 So, hello everybody. Thanks for tuning in. My name is Marcel Heine. I'm the founder of Orido. Orido is a German non-profit organization that has been around for five, six years, developing and implementing technologies, content, and strategies to provide accessible knowledge to marginalized women in the global south. Here I am today talking about open-source equality, a way to promote gender equality and women's empowerment through open-source solutions built by women. What I would like to do today is basically line out the relevance for open-source solutions, the relevance for open-source solutions for development cooperation, provide a link between women's empowerment and sustainable development, and also show how we're trying to implement this in the field. First of all, I would like to kind of narrate a bit to illustrate the problem. So, each and every day a task that most of the women in Sub-Saharan Africa are fulfilling is to bake the local flatbread. This is like a very simple bread. It usually has like two or three ingredients, flour, water, and some salt, and it's baked over an open fire. The whole process consists of mixing the ingredients, and women do not use, of course, they do not use any scales or measuring cups. They are measuring the ingredients by eye. So, if, and the woman knows, if the dough is too runny, she will make a mess instead of bread. So, if it's too runny, she will skip adding water and adding flour instead. If it's too runny, skip the water. This is the simple rule. And this simple rule kills more than 2,000 children every single day. And here's why. Africa leads the world in teenage pregnancies. In fact, more than half of the births that are accounted for in Sub-Saharan Africa are by teenage mothers. So, now imagine that such a teenage mother who hasn't had any access to education, who is most likely illiterate, that her child has diarrhea for the first time. So, she doesn't have a concept of diarrhea. She doesn't have a concept of the human body, etc. So, what she will do is basically she will apply her everyday knowledge to the problem. Remember, if it's too runny, skip the water. And this simple rule costs a life of more than 2,000 children every day. Diarrhea, in fact, is the second leading cause of death among children under five worldwide. It kills more children than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. So, I've given this example to illustrate the effects of lack of access to knowledge for rural women in the Global South. As a matter of fact, this does not only affect health issues but every single aspect of women's lives from psychological, economical to social implications. To give you an idea of the scope of this problem, more than 500 million women are illiterate in the Global South. So, the question is, what can we do about this? What can we do to stop this? Should we wait until every girl has had access to education? Well, good luck with that. In fact, while literacy rates have been going down over the last 50 years, the total number of illiterate people has remained the same. So, we had like 500 million illiterate women in the 70s and we still have them. So, this problem isn't going away anytime soon. As a matter of fact, if we continue by this pace, we will achieve, for example, in India full literacy in 65 years. So, this shows that we really have to act today. The good news is that today we have different options than we had like five decades ago. Today we have digital technologies. More than 500 years ago, Johannes Gutenberg created the printing press and revolutionized the way we disseminate knowledge and information. Today, we can create like an oral language printing press. The ingredients for this are digital audio. The development of MP3 more than 30 years ago has changed how we can disseminate audio. For us, we take it for granted, but when it comes to providing vital knowledge to marginalized populations in the global south, digital audio is nothing short of revolutionary. Secondly, we have mobile phones and those devices give you access to digital audio anywhere. And third, well, we have open source, which enables us to build tools that can be used and accessed by local stakeholders in the country where it actually matters in the global south. So, let me first establish the link between women and sustainable development. When we talk about sustainable development, we soon become to talk about the sustainable development goals. Sustainable development goals have been established in 2015 by the United Nations to pave the way towards a sustainable world. They consist of 17 different goals starting from zero hunger, no poverty, etc. And if you look at the 17 goals and if you would like to pick out one goal that is more important than any other, then you will find that this is the SDG5 gender equality. Each of the sustainable development goals has sub-goals and indicators and SDG5 is linked to quite a large number of those targets and indicators. So, we can really say that SDG5 gender equality and women's empowerment is a bad rock to the sustainable development goals as a whole. And to underline that, we can take a few examples and we'll find many more if you do some research. So, this is a very general quote that is given by many development organizations is that women spend 90% of their earned income on their families while men spend only 35%. So, this shows that empowering women economically has a very strong effect on the families, on the communities. To illustrate that a bit better, there's a specific study that shows that maternal income increases family nutrition by four to seven times more than income of fathers. So, one dollar earned by the mother gives the family four to seven times more food than one dollar earned by the father. Also true is that closing the gender gap in agriculture could lift 100 to 150 million people out of hunger. Closing the gender gap in agriculture means giving women the same rights and access to land, cattle, funding and knowledge to improve the livelihood of their families and to