 to veer pretty pretty directly towards the longer term issues, right? I mean there was some differences of opinion on how we deal with countering extremism, on whether in fact, as Ivan said, it's even a useful vocabulary to be using, but there was almost a consensus around the importance of network expansion, delivery of long-term essential services. But Vikram also teed up a really important question around all that, which is you can't do all of it. How are we going to prioritize? And we have a terrific group of people here to give us a sense of what's working, where the challenges are, and where you think the added value, the priority, should be. So let me very quickly introduce our panelists and turn it over to them. Josh here, Josh Nesbitt, is the Executive Director of Frontline SMS Medic Coordinating Projects to help health workers communicate, coordinate patient care, and provide diagnostics using low-cost mobile technology. And I know you are currently advising on ICT projects in about 15 countries, including Haiti. So we've got lots of great experience here. Margaret, who I said earlier, Margaret Orrick has just returned yesterday from Kabul, where she works with USAID's DAI's IDEA program, improving the function of local economy value change for the elimination of opium production. And Margaret also brings a wealth of experience working in policy planning for development and health services. So she'll have a good perspective on the transformational role of cell phones at the village level, I understand, in coordinating village level services and enterprise. Siddhartha, who introduced himself, Siddhartha Raja, is a policy analyst with the Global ICT Department at the World Bank. He's our big picture telecoms guy, having just come back from that conference there in Kabul. And we want to hear what people are talking, we're talking about at the conference in Kabul. Get some fresh news on what they are struggling with, where their priorities are in Afghanistan. Merrick Schaefer, technical project coordinator, UNICEF's innovation team, utilizing cutting-edge technology and strategies, including mobile social networking to bring youth together and coordinate health services to pregnant mothers and infants in a number of countries. And also I understand you spend a lot of that time, you spend in Africa, you spend climbing the region's highest cliffs as well. So he's used to dangerous discussions like this. And Catrine, Catrine Furclas is the co-founder and editor of mobile active.org, coordinating a network of practitioners on mobile projects relating to governance, accountability, m-banking and political participation in emerging democracies. Really one of the earliest people who worked in this field. And so we are very, very lucky to have her huge experience in private and public IT management and online mobilization. Also a 2009 TED fellow, congratulations. All right, so let me follow the precedents of the previous panels and have the conversation opened by folks who have Afghanistan-specific experience to be talking about right now when it comes to service delivery via mobile. Margaret and Sid Hartha. And the question on the table, folks, is where do you see future opportunities for using mobile in to deliver these services? Why aren't we doing that already? What are the big challenges? And then have the rest of the panel respond when it comes to those challenges? All right, Margaret, let me go to you first. Like you know that I work for a USAID funded project called IDNU. And I'll just tell you quickly, we have a mobile based system now. It's a market information system, and it's a component of a wider agriculture project. So we have lots of demonstration farms. We have a radio show where we give ag extension information people can call in and ask questions. And then the other component of it is right now SMS based. And you can send an SMS and get the price of 25 different commodities in 11 different markets. It's all the major markets in Afghanistan and one in Peshawar in Pakistan. And recently, the two biggest problems we have had with our system were one illiteracy rates, people not using the system because they didn't understand it, even after training, even after demonstration demonstrations. And the other was a sustainability issue of a US funded project. So recently, we started a partnership actually with Roshan and Mercy Corps to address these two issues specifically. Right now, we're developing and this week, it should be completed a interactive voice response. So you can call up and it says, you know, for apples, press one, you press one, and then you can hear the price of apples and all the markets. And then it also addresses the second issue of sustainability through using a private provider, hopefully generating enough revenue, and, you know, being able to expand on a national platform. So that's our project. Welcome questions about it. And we just for usage rates, we get about 14 to 1500 SMSes on a biweekly basis. And it varies according to the season. So usually in fruit harvest seasons, we get more. And a lot of traders, we find use our system a lot more than farmers are actually using it. And I just I wanted to say I appreciated Nick Lockwood's comments about, you know, keeping things really simple and addressing just really, really basic and simple issues. And that's what we've tried to do with our system is is just get information to farmers about about commodity prices to help them, you know, I guess help them get better prices in the market for their products. Challenges you're facing? Well, I mean, the two biggest challenges are illiteracy and and the sustainability issue. The other issue is, is, you know, getting farmers, I guess, to to use the system and to understand it. And it takes a lot of in person reinforcement, you know, more than just one time. But, you know, get sort of getting farmers to understand what price information uses are for them and how they can benefit from it in the short term and over the long term. Thanks. I had a 52 slide