 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome and thank you for joining us today for this exciting event, Tech for Social Good, put on in conjunction with the Department of State and their tech women program. My name is Sarah Morris, and I'm Policy Counsel for the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation. The New America Foundation is a vibrant policy-focused think tank comprised of a diverse array of programs. Programs that include an assets-building program, which houses the Global Assets Project led by our moderator, Jamie Zimmerman, a Middle East task force that looks to deepen the debate on American policy towards the Middle East, programs on health, education, budget reform, and the Open Technology Institute, which endeavors through technological, policy, and socially driven interventions to promote broadband access and adoption domestically and abroad. The Open Technology Institute's technical work, including its development of a wireless mesh infrastructure called commotion, has received much press and attention, and we view the technology as an important component to social change here and around the world, particularly where there is great need for connectivity due to government control or resource scarcity. However, we recognize that technology alone is insufficient for social change. People are the critical piece. Their ideas, passions, and desires for widespread change are what makes the technology relevant and important. And that is why we're so thrilled to have you all here. You and your stories are that critical component. So thank you to the tech women and to the mentors for joining us today. And for those joining us via the webcast, Tech Women is a 41 woman program of the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, implemented by the Institute of International Education, that connects female technology leaders in the Middle East and North Africa with their peers in the United States. By facilitating knowledge exchange and cross-cultural dialogue, the program encourages women across the globe to harness the power of technology to foster social change and innovation. I also want to thank our panelists, Patty Adarsh and Alex, and to Jamie Zimmerman for serving as our moderator. Also a big thanks to the State Department, and in particular Suzanne Filion and Heather Ramsey, for reaching out and for all of your work in making this event happen. Finally, thanks to my colleagues at New America Foundation who have helped so much with logistics and planning. Special thanks to Sita Pena Gangadharan, Greta Byram, and Hiba Hussein from OTI for your ongoing and significant support. I'll conclude with a few brief housekeeping matters. For those in the room with computers or mobile devices, and for those of you following along via webcast, please join the conversation via Twitter. You can use the hashtag Pound TW 2012. For those tuning in remotely, we'll also try to pull questions for the panelists and tech women as they come up on the feed. We intend for this event to be different than most, and that Jamie will be working hard to facilitate dialogue among you all, panelists, audience members, and remote viewers. And with that, I'll turn now to our moderator, Jamie Zimmerman. Jamie directs the Global Assets Project in its efforts to advance savings and asset building policies and initiatives around the world. Her current areas of focus include savings-linked conditional cash transfers, child and youth savings policies, foreign aid reform, communities of practice on savings products for the poor, and the role of technology in asset building and development. Welcome to Jamie. Thank you, Sarah. It's always a pleasure to collaborate with our colleagues at the Open Technology Institute, and I am really especially excited about this event today, Tech for Social Good, and not only because of our esteemed panel, but frankly because it is really awesome and an honor to host an event with such an impressive group of amazing creative entrepreneurial women right here at the New America Foundation to discuss these issues. And honestly for me, it's just exciting to see so many women in the room at these think tank events. They tend to be, I'm looking out at a bunch of men in blue suits. So this is a really lovely on many levels change of scenery for me. So seriously though, this topic, Tech for Social Good, it's a critical one and one of deep personal personal and professional interest for me. And I'm really glad to take part in this event and that this event is part of your Tech women, I believe, wrap up tour here in D.C. In our work in the Global Assets Project, we dedicate most of our energy to creating new ideas and understanding around opportunities to provide the disadvantaged, the marginalized, the excluded with opportunities to build, maximize, leverage their human and financial capital. And new technologies are changing the way we connect with the world, with each other, with our rights, with our opportunities, with micro economies, with macro economies. The list I think goes on and on. So our mission within the Global Assets Project is to break the cycles of poverty and exclusion that perpetuate inequalities on many levels. So I think it's fitting to have this discussion today on how we can use technology and innovation for social good. And not just because we have the rare occasion of benefiting from your collective experiences and voices right now, but also because we have the opportunity to look forward. Some of you probably know, maybe all of you know, that Thursday of this week marks the first ever UN International Day of the Girl, which acknowledges the extreme challenges that girls all over the world face. And also the power that they could have should they have the opportunity to unlock their potential. So I'm happy to announce that this week we're releasing our latest paper from our Global Savings and Social Protection Initiative on new ideas for leveraging technology to invest in economic and social empowerment for girls and young women around the world. I'm providing for all of you an early release copy. It doesn't come out officially till Thursday, but if you're interested there will be some extra copies outside today. So this is going to be a very interactive event, as Sarah mentioned, we hope. A bit unique among our typical format. We're going to spend some time listening to our panelists as they reflect on their experiences using tech for social good, but also going to spend a lot of our time today listening to you and your reflections as well. So just that's the general rundown of the event. There's going to be some Q&A where there's an opportunity for you to ask questions of the panelists, but we'll also be asking you questions. And so please don't be shy. There will be mics running all over the room and we're really looking forward to hearing from all of you and what your experiences have been, what you've learned, and there'll be more on that later. So from there, let's jump right in. I'd like to ask our panelists, Ardesh, Patty, and Alex to come up and take your seats. The panelists bios are included in the agenda packet that all of you receive, so I won't read them in detail, but I will quickly introduce everyone. And I'll start with my immediate right with Ardesh Desai, who is a program manager for Innovation Labs at the World Bank where he manages the secretariat, the Open Data Technology Initiative, which is focused on technologically enabling citizens, enabling technology among citizens, technologically enabled citizens. The many ways we can say this, I'm finding out right now, in among the World Bank countries. So I can say that I for one have been extremely grateful for and an ardent user of the mind-boggling amount of data coming out of the World Bank right now and your efforts to open up your data. And I really look forward to learning more about how these principles are being applied on the ground. Next we have Patty Michelle, who is the Executive Director of M Health, a multi-stakeholder alliance using technology to advance global health. I think that that explanation doesn't really do it justice, though. This is, I think, one of the most impressive global alliances towards a global development issue that has ever been created. And so I'm extremely excited to have Patty here today to talk about how the different aspects of that initiative are playing out on the ground. And then finally, at the end is Alex Counts, who's the President and CEO of Grameen Foundation, who's a non-profit focused on poverty eradication at the intersection of microfinance and technology. Grameen Foundation has always been at the cutting edge of the financial inclusion field. And I'm really eager to hear about the latest and greatest on all of your technology focused initiatives. So with that, I'll take my seat and hopefully I'm still mikes up. Oh, look at that. That is really cool. I never cease to be amazed. And we will turn it over to Ardesh, who's going to speak first. And you can take it away. Thanks, Amy. So how's everyone doing today? Really? Just great. Come on. How's everyone doing today? Awesome. That's how it should be. I'm delighted to be here today in order to share the stage with Patty, Alex, and Jamie. When I was invited on this panel, I really had no idea about Tech Woman. So as I started learning more about it, I just realized how incredible it is. Then I started talking to my colleagues and said, this is an awesome program. I'm going to be there. One of them asked, do you know you're not a woman? I said, I'm sure they know, but maybe how do I say that? I said, okay, fine. I'm going to go nonetheless because if I say I'm not a woman, maybe I'm not invited and I don't get to be here. Being a proud father of a daughter and also a technologist, this is truly exciting and honoring for me to be here, among some of the very talented individuals. It's incredibly inspiring. I was going through your biography, the bio data that was shared, your profiles. To see that, inspired to see your passion, coming from India, I can imagine how challenging it must be for all of you to work on the path that you've chosen. I hope that my daughter grows up and has a similar conviction and passion as you have today. I'm happy to share my work. I'm speaking on behalf of a lot of my colleagues and clients, the work that we do at the