improve their agricultural output. Another fact that has been stated by Project Drawdown, a scientific project that evaluates different solutions to decrease the CO2 emissions is that quality education for girls and rights-based access to voluntary family planning for women could lead to a reduction of nearly 70 gigatons of CO2. So, this is like a huge number, this is like a very important factor. And I think this outlines why gender equality and women's empowerment is essential to achieve a sustainable future for all of us. And in fact, the development cooperation has of course noticed that so the European Union will make gender equality and women's empowerment a cross-cutting priority. By 2025, 85% of new European Union actions should contribute to achieving these objectives. Also, Germany, the country where our organization is from, has established a feminist development policy for sustainable development taking into account the relevance of women's empowerment for sustainable future. And if you want to look for the link between women's empowerment and technology, we don't have to go far because the SDG5, Target 5B already announces that it is important to enhance the use of enabling technology and particular information and communications technology to promote the empowerment of women. So what we have seen now is that women's empowerment, gender equality, metaphor of sustainable development and we can and should use digital tools to support that. Let me talk now about the opportunities that arise from this for local stakeholders and for us as a community. To kind of outline, I'm usually using this photo I took five years ago in Uganda and it shows how we are providing knowledge in marginalized areas today. This is a community health worker that takes a risky ride on the back of a motorbike twice a year to reach this village. He grabs the megaphone and he talks about an hour about a topic in this case about tuberculosis. And people have a lot of questions about many topics because he's basically there, Wikipedia, there, Google, everything twice a year for one hour. And if you look at that, well, you can definitely see that we should do better than that. We should come up with something that is scalable, something that is sustainable and something that is digital. And this is actually the starting point for everything that we are doing. So the case for open and inclusive tools for development is that governments and the United Nations Development Program Global Network urgently need digital solutions. And this is a quote from UNDP. This is not a quote. This is not my quote. UNDP also says that a well-designed digital solution can impact millions of lives and support populations and new and innovative ways. To design those tools, Development Corporation organizations have established something that we call the Principles for Digital Development. And those principles state that the development of those tools should be open source based on a human-centered design and be developed locally. And this is like a kind of a top-down approach. So the United Nations Secretary General's roadmap for digital cooperation consists of eight pillars that outline how digital tools can be used to attain the SDGs. And one of those eight pillars is called digital public goods. Digital public goods is like a pretty novel term. It has been coined, I think, in 2018. But it's basically just open-source software, open data, open AI, open standards, open content that helps attain the SDGs. So it's not totally new. It's just a new term to basically explain that those open technologies are here to attain the SDGs. There are already institutions, organizations that have been created to support this. There's a digital public good alliance. And this is something that is already there in place. And it shows that there's a commitment from the top to implement those open tools. Definitely digital is the way forward in Development Corporation. So open digital tools will play an important role in Development Corporation, as we can see. And we also noticed that more and more requests for proposals, which is basically the mechanism that by which local organizations get funding more of those RFPs, require the use of open digital tools. And this, of course, is opening up opportunities for local software and content developers. The conclusion that we can draw from this is that there's a growing need for locally developed open-source solutions that contribute to SDG5, gender equality and women's empowerment, and follow a human-centered design approach. Now, this is all very nice. And this is all, well, pretty theoretical. What does that actually mean for in practice? So basically, what does it mean for the stakeholders in the global south that need to implement this? And to analyze this, I'm kind of splitting up the stakeholders into the demand side, which is NGOs and community-based organizations, which will be using those tools, and the supply side, which will be software developers who are developing those tools. If we look at the demand side, the NGOs and CBOs, well, we are talking about digital transformation. And as all of us know, usually organizations that have been working for many decades with the same structures, principles, etc., are kind of reluctant to digital transformation. And the same happens, of course, with NGOs and CBOs. So they are often not aware of the opportunities that digital tools provide and they prefer working the way they have been working for the last 40, 50 years. Also, NGOs often struggle to go digital in low-resource environments. So if you talk to people, they say, yeah, I have a smartphone and we have a computer, but in the field, in the countries, on the countryside, people do not have those tools. So using digital tools doesn't make sense. And third, which is also a critical point, NGOs and CBOs often lack funding, expertise, and digital skills. So we need to create awareness, we need to provide capacity-building to empower and enable those local stakeholders, local organizations to be part