presentation. Now just joking. But I do want to maybe run through just to give you an idea of the kind of work we're trying to do at the World Bank. As you know, the World Bank does not implement projects directly, we work through the government. And so our focus really has been on what we're calling mobile government or using mobile applications for service delivery and program management. So it's hard to really segment the panels. But really the first panel we talked about program management, where you want to supervise programs, you want to get money out into the field, you want to pay salaries, you want to verify that a beneficiary has received a service or an asset has been created where it's supposed to be. So we're trying to, on the one hand, do stuff like this. But we've talked about that earlier. So I won't go into much detail right now. I will focus a bit more on the service delivery aspect, which is of course the topic of conversation for this panel. To kind of reinforce a point that was made earlier, and I think must be reinforced repeatedly, is that mobile applications are not a silver bullet, right? They're not going to solve the world's problems. It's a tool. It's a great tool. It'll help expand service delivery. It will get information to people who never had information before, or were not receiving the right information. But it has to be backed up by solid government services at some level, physical access point, community service centers, birthing centers, whatever they might be. But there needs to be something at the back office that backs up the mobile phone. That cannot be the only solution here. However, in Afghanistan, things are just beginning. And I'm happy to tell you, in speaking of the workshop that we had last week on Tuesday, first of all, I will say one thing. In February, we had the first workshop on mobile applications for government. This was actually on liberation day. If you know the history of Afghanistan, this was the day of February 15th, when the Soviet army left Afghanistan. And it's a pretty big holiday. People showed up on the holiday, right? And attended a day-long workshop on this topic. And these were people from the government, from the mobile phone companies and so on. And I think this was really a kind of voting with their feet of how important they think this topic was. So just to reinforce and sort of to commend them on the high level of interest. And subsequently, we've had a series of discussions with various ministries across government. And in every case, there was a high level of interest in how they can use mobile telephones for a variety of service delivery, as well as program management purposes. A couple of interesting statistics just for everyone's benefit here. 52% of surveyed households, there were 4,000 households that the Asia Foundation surveyed in 2009. 52% of these had mobile phones, at least one mobile phone in them. And in rural areas, this number was about 44%. So today, at least surveys tend to show that there is widespread reach. And this is very encouraging. Even more encouraging. And I think Adam will also like the statistic if he hasn't all this, having got this already. 11% of Afghans surveyed by the Asia Foundation reported that they use SMS to get news and information about current events at least once a week. 11%, right? So this is also quite encouraging. It shows that there's a demand for information that even with the literacy problems and all the other issues that we're facing, 11% of people use the mobile phone to get news and information, especially by SMS. Now, in terms of the economic opportunity as well, which is, of course, very interesting when we think about economic development. As I mentioned earlier, we projected the market for mobile applications in all their forms could become something like $30 million in terms of revenues by 2015. This is, in Afghanistan, a significant amount of money. And this is a very, very conservative estimate. If you're familiar with the market in, for example, India, it's already crossed more than a billion dollars very, very quickly. And it's amazing what people pay money for, right? They pay money for ringtones and for astrology information. There's a joke in India that the things that make money are ABC, astrology, Bollywood and cricket. Right? So people spend a lot of money on this stuff. And the funny thing is in Afghanistan as well, even with very, very simple media services over the mobile phone, people are paying 10 apps a minute or something like 25 cents a minute to listen to music on their cell phones. Right? So this is, it's interesting. That shows that there's really demand out there for content. And hopefully we will have more sophisticated content in the future. Regarding the, regarding the kinds of possibilities, of course, we have one great example here of the agriculture information service that DAI has already been working on. But there are a couple of other services that we're thinking about implementing over the next couple of years. One of these, just to give you an example, is a health hotline service that will connect community midwives and community health workers. This is about 27,000 people across Afghanistan. Two specialists who are located typically in the five or six major cities. So the estimate, this is not a government estimate, this is a private estimate just to provide the disclaimer, suggests that there's about 200 OBGYNs across Afghanistan. And if anyone's familiar with this country, they know that maternal mortality and infant mortality are tremendously high. With just 200 OBGYNs, it's impossible to get them to serve rural areas, right? It might be therefore possible to at least have the community midwife or the community health worker get better information on a rapid response basis from these specialists who are located in the city. So this is something we're trying to figure out. There's a couple of rural development programs that the World Bank is very, very heavily involved in. And we're trying to figure out