 Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the United States Institute of Peace. My name, believe it or not, is Sheldon Himmelfarb, and I head USIP's Center of Innovation for Science, Technology, and Peace Building that's hosting today's session. In partnership with really some terrific co-sponsors, let me name them James Eberhardt and Mobile Accord, Nick Martin and Tech Change, the UN-mandated University of Peace and the National Defense University. We also want to thank our online partners for the event who are helping to kind of promote the live webcast so folks who couldn't be here physically can still participate, and I'll explain that in a minute. We've got Development Seed, ElectionGuide.org, Frontline SMS, Georgetown University Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Peace and Collaborative Development Network, the World Bank, they've all been promoting this online with their networks. We are, as I say, broadcasting a live video stream of the entire event at USIP.org and a Twitter thread whose hashtag is USIP Mobile. So throughout the morning, let me just say I'm going to be going to Anand Varghese of our staff who is going to be online throughout, and he's going to convey to us what folks are saying on Twitter and in the chat and he'll be also relaying to us the online questions for the panelists that are coming in from all over the place. And so if you're watching the webcast and you want to know, we want you to know that you really are a core part of this event. So go ahead and make your views and your questions known. We're going to try our very, very best to get them up here to the front of the room to the panelists. Now, having gathered everybody here to talk about cell phones, let me ask you to turn them off. Or at least set them on stun mode or silent. And besides, the discussion that's going on in this room is going to be a lot more interesting, a lot more important because we have a raid around this table. The around this EU at the front of the room, some of the world's leading innovators on the use of mobile phones in difficult environments. I'm going to talk about each one of these people. I'll talk about them and my co-moderator, Matt Venhouse, we will introduce them one by one when we get to the panels. But let me say right up front, I am truly humbled to be standing here amidst so many technology entrepreneurs who have also figured out how to use their considerable talents in very practical ways for positive social change. They're not just inventing things, they are inventing things and putting them to work out there in tough, very tough environments. So I sincerely mean that. I'm humbled to be with you and I just thank you all for coming here today. Why have we all come together? Well, we're all keenly interested in finding new tools and technologies with which to manage conflict and promote peace building. That's what our smart tools for smart power series is all about here at USIP. And there is no more promising technology these days than mobile phones. Fifteen years ago, only fifteen years ago, fifty percent of the world's population had never even made a phone call. And today, over fifty percent of the world's population are walking around with a mobile device. In a couple of years, we're all going to be walking around with a smart phone, essentially a mini computer in our pockets, even in Afghanistan, clearly one of the poorest countries in the world by virtually any index, at least until they found the lithium, and a country where mobile telephony is growing at an exponential rate, as we all know. But as the folks here at the front of the room, the world's leading innovators with cell phones know better than most, it's not merely about giving people, giving more people more phones, or more features on those phones. The technology is really really just part of the question, almost the easy part of the question. The bigger challenge is getting to a very clear identification of the problems that we need to be solved, and those that can be solved using cutting edge mobile telephony. Focusing on the right problem at the right time, that's the heart of innovation. And let me illustrate this, the really interesting story that I came across in the course of our research on this topic, and it's a true story about a very undisciplined young boy growing up in Ohio, and he was in school for only three months, before he was thrown out as being unteachable. And his father decided that hard work and brute force were going to be the only things this kid ever understood. Now his mom, as mothers tend to do, she continued to believe in him. She schooled him at home. But still he gradually became known as a juvenile delinquent, because he did things like walking into the local hardware store, picking up an expensive piece of equipment, and just walking out with it. So when he did that, a storekeeper demanded the boy be publicly thrashed in front of the store, and his father was happy to oblige. Now this was a boy whose story none of us would probably remember now, except for something unusual that happened one night. The boy's mother had appendicitis. And shortly after sundown one evening, her appendix burst. And by the time the doctors arrived, they had to tell the boy and his father that because it was too dark, they would be unable to operate on her until the morning, by which time she would surely be dead. So the father sits there with his head in his hands, and at the same time the boy runs out of the house, goes back to the very same hardware store where he had been punished before, and without hesitating, he breaks into the front window of the store, goes in, and steals $700 worth of merchandise. When the hardware store owner showed up at the boy's house the next day, he demanded another public beating from the boy's father, and he got one. But this time, the boy's father immediately knocked the store owner off of his feet, rather than the boy. And then he returned to the store owner what the boy had stolen, $700 worth of mirrors, which the boy had used to reflect and focus the light of a single lantern enough to fill the room, which meant that two doctors could operate on the mother of Thomas Edison. Now, I know what you're thinking about that story. Thomas Edison was a scientific genius, but in fact, that's really the point. He wasn't. Ask any scientist. He really only had one big scientific advance, vacuum tube in his whole career. The light bulb, in fact, had been invented by someone else. It was already in use in Paris. Yet Edison became known as the best innovator in this country's history. And his innovation started not with blinding science or some whiz bang new technology, but with a clear understanding of the problem that needed to be solved. He didn't focus on his mother's appendicitis like everybody else who was in the room. Her problem was darkness. He gave her light. So that's the image that I'd ask all of us in this room here today to be thinking about as we go through the morning, people innovating, generating ideas by better understanding the problems at hand. Each panel that we've got here has been carefully designed to have a combination of deep Afghanistan expertise as well as really valuable experience with mobile telephony, mobile phone-based solutions in other parts of the world. And we've configured the room in this rather unorthodox fashion because we want to try to get a good dialogue going among you all, among the experts here, so don't hold back, converse with one another, as well as a good dialogue with you out there. And we'll have times that we'll just go to the room and you'll have a chance to ask questions of the panelists. But these folks have really done it in so many different ways with interesting solutions of complex challenges in difficult environments that we want to hear as much as possible from all of you here. And speaking of people identifying problems where mobile phones can make a valuable contribution, we are really lucky to have with us to kick the day off. We've got James Eberhardt, founder chairman of that Denver-based company, Mobile Accord, Mobile Accord, and its associated mobile giving platform, MGIV, are perhaps best known for their staggering fundraising efforts during one of the greatest natural disasters we've seen in a long time, the earthquake in Haiti. James started the text Haiti to 90999 campaign. We've all heard so much about it. Many of us contributed to it ourselves. I know our whole family did. The success of this platform was really remarkable, even shocked James himself, I know, raised over $41 million within five days of the disaster, allowing over 2 million Americans to contribute to a cause that was meaningful to them. Unprecedented. But that success is hardly James's first. He dropped out of Colorado State University, and by the age of 26 he had sold his mobile ringtone business, nine squared, for 40 million bucks thereabouts. That's what he tells us. It may have been a lot more. Now I don't know what most of you were doing at the age of 26, but I can tell you my net worth was closer to kind of 40 bucks than 40 million. In 2005, James began on a mission here to enable social good by building a comprehensive mobile platform, making it easy to leverage the power of the mobile phone for mobile banking, and other services, mobile accords, mobile platform and systems currently allow mobile banking, crime and corruption reporting, SMS emergency, alert and warning systems, mobile polling, mobile donations, and through these systems, at least 4 million transactions are being processed daily on multiple continents. So to kick things off today, we've asked a true pioneer in the use of cell phones for peace building and development purposes to get us started. James really represents the kinds of resourcefulness that if we need, if we're going to turn our intuitions and our ideas about mobile platforms into real peace building outcomes. So let me ask James to take it away now. Thanks. Thank you, James. Thanks, Sheldon. So when we start looking at mobile tools and smart tools for smart powers, I think it's really important to actually look at the tool that we're working with and what we actually have to what we, the inherent aspects of the phone. You look at the ability to do data. You look at the ability to make and receive phone calls. You look at the ability to grab location-based information. You look at the ability to do billing transactions. And you take this and you put it in a pocket, in the pocket of 4.6 billion people around the world. And you come together and you have the powers of the internet. You have the powers of real-time communication. And you have all these inherent tools that are right there with that person at that time. And you take back and you look back 250 years. And, you know, things were, you know, much different, but people still had the need to want to communicate, to be able to gather, to be able to organize. And the way they went about it was a lot different. I mean, using the printing press to be able to give a message, being able to organize in back rooms. Today, I mean, those types of things are actually done on Twitter. And you have a mass revolution come together in seconds. And what took weeks, months, years to come together and organize movements is now done within seconds and done in such a mass scale that it's really hard to stop. So looking at the tools of the mobile phone and the powers of that it lies in having the widespread reach of having two-thirds of the world with the mobile device is really a remarkable piece. And it's really, what does that tool do? And so looking here at the United States and, you know, the tragedy that happened in Haiti and seeing what the film can do, you know, looking at the power of posting an image, posting a... Homes, hospitals, and schools. So from the time that we, the first hours we had it up and live and back to ours, we're collectively with K-Stan, Elk Ross, and others from the U.S. State Department to take this message and put it out there. And from there, you know, looking at day five, we had $5 million. And look at day 12, we started seeing this social gathering. We're the first text donations coming through on Twitter and then you start carrying this social movement where you started seeing trucks like the one that will come up here in a second. You know, a ball popping up a good look, you know, people creating shirts. And the shirt that I'm wearing here was actually