an aspect of the training that helped students learn.

Students who had completed the pilot program took the training to heart. One pharmacist referred to the training as she told us about about her neighbor, who had recently come into her shop asking for antimalarials to treat his fever – but, his test result was negative, so she advised him to seek treatment at a health facility. After visiting the clinic, he stopped by the pharmacy to let her know that he had been diagnosed with Typhoid fever; if the pharmacist had misdiagnosed the fever and provided treatment for malaria, it would only have allowed his case of Typhoid to get worse.

This is just one anecdote of many. While concerns about electricity and infrastructure remain very real, it is exciting to see the training accomplishing it’s goals. We are excited to continue supporting and improving the delivery of this training with Malaria Consortium!

Is your organization looking to train your teams online? Besides online facilitated courses, we also also create custom offline computer trainings that can be used in settings where internet connectivity is a non-starter. See our different projects on our Enterprise page and feel free to reach out to us enterprise@techchange.org.

By Ella Duncan

More than 300,000 people lost their lives in the bloody civil war that ravaged Burundi from 1993 to 2005. Almost twice as many were forced to leave their homes, slowly returning over the last decade. Today, the relative peace that Burundi so arduously achieved is again at risk; violent protests and rising tensions threaten to make the upcoming elections a moment of widespread chaos, rather than democracy and national unity.

Dr. David Niyonzima experienced the horror of the civil war first-hand. A member of the historically peaceful Quaker Church, which introduced him to peaceful social activism and helped him develop his spirituality, David survived a massacre in 1993. “I was teaching a training for young Quaker pastors when soldiers came to exact revenge, because they thought the students belonged to a rival ethnic group. I saw 8 out of my 11 students murdered,” he recalls.

David is now the Director of Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Services (THARS). He has dedicated his life to understanding the impact of peacebuilding programs on the communities they involve, in order to design better strategies. It was his experience as a survivor that inspired his determination to make his country a more peaceful place.

For David, meeting the man who led the soldiers to come to kill him and his students was a life-changing experience. “I extended forgiveness to him,” he says. “It gave me a great sense of transformation, even though I had not planned for it. I was inspired that there must be a reason I was alive, that God wanted me to plant a seed of peace.” Invigorated by the experience, David started community programs to foster reconciliation and healing, but met challenges that seemed insurmountable. “I began to organize peace workshops and seminars to promote peace through Quakerism. Yet we were not making progress, so I asked myself – why are we not making impact? Trauma healing was the missing element of peace.”

David believes that peace is not possible without trauma healing, that “treating the past” is the key component of peacebuilding. “Peace is not only the absence of fighting,” he explains. “It is also the restoration of relationships.” As a result, THARS takes a holistic approach to interpersonal development and relationships through Sensitivity Training, Trauma Healing Capacity Building, Individual and Group Therapy, and Self-Help and Self-Reliance initiatives.

To monitor and measure its work, THARS has adapted an existing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder tool to the context of Burundi. They assess participants as they enter a training or workshop, and then again six months later. Progress is measured on the basis of self-reported indicators of social behavior, the participants’ approach to conflict in their communities, and their decision-making strategies.

According to David, “the most important monitoring tool is testimony. It gives participants the opportunity to demonstrate through stories how they are self-reliant and addressing trauma on their own.” He strongly believes in the importance of developing a culture of speaking among the participants in THARS’ programs; “empowering people to speak truth about their history contributes to peace,” he says.

One of THARS’ current programs, Addressing the Past, focuses on villages where atrocities occurred during the civil war. It employs testimony and the growth of a culture of speaking to measure healing at all levels, using individual and group therapy to work through trauma issues. Addressing the Past doesn’t focus exclusively on those who were directly in the war, but also on people who are affected by the so-called remnants of war. David gives the example of wives who become victims of the untreated trauma of their husbands, when the latter return from fighting and engage in gender-based violence in the home.

David says that the major challenge in measuring THARS’ work is creating and communicating standard definitions of trauma and forgiveness. However, he and his colleagues have already made a lot of progress. “When THARS began in 2002, there was no discussion of trauma in Burundi,” he remembers. “We have brought awareness, and now people can see what trauma is, what to do to address it, where to go for help.”

David is hopeful that Trauma Healing will further spread as an accepted process in Burundi. He envisions it as an inclusive tool, that will unite all Burundians behind the common goal of emerging together, and stronger, from the violence of the past. “Peace will come when those who perpetrate violence join the healing process,” he concludes.

Dr. David Niyonzima

Suggested resources to learn more

Visit THARS’ website at http://thars.org/.
Read a mid-term evaluation of THARS’ work with Search for Common Ground on a 2007 Victims of Torture program, funded by USAID here (https://www.sfcg.org/2004-victims-of-torture-mid-term-project-evaluation/).
Explore Trauma Healing related resources on DME for Peace http://dmeforpeace.org/category/themes/justice-truth-and-reconciliation/trauma-healing.