how we can use mentorship services over Twitter-like SMS systems for village-level entrepreneurs and village-level producers. There's a very interesting program called Mobile Movement Kenya, which did something similar in Kibera, which is a slum just outside Nairobi, where they connect these micro-entrepreneurs in Kibera with people on the internet who are willing to pay small amounts of money to support those micro-entrepreneurs or give them some kind of business advice. So maybe it's possible to do something similar in Afghanistan and shocken all of them into entrepreneurship. But coming to the challenges, I will just want to of course reiterate the sustainability question. As one government official told me there are too many pilots and too few planes. So we need to get beyond that. There's also the technical questions. There's also technical questions like handsets that are very simple that force us to stick to SMS and voice-based services, a very limited base of skills within the country in terms of applications development and even within the public sector to use IT strategically, or ICT strategically. And then when it comes to users, and I'll just end on this, there's really five different issues that need to need to be addressed. And I'm focusing on this because we've talked a lot about users. There's low literacy rates, which of course we can overcome through voice services, but still it's an impediment. There's limited access to mobile phones among women. And this is this is a huge issue, especially when you talk about things like maternal health, for example. There's limited use currently of non-voice services. People still in Afghanistan don't use SMS as much as they do in the other South Asian countries, for example. The fourth is the need to get intermediaries involved and get them to get subscribers onto the onto the service and to educate users on how they can use these applications. And finally, again, to repeat, there is a need for the back office. There's a need to, you know, respond to those complaints to respond to the to the demand for physical services. And so we need to really focus on this as well. And maybe just the last sentence I'll say is that the bank is in the process of considering how it can support the government in its moves towards ubiquitous government or mobile government. And we're thinking of, you know, a project and I can get into that in some more detail subsequently. But I know my time is up, so I've done it back to Sheth. Thank you all. So we heard a lot of World Banks looking at infant mortality program, I'm sorry, World Banks looking at programs to support midwives, programs in commercial, in commercial space where DAI already is. We heard lots of different ideas. Again, let me turn to our discussants here and say, you guys have a tremendous amount of experience between Katrin and Merrick and Josh in all of these areas. How do you, what sounds to you like it's got the most potential? How do you start to think about prioritizing among these things? Let me start at the end there with Katrin, no, we haven't heard from, if you don't mind. Sure, it's great to be at the end. Let me say one thing. There's been a lot that's been tried and I've kind of seen it all in the last five years. We actually have a new event called Fail, Fail, where we look at the projects that failed and what was learned from it and as was noted many pilots, many don't exist anymore and there's lessons to be learned there. The primary lesson I think that we, there's one coming to your town, Washington, D.C., July 26th at the bank, in fact, who is a partner in this and we'll be presenting some of the failures. Because this is such a fast moving field, I think we make a couple of wrong assumptions. One is that the penetration of mobile phones, we infer that because mobile phones are being adopted at such a rapid pace that development should happen equally as fast. Development is hard. Development is slow. Institution building and capacity building is slow and it's hard. The problem is not the technology. I don't even want to say the problem is the people because that's not true either. But I think all of us who are in this field and have done development work realize that the approach needs to be slightly different. And I say this with all love for technology because I do love it very ideally. It provides opportunities for a bunch of things. So the other thing I think that we see particularly in those fail fare events that we've done is that there is a absolute lack of user focus. We don't focus on the user. So many of you come up with great ideas and then wonder why people aren't coming. Which I think is where the private sector is really good at. Because if you don't have users, you don't make any money and you're gone. Development organizations don't really understand that. So a focus on users and where they're at whether that's with simple handsets, whether that's with voice services, you know all these questions that were being raised, please ask, go back and ask your users or your potential users. That said, let me tell you about three different projects that I thought were really interesting that I've personally been involved in. One is I'm really glad that you guys are adding IVR. One is a project that we just implemented in Zimbabwe and it's an audio news service that's of a political nature where we put up a very simple open source system with 24 outgoing lines for incoming lines where users ping the system or send an SMS and get a return call back with information about various news events, et cetera. And an information start-up environment, that's a really interesting proposition. It's been up for three days, received 3,000 calls and it's being promptly shut down partially by the powers that be because they don't really like it. So there's now 21 lines open. A few lines were shut down. So this whole notion of voice services, not just SMS, particularly for illiterate and multilingual population is really interesting. The service that we set up there was