World Bank and engaging with our clients. What I've tried to do is to give you short snippets about World Bank, about the work, and so on. Then there's time later on when we can go into some of the details if that's something that you like to do. I'm also hopefully learn more from you today than I share. World Bank, as many of you might know, it's not a bank in the traditional sense. We are kind of an international development institution. We essentially work with developing countries, provide financial, as in loans and grants, and technical assistance, as in knowledge, advisory services, etc. We typically operate through six regions, one of them being MENA, Africa, South Asia, Latin America, East Asia, Pacific, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Those are kind of how we structured ourselves. Then the networks would focus more on health issues, social protection, things like that. I work at a part of the place of the World Bank or World Bank Institute. We do not do lending. We do a lot of capacity building activities for our clients. We tend to engage not only with the governments, but also with other stakeholders, like civil society groups, community groups, private sector sometimes, as well as city administration, things like that. We are kind of unique in that sense from the World Bank. Very few places like us in the bank that engage with other important stakeholders, but aside from the government. We have roughly three areas of services, one around open knowledge, connecting people from South-South, North-South type of thing. Collaborative governance, how can we bring citizens voice into the whole policymaking type of thing, and innovative solutions, trying sometimes emerging technologies to test out new things that might have an impact on the ground. We believe that technology can have a big impact if it is anchored in a policy reform. The examples that I show will give you a sense of what I mean by that. Obviously, the events from the Arab Spring, we have seen the transformation of power of technology. When a large number of people have access to it and ability to use it. We try to see if we can create an environment on the other side where the governments are receptive to hear the voice of the citizens. So, some of the questions we ask ourselves is how can we use technology for improved transparency, access to information, how can we use it for improving citizen participation in policymaking, as well as around public service delivery, and how can we use it ultimately to improve accountability. The program that I work on and I manage at the World Bank which is called the Open Development Technology Alliance or ODTA short form, that is precisely what we are trying to answer such questions and say how can we use technology for ICT-enabled citizen engagement. So, technology is an enabler not an end in itself. That is an important thing to remember. Somebody said earlier, Jamie said I think it is or Sarah said that it is people that matter, not the technology. We focus at all levels of development, early stage policymaking, kind of trying to support early stage policymaking where we can bring citizen voice to more like this service delivery, did I get the water today or did I receive the health services type of thing. We believe that the opportunity is big, but lot of the expertise, the knowledge is outside the bank. Like you see lot of innovations happening in the country, it is not inside the World Bank. You can examples of M-Pesa in Kenya. World Bank didn't create it and there are many, many such great examples out there. So, we are trying to see is how can we create some kind of a platform where we can bring the external knowledge, the expertise and kind of pair it with the people in the bank who work with the clients. So, we do it around kind of three areas broadly like we call the knowledge people and tools around knowledge. We try to not only produce knowledge based on what we have learned, but also curate knowledge of things that have worked outside and normally bank does lot of analytical research oriented work, but in our case we are trying to focus on more on not necessarily the know-how, but kind of the do-how like more practical stuff. People it is around creating a community, having a pool of experts who can work with the countries and tools creating some sort of an app store model. Let me give you some examples might anchor this a little bit because a lot of it is conceptual what I just said earlier. Recently, we engage with the water kind of unit in our one of the water units in the bank and they said we have lot of issues around water delivery, water servicing. Some of them could be addressed to some kind of technology intervention, maybe software of tracking, what is working, what is not working, things like that. Went through a series of exercise where we created kind of the problem statements and then we had this hackathons in 10 countries. One of them was Egypt. We brought the kind of the local utilities, the consumer, the bank folks and others to kind of work on these problems and say can we come up with a solution in 24 hours, 48 hours type of model. We got about 60 solutions. This was global event so it's not only Egypt but we had another I think 8 or 10 countries and we got a lot of good ideas, a lot of good solutions. Some are being pursued by the local like the water utilities etc to kind of adopt them as a way of doing it. Similarly, we did transport hackathon also I believe Egypt was one of the countries and we're doing something around sanitation that's upcoming. In another example comes from Democratic Republic of Congo as many of us know it's a relatively poor country and but this example is great that you can see that given all the concerns they have they were able to do something. So what they did is they came up with a participatory budgeting process where the citizens get to vote and kind of debate on what the local issues are and how certain percentage of the budget should be allocated to meet their needs. Not what the government thinks but what they think should be invested and a lot of this was done using simple SMS's. They learned about it, they voted through SMS, they got feedback through SMS etc. So again you can see that even in a constrained environment there's lot can be done if there is a will. Interesting examples come, another interesting one is from India. It's a state of Karnataka. There was this challenge of saying if there's a issue around how do you verify that the health services were delivered to pregnant women. Like how can you make sure that they're receiving the service that they're supposed to. So using a mobile device and a smart card type of thing the spoiler that started few months ago which says if the woman receives the delivery the nurse goes to the home and say you know you're supposed to have a three month visit and we were here then there's a proof like a biometric validation not through the smart card but also fingerprint and say yes we received and they get to vote on saying whether they were happy with it or not. So there's like the smiley face and a frowny face and angry face type of thing right. But what we observed is in that case that most people were uncomfortable saying something bad about the service that they had just received in front of the person. So instituted a phone calling system where you know every Sunday eight o'clock sometime those who have received get a phone call and through the voice kind of IVR system they were able to provide further kind of you know non-biased feedback if you will. Those are kind of the other examples as well. There's another thing most of you might have heard of quote from America it's become very popular in America and we're trying to see that similar model can be done in Africa so we're calling it the quote for Africa. Still at a conceptual stage but the idea is more or less the same we are learning a lot from them. I want to start to cut you off because for the sake of time I'm almost done. So here's the sales pitch. I would remind all of you to join the ODTA group the Open Development Technology Alliance group on LinkedIn it's on LinkedIn it's easy to join that way we can stay in touch and also I want to thank Department of State New America Foundation for giving us this opportunity to be here. Really as I said this is incredible and I wish you all the best in your journeys and hope you can stay in touch through LinkedIn, Twitter or the channels and I can't go I can't wait to go home and tell my daughter about this experience. Thank you Aradesh and I hope that everyone takes an opportunity to ask you it sounds like you had a repertoire of more examples and interesting things that you'd be able to tell us a little bit more about during the Q&A but for now I'll ask Patty to take the podium or senior see whatever you'd like to do and hear about in health and the use of technology to advance public health. Great okay first of all I'd really like to thank you Jamie and and Sarah for the introductions and thank the the tech women program and State Department and the New America's Foundation for inviting me to speak. We have a saying in Arabic that indicates to one's visitors that they have shed light into one's home or city or country depending on how far they have traveled and so to our colleagues from the Middle East and North Africa, no war tuna. And yes while my name is not particularly a good indication especially since there is no P in the Arabic alphabet I am Egyptian and so and I am the daughter of a tech woman and a tech man and the sister of a tech woman and so most most of my family comes from the electrical engineering computer science background and actually it was it was that passion that motivated my father to immigrate to America in the first place so he had studied computers in the faculty of agriculture in the 1960s and decided that rather than work in agriculture what he really wanted to do was to work in computers and then when my mother came to the US she decided when my sister and I were three and four that she wasn't cut out to be a stay-at-home mom and really wanted to have a career and so my father encouraged her to pursue computer science and so then she became a computer scientist herself working with computers in the day when computers were the size of rooms and now we live in a day where computers are the size