of this new ecosystem that should build local open solutions. If we look at the supply side, at software developers, we have to differentiate between open source in the global north and the open source in the global south. Those are quite different scenarios. So often local developers in the global south don't see open source and NGOs as an opportunity. So they prefer to go into the commercial markets, develop maybe application and find other business models than working on open source that is dedicated to be used by NGOs. Also important is to know that volunteering is often unsustainable in the global south. So while we should be aware that volunteering on an open source project is kind of a luxury that we have because we have the financial means, we have the time, we can do that. In the global south, the situation is quite different. And this is what makes the participation often very difficult. And another important point is, remember we talked about developing human-centered tools that are based on human-centered design. So if you're talking about gender equality, those tools should be developed by women, by local women in the global south. And now we all know that only 6% of open source contributors worldwide are women. So this makes the human-centered design for female beneficiaries very difficult. And this here is not the time and place to discuss the difficulties that women face when contributing to open source solutions. There is a lot of research on that. And this is just an image out of a paper that is kind of a review of literature of those issues and that outlines the problems and potential solutions to improve the situation. And those are factors that are generally true for women who want to participate in open source. If we talk about the global south, we will find that there are additional problems. Gender knobs and gender roles play an even more important role in the global south. So software development is seen as a main activity in our project in Uganda. When I talk to developers, they say often the female developers drop out once they are looking for a husband because they want to increase their chances of finding a husband and being employed in a male role doesn't help them. So also the point that I already mentioned, the time to volunteer is kind of a luxury privilege that we have and that volunteering is often unsustainable for many low-income women in the global south. Another part are the challenges of cross-cultural communication. Many most open source projects are dominated by white males and this leads to certain difficulties in communication when it comes to working on such projects. So if we look at the challenges, we must say that building those local open source solutions that support SG-5 in order to do that we need to stimulate and strengthen local ecosystem. We need to create awareness. We need to provide capacity building. We need to provide safe spaces for female developers to participate in those projects. Now we've seen what the opportunities and the challenges are and now I would like to introduce you to basically the approach that we have developed so far to tackle those issues. Well, we have been kind of paving this way since 2016. In 2016, after some time of research, we founded our non-profit Uridu and since then we had digital projects in 14 countries throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America where we developed digital solutions with local partners for different local settings. So we work closely with NGOs and CBOs and most of this work was funded by the EU and the German government but also by CSR and individual donations. One major part of this work was the creation of Audiopedia. Audiopedia is a Wiki-based platform for digital audio content because the thing is if you want local organizations to use audio it's a good idea to provide them with ready-made audio files that they can use for example to communicate symptoms of tuberculosis in Swahili. So it is, especially for community-based organizations, it is very difficult to come up with such content. So we provide them like off-the-shelf content that they can use in their communication. During those years we have developed a range of solutions that allow us to provide digital audio in basically any situation independent from the level of digital inclusion and accessibility. So basically we started on the left side where there is no access to mobile coverage, no access to electricity, where we've been working with solar audio players, they have a solar panel on the backside, we've worked with those in the rainforest of the Congo basin with nomadic pygmy tribes, the most difficult situations you can imagine and they work. But it is not really scalable so what you often find in rural areas is a feature phone, the good old feature phone like the Nokia's we used to use in the past, it's a good idea to use for example an SD card with those. It gives very good results, most of those phones can playback MP3 so this is a very good way. Then where it's limited access we can use hotspots, this is also an open source project that uses a Raspberry Pi to provide those contents using a local web server but we can also use smart feature phones which are not known in the global north. Those are basically feature phones, they have the keypad, no touch screen but they use Firefox OS to run web applications and run WhatsApp for example which makes it feasible to work with them, they cost like $14, $15. And of course in the best of all worlds people are using smart phones and WhatsApp. WhatsApp is of course can be a game changer for development cooperation or for providing those contents. Take for example India where we have the highest number of illiterate women, 200 million. In India alone 390 million people use WhatsApp. So if you use audiopedia, if you take an audiophile send it using WhatsApp to your beneficiaries you are already doing like a digital community outreach. But we also use developing web applications that make those contents accessible. If you think about the obstacles