someone took it, rode on the shirt and was walking around and going to TMZ and, you know, seeing this social gathering. I mean, people like Jimmy Buffett that, you know, you don't think of technology out there delivering this message. Just text Haiti to 90999 and you'll be able to contribute $10. Not really sure what's going on. You're like, but looking at this, I mean, seeing day one, you know, that money come through and start seeing this building, this social movement and look at this. And this is all representation of, fundamentally, we're able to change how people get and seeing these images on the screen and being able to say, wow, this is a horrific thing. All these people that have died and they're suffering hate and be able to take out your phone, text it right there, give $10. And what we're talking about here isn't something substantially different. You know, for the longest time, people have, you know, taken a bucket out and put it out and from someone said, hey, give $10 to this cause. What we effectively did is took that bucket and put it across the nation and enabled 290 million people had a phone to be able to come out and give money right there. And you know, through this campaign within the first 30 days, we've raised over $41 million. We account for 16% of the red cross is fundraising and, you know, just through a text message or something that two years ago in the U.S. didn't even exist. And so looking at this, it's, you know, what is this tool, this tool is enabled us to do. It's not changing what people are doing. People, you know, go out there and give and really it's making it easier, making it quicker, making that the viral network, the social networks and, you know, seeing stories from, you know, an 80-year-old guy that for his first time sent a text message to give a donation to Haiti. And people that were organizing, having parties around the U.S. instead of paying a cover charge, whether you got in was showing your receipt confirmation on your phone that you'd given to Haiti. And it really kind of speaks to that, that fundamental value of what you can do with social change and taking these tools and taking this powerful device that sits in your pocket and how you can actually use that to impact and act and drive a mechanism to engage people. So when we start looking at, you know, what's going on around the rest of the world, I know we're here to talk about, you know, specifically about Afghanistan. You know, there's been so much that's been done. So much has been leveraged to take these, you know, 4.6 billion phones and allow them to educate, allow them to give information, share information and deliver that out in a real-time mechanism. You know, last year with AFPAC and Asher Bomber and Vikram Sune, we launched out a Mario Vox. This is a service you can use on your cell phone to distribute news stories, to invite people to an event, to share your thoughts and opinions, to report problems that you see, to call for action to solve those problems. The United States is proud to support this kind of innovation by covering the costs of the first 24 million messages and to find out how to use this new service, text the word help, H-E-L-P. So this announcement was made here at the end of October of last year, roughly about eight months ago. And from this, I mean, from this, we enabled a social network. And a social network in Pakistan that, you know, just created, we set it up, launched it out. The secretary gave the first mission. And from there, effectively, we are able to connect over a million people. Outside, it's almost going on eight months. It's the service that's been up and going. We originally looked at, you know, for the first year, take a while for the service to adapt and really make an impact and start connecting people. We projected that we'd see about 24 million messages over the very first year. In the first five weeks, we'd already surpassed that first year budget. In, you know, doing this, you know, in the first eight months, we connected over a million people all across Pakistan. We delivered out over 300 million SMS messages. And this is something just coming from building the social network, putting it out there for people to use. And it's as simple as, you know, sending a text message that, you know, groups of as large as 50, 60,000 people that were connecting, coming together, sharing information. And you look at, you know, this is a text message that people are sending, passing, sharing information. And you kind of look at what the, what finally this has been able to accomplish. You know, remote parts of Pakistan, there's a lot of people that they have one information source in their local village that is able to give them, you know, give them their daily news, give them sports information, give them the current events of what's going on. And you have this one voice that's the way they've always gotten their news. And then all of a sudden, now that they can connect and grab information from across the country. And what does that do? I mean, we look at that this has, takes an evolutionary step where people are grabbing their information from one federated source. And now having another source that comes across the country, you know, has the ability to, you know, take and give information and keep people accountable. And, you know, while people aren't going to change their belief patterns and the way they've been getting information, isn't going to change. And they get a text message saying that this happened and they have their local leader say, this happened. Most likely they're going to continue on and believe what their local information source is. But when you start getting information, it may be a cricket score that you get. And then the local leader confirms that same cricket score that you just got on your phone. So they're saying, huh, okay, that's accurate. You start getting information that doesn't, doesn't coincide. You know, most likely they still look at the local leader as the one that's credible, but it starts creating this, this idea in this thought process of who's really right and starts driving that independent thought. And that's a powerful movement. That's a powerful idea is starting to come together and grabbing this real time information and be able to share across mountain ranges across the country and be able to get that information right there on your phone as simple as it may be. But we've empowered that and we've helped drive that forward. And you just start seeing all these things that are coming, you know, from looking at, you know, a project in the Congo with the World Bank, where we've effectively taken and partnered up with Vodacon. And so the thought process is that there's millions upon millions of people in the Congo that often don't have a voice. I mean, the wealthy elite, the government and NGOs are really the only people with a voice in the national, on the national stage. And so what we've enacted is an SMS system to allow people to take part and give feedback. And they answer a question on a weekly basis and it could be as simple as, you know, what's the problems in your village? People reply back and say crime and tell a story about crime or poverty or water. And then taking that information in real time, filtering and doing the analysis through an algorithm that puts up there and is able to map over top of a Google map and show what's going on from the collective voice of the people and taking these these millions of people and giving them a voice on the world stage to help bring that fourth pillar of NGOs, of government officials, of wealthy elite, and now having the people that are able to go out there and give their own independent voice. And it drives that power that, you know, someone that may have never stepped out of their local village but has access to a cell phone, is now able to communicate and get that world, that message out to the world and have their voice heard. And, you know, it goes into, you know, what's, what's out there? I mean, enabling local people, empowering them, looking at, you know, mHealth, which is something that you start looking at, you know, being able to get information over over a cell phone, maybe talking to a doctor or getting SMS alerts about when to take medicine or being able to ask a question and starting to look at, you know, in certain areas, there's could be people starting sick, patterns start to start to evolve. And you start to see that in this in this area, people are coming up with all of the same sickness and maybe you identify that the sickness is created off of the water source. Taking that information and then using the cell phone, using location based technology to be able to deliver a message back to everybody there that says be careful of water supply. It's been identified here that people are getting sick and doing this, you know, takes is able to prevent and take the collective good, do the analysis on and deliver out that message. So I mean, as we're looking today, and as we're talking about Afghanistan what what smart tools, what technology, what, you know, some of, you know, amazing people up here that are working to bring things, things to the forefront, bring technologies to the forefront to empower and enable people. I think it's important to look at that tool, look at the technology, look at the ability and realize with opportunities here. I mean, the opportunity is 4.6 4.6 billion phones out there in the world that have the connections to the world to be able to give people access to just take a step forward to know to be informed, be educated, to be service with medical care. And looking at that and how do we evolve that forward. So thank you. Enough time to take one or two questions for for James. But you're you've set the bar just in the right place. And you've told us about an exciting innovation with Umar was question comes up. Why aren't we doing Umar was in Afghanistan or something like that? You just well, I think that we absolutely look to extend that in Afghanistan some point. Is that the idea? That's the absolutely that you just identify yourself in your organization. We have a microphone for you. Richard whites Hudson Institute. I think we'll get to this probably some point. But isn't there an obvious problem with Afghanistan as a possible avenue for extending your business? The fact that the insurgents who's only aware of the potential value of this kind of communication particularly allowing people to work with the government and identify where they are and so on. Aren't they gonna aren't wouldn't the Taliban or other insurgents trying to do everything they can to destroy this the the polls and cut off hands of people who have cell phones do anything they can really disrupt it. Nice and that's something we'll talk about some point. No, I mean, absolutely. It's always a concern on on what's going to happen. I mean, you have those same concerns whether you have the mobile phone there or not. I mean, right now you have the Taliban that tries to shut down towers and blows up towers if they're left on overnight. You know, as you evolve technology and enable these tools enable the communication. I mean, you're going to have people that are going to try to repress it back down. But empowering them with those pieces that you can get the collective good to know about what's going on inform them and organize them. I mean, you're giving a tool to allow them to fight back, allow them to grab knowledge and share information. And you got to take steps forward on it. That's a great question. And one is going to come up right throughout the day, right about Taliban and their the threats, the security risks and so forth. And we've got a heap of people on the front panel here that have experience. Anybody want to throw? Anybody want to comment? We are going to be bringing up throughout the day. But anybody have a direct response? Margaret just derived back from Afghanistan last night. I think we also need to remember in Afghanistan, the literacy rate is 10 to 15% nationally, which means in the rural areas, a lot of people have no literacy, no education at all. And I think that's something very different from Pakistan. And the you know, in the rural areas, a lot of people can't do SMS or can't send messages. So I think that's important to keep in mind also. But on the specifically on the security question, we're going to try to keep this lively up here. I'd like to address the security question. I've