of they're about this big so so just a little bit about myself I'm actually not technically a tech woman although I work on tech aspects of of public health I'm actually my background is in international health and about I want to say a little over 10 years ago I went back to school to do a PhD and was looking at mobile phones and health and the ways in which cell phones even already at that time were starting to improve access to health services and information and transportation etc and and I did my fieldwork in Egypt in Minya at a time when the penetration rates in Egypt as a country were 3.4 percent so you can imagine that things have changed dramatically since 2002-2003 when I actually conducted my field my field research so since that time we'll fast forward to about a year ago when I became the executive director of the mHealth Alliance which was formed about three years ago to serve as an umbrella organization to really look at the enabling environment to support the advancement of the use of mobile technologies to meet global health challenges and so it was started by the Vodafone Foundation the UN Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation to convene many members of the mHealth ecosystem so if you can imagine you have everyone from the technologists to the health people and a lot of translation issues happening in between the two you have academics engaged in this field looking to evaluate the impact that it's having in terms of people's health you have policy makers various ministries that are all looking to see how they can leverage this tool that now seems to be in the hands of billions of people I don't think anybody could have anticipated that people would prioritize access to communication as much as they have and so now you'll see things which from a public health perspective are quite interesting like there are now more mobile phones than there are toilets in the world you know and so if you think about people have access to communication but they don't have access to water and sanitation which is a major building block from a public health from a public health perspective and so our role within the mHealth Alliance is to address some of the major challenge areas that are being faced by organizations trying to leverage mobile technology to support health and so we work on sort of five major program focus areas the first is around evidence so we have a lot of folks who really want to leverage mobile technology to support health but they don't know where to begin they don't know how to begin they don't know what's worked how it's worked why it's worked and so we have sort of a whole work stream looking at identifying gaps in the evidence and then mobilizing researchers to actually conduct studies that can help us become better informed users of mobile technology for health the second area is around standards and interoperability and I never thought in a million years that I would become one of these people that runs around cheering for more standards but we have a situation now where we have lots of mHealth programs applications platforms being implemented throughout the world none of them talk to each other and none of the data is standardized so you can't aggregate the data up the chain to then get a really good comprehensive picture of what is happening in the world in terms of health statistics and indicators all the building blocks are there but we haven't actually put them together in a very systematic way the other three areas because I see I'm being asked to to stop now but the other three areas that that we focus on are around sustainable financing models at the moment a lot of mHealth is financed by private philanthropies and or through corporate social responsibility programs and what we're trying to do is to look and see if there is a case for social marketing to government so that governments actually do to the cost savings that they can garner or to the reach that they can have through mobile technology that they are incentivized to actually pay for some of these services but then also looking to see if there's a business case to incentivize some of the telecommunications industry partners to think about how they can systematically invest in some of these some of these technologies and then we work in the areas of capacity building and and policy and so through all these building blocks we'd like to see happen you know in in the next few years and things are moving very quickly is that is that we'll rapidly see a mainstreaming of mHealth where you know me as an individual you as an individual can really start to actually experience the benefits of it because it's one of those things that is in the interest of every individual to see how it's going to work because we're going to be affected by you know health issues in one way or another either because we're trying to prevent something and keep ourselves healthy or we find ourselves pregnant and may be in need of messaging throughout our pregnancies or we come down with a non-communicable disease like diabetes and need some kind of platform that can help us manage our chronic condition and can connect us in a systematic way with the larger health system so just want to thank you all uh elphyshock and i look forward to the question and answer thank you patty all right last but not least alex counts terrific thank you and it's a a pleasure to be with you all uh and on this panel um and uh i just one disclosure before we get going i i had some honestly i had some dental work done a couple of hours ago oh side of my face is coming out of being numb and my doctor the dentist said that people have a tendency to drool on themselves um uh while this is happening so if you see me looking strange it doesn't necessarily mean how i feel about being on this panel not necessarily uh not necessarily um also i i'm really appreciating the opportunity to bring some gender balance to this room uh and uh and so well i say i i think to echo a couple of themes you know grooming foundation which has been known in grooming bank known for micro finance eleven years ago we launched a major technology program information technology and the guy we hired to run it said sign to me which has been born out ever since which is to make technology work for the poor uh the technology is usually the easy part um and he said that and i've seen it um one of the things that i've seen is very important is to bring technology to disadvantaged groups so they actually use it and understand it it requires on the ground groups can be government or in many cases better civil society groups to sensitize them to help them understand it and in that context it's i have to use this moment to say how unfortunate it is that in Bangladesh right now the government of Bangladesh is uh acting extremely hostily to one of the great civil society organizations grooming bank is a step or two away from nationalizing it and i also would be remiss of me not to say that the us department of state and the world bank have been stood very strong for an independent grooming bank and hopefully that will prevail the other thing that's very important um beyond the local presence to make technology work is relationships uh we eleven years ago when we were launching our technology program we had no presence in the middle east in north africa it was kind of a off of the grooming foundation radar and we were approached by a a company and a family company a very large one the abdulatif jamil group based in jeta saudi arabia and they said we want to join hands with you and bring micro finance and other social innovations to the Arab world and we were initially a little bit wary uh and our wariness probably made them wary but within a short amount of time we developed a very strong friendship and relationship with them that is now 10 years going strong i was in they also very strong ties to mit and that's where i was yesterday to make some linkages with one of their other big philanthropic orientations uh uh uh partners and um and we have had tremendous success and i think more than either of us could have done independently they know the the region and the business climate and uh and we know micro finance and social innovation and joined together and we've created something called grammine jamil pan arab micro finance limited based in dubai uh and uh and it's uh we've it's been a great joy to see that organization develop now what have we been doing in the tech space let me just get a couple of points uh as you may know grooming phone an offshoot of grooming banks started a a major cell phone company uh which was a big commercial success called grooming phone and on the side set up 300,000 Bangladeshi women to be uh human pay phones to get a cell phone that they would then rent out for a call or something to their people in neighborhood we took that the first in the world took that outside of Bangladesh to Uganda those were relationships are important because it wasn't necessarily the most the country that would made most sense but MTN a dominant telecom there was so excited to do this to be the first in the world rolled out the red carpet for us and we throw throughout our matrix about which country to go into said we want to work with people want to work with us and we started out and uh we made a ton of mistakes uh in Bangladesh it seemed to be enough to kind of throw the phone over the wall and the women were off making calls and Uganda you know they the cow steps on the phone it doesn't work and how do you you know and then uh the signage was very important for the pay phone but we ultimately got it right 80,000 phones rolled out as a new income source and and women being sensitized to being a uh a link to their community to technology that we saw the phone pay phone business going down because everyone was getting their own phone so we said let's use the data possibilities of phone we developed something uh with Google and MTN a couple of applications to get information about agriculture health and commerce over your phone with the free form sms you didn't need web browsing capability and what we found when we rolled it out nationwide any farmer anyone with a health question could search this and what we found to summarize a lot of research was that it increased knowledge in these domains but didn't change behavior right that's the kind of the