 Hello, my name is Matt Wright and I'm the web planning and content manager for the International Institute for Environment and Development. I oversee the digital team at IIED, so I'm responsible for all our digital channels, our online platforms and helping to guide the digital direction of the organisation. I'm particularly interested in the digital divide and how we communicate with all the marginalised audiences. I trained as a journalist, as a news and politics reporter, and prior to joining IIED eight years ago, I was head of communications for a football club, so I bring lots of different skills and approaches from different sectors to our work. I want to start by introducing this project, which was prompted by the new ways of working due to the pandemic. Like many others at IIED, we were all working remotely. We even moved out of our London headquarters to a much smaller, serviced office, so there was little in-person contact between colleagues, never mind our overseas partners. We had three main aims from this project. We wanted it to give us the confidence to design and deliver creative projects that balance the need for online and physical engagement. We wanted to be able to talk to donors about how to use online engagement to ensure perspectives and voices from the global south were heard. And finally, from a more internal perspective, we wanted to inform our IT strategy, so part of the report was a series of recommendations for the Institute. During the course of the work, we conducted extensive interviews with a range of partners, covering different sizes, different sectors, different countries and continents. And we also spoke to dozens of IIED staff and drew on research by other IIED projects with digital elements. We incorporated lessons from our experiences of shifting everything online and there was also extensive desk research. And the most important finding, both in terms of the way we work and the strength with which it was communicated to us, was that our partners felt that organizations and donors in the global north, including IIED, didn't ask them enough about the limitations they face and which tools and ways of working would best suit them. They already face a host of challenges, from lack of connectivity, internet speed and cost of access, to the political climate in which they operate, with internet shutdowns and the like. As a result, they feel dictated to, even by organizations that they work in partnership with. They feel forced down past they wouldn't choose and that they feel haven't properly considered the challenges they have to deal with. Another strong message from partners, and particularly those with smaller capacities and less digitally skilled staff, was the need for assistance in how to use some digital tools and indeed selecting which ones to use. They don't have the time for this, they ask for support and in some instances, specific training. Due to the pandemic, all meetings, workshops, events have had to take place online and going fully online has opened up opportunities to hear new voices and make new connections. At IIED, we've hosted a successful online event series and we've seen the representation of our non-UK based speakers double during this period. This has also really enabled us to hone how we do things. We've needed to engage and listen to people and partners to resolve all kinds of different issues and develop clear processes, instructions and tools to do it effectively. This has led to the creation of an online resources hub that you can see here, containing how-to guides, templates for presentations, scripts and feedback surveys and guidance around how to run collaborative and inclusive sessions because the facilitation you need online is very different to how you would deliver at an in-person event. We've produced this for our own staff and we've had training sessions as well trying to pass these resources and skills throughout the organizations and we're now increasingly sharing these with partners as well. This has strengthened relationships in many cases. We've developed them already for our use and our partners appreciate the help. What's more, they're also giving valuable feedback which we're using to revise and improve the resources. Throughout the study there was lots of talk about digital tools that were useful but we also need to factor in the cultural differences and sensitivities. For example, we know Tanzania has a strong oral communications culture. One researcher told us no one on their project ever responded to any emails so everything had to be done verbally which obviously has a lot of implications. In Malawi, meanwhile, another project only communicated using WhatsApp. This plethora of options means there is an increasing requirement on all of us to be more digitally savvy. I've seen the pandemic described as having inspired a five-year leap forward digitally. Those not using digital before are now being forced to. Those who were already using digital are now asking deeper questions. Because of this range of needs and challenges there is no one-tool-fits-all approach. Flexibility is vital but equally it's impossible to know everything so we need to understand the broader principles of digital and what are the important questions to ask and make sure these questions are asked at the earliest possible points in proposals and when projects are being planned. Another key lesson from partners was being careful we don't use digital to offer solutions for problems that no one has actually identified and that no one wants to use. One researcher working with grassroots organizations wanted to bring everything they've been sharing in a WhatsApp group during the pandemic things like petitions, messages, photos of how they were supporting people by providing food parcels into a space that could be more easily accessed by others. They thought it would help with more systemic analysis and would be easier to learn from one another but in actual fact it was never used. Even though what was set up was perceived by the researcher as being relatively simple it was too complicated and hard to access for the organizations and was simply a waste of time. Equally it's not all about digital at all. While doing this project the point was repeatedly made to me that a lot of the most important work researchers have done has only been possible from them being able to immerse themselves in a place or with people and it's just not possible to recreate that digitally. So let's look a bit more closely about how we might combine face-to-face and digital collaboration. This is something we developed a few years ago that we call a research cycle. It shows the typical stages of a project from the launch, generating findings, getting the message out, carrying out an evaluation and so on and then from a communications perspective we've mapped onto it what outputs and dialogue work at which points. Things have obviously moved on since then and although digital outputs were including this we realized it doesn't really represent a digital way of working one that's less dependent on travel where it's easier to connect and where greater collaboration is possible without having to meet in person. So we updated it by