been working at Afghanistan for quite a few years. And it's a risky place. It's a war zone. And there will always be risks. And if we don't step up and take those risks or allow the Afghans that are choosing to take that risk, then we're actually impeding their progress. You just have to accept risk and move forward. The only way to actually do this is overwhelming communications. I mean, what if there's a sniper, then they can use the roads and then we should tear up all the roads? No, overwhelming communications is the only way to counter oppression. All right, we're going to be coming back to this theme throughout the day. Anybody else? Another question, comment for James. Sorry, go ahead, Shenor, who's also just in from Afghanistan yesterday and works at the largest, one of the largest telecom providers in the country. Roshan, I just want to source the fact that there isn't electricity problem. But I think that you have a very valid point. If you empower the community, then they can make a difference. And so, you know, with the cell phone towers that will be involved, we move from a security model as in having external guards guard our towers to a community engagement. So now the community guards our towers, we use solar power for them, we take the excess power to the community. And if our towers operate, we make a certain amount of revenue, they get a revenue share. Now you can even power them. So, you know, during the election that just happened, 18 towers of ours were blocked at a cost of $14 million. But when we moved to the community engagement program, we recouped $13 million. And there was one village where the towers asked to be switched up and the community said no. And during that time, unfortunately, the village sheriff's wife was asked you to give birth. And that birth went wrong. And the people came out and protested. So I think what you're seeing is the building blocks of that community empowerment. But we've got to be there behind the technologies and the models that we put forward. There's got to be that commitment to move forward. Excellent. So you hear we're going to have a lot of ground truth throughout the day. We've got people who really work in this milieu every single day. Any other points for specifically for James so we can sit down? Any other questions right here in front of me? My name is James. I'm with the Internet Bar Organization. I was wondering, how do you view the sort of acceptance or dependence of these mobile technologies in comparison to like developed countries? Are they different? Are they becoming more dependent than perhaps we are? Well, I mean, you look at like the developing nations are often are looking to leapfrog us in terms of their adaption, the use of up the phone. It comes from a simple thing. Like when we look at like places around the world, like in the UK, it's get a landline phone for a business. You know, it takes months to get it set up in the place where you can walk downstairs and set up a phone and driving that just off of the old infrastructure in Europe. I mean, it propelled Europe a lot further and faster than the United States in terms of their adoption. I mean, here, you can have a phone turned on within a week easily at your home. And there's so many different choices because of our infrastructure so well built out. And when you look at like developing nations, you know, trying to set up and build a strong infrastructure when there's not a lot of money, you can take and put up a tower. And from that tower, you start empowering it with financial services, news and information, communications, health. I mean, there's amazing things that you can do just from placing that one tower and servicing people for kilometers, hundreds of kilometers, or, sorry, 40, 60 kilometers around the base of that tower. And so in terms of how they adoption and how they how they go, I mean, it's amazing to see the the simple innovations in the Philippines. You know, being able to place an order for McDonald's, have it delivered to your house through text message by texting, you know, one H to, you know, F and, you know, having a large, a large hamburger and a fry delivered out. And it comes off of just need and necessity and not having access to other things. So innovation absolutely is driven by need and access. Good. Amherst, right behind you. From Amida Associates. It was really interesting, your example of Pakistan. I think that it's fascinating. Over the years I've been working, I can really see how that meets real needs that are there and the and the issues of being able to discuss and debate in a way that's often very difficult. But I'm wondering how you actually arrived at that particular idea. What was the needs analysis? What was the understanding what the issues were, which led you to that particular response? And also how do you measure how effective it's actually going to be or is being at the moment, beyond the actual numbers, which are incredibly impressive. And there's really two messages per person in Pakistan. It's incredible. Yeah. I mean, as we can assess and like looked at it and we looked at, you know, what can we do to drive information and just taking the whole principle of, you know, if people have the ability to receive multiple information sources digitally, how can we empower them? How can we enable it? And looking at just really putting a tool out for communities to be able to go through and organize and kind of seeing this effect of, you know, having students organize and, you know, get up and actually go out and do things, have people are advertising jobs. And looking at like the use of it and there's a lot of people advertising promoting their businesses out. And so, you know, looking at just the fundamentals of what we thought, you know, was really like people start sharing news. We really see it growing that fast. But people quickly took that tool and saw, okay, I can advertise a job on here. I can promote a business. I can share information about local markets. And, you know, we didn't do any of that. We just put the put the tool out there and, you know, serviced it with the wireless community. And the people really were the ones that developed it and used it and made it into what it is today. All right, last one before we go to our first panel. Yes, there's a microphone there if you just identify yourself. I'm Margaret. I'm going to pick up on a thread. I think it's going to be interesting in your comments. So it's certainly not a complete answer in any context. But with the literacy rate issues and the rapid adoption of cell phone technology, it's just kind of interesting that it teaches a lot of people how to count from one to nine. And learning to text in short code messages for rudimentary communication is the pathway for people to learn to want to become literate. And I'm just wondering if you're seeing evidence of this in your experiences. We have a SMS-based system where farmers can retrieve market information in different markets throughout Afghanistan. And we'll talk about it later this afternoon. But we found that happens a lot actually, or maybe the farmer doesn't know how to do it, but his son has gone to school and can show him. And yeah, I think you're absolutely right that that does happen. And I know that Shai Nor probably knows a lot more about things. Do you want to add to that? Sure. I mean, absolutely. We, you know, just looking at like yesterday we in the Congo launched the polling it was all done in French. And you know, in the Congo there's a number of different languages that are spoken. And so what we saw is, you know, the time it took for people to reply back and, you know, opt in to receive and be a part of the World Bank Survey was, you know, over the course of a day or two. And they received the message and what we kind of attributed to is, you know, in the US you'd see that, that you'd see a lot of the people do it right there where they wouldn't do it all. But when we looked at it is, you know, people got the message on the phone and then went to someone else and said, what does this mean? And being able to look at it and be forced that you want to know and understand with messages and using other people to help educate you and, you know, driving that need to know what says be a part of it is driving people to actually start taking those fundamental steps forward towards, you know, self-education. All right. Thank you very much, James. Really gotten us started on the right note to man who has both been an innovator and really practical in, in, in his application of that, those innovations. All right. Let me now turn to our first panel and get us going on this topic of tackling corruption and improving governance. In fact, in all of our panels today, we're going to try to answer fairly simple question, which is to say, where are the opportunities? Where are the significant challenges to the use of mobile phones for peacebuilding in Afghanistan? What's being done right now? Where should we be headed and what's keeping us from getting there? So on this first panel, we're looking how we can answer that question with regards to tackling corruption and improving governance. As far as our research is telling us the potential of cell phones to address those challenges, what we've seen is a lot of work in essentially three areas. Mobile banking to cut down on the ability of officials and businesses to cook the books and take kickbacks and so forth. We've seen mobile phone systems that are giving ordinary systems a way to report one corruption and other crimes. And then we've been seeing mobile phones used very interestingly with mixed results to monitor election, monitor the elections last year to map irregularities. So it was being done in mobile phones, crowd sourcing the information used in conjunction with mapping platforms like Ushahidi. And we have got terrific people here that can speak to all three of these as well as a potentially new cutting edge use of mobile phones in the area of improving governance and that is to say resolving disputes over land peacefully. Yes, we are going to hear about how one group is suggesting we use mobile phones in Afghanistan for long distance land dispute resolution. So let me quickly introduce our panel and I do mean quickly because I think you all have if you don't have them, their full bios are outside. So and they really are too extensive for me to be going into great depth here. I'm going to give you just the highlights. First, we are very fortunate to have Shenor Koja here who flew in yesterday from Kabul from Roshan. As I said earlier, one of the Afghanistan's largest telecommunications companies and which has also done some of the most interesting things in Afghanistan of any private company in the way of corporate social responsibility, telemedicine program, for example, micro finance, mobile banking and a lot of it is thanks to this woman who is managing director of Roshan's corporate social responsibility department. So thank you for coming Shenor. We also have Patrick Meyer. Where's Patrick? There's Patrick, one of the founders and pioneers of the now quite well known Yusha Hedi, whose mobile based crowdsourcing platform was used first to monitor election violence in Kenya in 2007 and now is being used every time I turn around. It's being used in places like Gaza in India and Afghanistan. It was even used here last year or this year in Washington DC to map the cleanup process going on during our winter infamous snowmageddon that we had here. So that was a surprise for me. But I guess we're now starting to think of Washington as another conflict zone. Eric, we've got Eric Gundersen. There's Eric, president co founder of the very highly regarded development seed, whose innovative tools like managing news were also used to in the process of monitoring the elections in Afghanistan. But Eric's I think Eric's real claim to fame was his money created a ringtone for the famous George Bush statement to the former head of FEMA during the Katrina disaster. Michael Brown, I think that return goes something like Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. And then we have Ruha Devanesan is the vice president and executive director of the internet bar organization, as well as head of the Silk Road initiative, which is working in mobile banking as well as on the cutting edge is what I mentioned earlier of land dispute resolution in Afghanistan. And then lastly on this panel, we've got Nick