that women are facing while using digital tools are affordability, this is one thing, but we see that devices are becoming more and more affordable but the most important thing is accessibility. Even if a woman can afford a device it does not mean that she can use it properly because she might be facing literacy gap and especially a digital literacy gap. So you have to carefully develop user interfaces that enable those women to access those contents. And in order to do that, now that we know what works, now that we have the tools we are starting kind of open sourcing them by creating this open source for equality initiative where we are trying to basically convene different stakeholders, bring them together, international organizations, NGOs, local NGOs, content creators and software developers in order to create like an ecosystem that can help build those tools locally. So this is the idea behind open source for equality. You can say that open source for equality is a global initiative to promote the development and use of free and open software that supports women's empowerment and gender equality. So this is the part where we are trying to convene partners, where we are trying to create awareness, we are trying also to build capacity among NGOs and community-based organizations. At the same time, open source for equality is a beginner-friendly safe space for women to participate in real-life open source projects in collaboration with local women's organizations. So we want to really give a platform for local female developers to participate in those projects that are actually real-life projects. So my solution, the solution that I am building here is being used by a local NGO to empower women in my country. That is the core idea behind all that. The process per se works like that. We always have a local partner, a local organization that already works, ideally works with local female developers and they host, for example, open source for equality challenge and support entry-level developers with mentors. Then we have the local developers, which engage in open source project building a real-life solution for a local organization in a safe, beginner-friendly space for women. And then we have different open source projects on which those developers can work. So basically we are taking an NGO with a kind of a need for a specific solution and we kind of match this NGO with local developers, female developers, ideally and then the solution is being developed for this organization. The different solutions that we are currently hosting, this is just a start so we are open to include more and more solutions. As long as their goal is to support SDG5. We have the aforementioned Audipedia, which is a health education audio content wiki, if you want. We have WMFM, this is kind of an accessible audio player platform. So basically you have a QR code, you have a short URL and you use your smartphone and it will basically pop up, a web app will pop up and you can play back the audio. We have a framework that we are calling Augmented Audio, this is a JavaScript framework which combines audio with images, with still images and with interaction to provide a platform that makes it easy to create e-learning applications for marginalized populations. And one of the benefits of this approach is that it will take only like 3% of the bandwidth in comparison to video, which is very important if you think of remote areas. We have Mandis, which is short for mental distress. This is an audio mental health survey that we piloted in Pakistan where beneficiaries that cannot read or write can fill out a mental health survey using audio cues and this makes it for example possible to monitor the mental health status for example in refugee camps or for NGOs to monitor the mental health status of their beneficiaries. And also the aforementioned Qwifi, which is a local Wi-Fi content server that can provide the contents free of charge without the need to connect to the internet which is important in cases where you don't have any internet connections. Also for example refugee camps. We started kicking things off with WMFM. This is basically the first project we currently had. WMFM is a simple web app to provide educational audio content. You can see it here, a screenshot. It has been deployed to offer health education, a number of initiatives in Africa, Asia and Latin America. And it is template based. So we have a template on GitHub and women, female developers can basically copy the template to their account and start working on it. So basically this is a very easy way of starting to use open source for such kind of projects. And we have used this approach for the first time in Uganda back in July-August where we started off with an open source for equality day where we were convening stakeholders from government, from NGOs, from local developers, etc. And where we started an open source for equality contributor which had five local female developers build WMFM solutions for local NGOs and CBOs in four languages. Language is of course an important thing. In Uganda alone we have like 40 to 50 different local languages and you have to provide those contents in the local languages in order to increase the acceptance and in order to really, well, create a behavior change out of this. So and those solutions will be used and are being used by local NGOs which can use them in their community outreach projects. So this is the idea behind that. Have local stakeholders develop solutions, open source solutions for local organizations. And this is basically the change. So on the right you see my initial slide, one of the initial slides with showing how community outreach works today. The guy with a megaphone who ends up in this village like two times per year and people cannot take any notes because people are literate. So basically it's very questionable what they will get out of this. They will get something but you cannot leave the brochure with them. So basically this is not sustainable. This is not efficient. On the left you