overlaying all the different digital tools and techniques you might use to achieve the same results. I think this is also very relevant for donors. During the pandemic donors have seen what's possible for organizations to shift to online meetings and it's very likely donors will become more challenging about paying for travel costs and rightly so, we're going to be asked more often why can't this workshop take place online? Hopefully this cycle of engagement shows what an integrated physical digital approach to projects might look like in practice. It hopefully demonstrates that we're considering these issues and what works in what situation and we're serious about delivering value for money. As we've been exploring, doing things online not only doesn't replicate the greater relationship building possible in person but also doesn't expose you to the wider environment and culture of a place in a community. I want to talk now about one specific piece of work we did with Indigenous communities in Peru, China, Kenya and India to share their expertise on resilient food systems and help bring their voices and knowledge into the current global debates. This included a series of events with each of the communities and the crucial thing about this work is that when we were forced to shift from an in-person to an online activity we didn't just think about how to deliver the same event online we went back to the drawing board to see if we could use this to deliver something better. To give a more researcher perspective on this one of my colleagues, Kristina Swaderska will now talk about how we adapted the event and what that meant in terms of outcomes. As she talks you'll also see some footage from the event itself with the Quechua community in Peru. As you'll see we ambitiously planned this to be live streamed from the side of a mountain in the Andes. This was meant to be a two-day workshop and we've split it up into four webinars over four days and two key objectives were developing new interdisciplinary research so networking, partnership building including between different sectors and between different actors and another key objective was meaningfully engaging Indigenous peoples in that process making this a virtual event was quite a virtual workshop was challenging giving those objectives but actually we saw that there was real opportunity provided by going virtual I mean we had a small budget just enough for like 30 people but we ended up having more than 130 participants even though we tried to keep it small and critically we had many more Indigenous people involved and presenting than we could have done with the budget that we had. We had 28 Indigenous participants rather than five and they came from different regions Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Arctic. So we were able to completely redesign the event to make Indigenous speakers the main focus and the main speakers for the whole event. We were really lucky to have this partner in Peru who's a real technical wizard. We are able to give him some of our travel budget about 6,000 US dollars to buy good equipment. He worked with the communities to develop the script and different actors in the communities presented. They started with a ceremony to the mountain gods and you could see in some of the shots you could see the mountains really well when they were focusing on the landscape and so you really felt that you were part of this ceremony in the community and then they were explaining their beliefs and their values and how that relates to their food system. And I think it was a real eye-opener for a lot of the academics. We had more than 50 academics from UK universities, from Kew Gardens. As Christina said, reshaping the event permitted a much greater focus on the Indigenous communities and their views than had been initially planned for the workshop. As an aside, this contribution came from one of the internal online events I mentioned. We'd been arranging to share our lessons of digital working. We asked four or five researchers we knew had worked on projects with interesting or unusual online challenges to share their knowledge. We wanted our researchers to hear from their own colleagues about the challenges and opportunities and what they needed to think about. I also wanted to show some behind-the-scenes photos of the rabbi community in Kenya. You can see it's quite a substantial integrated setup. This is particularly interesting to me because IID's role in this was as a facilitator, bringing these communities together and helping them to share knowledge of how to run such an event. It was supported by sessions where we discussed what equipment was needed, where to put the equipment, how much data for good connectivity was required. We also chipped in with various lessons we'd learned. But fundamentally, these communities were sharing with one another about how to do this online. And where a local consultant might be needed, we helped them identify what the needs were. Around 40% of the world's population remains unconnected to the internet. But I'm not going to talk too much about this. I think most people have at least a general awareness of these issues. Even the weather makes a big difference when it comes to connectivity, though. We actually did another event from the side of the same mountain a few months later, only to suffer severe connection problems when the higher winds were interfering with the satellite phone we were using. However, I do want to focus on the cost of data, where, although the reach of mobiles is growing globally, the world is still a long way from fair or equitable access. One memorable statistic was that there's a 30,000% difference between the cheapest and most expensive average data cost in the world. We're in the countries where IID works in particular. The cost of one gigabyte of data ranges between US$2.7 in Malawi to just 16 cents in Uganda. Given the average user in sub-Saharan Africa consumes 300 megabytes per month, roughly enough for half an hour of video conferencing, they're understandably going to use this sparingly and carefully consider whether every specific use is worthwhile. One researcher I spoke to said that cost was the main reason why their primary communication with partners was through audio only. They'd asked partners to turn on their video, but they declined because it's too expensive, saying that it can cost them 20 pounds for just a one-hour meeting using video. We wanted to look at this in more detail, so we did an exercise looking at IID's web pages, PDF publications, and some average audio and video data usage, and then looked at what was possible with just one gigabyte of data. This table shows the results. The purpose was to get our colleagues thinking about how they designed their engagement. When designing sessions, do they know what the cost of data is for their audience? Are they considering using tools and resources that require less bandwidth and are less data-intensive? Applying that to this presentation, for example, I played a video earlier, but did I need to? I could have supplied you with the link to it on YouTube in advance, and if you'd had a weak connection, you could have watched it on YouTube in lower quality, easily, and at a cheaper cost. One thing I did do was transcribe what Christina was saying, and then played the version with the subtitles, because different people comprehend information in different ways. I could also have put the entire text in the chat box. These are all the sort of online design and accessibility issues we want to encourage our researchers to think about. It's not just the cost of data, either. 