Lockwood there. Nick is the Afghan communications advisor in the Hillman PRT. So also just back recently from the field, he works for the United Kingdom's stabilization unit, which is kind of a piece of different piece of the foreign Commonwealth office. It's a stabilization unit from the UK. So needless to say he brings to us again, a great deal of on the ground expertise. Also having spent two years working out of the British Embassy in Kabul before that in support of counter narcotics and the rule of law. So a pretty amazing combination of Afghanistan and mobile phone expertise. And we are really delighted to have you all here. Thank you for coming, especially very long distances. So I'm going to ask Schaener to kick us off. Schaener, Nick and then Ruha to answer from their vantage points and experience basically the same sets of question. This is kind of the format for the day. We're going to have people who have been working deep in Afghanistan issues recently to set up the discussion by telling us briefly, hey, what have you seen in the way of using mobile phones to fight corruption or to promote good governance? Where do you see future opportunities? And what's holding us back? What are the obstacles? And the reason why we're asking that all three of them to speak to those questions. What are you seeing? Where the obstacles to moving forward is because then the other members of the panel who have lots of expertise from other places will bring that expertise to bear. They will comment on some of the challenges they're hearing about. Maybe they'll have some useful experience to apply that will help us resolve some of these challenges. Maybe not, but at least we'll get their input. So, Schaener, having come the furthest, you should have the floor first. Excellent. Welcome everyone. I'm going to start off just telling you a little bit about Roshan, a few important points so you can see the impact of mobile phones. Roshan is 51% owned by the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, which is part of the AKDN. So, we are mandated for social and economic development, but our for-profit arm has to be profitable. Before Roshan came to Afghanistan, there were very few landlines, about 10 to 15,000 landlines, because of the very mind area and the war, and there was one mobile network operator. Roshan has invested over the last five years $480 million in its infrastructure, but what's that resulted in? We've paid $200 million in tax, we represent 6% of the GDP of Afghanistan, we have 1,200 employees of which 20% are women, we've created 30,000 indirect jobs. This is impact, yeah? So, Roshan itself means light and hope, it was named by the people of Afghanistan, it covers 60% of the population and it covers rural populations, it has the largest coverage map of all the telco operators, has 4 million customers and collectively the telcos reach 7 million plus subscribers. Let me tell you a little bit about Afghanistan now, it's a population of 32 million people, 50% of the population is under the age of 15 years old, the GDP is $350, the average life expectancy is 44 years, there are 17 to 20 banks, 38 ATMs, all the banks put together can reach 2.2 million people around Afghanistan. So, and I think an important point to note as well is because of this lack of infrastructure, the largest bank in Afghanistan has a million customers and has capitalized at $1 billion and then the second largest bank has 80,000 customers and has capitalized at $5 million. So this is just to show you that what happens if a large bank collapses, what does that do to the country's economy, it's just a thought to questions afterwards. And so amongst a number of technologies that we've brought for Afghanistan, like telemedicine and voice SMS, that's how we get around the ability of people not to be able to read and write, we brought in voice recognition technology so you can speak your text message, gets converted to a text data packet and gets sent and then it's reconverted into voice. So these are some of the constraints that we have to live with day to day. But what I'm going to talk about today in terms of corruption and helping spur the economy and the development process is mobile money because I think it's a really critical build in the infrastructure that can really help progress the country into the 21st century and it would be very good and cost-effective use of mobile technology. So today we have launched M-Pesa. We launched it two years ago. It's a partnership with Vodafone from the UK. And basically what this technology does is it allows you to send money from point A to point B. That can be from an employer to an employee, from an employee to their family. It allows them to withdraw money, deposit money, pay their electricity bill and we've just started the ability to buy certain groceries using your mobile phone, using e-currency. And it's being encouraged because you take away the cost of transporting money and the security and the risk. And so the supermarkets are actually giving a 10% discount if you pay with e-currency. So what has happened since we launched this? We launched it. And what we found is that about 20 private companies signed up with us to have their payroll deployed, dispersed through the system. What it means is that with one click, with one click, 1,200 employees or 500 employees all get paid their salary. You no longer need a security vehicle to go and pick up the money from the bank, drive it to your office, lock it in a safe, counter it into piles and then have employees walk in and out and have their cash given out. Because this was successful, we were asked by the Ministry of Interior to help with the payment of police. And so not an area that we would have ventured into but in an effort to assist the process, we actually did a trial with 50 police officers in Jalrez. The first thing that happened, the first month that we paid, the police officers, you know, all phoned up the call centre and said, oh, we haven't got paid because they didn't understand the system. So herein is one constraint. It takes a lot of training, a lot of explaining, a lot of reinforcement of what the technology is and how people acknowledge receipt and what they can do with it. So that's a cost, that's a limiting factor. The second month, everybody phoned, well, 30 of the 50 phoned and said, oh, my gosh, we've got to pay rise. The US government is paying us 30% more than we ever got. They didn't know what they were getting paid because there was so much skimming off. And we also had a situation where not to name any names but we had a commander turn up at one of our agents' offices with 45 SIM cards and say, give me the cash. That's right. And I'll send it on. So you can see how this transparency and the speed would affect change, right? And because you can transport money, rurally, sorry, I'm beating up my fellow colleague, because there are 234 cities, towns and villages in which Roshan is and if you add the banks, if you add the microfinance, if you add the havalas, which is the normal system of, I give Eric 10 bucks and he gives RUJA 9 bucks. You know, that's how I get money to RUJA. If you add them all to the network, we have a nice urban and rural distribution system that can allow people to get liquidity rurally. Now, when you think about that and you think about the payroll of the police and other employees, government employees, all employees, if that full sum of money was getting out to rural villages, what would be the impact to the economy? I think that's a question that we all need to ask and answer and understand why such a system would be important. So, you know, what are the benefits in summary? Safety, effectiveness, efficiency, speed, correct salary payments, more time at work because you don't have to walk home three days to deliver your money, more retention of staff because, you know, when they go back and they've paid money to go back and they can't come back to work because of security issues, you've lost an asset that you've invested in and through mobile money, you see, it doesn't matter on the amount that's transferred. So you're providing financial inclusion to the very, very poor. Now, I'm not saying this is all rosy because most families may not be able to afford two mobile phones. So there are limitations, but today you can get a mobile phone for $30 or less if you bought en masse. So it's not an insurmountable issue, but to build 500 banks across the country is going to take a very, very long time. The other really important thing I think to understand is that with the efficiency that the telco brings, you are now disrupting the ecosystem. What do I mean by that? Today, that massive payroll is managed by the banks, by one bank. In the time it takes to transfer those funds, there is a certain period of time where interest is earned. If you multiply that by 12 months, that's a certain amount of income that may be displaced if you could transfer the money immediately, that takes away that. With a mobile phone, in order to get a SIM card, you have to follow KBIC rules. These are rules that require you to have a picture, or a thumbprint, you know, fixed abode even if it is at the corner of shush the rock and pull a mammoth round about as opposed to number eight or something. And so, you cannot have ghost accounts. Through GPRS technology, you can see that the people that you are paying are actually real and moving around. So, you know, I put this all out there to you really for discussion. There are issues around the cost of training, of setting up expertise and centres, there's cost around hardware for Afghan organisations and government in order to do this. Right now, it's done on bits of paper. You know, that all needs to be digitised. And then, of course, you know, there's a very important point that the paymasters have to be on your side to effect change like this. But I think if you put money in the hands of the rural individual, if you develop an e-commerce, brutally, you are going to get other value-added services happening and you are going to empower the person that makes very little, $100 or $150. So, not wanting to take up too much time, I think I will end there. That's fantastic. You're amazing the way you stayed to exactly 10 minutes. I should, before we go any further, let folks know I'm going to be signalling to one minute to panelist because we really want to have lots of good discussion across the experts here. So, the presentations will be fairly limited, but you've got to start it on a great note. And I'm hearing the challenge around training. And I do think we need to come back to M-Pesa because I understand there was some backlash from those officers who suddenly found their take being skimmed off the top. And I'd love to hear you. Part of this purpose of this meeting is to bust some of the myths around mobile phones in Afghanistan. M-Pesa, there's a lot of mythology around M-Pesa. But let me turn to Nick Lockwood, who's also been doing a very interesting program in Afghanistan on the ground that has been getting at the governance and corruption issues. Nick. Thank you. I'm not one of the mobile telephone innovators here. I can't really even use my iPhone. But we do use, we are using mobile telephony in a Helmand in a number of ways. Very quickly about Helmand, it's really challenging. If you're British, the unit of size is Scotland or Wales. I think Helmand is the size of West Virginia. It's probably like West Virginia in a number of other ways as well. It's kind of... It's kind of Jake, I don't really understand the context. People laugh, threaten me. It's got a population of 1.4 million. Oh, up to 1.4 million, we don't really know. The vast majority of that population, 70% of it, are in the centre of the province. In between, and in between, the two cities of Gureshq and Lashkargar, the provincial capital. And that's where there's mobile telephony. Provided by Roshan and AWCC. If you move south of Lashkargar into the town of Garmsear, into the district of Garmsear, you can move west into the district of Marja. And if you move north of Gureshq into Sangin Valley and into Missakala, you don't have 24-hour mobile telephone coverage. And the reason why you don't is the Taliban quite clearly don't like it. And I always think it's worth remembering if you ask how important mobile telephony is, if it really has a power or a use, the Taliban certainly thinks so. They attack Roshan and AWCC's staff and kill them. They