in three languages and you can choose from the outset what you want. So I applaud you that you're thinking about voice, which is what every phone can do. The second project, and I heard a lot about service delivery, that is broadcast. I heard very little about sort of incoming. The Crime Stopper program certainly is one, but it's an interactive medium. And so there's two ways in which to communicate. So we did a very interesting project with the UN, a new project under the Deputy Secretary General called UN Global Pulse, which was two things. One, mobile data collection through intermediaries, community health workers, or bottom up through people at large. We did an inventory of all of the projects that are out there. Who's doing what? There's hundreds of them, hundreds. Mobile funds are great for data collection, bottom up data collection. The second one was a 10 country mobile poll. It's not even a survey because it wasn't statistically significant, but it was an attempt to figure out how fast can you get sentiment data from people in various different regions. And we worked with partners and it was, you know, very interesting to see how fast you could actually get information with partners, through partners, from regular people on the street. So if you're trying to figure out, you know, what is the mood? What is the, what is the situation in a particular region? What are early warning symptoms? Right? How are you feeling about the economy? You know, are you able to feed your family better or worse than last year? Those were some of the questions we asked because UN Global Pulse is interested in, in vulnerability data. And so, you know, it's not necessarily statistically, you know, relevant or representative. However, it gives a sense of what is, you know, the same way that Ushahidi can give a sense of bottom-up data collection aggregated on a platform like Ushahidi can give a sense of what is the sentiment on the ground. So thinking about mobile communication as, as two-way. You know, I'll leave it at that because I, I see the nods. But I invite you to actually think about, you know, your users if I want to make a final point and, and find out where they're at and what they need. Yeah. Sure. So really great points. And I think that I'm going to echo something that we've heard all day long. And that's that we're talking about our tools and not solutions. And that means that we need to start with what we have and what we know. And very quickly, my background is in international health and bioethics. And Frontline SMS is a free and open source software platform that basically lets anyone with a laptop and a USB dongle coordinate large amounts of contacts and incoming and outgoing text messages do little manipulations like auto replies, auto forwards and whatnot and has been downloaded about 8,500 times by NGOs all over the world to do different work in different sectors. And Frontline SMS Medic is a non-profit focused on health care and we've implemented projects in 11 countries, mostly Sub-Saharan Africa, but also India, Bangladesh, Honduras and most recently Haiti. But getting back to what we do know, we do know that there are roughly 40,000 informal informal community health workers on the ground in Afghanistan. And we do know that roughly a quarter of children are dying before they're five. And we do know that maternal mortality has peaked numerous times in Afghanistan. And so there are very concrete needs on the ground. And part of what I wanted to do today was just to listen because I think that we have the most success in this field when the people who know the ground truth and our subject matter experts then come to the technologists and say, you know, what can we do now? And what can we do in three months? What can we do in six months and what's going to be ready in five years? So that's the first point I wanted to make. Second is when we're talking about service delivery, a lot of times what we're talking about is really how can we use these mobile tools to help you do what you already do, but do it better, more efficient, faster, with greater impact in reach and in certain contexts more safely. So that might mean just simple security alerts and coordination built on top of what you're already doing. Next, I wanted to say that in context, and we've lost some of the military folks, but a really good strategy from what I can tell is to win over a population by keeping them alive and healthy. Right? Absolutely, right? And I think that to be honest, what I've seen to make that happen is really local action and local actors. So the more that we can do to put the tools in the hands of those local actors, the better off we're going to be. Next, I wanted to sort of get us a little bit excited about the tech and contraining gives me a hard time for hype in mobile a lot, and I think rightly so, but I think that there are technologies that are sort of on the cusp. So we're seeing offline electronic medical records for patients that you can use anywhere you have a mobile signal. You're seeing really interesting online and offline mapping platforms with Ushuaidi and health map and managing news that I think are going to provide really smart platforms for public health officials as they're making decisions about disease burdens and resource allocation. We're going to see really smart supply chain monitoring. This is actually really low hanging fruit based on what we've seen in the last couple of years. Then there's the slightly crazier stuff, but I think it's coming quite soon. Really excited about the Swift River Project at Ushuaidi to help us manage large data streams. Robyn Rowe based out of Stanford is working on artificial intelligence and basically subword natural language processing so we can take large amounts of text messages sent free form in all different languages and auto categorize them based on learning algorithms. I think that sort of thing can, that linked into a network of 40,000 community health workers can really start to give both local actors and decision