2.5 billion people live in countries where the cost of the cheapest available smartphone is a quarter or more of the average monthly income. Someone in Sierra Leone on the average wage has to save for six months before they're able to afford a smartphone. In Kenya, that's just 11 days. And we're not talking about the latest iPhone, either. We're talking about a cheap phone with fewer features of lower build quality, including the quality of the screen. Where phones are expensive, it's likely that phones with damaged screens and other faults are going to be used for longer because people are unable to afford to fix or replace them. There are many things like this to consider, and these are the aspects that should be factored in decisions we're taking. The cost of internet access is just one aspect of the digital divide. There's also geography, gender, age, race, social status. How to access and collaborate with these marginalised audiences is one of the biggest priorities for an organisation like IID, because those stakeholders are so critical to us. The community at the front line of dealing with climate change impacts may have minimal internet access, but it's also the community with vital lived experience and knowledge that needs to be shared. In some cases, it could be a simpler supplying data packages. Christina explained earlier how her project had managed to switch its travel budget into funding for data and equipment, and we found donors very supportive to such requests, especially during the pandemic. This might come to an end after COVID, of course. There might be a little less flexibility shown, but we know donors have their own digital strategies and their own desire to target these communities. In many ways, we need to treat digital as a social justice issue. We must increasingly consider access and accessibility issues at project proposal and inception phases. Communicate openly with donors and funders about them from the outset. Our experience is that donors respect this, and they want these issues to be considered. When we talk about accessibility, we're talking about improving the user experience for people with disabilities, including visual, physical, cognitive, and so on. The World Health Organization estimates that around 15% of people live with some form of disability, but good practice and accessibility actually benefits all users, particularly older people, and ensuring what you deliver is inclusive means your services and products are usable by as many people as possible. This means you can get the largest audience possible and it also fits with the mission and values of organizations like ours, creating equal opportunities for all. A good example of this can be found in some work. Our climate change group and digital team have been doing to encourage digital working in a more inclusive way, including the negotiators from the least developed countries at COP26, ensuring that web pages load quickly, brings down the cost, and can address problems with low bandwidth. For people, especially in the global south, only use mobile devices, so it's vital to ensure that content works on small screens. Providing different ways to access content, providing transcripts and translations, and encouraging working in asynchronous, non-real time ways can help reduce problems caused by connectivity issues. If you're having a meeting and someone is making notes in a shared document as you go along, if someone drops out for 10 minutes, they can easily see what they miss when they resume. This leads neatly to the environmental impact of digital itself, which is often ignored. Reduction in travel and flights reduces carbon emissions, but not completely. All that work that we do online, from emails and video calls to hosting websites, it all has an environmental cost. There's been a lot of coverage about the extraordinary amount of energy needed to produce Bitcoin, but the truth is that everything done digitally requires electricity and needs to be hosted on a server somewhere, and we have a duty to consider all this as well. This is a growing problem. It's estimated by 2025 global communication technologies will be responsible for more carbon emissions than any country except China, India and the United States. But the good news is that a lot of the measures you might put in place to make your content as accessible as possible and how you design events, all the things we've been talking about all helps with environmental impact. At IIED we're currently working on a large project to update our main website and through doing various audits we've discovered that we have around 4,000 files that are no longer being used. That's 4,000 files we are unnecessarily hosting on our server that's taking up space that we're having to pay for and it's having an unnecessary environmental impact. We recently also worked on a quick and agile project to launch a clone of the word or word game that focuses just on answers that are related to climate and the environment. The author of this tweet is a campaigner on digital waste, so this was a great response to see. We have targets for reducing carbon emissions from air travel, so why not the way we work digitally as well? Of course we have to recognise that air travel is still far and away the greater polluter. You need something like 55,000 hours of HD video meetings just to equate to the carbon emissions of a flight from London to New York. But nevertheless, turning off your camera on a call can still reduce your digital carbon footprint by 96%. Just before I finish, I want to come back to where we started in that too often it's organisations in the global north dictating to our partners. This is not intended to be malicious. Using a certain digital tool or proprietary software rather than open source might simply be the quickest or easiest way to do something. But if that's the case, we're not capacity building to the extent we should be. We're not increasing others' knowledge to the extent we could if we were more intentional about what we were doing. We're not reducing others' reliance on us. I was part of a digital dialogue last year with representatives of government, technology firms and grassroots communities that focused on how digital technology can be used to enhance climate action led by social movements. One key point that came up was the issue of trust and the extractive nature of most data collection by global north organisations from global south organisations or communities. If the aim is for marginalised communities to be empowered, it's essential that they have access to and can indeed control the data being generated that is about them and that they have helped to gather. So, those are just some of the areas I covered in this study. I hope it's prompted some interesting thoughts.