blow up their installations. And the security is very challenging. And there's no easy answers to it as well. Sometimes it's suggested that the military can protect the Roshan facilities or AWCC facilities in Helmand. And they probably can, they probably could. But you have to protect an entire network. It's not just what happens in Helmand, not just the security which you can provide from the Marine Expeditionary Force or the British Task Force. It's what happens. It's all their staff across the whole country. It's the whole network. These are vulnerable. And you can't necessarily guarantee that security. So we don't have mobile telephony everywhere. But we have it in the center. We've got about 70% with it. We have problems with literacy, like the rest of the country. The rates I have is we've got men over the age of 25, 20% literacy rate, women over the age of 25, 11% literacy rate. And I think that compares with averages of 35% and 13%. But I can't prove the validity of those figures. That's the kind of context. The problem we've got is we want to create a relationship between the Afghan government at the provincial level and its population. A relationship which hasn't really existed before and a relationship which we have to enable them to create themselves. And in a provincial reconstruction team, we don't want to do things ourselves. We want to enable the Afghans to do it financially or with skills or whatever way we can. And there's a couple of things we want to do when we create that relationship. We actually want to give a sense of ownership of the government and a demand. And there's a third thing which is very important. Our answers can't be too clever. Whatever we do has to be, we don't have a lot of time and we don't have a lot of bandwidth. We've got, I've got three officials I can work with in the province who will implement any kind of project like this. And they've got an awful lot of other things to do as well. And they're not technologically literate. Our bandwidth is very limited to do anything. So sophisticated ideas probably don't work. Complicated ideas probably don't work. And the two examples of use of mobile telephony which I'll very quickly describe to you, they're really simple. Not suggesting these are rocket science or anything clever. The first is that one about the relationship with the people and its government in a very direct way. The most easily used means of communication is radio in terms of broadcasts. And the FM footprint pretty much matches the mobile telephony footprint for pretty similar reasons in the province. Most of the ministries have provincial director or deputy director represented in the provincial capital. And I think in two or three districts you'll find district agriculture, health and education officials. It's very hard for them to move around. When I move around I have helicopters and lots of men with guns and armored vehicles and it's relatively safe. But officials, and I still can't move that readily. If you're an Afghan official it's much harder. So it's very difficult for them to go and use their traditional means of communicating. It's very difficult for them to go and meet people and to talk. Mobile telephony enables that to be different. So we have set times. It'll be education week and the provincial education director goes on the radio. It's advertised in advance and people phone him up. The education ones are easy. It's interesting when you put district or provincial police chiefs on the radio. People scream at them. They get massive interest when people want to discuss the behavior of the police. This touches on something which is really important. It's about if you can do all this but it's what happens next. We have had an example there. We had so embarrassed as a provincial police official by having them been put on the radio and listening to complaint of, to complaint about the behavior of a particular police unit in a particular area that he actually went and did something about it. Now, did something about it for three weeks. I don't know what the long lasting effect of that necessarily would be but it certainly is some form of response. And it creates a demand. Another one is a very, very simple thing which is a kind of crime stoppers. There's no, it's a 9-1-1, a 9-9-9 line. People can phone up when they see things they don't like and this isn't meant to, this isn't a sort of an intelligence line or a, you know, an informed snitch line. This is sort of traditional community policing. This is phoning up when you think something bad's happening or you need help in some way. It takes about 1,000 calls a week. The problem we have is the, literally the infrastructure. We rely on somebody answering the phone. It's got one line. So when somebody else phones, if somebody's already on the phone, it goes to an answer phone. It's not the greatest way of doing it. But we're changing that. We're not gonna have a modern exchange with 10 different lines. We still have to have people to answer the telephone and once the phone's been answered, we still have to then do something about it. When I was first discussing this with Sheldon, he sort of asked me the question but don't you raise expectations by potentially doing this? And I've been struggling about my answer to that and I think my answer to that would be, yeah, we do. But Afghan governance and Afghan responses at a provincial level to a very difficult province like Helmand, they're bad. They're not what we'd like them to be. But we have to try. I think that's probably, that's not a mobile telephone issue. That's an Afghan governance issue. That's probably enough for me for now. Thank you. Thank you very much, Nick. Our last panelist who's got some very specific Afghanistan experience and ideas here is Ruhha and she's gonna tell us how you are thinking about using mobile phones in this area and then we're gonna open it up for discussion on the panel. Ruhha? Sure. And I have, clicker if you- Oh, yeah. Please. Ruhha, there's a couple slides she wants to show us. You're welcome. So I'm with the internet bar organization and what we do is we try and use, find ways to use technology to bring rule of law to developing countries in various ways. The Internet Silk Road Initiative is our initiative for Afghanistan and we look into the use of technology through mobile phones. And I'm having trouble with, there we go. Just a patient. Through mobile phones to tackle land rights clarification, mobile banking, mobile commerce, I'll leave the mobile banking discussion to Shainor and focus on land for today. And what we basically are trying to tackle is a very complex land situation that has evolved with 30 years of conflict, a lot of refugee coming and going, millions of people leaving Afghanistan, going into neighboring countries, returning in the past few years to find that their homes and their land has been taken over by other people. You're also dealing with conflicts between agriculturalists and pastoralists over the use of land. There's also a huge inaccessibility to the judicial system for rural dwellers and just to put it in context, about 80% of Afghans use the land for their livelihoods. So that's 80% of people who feel they don't have access to the judicial system. Corruption is something that is dealt with on all levels of government, not to say that all government officials are corrupt, but bribery tends to be the norm. There is, especially on the lower levels, a lot of strong arming of local officials by the Taliban. And so it makes it very difficult to approach your local government official with a land dispute when you know that you're putting yourself at risk, first of all, by approaching them with the community warlords and people therefore tend to try and resolve issues by themselves. This is the current state of the land deeds. So any improvement, I think, is an improvement. There are many efforts to digitize land records which currently, I believe, just consist of taking photos or scanning these deeds. What we propose is just going over some of the negative effects for people who aren't familiar with land issues. If you don't know who owns a particular piece of land, that person may be able to occupy that land, but they cannot get a loan based on that land. It becomes hard to buy and sell land. You have disputes evolving over pieces of land which can then lead to violent conflicts and this has become, not has become, it has been an issue for the last 10, 20 years. Conflicts not only within communities but between communities. And foreign investors feel unsafe investing. This becomes particularly pertinent with the discovery of trillion dollars worth of lithium. It would be useful for people to prove ownership of that land before they have to sell it off to whoever's coming in for that lithium. So there have been several attempts to rectify these issues by the governments, by community elders in the forms of jerga sessions. A jerga is basically a gathering of community elders to resolve disputes on an informal level. And one of the problems with land has been that jergas may resolve disputes and the people may go home feeling like they've settled something but that resolution doesn't get transmitted back to the central government. So central deeds and central repositories of deeds don't reflect the actual situation on the ground. So what we propose and we haven't yet done the needs assessment or the pilot projects yet, this is basically an idea to bounce off all of you for your opinion is to train Afghans in using simple mobile technologies to collect evidence first of all on how jergas resolve these disputes to gain some knowledge about how it's done on a community level. To help in mapping disputes we know and we'll hear from Usahidi and the people from Frontliner SMS that geographical mapping of disasters is already taking place with mobile phones. We also have heard about the use of SMS texting to crowdsource information. So all of these technologies already exist, it's just a matter of applying them to a new field which is land disputes. You can detect new disputes and then SMS them back to a central alternative dispute resolution center which could then send out ADR arbitrators or mediators to resolve disputes and then SMS back the decision to a central repository. This slide talks about why mobile phones and you've heard already about the ubiquity of mobile phones in Afghanistan, it's something that's accessible, it's something that when people feel they have a need they'll learn how to use them. And our particular model doesn't depend on every individual being able to use a mobile phone to map their land. It's more of what's called bounded crowdsourcing where you select certain people to train to go out into the communities and use simple mobile technologies to transmit information back. So you can't really see any of the text on this slide and Sheldon warned me about this but I'll just describe it for you. It's a very simple idea to use. You've already got the ability to take satellite images of land but with satellite images you can't see who owns what. So we would be sending people in with a satellite map who could then go from plot to plot and use a mobile phone to send up GPS coordinates, to send up photographs of boundary markers, to send SMSs with written descriptions of boundary markers back to a central registry so that the file on that particular piece of land now has several layers of information attached to it. In terms of resolving disputes at this stage basically what we would be doing is sending people in who have been trained in a combination of formal sharia law, statutory law and in basic dispute resolution mechanisms that are used across Jogas in different communities. So we'd be sending dispute resolution arbitrators into communities when we find there's a dispute. Have them settle the dispute with the various parties and SMS whatever settlement is reached back to a central registry. Again, updating the formal registry so that there's a link between informal resolutions on the ground and the formal repository. The main issues that people have with the central government when it comes to land is that they don't feel like there's any accountability. They don't feel like there's any transparency. They feel like it's a security threat to approach the central government because first of all, your disputes probably not gonna get resolved. It's probably gonna get tied up in bureaucracy and you've just pointed