holy grail is behavior change so we then said well we kind of fail so then we said let's take the agriculture domain and create what is now 850 community community knowledge workers these are kind of paraprofessionals agricultural extensionists who basically take the phone and visit farmers um and actually let them ask the questions but walk them through the process um and what we found is uh in adding that human element to bring the technology there it actually has changed behavior crop choices have changed um not only knowledge has changed but farmers were getting 40 percent higher uh prices by being able to use their community knowledge worker to find out which market to sell their crops and they were they were uh growing higher value added crops so that was a big learning for us uh and on the health sphere we went off to Ghana where I was just a couple of days ago and we created something called the motech mobile technologies for community health which is basically a mobile midwife type of project where you enroll women uh who are expectant mothers um into a system and it does a couple things it gives them reminders throughout their pregnancy of what to do and what not to do which have proven very useful and again people uh and then secondly in fact it's interesting you get a message every week and if you opt in you can get a secondary message of which two-thirds of the women opt in to listen to that second message and then another half of them opt in for a third message so this isn't like junk mail equivalent people are really using this um the other thing is it it enters these women into a database which then sends reminders to the Ghana Health Service frontline nurses that someone missed an appointment they're in their seventh month what's going on and so it's also creating in a couple of districts so far a kind of a kind of electronic medical records for poor women and throughout rural Ghana before we have them here in the United States really which is exciting all of it being entered on a mobile phone and I visited one center a health center which is one of the first which by using this now for about nine months they've actually gone totally paperless in how they work with uh pregnant mothers and with newborn children in that community which was a big joy for the women because for a time they were doing both and now they can they threw out all the paper I'll just one last word and I won't even get to what we're doing in Indonesia on the mobile livelihoods micro franchise but on the interoperability thing I have to say I really agree and what the people that have been looking at what we did in Ghana on the execution side with the mobile midwife in the Ghana Health Service and by the way we our goal is to institutionalize this within the Ghana Health Service and have them take it over that's our sustainability strategy so it's not just a one-off little thing but people that know this much better than I feel that we got the underlying technology of the platform of how to do this as you know pretty good and so we have now the BBC and their philanthropic arm Johnson and Johnson Care partnering with us doing their mobile health programs in Bihar on the MoTeC platform so they didn't reinvent the whole underlying technology or just using ours and the open source nature of it which we think is one small step towards doing this in a more kind of not such a fragmented way and and even my colleague who's the lead on this whole program is in a two-day meeting hosted by the Gates Foundation today or this is the first day with one of the largest humanitarian organizations in the world migrating all of their mobile health work to the MoTeC platform so so I think that if we can move beyond the this is one area where let a thousand flowers bloom may have been the way to start I don't know but it's not the way to scale and again we're trying to play a role in that great thank you thank you to all of our panelists I have a number of questions but maybe in the for the sake of time let me see just a quick show of hands who in the audience has questions for our panelists to start okay good so I'll start with one and then we'll and then we'll get rolling for a little bit of Q&A and then we have some questions for you so you know I think that you know there's a lot of exciting that you know I love this panel because there's such a breadth of issues that we're all trying to to address and to find solutions to and one thing that I'm hearing mobile solutions platforms interoperability biometric tech all these different tools that can be used and then I'm hearing about the variety of stakeholders talking about people the actual users of the technology on the ground the governments who want to increase their transparency and the your accountability the multilaterals the the NGOs who are you know leveraging these planning that it seems like the private sector who is obviously you know wanting to capitalize on on these opportunities as well so the scope of opportunities seems incredibly immense and I think that you've spent I think gave some really amazing examples of you know how each of your different organizations and those affiliated with your organizations are taking advantage of those opportunities I'm curious if each of you could just say what your biggest what you think either for your organization or for what you're trying to achieve broadly what the biggest challenge is what is the biggest challenge that's keeping you keeping either your specific initiative your organization or the field in which you find yourself operating from taking these the scope of opportunities and you know changing everything overnight yeah sure we can just go down the line it's fine well I won't speak on behalf of the world bank it's too large an institution to say this is the problem but I can speak for my program around the you know kind of technology for citizen engagement or social accountability many factors but one of them being convincing the government that it's good to listen to the voices of the citizens because you know starting one way traffic of providing a mobile platform or a web platform is easy but if nobody responds to that then it doesn't solve the problem right it doesn't solve the purpose so what we're trying to set up is kind of two way communications where essentially everyone will benefit from that conversation right so that is one big challenge the other big challenge is finding the people to support such programs in the country right as I said in my when I was talking earlier the lot of expertise doesn't reside with the bank you can't only find so many people in America let's say to even fly around so the it's important to have people who understand the local context because at the end of the day it's not about technology right I mean technology as as alexa is the easy part so I think let me stop here and say these are kind of two and there are the constraints as well around you know how do you fund and so on so forth but I feel like these are two major constraints for us to you know scale up I think for from where I sit in this space I think that there's a lot of hype right now around mobile technologies and mobile health as the solution as if somehow miraculously running around and distributing cell phones to health workers is going to completely revolutionize the way that health services are delivered or accessed or or done and I think we're starting to see a much more tempered view and a much more realistic approach to to mobile health which is really exciting exciting for me I have I have a really good colleague at at UNICEF which has done I mean UNICEF Innovations has done a great deal of work in mHealth and probably have some of the largest mHealth implementations that are now moving towards scale and and she and I joke with each other that we should co-author a book entitled mHealth is hard because it actually is quite hard because you're dealing as our dash was saying a lot of people issues so it's not the the technology components that are really really complicated it's that if you put the technology systems in place are the health workers fully trained to be able to use it effectively do the people trust the sources of information that they're being asked to phone into and is the government secure enough in its position to open itself up to accountability and scrutiny by the people because that's ultimately what's going to start to happen as this data gets aggregated and people see some of the the disparities etc this is going to become a a critical critical issue there you go two things briefly as we collect data on whether it's the pregnant mothers or it's the farmers in in Uganda in fact we our community health worker community knowledge workers in Uganda we actually get contracts for them to do periodic surveys of other farmers which is something that a lot of companies in Kampala are willing to pay for and so there's a sustainability aspect of it but one of things we're bumping into is the rapidly changing and very fragmented privacy laws in the world this information aggregated and and and if it's you know put in an analyzable form can lead to a lot better services more customized services to people but it had we're going to have to figure out a way and right now I mean the laws in Colombia are just changing and we're needing to change our thing we're hardly even underway there so working through that piece and I don't I don't have a cookie cutter solution but it's it could become a real barrier the second thing is you know building in the sustainability aspect of this is so these aren't kind of one-off things that fall off the the cliff in Indonesia I'll just say we were going to launch the last of the village phone programs but by the time we got it going the the pay phone market was gone and so we said what the heck are we going to do and we helped start a local social enterprise called Ruma and which is its own great story but we said the simplest thing even though it isn't creating you know creating value like health information or agricultural information is actually allow women to sell airtime from them to their neighbors and increments as little as ten cents and which is actually was a real need and we found we did it we do a intake survey of people's poverty level using a tool we call the progress out of poverty index on the phone when these entrepreneurs