see what happens if, and even in a situation, this is one of our projects in Pakistan where not all the women have smartphones but some have and if you empower those smartphone owning women and tell them, okay, we will buy you some airtime and we will send you some audios every now and then and every week you can join with a group of women and you can play back those audios. So this makes even in such situations makes digital audio very, very efficient and very, very scalable and there are other benefits of having women basically joining in a group because they have a safe space where they can talk about stigmatized topics like gender-based violence or menstrual health and the important thing between those two pictures is on the left the knowledge stays with the women. They are the owners of the knowledge. It's on their smartphones and they can play back whatever they want. They can play it back five times. They think, oh, I didn't understand it. Well, they can play it back and back. On the right the knowledge vanishes with this guy and it's questionable what will stay there at all. So this is a sustainable way to provide knowledge to marginalized populations using open digital tools. So in the end we can say that the third definition of open source for equality would be that we aim to be a facilitator for organizations and individuals wishing to support open source for equality projects in the global south. So that does mean, I mean, we are already receiving some support for example from Red Hat, but we aim to work both with development organizations with donor organizations with development agencies but also with commercial, I would say, preferably IT organizations because they understand the power of digital tools. They understand the power of open source. And if our goal is really to connect those organizations with organizations in the global south to jointly work on projects that help empower women in the global south that help promote gender equality and finally to hopefully which will lead to a sustainable society, a sustainable world for all of us. When we talk about SDG5 and we've been talking about SDG5 the whole time achieving gender equality, well the latest numbers are in. The UN says it will take like 99.5 years from now. The AIDS Foundation says it's 86 years. So you can take both of that. We can really say we are way off track when it comes to achieving and attaining the sustainable development goals. So even more, it's even more important today to think about scalable solutions that help empower women and obtain gender equality. And we believe we have something here that we have a blueprint that can work and currently we are kind of building this up. As you saw, we have a first pilot project in Uganda. We are aiming to have a second project with a larger scope also in sub-Saharan Africa in the last quarter of this year but we are building communities. So we have our GitHub repositories. We have the website ossec.org where we are already matching organizations, NGOs with developers where we're creating community. But this is just the start. So basically we are looking for developers who want to mentor. We are looking of course for funding from organizations who like the idea and would like to participate in it. And yes, that's pretty much it. Thank you very much for listening and watching. And feel free to contact me if you have any further questions. Thank you. So are there questions in the audience? Yeah, good question. I will repeat it for the audience that is watching virtually. So basically the question was about how can we ensure that local NGOs are involved because you saw that Save the Children logo. The Save the Children logo was actually there because our partner in Uganda was Responsive Innovation Lab. They are kind of an organization that was created by Save the Children, Oxfam and some others. Just to do that, to connect basically digital innovators with local organizations. And as you say, you're totally right, this is key. What you are explaining, what you've been explaining is this trickle down approach. So basically the donor organizations like the German government give money to the UN and to GIZ, the German Development Agency. And from there it's supposed to trickle down and we know, and we know for a fact that 0.5% of development aid is actually ending up, for example, with women's organizations, 0.5%. So this is in stark contrast to what I've been saying about the importance of SDG5, gender equality. So how does that, how do you make ends meet if you know that? Yeah, I would assume and hope that open source helps us with that because when we work with local organizations, like for example the open source community Africa and she called Africa for example in Africa, those are already there and they can basically connect with local CBOs and local NGOs. And we are trying also to build the platform for that because for me one ideal situation would be if we could really reach the small organizations to community-based organizations because as you know NGOs, they have their funding and then after two or three years they move on to something but the community-based organizations they stay there. But they're usually like totally underfunded and overworked. And they cannot afford to have like a digital transformation. So if we provide them with tools that can be adapted by local stakeholders, by local developers then my dream would be really to empower those local organizations to use digital tools and this is kind of more like a grassroots approach because actually I don't believe that the trickle-down approach will help with this. We need to create a situation where we create a grassroots approach where a local developer in Uganda says, hey, I've heard about this open source equality thing. I can build you, hey, you're a women's CBO. I like you and I have a friend that works for you. I can build you a solution. Why don't we sit together? So that would be the ideal situation. So that no development agent isn't involved at all. So this would be created from