makers at the policy level the information they need. And then- It's that hype that's smart. Thanks. I think, thanks. So maybe a little bit of hype coming very soon is MMS based diagnostics. So built on top of the data connectivity once we're seeing MMS fly around, we're seeing really innovative groups in the US. Ida Gan Ozjan's group out of UCLA has basically figured out how to hack a $15 camera phone to do intercellular imaging. So you can slide a blood sample to the back of the phone, shine an LED on the sample and catch a holographic image, then transmit that by MMS. And the goal is for something to sit in our software and basically run a simple query, simple algorithm to compare that incoming image to a cell library and shoot back a diagnosis by SMS. So that'll take 10 seconds, cost about $0.15, and be done anywhere you can send an MMS. So there's that, there's diagnostics for all that's being paper-based diagnostics. So there are innovations that are exploding on top of this infrastructure and get me really excited because I think it's going to save a lot of lives. And I think sort of the last point again in the context of security is can we innovate faster and can a goal be to make people's lives better? All right, Josh. I'm not going to let you off the hook though. You've got all these options out there, all this wonderful cool whizbang technology. We've been sitting here all morning talking about making sure the solutions fit the problems. What's the one piece you would say to Vikram if you were sitting here or anyone else, the European Union, this should happen now. Yeah. OK, so I'm not the right person to come up with that need. I think put me on a plane or give me a Skype call with 50 physicians on the ground in Afghanistan and I'll have a much better answer. But I think that it's really low hanging fruit like patient tracking, making sure that patients that have entered care at some point continue to remain in care and in the system. That can be accomplished with a couple of text messages flying around and linking into pre-established social networks and is really low hanging fruit. And you've seen that happen in lots of other places. All right, Merrick, let's bring us home. Hello. So I'm part of the UNICEF Innovation Group. We started about two and a half years ago and we had a director that let us fail. And that was the only reason we succeeded at anything at all. And it was quite a blessing, especially in the UN context. Most of the failures have been safely swept under the rug, except for when we exposed them that things like fail fair and dramatic and hopefully learning the environment sort of way. It's a safe environment. Safe environment, yeah. So I basically agree a lot with what the other people who have done practitioner level work, I have to say. I myself spent the last few months in Zambia working inside health clinics in the middle of nowhere with minimal connectivity, trying to understand what the needs were from that perspective. And so I'd like, I think, to speak a little bit about sort of the inside, the guts of how to think about one of these projects to make it successful. I think that the problems do, as Josh eloquently stated, have to come from the people who have them. They can't come from us sitting in this room here. And the conversations need to be, you need to have conversations to arrive at those problems. Now, you can't pick sectors. You should maybe pick health and maybe you should pick clinics. You know, that's a place where there's a lot of opportunities. And before I mentioned target audiences, so people who have phones and know how to use them or can be trained to use them. And you can leverage them to access tons of people who don't have phones. And I think that's one of the things that people often misthink is that, oh, someone has to have a phone to receive the benefit of a phone service. And this isn't true at all. In fact, we were working with a lot of clinics. They don't even have mobile wireless coverage. But the people working in those clinics walk every week to the bone of the business area and the regions I work in with their phones to communicate with friends and family. And they can then interact with our systems asynchronously to get health data and pass it back and forth. So you even have to have coverage to address some of these issues. You have to understand the problem of the people on the ground. So that being said, I think that the question needs to be reversed. It doesn't need to be what can mobile technologies do for us. It should be what are the problems where mobile technologies are appropriate. And so, for example, our last project, we sat down with about 50 health workers from three districts in the far north of Zambia where there's no electricity and very little coverage. And we had them do gap analysis on what services they were providing to their communities, what they were doing well, what they weren't doing well. First thing everyone came up with was we need ambulances, we need doctors. And we said, yes, you do. However, we don't have the budget for that. What can we do with those sort of limited resources budgets that we have? And they basically identified about 13 areas that were like fundable, small, real-world interventions, health interventions in the clinic context where they could provide value to their communities that were mattered to them. Then we stepped in and we looked at that list and we said, where does mobile fit in this context? And we were able to identify about 10 areas that we thought and we prioritized those down to three and we ended up building out two in a very iterative fashion working from inside the clinics. Well, we were at a hotel on the street but we'd go to the clinics like almost every other day with a little bit of working software and what's known as Agile software development and people play with it and try it and give us advice. And we started off going in this direction. This is after reading the gap analysis and thinking it through. We started going this direction