About Ella

Ella Duncan is the DME for Peace Project Manager, DME for Peace is a project of Search for Common Ground which connects a growing global community of over 4,000 members to over 800 resources on Design, Monitoring, and Evaluation for Peace and Peacebuilding programming. Ella received her B.S. from Cornell University.

This post originally appeared on DME for peace.
Featured image credit: Dave Proffer Flickr (Creative Commons License)

by mPowering and TechChange

mPowering Frontline Health Workers is delighted to introduce a new video, developed with TechChange, that explains how publishing content under a Creative Commons license can maximize the reach and impact of health training materials.

Frontline health workers play a vital role in delivering health services to their communities. Yet these health workers often lack the training and information they need to feel confident and to do their jobs effectively. NGOs, academics, and governments are all developing materials to improve training, but often the content is not widely shared and does not reach the people who need it the most.

To address the shortage of high-quality health training content, and to ensure this is available for sharing widely between health workers, their trainers, NGOs, Ministries and others, mPowering launched ORB.

ORB is an open source content platform that connects health workers and training organizations with mobile optimized training content and job aids. With a focus on quality, ORB brings together multimedia content (videos, audio and text files) that can be used to deliver educational programs, refresher training, or counseling tools for health workers.

All of the content on ORB is released under one of the six Creative Commons licenses. Publishing under a Creative Commons license means that authors can retain their intellectual property while allowing others to re-use and share their materials. In many cases, users can also adapt and translate the content for use in a wide range of contexts.

mPowering believes that health content is a public good. Training resources, health information and job aids for health workers contain life-saving information and should be shared as widely as possible. Creative Commons or other open licensing allows more people to access this information. It also saves time and costs so that training can happen faster; and content can be remixed, translated, and compiled into courses.

This video gives more information on what Creative Commons licenses are, how they work, and why they matter. TechChange developed the animation to represent diversity and access to information; and to communicate the significance of a Creative Commons license in public health training. Through the short and compelling animation, TechChange delivers this core mPowering message – make health content freely available – in a simple and powerful way.

To learn more about how you can apply Creative Commons licensing to your work, we invite you to watch the short video and read the FAQ on ORB, or to contact mPowering at info@mpoweringhealth.org

This post also appeared on mPowering Frontline Health Workers blog

By Innocent Hitayezu and Ella Duncan

How can peacebuilding programs get a better understanding of trust? This question is at the heart of Innocent Hitayezu’s work with women and issues of reconciliation, and continues to shape his work as a peacebuilder and evaluator in Rwanda.

Innocent was working with a reconciliation project that brought together widows of victims of the Rwandan Genocide with widows of perpetrators of the genocide when he questioned, How do we know we are bringing community relationships to the next level? During group discussions and interviews, he asked the women if they were working together outside of project activities, and the group replied positively that, yes the project was changing their interactions and attitudes in daily life. However, during individual interviews, he found that some women were still experiencing extreme challenges of reconciliation and that outside of the mandatory group meetings these two groups were not coming together. Individual interviews showed that the project was not building trust in the community in the long term. To Innocent, this moment demonstrated that the power of group level projects could be better harnessed with the inclusion of reflective monitoring and evaluation on the individual level subsequently having positive effects on entire family and community at large.

Innocent works at the community level to examine the root causes of conflict in Rwanda, and on the issue of post-conflict intercommunal trust. Innocent’s work explores how new approaches to monitoring and trust-measuring evaluations can strengthen programs aimed at traditional community building through reconciliation and those focusing on the peaceful reintegration of former refugees.

Innocent’s own experience as a refugee sparked his passion for community building and trust building. In 1994, to escape the war, he and some of his family members fled Rwanda to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Upon returning to Rwanda the family faced the suspicion and distrust of those who had stayed behind and experienced the genocide. In search of community, Innocent joined with other repatriated refugee youth to create support systems for community action and economic opportunity through informal youth symposium.

This youth-led community building has been the foundation of his life’s work building peace in Rwanda through inclusive community development. Innocent says, “in some families, People are taught that communities are divided, but they must fight to say instead that ‘Rwanda is for all of us.’’

It is this conviction that reconciliation processes, in Rwanda and elsewhere, must be inclusive that inspired Innocent to pursue a career in Monitoring and Evaluation. Digging into the root causes of conflict, and extensively measuring trust within communities led Innocent to question, “Where is our evidence that we are making positive change?” Innocent, like many others in his field, believes that peacebuilders must be able to demonstrate success.