the grassroots level. I mean, we think we have a good idea here but we are still in early, so this is at an early stage. But this is what we're trying to do because we also, well, we have our experience with how development cooperation works and we want to do things differently. But as you know, if you have a humanitarian background, changing the structures is a tough job. So we shall see how this will work out. But thanks for the question. Yeah, sure, sure. I totally agree with you. So to repeat that, the question was, okay, the challenges of basically funding those alternatives because they don't fit into the funding schemes that are established in development cooperation. Totally agree. I think there is some slight change. For example, we were just talking about UNDP digital acts. So UN United Nations Development Program has set up like a curated list of open solutions and they provide like funding to the local UNDP offices to implement those locally in their countries. This is like a first step, not exactly the solution to every problem. But actually, my hope is, and we have had like good experiences with CSR corporate social responsibility programs in the past. My hope is that more and more IT organizations would chip in and say, yeah, that makes sense. We would like to participate not only by funding but also by providing our expertise and mentorship and all that stuff. Because if we can basically link IT organizations in the global north with local organizations there like Open Source Community Africa, everybody wins. And even the IT organization might find a future developer down there because I mean, we are more and more working remotely. So CSR is one of my hopes to provide like a more flexible funding mechanism for that. But I totally agree with you. Everybody is talking about digital public goods and open tools, but nobody has figured out yet how the funding mechanisms should work. And still as of today, yeah, the funding mechanisms that are in place in development cooperation are project related like you get two or three years and not platform related. Basically, okay, it's not like like a technology project would work and say, okay, yeah, we have like a 10 years time frame or whatever. So yeah, I totally agree with you. Yes, please. Cultural change that even in the global north, we're still trying to struggle with. But I wonder, and this is something that comes to my mind a lot, how do systemic changes are really hard. But what can I wonder about having aspects of when you have these kinds of programs, having things like childcare, having things like feel that, you know, like they brought home to me and all of those things that could do some of that domestic work that someone feel like if I don't do this, it won't get done. Everything falls apart. I would love to go be part of this. But how can I do all these things? Yeah, that's that's a tough one. And we're talking if you're talking about the global south. Of course, we're talking about gender norms. We have similar projects over here, problems over here. The workload of the African women is twice as high as the workload of African men. So this is this is the fact in changing that will will take time. And it is incredibly difficult. So actually, I must say, I don't, I don't have a really great answer for that because it's, as you say, it's a systemic change. You have to, to, to, to, well, you have to change gender norms. And of course, we are seeing we're seeing progress regarding changing those gender norms, but it's very, very slow. And so I really admire those women who who managed to go ahead and kind of build a career, for example, software development engage open source in the global south. And I see that, I mean, the price for doing that is very high and it shouldn't be shouldn't be that high. And the point is, I mean, if we if we think about, and what I've presented you is a huge challenge because we were talking about what you said household chores gender norms. But Internet access is of course also a financial issue. So basically, when we had our first project, one of the first learnings was, yeah, we have to provide like airtime to participants beforehand. I mean, we paid a stipend afterwards, but we have to do that differently. Some have don't have access to computers because at some point they said, yeah, I have a smartphone and maybe I'm not focusing that much on that development software development career. So I can sell my laptop and whatever. So it is very, very difficult. And I don't have a really good answer how we can change it. It takes patience. But the point is really overall, it needs more focus and more investment in women's to empower women, especially in the global south. I mean, it's clear that we've neglected this over decades. And the fact that, as I mentioned, it will still take almost 100 years to reach that. And taking into account that COVID wasn't very helpful for that. So we had increasing numbers of gender-based violence, not only in the south but also in the global north. Women are the first ones who will suffer from economical downturn. The first ones who will suffer from natural catastrophes. The first one who will suffer from war and all that. So we need to invest more into making women more resilient into offering more opportunities, etc. I mean, what we are doing is like a small grain of sand. But the thing is, everybody agrees that we need to do that. But I'm finding it difficult to really see the big breakthrough and the progress. So hopefully we will see it over the next decades. But this is still, this is like an ultramarathon. But you have to start somewhere. And I admire those women who make it and who become role models for others. So you have women to spearhead and to really take all that work of building something there in order to have role models. And my hope is that now that we have some role models, more will follow. So I think this is like a mechanism that will be hopefully dynamic. But yeah, there's still a long, long way to go. So thank you again. Have a nice day.