yourself out to whatever warlords in the area have interest over that land and you've said, oh hey, here I am, I'm disputing your occupation of my land. So something that mobile technologies provide are transparency in the sense that once you have a central repository of information, digital footprints can be tracked and who's accessing that information, who's changing it. When you have deeds in paper form like that photograph that was just shown, anyone can walk into that office and change those and I've seen photos of a deed with literally scribbled out parts that are scribbled out and written over. There's no signature attached to that writing over. It's just several changes made by who knows whom. So it provides transparency in that sense. It also allows, and this is more of a future application, it would allow the public to access an online registry through their mobile phones and this is something, this is where we would like to be in the future. In terms of security, SMSing may not be encryptible but once you SMS it back to a centralized server that information is encrypted. It's also harder to intercept an SMS text message than it is to intercept someone carrying a piece of paper. So just to summarize what I've talked about, these are the ways in which mobile technologies can help now. They help in gathering evidence and they help in transmitting evidence more efficiently and more securely back to a central location. How can they help in the future? We foresee more of a two-way interaction between individuals and a centralized government which would increase accountability, increase transparency and make people feel more empowered. And that's basically it. We plan on partnering with experts in online dispute resolution, one of whom is sitting right here, Daniel Rainey, experts in cell phone mapping. Especially important is local partners on the ground and we've reached out to several GIS, GPS specialists. We've reached out to the Afghan Bar Association and several universities and have had very positive feedback from all of them. So it's an exciting opportunity and I'd like to hear from all of you your thoughts on it. Before you finish, why aren't you doing this already? In other words, this is readily available technology, your mapping boundaries, be able to archive the settlements. Why aren't you doing it? Is it a resource question? Because we've got lots of folks here from the US government. What is it? Yeah, yes it is. Give us money, no. What are the big obstacles? One obstacle is finding funding for it and that's the stage we're at. We have done a lot of research and a lot of planning. The next step is to go to Afghanistan, reach out to partners on the ground and to gain the funding to do that and to run these pilot projects because we're using such simple technologies that have been tested and proved in other areas as everyone else will talk about on these panels. It's not really that huge a leap of faith. The leap of faith comes with the more difficult questions of people-to-people interactions. How are you going to resolve disputes on land? You may have mobile technology to transmit the resolution but if you don't have a resolution, then that's a problem. And that's what we're working on in terms of coming up with a new system that combines traditional informal mechanisms. All right, we've got lots of people with lots of interest in the three presentations we've already had. Let me quickly go first to Patrick Meyer and Eric Gunderson. You guys have some comments as the discussants of what you've heard given your experience. Lots of efforts here to create transparency around land records, around banking and the movement of money. And certainly, Patrick and Eric, your various efforts at mapping technologies using data from the ground have a lot to do with creating transparency. That's one of their big strengths. What are your thoughts on what you've been hearing? Great, well, thanks a lot, Sheldon. So, I mean, disclaimer, first of all, I'm not an Afghanistan expert. And so I'm going to be drawing from a number of different examples. And I should state as well, Ooshidi is a non-profit tech company. So we don't implement. The stories or narratives that I'm going to share are from other organizations that have used this platform. And basically, all Ooshidi is a platform that allows you to map information in interesting ways. It's definitely not a methodology. There's a lot of confusion sometimes that happens if people think that Ooshidi is a crowdsourcing methodology. No, it's just a platform. The way you collect your information is up to you. Whether you use crowdsourcing representative sampling, it doesn't really matter. Ooshidi does not come there. Ooshidi comes when you've collected the data already and then you're mapping it. So it's been used in interesting ways. In terms of different governance areas from corruption monitoring and the new program that Transparency International and other groups are using in Panama for corruption monitoring, in Liberia there's been interest by the Norwegian Refugee Council to use Ooshidi, meaning using mobile phones and other technologies to report information and map that information for land disputes. Also, local governance was a new initiative or a couple of months ago in India to use Ooshidi for local governance type issues, transparency and accountability. It looks like this is what's gonna happen with the Haiti deployment in Port-au-Prince. And then of course, elections, Sudan was the first example of Ooshidi being used in a non-premiseive environment. It got shut down by the Sudanese government for a couple of days and came back up so that was an interesting initiative by local civil society groups. So I should say that the vast majority of the times that Ooshidi is being used is by independence of all society groups. So in the case of election monitoring of citizens, monitoring whichever way you want to call it, it's not external international observers who come into the country, but it is actually folks on the ground. In Afghanistan, I was talking to colleagues of ours who implemented Ooshidi in Afghanistan and I didn't actually know much about it. So I asked a bit and it's quite interesting. I didn't realize that they had set up five or six different frontline SMS installs. So they had five or six different numbers that people could actually text to and that one of those numbers sort of became the source of some conspiracy and misinformation people were saying, starting to say, oh, that number is monitored by the government, you shouldn't use it, what have you. But they had five others. So this idea of sort of overwhelming communications like you were saying, Dave, I think definitely resonates. Another thing to point out is they still had to use some satellite technology. So they still had to pay some between five to $10,000 in addition. So it's not automatic. It's not just using Ooshidi out of the box. Sometimes in these challenging environments, you do need to have other technologies to help you do what you wanna do. And also it was not open crowdsourcing, but it was a bounded crowdsourcing approach and what my colleagues were telling me was really important that they had this Pajwak news on the ground. There were the folks who actually did the monitoring. There were about 30 people who were trained to do that and they went to the different polling stations and they would report on what they saw. And again, it was independent. What really surprised me was when they told me that they actually launched a project two weeks before the elections. This is something that I actually actively discouraged to do from different partners who approached us. They say we wanna use Ooshidi for election monitoring Guinea with just a few weeks ago. So it's pretty impressive that they were still able to pull that off in such a short period of time. I think finally what I would say is, in terms of learning, Ooshidi is still a very new platform and I think a lot of people are still trying out the platform. And so when you have the case of Afghanistan or in the Sudan, sometimes it's even more symbolic than anything else. The idea that an independent Sudanese civil society group would go and use cell phones and SMS to monitor independently of the government and establish formal institutions like NDI and the Carter Center to do their own thing is kind of revolutionary in my mind and certainly in their minds as well. And I think, I've been trying to think about an analogy. It's still a very new technology. It's not like the Wright brothers created the 747 right away, right? Most of what they did was failures, failures and failures and failures. Are we gonna say that the Wright brothers were complete failures? No, they were pioneers in the sort of era of flight and so on. So I think what we've been able to do based on these different applications of Ooshidi is learn a lot and share a lot of that learning. That's all I have to say from the Ooshidi and I can definitely answer questions and I'm really learning a lot in Afghanistan. It's very important because we do have partners that are looking to use Ooshidians in Bobway and Iran and Burma and so this is really helpful. Eric, about dad? Yeah, again, Eric Ganesan from the Development Seed. We're actually a strategic tech partner for international development organizations so like Patrick. We're not actually running some of these programs. We're coming in and helping deliver the ball bearings that are gonna power some of those. And on the governance side, so I'm here today to talk more about our partnership with National Democratic Institute around the election that happened, the presidential election in September of last year. And like the rest of the panelists, there are some interesting struggles when you're actually working on the ground. So our expertise is in large data sets. So what we ended up doing with NDI was in the end of August, so the election was August 20th. So towards the end of August, it quickly started looking like the data was weird and they weren't sure what was coming in. We were brought in to actually look at some of the, some of what the Independent Election Commission started releasing and some really basic requirements came up and these basic requirements were about, hey, who was voting for who, who where? How can we better visualize it? And we ended up working with NDI to actually parse out and strip all the PDFs that the Independent Election Commission was releasing and make a private intranet site to allow NDI's team in Kabul and their team back in DC to actually visualize, visualize a combination of, a combination of voting returns and also running certain fraud criteria over those terms. And anybody, anybody with a laptop out there right now can actually go and see a portion of the site that NDI has made public to help for capacity building in the run up to this Walesi Jega election. It's AfghanistanElectionData.org. And so what we ended up doing here was we wanted to be able to quickly, quickly drill down and take this 2,500 page PDF that Karzai got 54, 54% and be able to say, wait, let me actually look at this data now on a province basis. Let me actually look at 600 ballot submissions per polling center, which was 100% ballot submissions. Let's actually quickly start graphing that. Let's quickly now drill down to a district level. Again, this was made as a private site for NDI's team. These were some of the best election experts in the world. It does not necessarily mean they're experts in all of Afghanistan's 400 districts. So we started pulling in other open data sets like literacy rate percent urban and rural, population numbers and really tried doing this dynamic dashboard mashups. And what's been interesting about this process was actually seeing how bad the data is in Afghanistan. You would quickly see discrepancies between estimated voter turnout and population, of course, because it won't even go there with this crowd. We were very fortunate that we were able to map, and this is the actual hook into the mobile side. We didn't do anything with all the mobile data that was actually happening around the election. I mean, the texting in for these mobile, texting in and putting dots on the map in the case of Afghanistan had such a limited sample that it was almost like a visualization for a talk show site. What we were trying to do was actually take existing open data sets and visualize much more official data. It's just a