In the two decades since the Genocide, Rwanda has made great progress toward stabilization. As a result, Rwanda is often cited as a model of stability and security in East Africa. Rwanda’s security has come through traditional methods of community justice and reconciliation such as the Gacaca, a community court system, and Umuganda, which roughly translates to “coming together in a common purpose to achieve an outcome,” which is observed through a nationwide monthly day of service. Innocent believes that these traditional group based reconciliation methods can be strengthened through modern monitoring and evaluation methodologies. This is because traditional community-based methods are focused on the group level, which may miss tensions and challenges that participants are hesitant to express in front of their peers. In response to this challenge, Innocent advises that group reporting be validated by individual reporting, to make sure minority voices have an opportunity to be heard in the process of evaluating, and designing programs.

Giving space to individual voices also helps a program remain vigilant to the concept that progress should come from within the community, and that no pressure is applied from the top-down.

Based on his experience, Innocent sees individuals’ ability to express their views as an important indicator that communities are healing and maintaining peace. For Innocent, monitoring self-expression is key to understanding what is happening at the community and individual level.

Innocent is proud of the progress of reconciliation in Rwanda, and of the power and strength communities have drawn from traditions like the Gacaca and Umuganda. He is also hopeful that new approaches to reconciliation will help community trust and open expression continue to grow, enabling communities and individuals to build a lasting peace.

* * *

Innocent Hitayezu is a peacebuilder and evaluator living and working in Kigali, Rwanda. He has over 13 years of experience, including consultancy work in sustainable agriculture, socio-economic assessment, strategic planning, market research and consumer behavior analysis, farmers’ trainings; 8 years working with International NGOs. He holds an MBA in NGO Management from Kampala International University (Uganda), a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology; and a Diploma in Philosophical and Religious studies.

This post originally appeared on DME for peace.
Featured image credit: Leandro Neumann Ciuffo Creative Commons License

TechChange courses are designed for busy young professionals. In any of our courses, you will find yourself taking the course alongside international development field and headquarter staff, university professors and students, freelancers, and so many other kinds of eager learners. Today, we are excited to chat with Eva Erlach, who is a full-time law student in Vienna, Austria and also works part-time for Ground Truth Solutions. Eva recently took our Technology for Data Visualization course. We caught up with her to see how she was able to apply what she learned in the course.

How did you come across the TechChange course?
At Ground Truth Solutions, I am regularly tasked with producing reports on the perceptions of crisis-affected people during humanitarian actions. In order to visualize the data, I was looking around for the best resources to learn more about data visualization. I came across TechChange’s Tech for Data Visualization course on Twitter and my employer helped me pay for the course.

Have you taken online courses before? What did you think of the TechChange course?
This was actually my first online course and I was very impressed. The ability to interact with other participants in the course was great! Also, since the live events with guest experts were always recorded, and I could revisit the course materials for four more months, it really gave me flexibility to manage my time to make the most out of the course. There were a lot of resources — which is always better than having less — and that gave me freedom to either just get an overview of the topic or dig deeper on the topics most useful to me.

Are you new to data visualization?
I have actually been doing data visualization for a while, and mainly on Excel. I also knew of the other data visualization tools but wasn’t sure which ones were good ones and how to really work with them. This course gave me the insights I needed on different data visualization tools. It also helped me see that you can do much more data visualization just with Excel. Most of the other data visualization software tend to be expensive, so learning more about data visualization on Excel was great.

How did you use what you learned in the course at Ground Truth Solutions?
I worked on Ground Truth Solutions’ three reports on community perceptions in the Nepal crisis. As part of the Inter-Agency Community Feedback Project, Ground Truth’s role is to provide the government of Nepal and aid agencies with real-time feedback from affected people and recommendations based on that feedback.

Our audience for this report were agencies involved in the humanitarian response in Nepal. Since the agencies wanted to be able to print and disseminate the reports to field staff as well as email to their branch offices, we decided to do a pdf report instead of an interactive dashboard. I used R for the analysis and created the graphs on Excel. I then created the maps on Inkscape, and used a python script for the labels and colors.

A snapshot of Ground Truth Solutions’ Community Survey Report 3

I was able to visualize the data in a better way because of the course. The reports are available on our website to download and we have been promoting it all over social media.

How has the course been useful to you?
The course really allowed me to understand data visualization on a deeper level, and to realize that we really need to think about the audience for any visualizations you work on and the kind of message you are trying to communicate through the visualization.

Would you recommend this course to a friend or colleague?
Absolutely!

Interested in learning more about how to use technology for your organization’s data visualization needs? We start our next Technology for Data Visualization online course on Monday, November 23! Join participants like Eva in this four-week online course!

About Eva

Eva Erlach is a program analyst at Ground Truth Solutions. The aim of Ground Truth is to support humanitarian actors to systematically listen and respond to the voices of affected people. Eva holds an undergraduate degree in Development Studies and is currently finishing her law degree at University of Vienna, specializing in human rights. She has volunteered on social projects in India and Uganda and has experience in the field of asylum law and domestic violence.