 Can we use the fact that so many people are now connected with the mobile technology to address some of these challenges? Okay, so can we use mobile technology to increase political accountability to improve for example service delivery? Can we use them to flatten political access to marginalized populations? There's an underlying demand to contact one representative using mobile civil tech platforms But we've also learned another lesson that you know and I think many of you in the room have learned this lesson in the past If you build them it doesn't necessarily mean that they will come and a lot of the research that we're doing in this space is trying to understand Why some platform catch and some platforms don't catch another important lesson that we've learned and this is a very important lesson That we've learned is ICT Platforms platforms and allow citizens to contact their representative in in government having real Potential of flattening access and what you can see here on the left is the more marginalized you are the less engaged Okay, so that's that's the negative trend. Okay, these are traditional forms of participation on the right What we see is the same Marginalization as a function of the show of people that send the text message to the representative in government Okay, and what we see that this is this is straight Okay, this is straight line meaning more marginalized people are not less likely to send the text message So if only 20% of the people that get up and speak are women In the community meeting but 40% of those that send messages are women then we can say that we added another channel that flattens Access the fact that Marginalized populations value this form of connection doesn't necessarily mean that every time we will put in a platform It will be an equalizer by itself. Even though marginalized populations value this form of communication a lot By itself, it doesn't guarantee the participation And there's a lot of things that we need to think of like the marketing and how personalized the invitation to participate So studies show that people are much more likely to contact local governments the national parliament Because of what the government actually does. So it's much easier to contact about what a world that is broken health, you know the quality of teachers a Health clinics that are always closed. It's much more difficult for citizens to message to contact the MPs in Parliament Because in order to do that, you need to know what's on the docket of parliament What's the debate what sites people are taking and what are they gonna vote on and people people are not good at that For that you actually need civil society in some places. We gave the platform Tablets the access to the platform to bureaucrats in in some districts who gave it to Counselors to politicians, okay, and we wanted to see what's happening and what we found is significantly higher uptake Significantly greater involvement when we gave it to to the bureaucrats. Okay, so when we gave it to the bureaucrats People anticipate that the bureaucrats will respond They anticipated that they have the knowledge the know-how The technical ability to address some of the problems and they were sending messages in high rates mobile civic tech Can create a platform of communication but by itself it doesn't make a non responsive government Responsive what we're discovering that it's important to think not only About knowledge and information that is passed but also about government incentives Okay, there has to be a political economy Analysis behind what we're trying to do when we do Mobile civil tech if we think that by creating a you know platforms You know, we we can somehow eliminate the real world because everything will operate on like the you know Some some servers we won't okay, especially for those studying of us working in developing countries at some point The virtual world and the real world need to kind of connect and that's when we get the best outcomes