totally different user case scenario, right? It's not about giving people a voice or anything. It's really allowing, it's really a very wonky user story of taking very dense data sets and allowing people to try to play with it that otherwise haven't. So turning the corner from the actual project to what this could be interesting for people in the room. All of these tools that we're doing are made with open source software. So the actual Afghanistan election data site is powered by Managing News, which is an aggregator, much like Ushahidi. You're able to suck in RSS feeds or XML feeds or parsed out PDF data and quickly map it and start being able to drill down on it. You're also able to use tools like Slingshot SMS, which is also all open source, and be able to send text messages into it. Again, we're ball bearing people, right? We make some of the underlying software that is a foundation for some of these applications. Also, the maps that you'll see on this site can all be used for some folks' mobile applications. In this room, we end up using a combination of open data sets from OpenStreetMap, which happened to, at the time, have some of the better road maps to working with AIMS to get political boundaries and thank God they matched up with what the IEC was saying. We had 400 districts at the time of the election to also using SRTM data from NASA, which is the shuttle radar topography mission. So we were able to make terrain maps. This was important for NDI and the mission over there to actually see in the run up to what we thought was going to be a runoff of where to deploy folks. All these maps, NDI is really big about trying to take these maps that they have made from OpenData and turn them into a derivative work, nice map tiles that can be loaded in Google Maps or OpenLayers and actually put them online. So other projects, whether it's an Ushahidi site and we work with Ushahidi in Haiti where they were able to take some more Haiti map tiles and drop them in and quickly start running with some of these maps. This is only going to get more exciting. We're working with NDI again for this coming election and the quality of maps we're planning on doing is especially exciting. Maps that are going to work that are very light, that are very fast, that will work well in low bandwidth situations. Maps that you're able to actually take offline with you, run on USB drive and overlay your data. So it's wonderful to be up on a panel like this, especially on a mobile panel from past experience, even more than playing with ring towns and more building things like Slingshot and working with Katrina for a couple years on mobile active. But what I'm excited to do today, whether it's through questions or over coffee, is actually talk about how people that are building certain applications in Afghanistan can start using some of these maps and data and using some of these open source tools and how we can really start capitalizing on pooled investment actually. So let me just stop there. That's great. All right. Well, this is the time we're going to throw it out here for the start on the panel. People I know have had, I've seen lots of nodding heads, lots of notes been made, questions about what you have heard already. Shama Mood, you had a point. You wanted to start us a little bit of ground truth about I guess what we heard from Shane earlier initially or? Thank you very much. Actually, this is a very good initiative to start the strengths and it has so many different dimensions and I wish we had the same kind of forum in Kabul to discuss more about his advantage, does advantage of the technologies there because if you just talk everything from here, maybe it doesn't solve that much there. Next year, Kabul. Yes, and the second question is dependency on technology in a country where 50% people is living under the poverty line. If you just applied those sophisticated technologies, some things there, how it can be sustained in the long run in the country because some of these things they were not applied in the developed countries like the United States and others. Some things we were just talking about here. So this is another challenge that's existing. But I'm not, what's called challenging the advantage of technology because in enhancing knowledge and also bring a lot of things and others. But this is a double-edged sword, how you want to use it efficiently. Who use it efficiently? Either the government of Afghanistan or the people of Afghanistan or the international community or the Taliban use for the insurgents or the criminals, they use it more efficiently than us. That is another issue because we have to just, I give some examples specifically. For example, like Bluetooth technology. They use it more efficiently. Last year I wrote a paper which was published in the Middle East Institute. I translated those poems with the scene of activities, how the Taliban attacked the international forces. They showed the scenes of those activities there. And then they transferred to each other very easily because this was the same kind of things like in the 80s the Mojahedin were using, the local poetry, songs and others to instigate people against the sword there. Sometimes this kind of the whole media thinks, it created as a public depression in Afghanistan because I just call it. The reason is that or international depression in many ways because we share a lot of information but we have a new solution for that. Or sometimes even for example, now if something has happened in my village in Kunar, I'm from there. So my mother just in Washington, she know more before than me because somebody called to her there. It create another anxiety. If some incidents happened, some other things has happened or the TVs we are just seeing here. So these are all challenges was existing for corruption, for example. I was, when I was in the ministry that because we just went from landline to the wireless to all sophisticated things there, this what is called the CDMA, not the wireless phone, what is it called? JSMIA. So which is have a range of carbon. So every time when I was giving a call to that person, where are you saying I'm in the office? But he was moving that phone with him in the car to his house and use it there and say okay, I'm in the office but he was not there. We have to give you GPRS, then you'll know where he is. The question is, you know how use the same, you know I'm just saying is how efficiently they use it, you know, for their own purpose or some of the people just take the government phones to their own house and how to use it, you know, for their own advantage in the offices. So there are so many other challenges also existing to this. Well, I think Shamut is teeing up a really, really key question here and I'll go to you in a minute to sit down. Which is, so we've heard about what you're doing in mobile banking. We've heard about what NICS got the phone in programs to local officials and we've heard about, you know, the Crime Stoppers program and all of these things we've heard about the election monitoring. It was a very mixed picture is what I'm hearing from Eric, very mixed success. But we know all of these things are taking place, are doable. The technology exists and yet fundamentally, correct me if I'm wrong panelists, but the perception is that when it comes to improved governance and corruption in country, the perception is that with all of these great initiatives going on, we haven't really made much progress. And is that because of, do we have any solutions, ideas? Is it scale? What should we be investing in just distributing wholesale phones to everyone? They're not that expensive compared to the, you know, billions that we're spending in many. We did that in other war zones I've worked in. We distributed wind-up radios in different situations so people could have information. Should we be just wholesale distributing phones? Or is it something else? Is it time? We should be patient. We're gonna get there. We have to figure it out as we go along. Or is it a new application, a new use of these things? Like the one Rua suggested, are we been looking in the wrong place? Should we be looking at local land disputes as one of the keys here, especially, you know, there's poppy fields, now there's lithium, all kinds of natural resources in country. Are we looking in the wrong place? I just throw that out to this extremely talented panel for discussion and I know Ivan's been wanting to jump in here and he's got a lot of experience in this area so I didn't take it away. I think a lot of this has to do, I mean I'm sort of wanting to answer a lot of those assertions so I'm gonna throw one of them out there really quickly. There has been massive change and massive success in the Afghan context in the last eight years if you look at the communications infrastructure and information infrastructure. There's no doubt about it. You went from a place with the country with one national broadcaster and a number of small newspapers and a tiny landline infrastructure to a country with four large cell phone providers, several hundred television and radio stations, satellite service, a population that has redundant and resilient access to multiple sources of information. So the answer in short to that question is actually yes. An awful lot has happened. But I think we have to be really careful going back to Sheldon's first illustrated point with Edison of not confusing the tool for the end because cell phones are a tool and we're gonna have lots of examples and anecdotes of good use and bad use and as Patrick said, lots of mistakes on the way. We have a basic question to program design when we come to something beyond the distribution and natural growth or market growth of the use of the tools that we have in front of us. That basic idea, I think, is that technology's easy and people are hard. We have a lot of the technology but how do we use it and towards what end? Are we clear about our own goals? And if we start with that framework for discussion, we'll find that it's really easy to play that kill the messenger game. So it's easy to say the phone is at fault because my employee went home from work and pretended he was there or the phone is at fault because the Taliban have decided to target a tower but I think that's a mistake at a analytic level to start from that perspective. We're going to see lots and lots of anecdotes that look that way and if we want to start to think about social change we have to start looking at in the way that Eric talks about at larger data sets and real learning over time. Where's the empiricism in this analysis, my point? I could go on but I think probably others want to so I'll stop there. Siddhartha, Nade. Thank you. Hello everyone, I'm Siddharth Raj. I work for the World Bank and been working in Afghanistan for a couple of years now and in fact I just wanted to respond to Shaman Mutsab's question about doing a panel like this in Afghanistan. I'm happy to let you know the World Bank was there and did that. We actually on Tuesday last week had a panel in Kabul which included of course members from the mobile network operators, the various ministries in the government as well as some of the private IT firms in Afghanistan where we talked about how the government can mainstream mobile applications across its different programs and ministries. So I just wanted to put that out there. I'll be talking more about that later but I just wanted to reassure you that we have had some very productive discussions with the various ministries and programs and I'll be happy to talk about that in more detail later. Regarding the point that the panelists just made, I do want to again reinforce that very message which is that the mobile phone is not the silver bullet. And one of the underlying question that has come up in the discussion so far is about what happens after the application. Okay, you collect $40 million for Haiti. How is it going to be distributed? What's gonna happen on the ground? You make that phone call to complain about corruption. Is there someone who actually responds to it and creates the legitimacy and credibility behind that service? Or actually does it become a way to blame the government for an action again? So it's critical to have that second layer of the backup really, the back office behind the application. And this is really the big problem we're struggling with. Especially in the context of the weak rule of law that does exist within