come in and in fact while they're a little tech savvy two-thirds of them live under a dollar twenty five a day and what we found is just by viewing how much airtime they were reselling and we knew what their margins were forty percent of them were increasing their income enough to come out of poverty within six months so this was the killer app even though it's just getting airtime from one to the other that you know so people can you know you have on the phone a little bit more but what what happens then is that once you have the financial sustainability built in in an application like that then adding on top of it some things that might not earn a lot of money whether it's around it you know health information agriculture the app we're running out rolling out now is more of a kind of monster dot com but for you know for casual laborers in this part of indonesia matching them with the demand uh and uh but you got to have that thing there that pays the bills uh otherwise these things have a can have a really one-off really time-limited project like quality of them great so let's open it up for just a few questions um let's see those hands again who had okay um we'll start with you and we'll just take let's take three um and then uh and just when you please stand up introduce yourself um since we do have a live stream that's happening and you know maybe say where you're from and what your you know interest area is or your entrepreneurial area in which you you know so yeah please go ahead so thanks my name is Vera Ghazal I'm from Lebanon uh part of the tech woman delegation uh I work at uh Oracle Middle East I'm a technology consultant uh I cover the area of Levant and North Africa uh I have a question for Alex actually uh so I noticed that uh within your projects and enabling um uh housewives and farmers and handymen with uh such handheld devices let us let us say handheld device with basic messaging in order to um enhance their domestic lives and their businesses so assuming that they had uh I have to have a certain level of literacy for that and uh how do you deal with people of such kind of people are illiterate are you collaborating with other programs for literacy thanks okay and we'll just take a couple and then we'll if that's okay so let's go um the third row back here hi my name is Isheeta Majumdar and I'm a excuse me for my bad throat um I'm a tech mentor in this program and I've been associated with cellular technology um since the beginning of my career which is a long long time ago uh since the days when cell phones were uncool, unsmart and wifi was a strange acronym um your discussion is very inspiring I've been part of a lot of these discussions as my focus was emerging markets and I come to you as a technologist as an engineer and I ask you if you had a wish list for technology enablers across devices networks services application security what would they be what would you tell me and say go and build me this or go and improve this that's a good one wow okay and do we have one more okay let's go to the back yes you can um I'm I'm Haida Ahmed I'm from Palestine I'm a tech woman participant um actually my question is directed to Josh um how can the world bank be sure that there is a much transparency in um um and execute in the execution process in um the the destination country please thank you okay great okay so we'll just go we'll start with that for now um Alex why don't you go ahead and take the first um the first question um first of all yeah literacy is a real issue and we've found some workarounds but we're not totally satisfied um first of all though I think one of the insights for us is that people if people are illiterate there they may be numerate they may be able to use an SMS uh in in different ways and if they can't their children may be able to so it's if you can create the demand you there's some actually uh uh there's some ways people can get around that but we did find um when we rolled out um the uh the mobile midwife in Ghana you know we gave people the option um to get their messages through SMS or voicemail and we negotiate with the telecom that'd be free in either case well 99 percent wanted voicemail and what was interesting and this is kind of um is that we found we thought it might be 50 50 we didn't you know we didn't know um the simple messages but uh but also it mattered a lot the accent of the voice there are many dialects in Ghana whether it was a male or female what age did it sound like and basically people we found the the killer voice was someone who sounded like you're kind of kindly anti who was not like so over educated but not under educated um and that was the huge amount of research that went into that um and I think also on top of that uh in in terms of uh I think our other big lesson in this space is it goes back to the importance of the the trusted intermediary whether it's the Ghana Health Service nurse um or the community knowledge worker in the community you know if you have one farmer who is literate who and it gets the prestige of having the phone and then we give him a charging solution or her um which makes a little money on the side charging other people's cell phones um that person can really bridge the gaps of discoverability that it exists um and then literacy and then contextualization um and all of that to actually go from again that's the big jump from knowledge increase um at best to behavior change um and so doing this without the trusted intermediary without utilizing either those civil servants or civil society and taking advantage of the fact that there are literate people in those in those that actually go out to these places um you know that's that was one of our one of our big lessons um uh enrolling this out so let's move to our desk since there was a questions specifically for you on transparency and the processes that you use at the World Bank we are doing multiple things to kind of make make the work that we do or the work we support in development countries more transparent at the same time we're also working with the countries to kind of make their information more transparent I'll give some examples so as Jamie mentioned earlier we started with our own data right and we said how can we start in something eat our own dog food we've been talking about this for a long time but we still sell our data it's not really accessible how can we do it so we started with opening up our data because if you don't do it we can go to a country and say you should open up your data by the way right so we started with that um Kenya is one of the recent uh big story on open data um and our opening data it has for example it's just a starting point right there are a lot of components to transparency one is access to information so we advise we work with the countries too so that they they pass access to information laws like Bangladesh has one of one of the success stories around access to information for example so is India and many other countries um when it comes to data there are a lot of things that have to happen one there should be some access to information policy then is to be legal policy around what data can be opened up how fast whether the data quality is good and so on and so forth the other aspect of this thing can we make our project information as transparently available it's already available but doesn't mean that it's actually accessible or it's easy to understand so we're trying to also so one of the initiatives that one of my colleagues we did it within the innovation labs is called mapping for results and if you look at it's called maps dot world bank dot org and essentially it put also projects all projects on the map and it also puts key indicators on the map so sometimes you see that there are a lot of health projects in an area but that's relatively well off compared to other area which is poorer but there are no health projects for example maybe there's a reason maybe not but at least that starts people to ask such questions we are spending more kind of resources to say how can we make our interim indicators that we track for every project more transparent more visually easily understandable right we also doing another kind of project which is called the open aid partnership where if you see that in many countries especially poor countries sometimes their core budget about 60 sometimes 70 percent of the core budget comes from foreign aid right including the bank but there are many other donors who put the money but but there is no single place to see today where all the money is coming from and where how the money is being used right so we looked at Malawi as an example and we mapped and it's fascinating again we mapped all the aid that went to the country and and map the poverty indicators and you can see that sometimes people are working on the same thing in the same area but they didn't really know about it right so we're trying to address this whole issue of transparency accountability in many different ways because there's no one size fits all or there's no silver bullet type of solution hope i answered the question and great and we have an offer on the table for a tech mentor to build for you exactly what you need to do the things you want to do um so tell her let's make let's make that pitch um what is it that if you want to if you were to tell her what would you go and build this for me what would it be let's start with patty and then we'll wrap around i'll actually tell you a story to sort of contextualize my my my response to you in in 2006 i have the privilege and i continue to do this now to go and spend some time in the ministry of communication information technology in egypt and and they have incubation projects every year that come in and so they've invited me to come and review and advise on their health related initiatives and so in 2006 i was invited to go and and take a look at one of these initiatives and it was a team of four two engineers a cardiologist um and a public health person and they were working on a mobile cardiac monitor um and so it was interesting because when i was sitting there talking to them i started the social scientist and me came out and and started asking them questions about this application that they were working on um and i you know it was just like well have you spent much time in the hospitals or the health facilities observing the work of the cardiologists have you uh interviewed some of the patients that you expect to put these things on themselves at home to see how they're going to react to this um and and and very quickly it became quite clear that they they had a technology that they were developing in search of a problem that they were trying to solve um and so so there there isn't i couldn't i couldn't tell you right now for a specific place that here's the killer application that is going to to transform things but i can say from the health perspective that um really understanding the context of the problem and understanding some of the issues that have been raised including some of the literacy issues um i actually worked on the the ethnography for the the motec project in gana where the project itself was originally intended to be a text message based program but through the ethnographic process we discovered that there were literacy issues and there was a strong preference to get the information via voice and so even if they designed the the system in a way where they were delivering these messages the utilization may not have been as as high um i have a colleague who talks about designing technology and building it under the mango tree but really spending time and engaging in agile processes tends to work quite well where you can really understand the context and the issues that are being raised by the people who ultimately are going to benefit from the technology so alex or our desh to either of you have a killer app that you want to make a pitch for well very brief if some of my hardcore kind of technology colleagues are here they probably take this in a different direction but coming from gana uh just a couple of days ago i swear to god and if anyone has this if someone can find a solar charger that can actually charge cell phones a single one that works um that would be i don't need anything else um and uh and i swear i think we're on our tenth one and everyone has promised that this is the one that's robust that'll work and we went and saw this guy who we who's building a business around charging the cell phones of the gana health service nurses and the and the women and you know there were in two months after he got it the solar panel doesn't work anymore and he had to take it an hour into town every day to charge it from a an outlet and bring it back because the demand was there so if someone can work on one of those uh i'll be really a happy guy well that's great well with that you know i think one thing that you said patty that it's really interesting um you know that that strikes a chord is in your story that you know had someone having a technology and using it to you know in search of a technology in search of a problem you're trying to solve and i really think that this is a really good opportunity for us to to kind of pivot this conversation and take it back out to to all of you as the experts on the on technology and access to and use of technology in your home countries and your communities in your region um and ask you um i guess i would look at maybe a couple different ways what is what are the problems that technology can or should solve um in your regions and and do you have any of your own ideas for some killer apps to do that i would love to hear your thoughts on this so um let's get that started and maybe i don't know if maybe the person who posed the original question might have some initial thoughts to launch us off or if someone would like to volunteer i think we'll have a mic for you the reason is it on yes the reason i asked that question is precisely of what you mentioned patty a lot of us today we sit in our back of our research labs and we draw an emerging market and its problem on the whiteboard and we design these low-cost phones um for ten dollars or fifteen dollars and with a lot of language we did one for india we had five language capabilities and we thought we solved the problem and then we go to the market we go to our sales people and they are like why didn't you talk to us and we learned a very good lesson and uh we i said that we will have to go and talk to the people in the world to understand that uh but um when i asked you that question is um i belong to a research lab and i am always looking at bigger pipes low-cost um uh pipes with which can do a lot of data so i look at networks a lot i look at devices not necessarily only the smart devices i don't think smart devices smartphones will apply to the regions where you go what can we do on the non smart devices using voice using sms using other telepresence video if you have a low-cost video application um and so uh we did a few um from my experience uh i am very proud of putting a solar powered base station in namibia spent three months there and uh what we did is not only powered the cell phones with the extra storage it stored and harnessed power we actually powered the villages around it and uh that was something i'm very proud of and uh i i moved away from the project and moved away from the company but my passion still remains so thank you we have another hi um i have a phd in um structure function and proteins engineering um i have a faculty position at st joseph university of bay root and i do research in anti-hiv drug design so my question is too petty and because uh yeah of course we always need like technology to improve the house uh the quality of life in our countries also in labanon but concerning like when it comes to africa and aids i'm so passionate so i will skip this part and i will go directly to my question um uh are there any like m healths for infectious diseases and especially for aids in particular for example or other kinds of diseases yeah actually um hiv was one of the first areas to apply mobile technology to address it and probably has the largest amount of evidence to support that it's actually showing results so things like treatment adherence so because aids treatment is the sort of thing that you have to take systematically and routinely um enrolling people in reminder programs um is is a huge um is a huge piece of it also even just in mobilizing people to come in for testing for counseling um to just understand their status but we're also starting to see interesting uses of some of the social network capabilities of cell phones for support groups for people who are hiv positive emerging in environments like south africa where they now have more feature phones and smartphones than they do basic handsets because data is actually cheaper than voice or text messaging and so they're gaming the system in some ways but they're also getting higher capabilities through their um through their mobiles so i have another question but i hope you don't get me wrong so is it like you think it's better to give these people mobiles instead of giving them like access to therapies like if the therapy costs around six hundred dollars and an african man's salary is around a hundred dollars so it's like he'll never get to afford for himself or himself the multi therapy thing so it's better to give him a mobile and like to implement this awareness mentality or concept instead of giving him the therapy one and two is this working like the awareness thing or the awareness campaign is like really doing great job or is like is successful do you find like good results well we don't actually i mean i don't encourage people to distribute mobile phones particularly if you're looking at the general population just because it becomes a very expensive undertaking i think a lot of people have prioritized cell phones on their own so just really piggybacking on the technologies that they already have is sort of part of that in terms of behavior change that is one of the biggest challenge areas that we're currently facing where you have a lot of discussion a lot of hope that mobile technology is going to be able to change behaviors but very little data or evidence that it's actually working and so there are now a number of studies that are trying to look at the connection between not just the increase in knowledge as alex was was talking about earlier but what is it that it actually takes to engage people in healthier lifestyles and in preventative types of of activities and so that there are a number of studies that are ongoing right now but we're still there's still a big a big question mark and then back to the killer application i've actually thought of one for you if you can build security into the devices that would be huge and and and one of the biggest challenges that we're facing is is that a lot of the particularly for basic handsets there isn't security built in for transactions either via sms or via voice and it was in the united states actually that there was advocacy movements made that sort of pushed blackberry to create a secure blackberry system where now all of the blackberries are secure encrypted platforms and so that may actually be particularly on the health side where privacy and confidentiality and security issues are really important to to address we have okay now we have some more hands popping up let's start here in the front where's our mic runner not running a pair okay here we go and around and we'll so that's sorry all right hi iori salasi i'm one of the mentors here with tech women and i hear everyone on the panel reiterating that the real complexity is not the creation of technology but it's really the delivering that engagement i'm wondering if there are you know we talked about transparency a lot which is a very critical issue now what transparency do we currently have into these other countries such as middle eastern and north africa that would help us to as we're building these technologies to actually get them into the hands of the folks who are on the ground or are or are or those groups things that we need to also be involved in creating so you wouldn't have a thought on that well i think let me just offer one um you know the the civil if i understood your question correctly i think civil society groups you know let me just say there are a lot of myths about the middle east and north africa here in the united states if i can say one thing um and um and perhaps their myths in both directions but one of them is again just on the microfinance side people saying that you know how can you ever have a situation where women in in the in the middle