Afghanistan. And in the Farsi, Badla and the Pakto Badal where you might report a corruption incident but then somebody gets shot because of that. So these are real problems and questions and challenges and I don't think that the mobile phone will solve them but I do think it helps in certain ways extending services out to the people where there were none. Maybe helping supervised programs better and so on. And just on that, maybe just in terms of practical our feedback for your work. I'm not sure how many of you here know this but the government of Afghanistan and actually the Ministry of Interior is the leader on this is embarking on the creation of a national electronic ID program. And this is, I think the pilot phase is going to begin very, very soon. And this program is going to for the first time create a national registry electronically much removed from the Taskira paper with the photographs and all of that. Which will actually create a registry of citizens and then can probably be used for land records. And this is also a great window of opportunity for the land records and land disputes resolution because of the one trillion dollars that's lying under the ground. There's going to be a lot of questions about rights of way and about land easements and so on. So I think it's a good opportunity and I wish you the best of luck on that. Just the final reinforcement maybe of the point that even Shah Noor made and a couple of other colleagues here have repeated that the work that I've been doing so far tells me that there are some users at the end who will pick up the phone and dial a number or a short code or send a text message or so on. But not just in Afghanistan but around the world what's been realized is that the role of intermediaries is critical. For example there are agriculture information services that you can subscribe to in India. For a dollar and a half you get a number of SMS messages and so on so forth. The problem is that it's not enough to market this. You have to actually have people go to the farmer, sit down with the farmer, explain what this thing is, what it does for him or her, and get them to sign on. And this subscriber acquisition, this education is really, really critical without which you don't reach the kind of numbers that you would like to see. And the good thing about Afghanistan is that there are some intermediaries already there. There's the community development councils, part of the NSP program, there's going to be village facilitators which are part of the rural enterprise development program and so on. So people exist there who could potentially do this for us. Now the question is how we mobilize them. And so I'll leave that question out there and. I don't know about you. Thanks a lot. Dave? Oh we go to this room. For the land deeds. I actually took those pictures in 2006 and that was just back in the area talking to folks and not much has actually changed from those documents. There's a lot of reasons that some of this technology, I'd say one cautionary note is pick your problems and pick it from ground truth and actually go there and understand what the problems actually are before designing too much intricacy of the system that you're proposing to solve it. Which frankly from working in Afghanistan many years I see this tends to be what happens over here. And just to sort of solve that, I run a guest house in East draft gas stand would be happy to put you up for a few days, get you out about, go actually meet some of the people and get some of the ground truth. Would love to have you out there. So it's really going, it's a good idea. Land disputes are probably one of the biggest causes of preventable violence in our region and several others. But it's a problem of complexity beyond what you can actually imagine once you get onto the ground. And so it could actually cause more conflict if not done intelligently. And so I would just say pick your shots. I do think it's something worth addressing. I think dispute resolution is a critical problem. It's like doing brain surgery. You kind of gotta know what you're doing before you go in. All right, hold on, we got the folks here. Adam, did you say you had a quick one? I do have a quick comment. Excuse me. My name is Adam Kaplan, I work for USAID. I was involved in media development in Afghanistan 2003, 2004, 2005, have recently gone back as part of my office, the Office of Transition Initiatives program in southern and eastern Afghanistan now off and on for the last six months. I'd like to make a comment about the very notion of the mobile phone as something of a revolutionary device in a social context in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a communal society. People exist within the structures that are laid down by patriarchs and matriarchs. And you know your rank within that structure. What we've seen is in a specific community, namely host in southeastern Afghanistan that has a very large population living in the Gulf is that the ways in which that community has remittances from the Gulf return to it has radically changed the way that money is distributed in the society. Used to be that remittance came in by a letter and more often than not the recipient of that letter couldn't read it. So the letter was read communally. Everybody knew exactly how much that individual was receiving from the Gulf and was expected to divvy up portions of that remittance to all of the various patronage relationships that he or she held. Now remittances come in individually to a person on their mobile phone. It's quiet, it's secret, and they decide how that money is spent on their own. They have an individuality that they never had before. That changes the way the society views itself. It changes traditional structures. It is revolutionary both for good and quite possibly to its own detriment. So I think we need to be cognizant of the impact that an individually owned device can have on a society that has traditionally not been focused on individual identity. On the one hand we're hearing, it's not the silver bullet, on the other hand we're hearing it's capable of transforming an entire way of society things operates. I want to make sure that we get at least one from the audience and I want to make sure our online people get a quick question, but we are supposed to have taken a break at 1045 and we are in danger of violating Geneva convention if I don't let folks have a by-break. So I'll take one from the floor here, right here. Thank you. My name is George Dunlop. I'm the chairman of a company called Koba Systems Corporation. We produce and service banking software and also I serve on the board of directors of the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce. My question relates to the relationship of mobile transfers of money. The movement of money, even small amounts of money ends up under all kinds of banking regulations as being treated as an account. And accounts are very heavily regulated activities all over the world, the banking laws of virtually every country including Afghanistan, but every country in the world, the Basel Accords. And then the movement of money is further regulated by such things as the Patriot Act, the Foreign Corruption Practices Act, various money laundering laws in Afghanistan, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction has to monitor payments and all these things. And so my question pertains to the degree to which mobile transactions of money, the movement of money can have a nexus with this very sophisticated set of protocols and procedures and practices that are required for the movement of money. Basically what the mobile phone does is it just provides the pipe. So for example, the Roshan and Pesa account is a trust account. It doesn't earn interest on that account and all the users are encouraged to move their money out. What the mobile phone, what Roshan wants to do here is to integrate the banking system into the platform and to integrate other operators into the system so that basically everyone can transfer money but as such the accounts, the resting money would always be with the bank. Now this has been in great discussion with various central banks around the world where mobile money is occurring but also with the Afghan Bank, the Central Bank of Afghanistan and the technologies today enable you to put parameters on accounts. So for example, you can put down the number of transactions, the amount of transactions, you can track simultaneous transactions from one number to another, you can geographically track them, you can track through GPRS, you have a double check with the bank account number and the SIM card number so it becomes far more trackable than the system at the present time. So I think this is a very large myth that we really do need to address in terms of you're absolutely right. The banking system has huge regulation and to accept deposits and hold them has regulation rightly so to protect the public. That is not the business that the cell phone companies want to get into. Our business is communication, connecting people, transferring from A to B, not holding cash or making interest. And I think that is often lost in this sort of barrage of heads. And so I think a discussion like this is great because it clears up those nets. Thanks, you know. Could I make a quick comment? Yeah, that's an excellent question and Roshan's viewpoint is well known on this. Is he from the World Bank viewpoint? Roshan's viewpoint is well known on this. No, certainly this is, especially with the anti-money laundering and the consumer protection considerations, it's important to put the right regulatory frameworks in place. My understanding is that the Afghanistan Bank is working on this and we are hoping to see some improvements in the regulatory framework to the extent of clarifying it and putting in place something that encourages innovation while protecting consumers in order that we can start doing these kinds of money transfers for government subsidy payments, salary payments and so on. So there is a lot of work going on here and again I'll be happy to talk with you offline about that but it's encouraging at this point that we'll see something happen soon. Let's go to Anand Varghese. The last word from Anand, what are you hearing online or seeing online from those who are watching and do they have any questions or particularly good question for the panel? Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of interesting discussion. I think a lot of people online are worried quite rightly so about the security and traceability of people who are calling into systems like crime stoppers and they're wondering if maybe the answer is disposable phones or some other open source version of encryption for text messages. Is there a quick answer to that or? It's a fundamental problem, right? Well, I don't think there is actually in that people don't seem to hesitate to ring too much. The crime stoppers thing is not a snitch line. This isn't, there's some Taliban men meeting in the fields behind my farm bringing in the Apaches and Fran them. It's much more a communal policing line. Forgive me for not being familiar. Other than 9-1-1, do you have a less urgent fine? It's more like that and some of the calls aren't to, yeah, people report crimes, but it's much more, there's just the fundamental things that people don't have a way of communicating with government. There's just no access to it. It's not like you can, you meet your ward's counselor or you can go to the office. Particularly in a place like Helmholtz, A, very big, there's not many officials and traveling is dangerous. So it's a very simple access thing and it's interesting, a lot of the calls you get are really not policing matters at all. A lot of them are just a way of contacting government in some way. Well, that's a very nice segue actually to our next panel on countering extremism because that's one of the reasons why we've seen lots of phone-in programs have been established, to radio, cell phone, to phone-in, to radio, where district officials are there answering questions. And of course, the blowback from that is you can ask all the questions you want but if nothing gets done, do you not do more harm than good? And on the next panel, we've got Adam for USAID who has been responsible working on some of those phone-in programs at the call-in level. So let's take a quick break. Come on back here, literally in five minutes and get started again.