east north africa will take up loans and will society accept that it turns out to be much easier to do that than in india um and uh and much less controversial and so that was kind of a uh and the other thing is that there are the civil society groups that can play this kind of trusted intermediary role they are there they may not be as widespread and is national or pan regional in scope is some of in some other regions but they're there and i think let's start leveraging the ones they're there um and then whether they're in microfinance or health whatever uh to uh to utilize some of these emerging technologies get them familiar with it get them uh and i think they'll you know this civil society sector will happen i think there's also just a in terms of transparency you know we've we because we want to create some transparency ourselves around the poverty reduction track record of our programs that are focused on livelihoods we created this tool called the progress out of poverty index that it's a 10 question survey based on census data and uh and we found that um you know some countries didn't want to give us that data without the data we can't build the tool and the transparency that comes and yet we in several cases after the arab spring when things were in this kind of chaotic situation we were able to you know utilizing our local partner to actually get the information that we were trying to get for six years and someone said oh sure it's right here just hand it over to us egypt was a great example so so i think there's there are probably some openings in terms of civil society organizations transparency that are there right now that weren't there two years ago but again i think that there's um there are a lot of opportunities that people that you know that year five years ago i would have missed to partner with with civil society groups and with emerging technology leaders that are in the region that i just don't think are on the radar screen and i think it's a really um it's a really great and important question and another opportunity i think to kind of to extend that this conversation out into the audience as well and to hear from you about what those barriers and what those challenges are and and i think that you would be the foremost experts on your region and be able to provide us with those insights as well so i i welcome the opportunity for others to to share their perspectives um yes let's move to you yeah you um on here in the front yeah hi i am maria moine from morocco and actually um i want to share an experience that i had uh i don't know if you know about imagine cap it's a program that is launched by microsoft's and um within that program uh we with with my team we developed a platform that we called smart vaccination actually it was uh it was supposed to uh to notify the parents about the vaccination uh meetings of their children and and to to to make some kind of uh smart calendar so that they can track vaccinations one of the issues that we found in really implementing this in morocco is one the infrastructure uh morocco we have some regions that are in the mountains uh it was a little bit challenging to make the the whole technology infrastructure even though we were we implemented a voice uh voice messaging system uh we still had a problem with decentralization of data for example uh we need the medical records to be uh moving with the user so for example if he goes from a city to a city we need that record to travel with him not only to say in that that little town so that was one of the first challenges the second one uh was more of a challenge like we um we run a little survey and we found out that parents in some regions are not very open to this idea of uh of having some kind of power that's how they that's how they label it like some authority telling them what to do with the with the health of their children like if they were they are not really taking care of their children or like if uh the old method was not working well so um really look forward to for you especially Alex to share with me your experience on the cultural side first and uh how did if ever you encountered technological aspects issues how did you uh for example how did you manage to get computers in the region did you find any founders for this or governments thank you sure well we can take a couple more any other comments and or questions yes maya and then we'll come over so here first and then we'll come to you thank you uh i am Farida Mansouri uh from Tunisia i am a tech woman i am the head of of department in ministry of agriculture so i will ask about farmers i am working in the organic farming so i think that if i want to ask a question if there is any possibility to have um a pilot uh zone in Tunisia and practice what you are doing in other countries uh we try to help our organic farming to uh farmer to have a market in Tunisia and outside so i uh i want to know if there is any possibility to do that thank you okay thank you and we have another question from the lady who just took a picture so uh patty i just wanted to tell you about something that might be helpful to you if you're looking for technology that tracks positive health behaviors there's a uh device called a fitbit i don't know if you've got one okay well i mean it's actually pretty nice they've got some it's got a good way of tracking things it seems to be relatively bulletproof uh it encourages good behaviors all around and it's incredibly easy to use so uh as a way of encouraging exercise and prosper diet which uh are next to sanitation probably some of those things that people need to do most so good start great okay and and then one last one and then we'll respond if if there are any responses yes ma'am hello hi um i just have a question i'm one of the tech women mentors my name is rika and the question i have is a couple actually um if we um as part of the engineering community um i also work with a non-profit um called design revolution they built product innovation designs um to make it affordable and the question is uh you have a really great think tank you have experiences of taking products and technologies to all these far off places and really understand what it means to deliver these technologies so um if if there are engineering um communities that needed to work with you what are the different models that you would work with and the second question is are there any win-wins with any you know like telecoms or enterprises that you look for what kind of win-wins have really worked you know for the non-profit side that would be okay and let's do on just the one last one and then we'll because we'll be we're having a wrap up soon so let's yes ma'am in the red jacket please or pink or i think that's and i'm from jordan uh actually i'm palestinian from jordan and i just want to just give you an idea i was raised in a camp so i was one of the poor people we're talking about and i want to give you like an idea now i i knew all my life that there was help coming from outside now the issues is that we did not see a lot of these we had but i think that i don't know exactly do you do you work with the government or with NGOs to find these people poor people till now i'm still like working with a lot of NGOs to go to these people and i feel that there's tells skeptical let's say about any help coming from outside they they think that there's like you know the conspiracy theory that the idea of people you know when you're poor you you don't you're not convinced that there are people helping without an agenda yeah so they are either they want something from us or they want to be like being like shown as they are good on account of us or they they are they they are taking like 90 percent of the money and they are giving us like 10 percent so i'm not sure i think that we you might be unique i don't know if you're like working with the locals to reach these people and working with one of them don't go to the that you know that people who's educated rich and with a good intent because as though they are good and they have good intention but they don't know exactly what these people need so you might you you need one of them to convince them that your intention are good thank you all right great so that is a lot for this panel to chew on and you know for the the final five minutes that we have before we break into refreshments i'm just going to i think take us down the line and allow you to address whichever of any or all of the questions and comments that have been made to your choosing and if you have any kind of final remark that you would like to make so this time let's start with alex and we'll move down to our dash sure um great a lot of great questions um you know when i was started working in the middle east north africa people said this is the land of conspiracy theories and i said and i said listen i've been working for six years in bangladesh uh and nothing will equate to that experience and i i think that um the truth of the matter is that that first of all having a local partner with us it's the Abdul Latif Jamil group who really understood the lay of the land that would take us 25 years uh was important and the other thing is just if you deliver value i think the conspiracy theories for most of the people tend to dissolve um the um a couple of things quickly in terms of just the the ecosystem if i understood your question right um you know to make these things work is ever changing complex it's not one simple entity whether it's a funder or not but we do feel that having a large scaling partner in co-creating from the beginning is very important we're a 25 million dollar organization we're not huge but by partnering with groups that are much much bigger it's a headache some of them tend to be a little bureaucratic no names um but but they're they can actually if they feel an ownership they can get something to scale in a way that we can't um in terms of if i understood your question of a win-win type of when we worked with ntn and uganda just i reminded in the early days they didn't extend their network out to a lot of uganda and so we made an investment in these kind of booster cables booster antennas that if cell phone could work outside of their network and it actually it cut those those uh people those business people micro entrepreneurs in on the early cell revolution uh made them kind of cutting-edge technologists in their community and it demonstrated to mtn that there was a market out there um that they could make money on that they didn't know before and it also was a good revenue source for us um so that's just one that comes to mind uh intro the community knowledge worker in tunisia i'd be happy to talk to you about it um and also put you in touch with our team in in dubai that um does that and just the last um two things we do have a program speaking of mentors and called bankers without borders but that is way beyond financial services it's we have a 10 000 person reserve core of technologists and financial sector people and management consultants we partner up uh for ways to work with poverty fighting organizations and so you can check that out uh and just last you know i think the question was here about is this replacing the drug therapy or whatever and i the way i think of it is that was kind of you said this is that the is well designed applications can really be an accelerator for not a replacement for drug therapies and also frontline staff whether they're agricultural extensionists or health workers they can be an enabler of them rather than a replacement of them and that's one thing we've had to underline in uganda we're not trying to put the agricultural extension service out of business we're trying to create a tool that can allow them to get more done and to manage the information more efficiently than they've been able to do up till now great i think um a couple of points that i wanted to pick up on um one is is the need for design and design thinking in a lot of this work so so i find myself you know engaged in for uh you know at the country level at the global level thinking to myself what we really need is a designer to come in and help facilitate some of these discussions um and facilitate processes across multiple stakeholders to identify you know going back to some of these win-wins um that can really benefit multiple people together but i think it's it's the the need is much more around the processes um than it is around the the particular technology and what you'll find when you start to engage in some of these processes and discussions is that a lot of the technologies already exist they're just not being systematically applied to address the types of problems that they could be addressed to apply and then the work that needs to happen to bring meaning into them is probably this much instead of sort of starting from scratch and trying to build something from um from the ground up and then just in terms of um looking at people at the the bottom of the pyramid and really engaging them i think one of where we work on a program called mama which is the mobile alliance from eternal action and uh and one of the challenges that we're facing is the the desire to be sustainable while trying to reach those who need the services the most um and and so even as late as a week ago you know we were sitting with the the major donors for this program to to clearly decide are we committed to reaching those who need to be reached or do we want to make sure that this program lasts longer and they came down on the side of meeting the needs of those that need the information most and and we do a lot of work with local partners um etc but it is that challenge where you know you're trying to look for economies of scale you're trying to look to see where are some of the emerging business models that are going to make this you know these efforts sustainable over time um and we're learning a lot as we go along so you know it's it's a time right now of great learning um and in in the next few years what we're you know and we're starting to see more and more are these very large-scale national uh efforts to uh deploy mobile technology in a systematic way with all the sort of support systems in place to to manage them going back to the last question around how do we kind of engage the people who are local maybe at the bottom of the pyramid and so on and that's precisely what we're trying to do it's not an easy thing to do because technology even if you give somebody a cell phone doesn't mean he or she is going to participate so lot of things need to happen before the technology can actually start it's kind of it's work so to speak right so building trust is a key component building like it's it's also a lot to with human behavioral change and change management as Alex was referring to you know I was met with somebody who does a lot of work around sanitation and he said there are many many examples where we build a lot of toilets but nobody uses it because it's not about the toilet that you know people have this notion that you build a toilet people start using it that's not the case it's about changing the behavior humans are used to certain behavior in certain patterns and it's not that easy to change same applies for technology intervention as well but the intention is because of the cell phone penetration we have the unique opportunity to listen to the ultimate end user ultimate beneficiary if you will and bring them early on so not only at just the service level whether you received water or food etc but early on into the policymaking process but that's a multiway conversation right it's not only about the people of the government you know you need other you know media needs to be played sport the civil societies they need to play it for the other non-profits and our foundations need to play that's a lot of these things obviously today's event we focused a lot on technology but it's the non-tech part that consumes most of the time when the technology actually kicks in going back to there's a question around when when they're on engine how do you leverage like that's another area we focus on like typically in the old days like World Bank used to talk to you know the policy guys or the economics and so on like we didn't talk to the software guys like that you know there are few people like me in the bank and growing but it's not like you know I'm not the typical World Bank guy so what we're trying to do is to say how can we engage the local technology community so they can participate in the local change management process one thing you realize that you know software developers as somebody said they all speak Java right so they're connected ubiquitously through the software language right so that's easy the other thing is oftentimes when I was into software development I said many years ago I know how to develop but I didn't know the problem I didn't understand the context so you have to bridge that gap so a lot of exciting you know young people like yourself I want to contribute to the society but they say I have the skills but I don't know how to use it so the question is then how do you bring the example of water hackathon is to bring this different groups together and give them defined problems to solve then they can use the skills to do it and obviously also focusing we're trying to emphasize more on the design thinking principles like think about the actual end users as I said in the old days we used to you know work with the governments and we often used to talk to them but now the question is how do we know that all the work all the aid all the lending that we do is actually making impact on the ground and therefore how do we listen better to the citizens so thanks yeah thank you I think you know I love that this event this portion of the event is wrapping up around a conversation about engaging communities on the ground understanding the end user understanding those who you know we're building these technologies for providing new interventions and access to and I think you know in the work that we've done on asset building and financial services we've we've learned a lot about the need to listen to the voices of those who we are creating interventions for and finding ways to do that more and better in these challenging environments in which you know we are we do have barriers in terms of resources that enable us to do that and so on and I and I hope and believe that technology is also going to be a great connector an increasing connector that's going to allow us greater access faster to those voices the ability to to hear them more clearly to understand them better and you know and I think that that is at the core of a lot of the proposals that we make both within the global assets project but also within a number of the initiatives the open technology institute here at at the new america foundation so I think it's a great place for us to perhaps wrap it up I see a burning question but we are over time um so I you have just it's 30 less than 30 seconds okay go ahead idea I don't know if you have this experience is um um to launch uh online classes for children in high mountains or with the limited mobility in one of emerging countries thank you great well so I won't go into all of that right now but I will say let's you know so great idea I love that you know we're still sparking ideas and more questions um we do have uh some refreshments outside for everyone and and a good half an hour or more of time for us to stay together continue to share um and have and continue this conversation so I'd love to thank our panelists um for joining us today and sharing their insights to the 41 tech women and all of their mentors the state department um OTI everyone who brought the event together it was very lively informative I am looking forward to this conversation continuing out in the hall and going forward and I just want to say um quickly coming back to what I mentioned at the beginning of the event that on Thursday it is the international day of the girl and that's on our heels and I I think that that's an important reminder to us of the opportunities ahead but the challenges that still exist to empowering girls so I'd like to just leave you all with that challenge um to uh to think about and to continue to think about the work that you're doing what you've learned through this experience with tech women and how it could impact the next generation as you go back to your respective countries um and what that's going to mean for the for the next generation of women leaders such as yourself so thank you please um enjoy your refreshments right outside the door and we'll all be around to continue the conversation thank you so much been a pleasure