and we swerved like this and ended up with sort of a very different project and product at the end. And I think it takes that kind of you if you want to have an impact and you want to have something that matters to people and can influence their decision at a propaganda level, you have to develop a service that matters to them and to do that you need to engage with the user in a way that isn't just focus group or a survey or I read a case study somewhere. You actually have to get your hands dirty. And so if you do have a huge amount of money because this takes money and it takes time to do this maybe the investment should really be in getting people invested in the places where the problems are and then you can then have people on the outside help build the technological components or help build the network components to support that. But it's really about what is the problem that's relevant to the person and who has it. Let me add two things and we already do a lot of this. The bank is right now in the process of trying to figure out how to fund mobile innovation labs in Sub-Saharan Africa. Okay, put one in every country or 10, right? Working with local schools, universities, small and medium sized enterprise is what makes economies to your earlier point, mobile technology, fastest going technology build that kind of capacity. Ivan came back from a trip to Afghanistan looking at media organizations there. They're, as was noted, people are hungry for media. What's the delivery vehicle? The communication vehicle? Available mobile phones. So how can we strengthen media organizations so that the person who's on that, who was that? The elected official or the government district who's on the radio? Okay, we have Twitter here. How about SMS text and service for every radio station in Afghanistan so that when there's people on the radio, they can actually interact with the audience in real time? So those are the kinds of things that are being done. They're, it is to some extent not super rocket science and I would look to the people who are doing hard work on the ground. I wish Ivan had said more about this. Actually, in some of your findings, but to look at the kinds of leverage points that Mary was talking about, that are, that build that mosaic piece by piece by piece by piece looking at what is already there and what people really want. And I think that a key piece of that is addresses design solutions that can scale, that are not dependent upon donations of text messages, that are not dependent upon donations of phones or infrastructure that doesn't exist. And also design things in a sustainable way in the sense of bring local people into book the design process at the conceptual level, the issues of health, local officials, as well as the people building the technology. We always try to hire local software developers. They don't know the languages we program in and it doesn't matter. By the end of the project, they've learned a new software development language, they've learned a new way of working and they've actually built the software with us. When we walk away, they fix it, they build it and they take on and do other projects with it. All right, if there's one message that's coming through now and clear here, it's start with the problem, identify the right problems and we have lots of Afghanistan expertise around this table. As Katrina pointed out, Ivan has just been out there. We have Sheinar who's just over from Kabul. Adam, I know you've tried a number of these things at the district level in Afghanistan and Nick has spent plenty of time out there. So let's talk about the problems. Let's talk about what you found first of all, Ivan, when you were out there and then we'll go over to Eric. Well, I mean, linking SMS and mobile technology into mass communications is something that's been happening in Afghanistan since probably 2005. Many of you probably saw the documentary Afghan Star about Tola TV's Colin, Talent Show, which was based on SMS texting and that was the most visible early example, though there were lots of others and almost every mass media outlet that has, most of them now actually have SMS texting as far as I know that they both have Colin programs and they have the opportunity to ask people to text in information and so on and so forth. I know that many radio stations in Afghanistan use the frontline SMS platform. So this is a progression of engagement that's been occurring for quite a few years and if all of us focused on the user and focused on Afghan experience and asking Afghans what it is that they want rather than trying to impose a viewpoint or impose a solution, I think maybe there might not even be a war. I mean, that may be a little bit radical for me to say, but, you know. I'm all for that. One other idea here, which is that we often have in the development space an obsession with scaling and for certain projects and certain ideas, big is good, absolutely. For a certain large, if you're talking about revising or building an entire educational system, for instance, and you certainly do need large strategic issues that need to be involved, but one of the nice things about networks is that you can have lots of small networks with lots of local people doing lots of things for relatively small communities and sometimes that's a really good thing. Sometimes networks don't need to scale. They can be focused on a particular problem for a particular context and so, and maybe they're replicable in other places but I would urge some humility on that side, and if something doesn't grow beyond a certain size, throwing money at it to try to make it grow is probably not a good idea. Maybe that's where it should live and I'll stop there. Eric, you had somebody you wanna say? Yeah, if you're gonna be building these, you need to be very technical and this is something you can outsource. Technical partners are valuable, yeah, but you actually need to start building up really in-house technical expertise and they're just simply the majority of NGOs operating on the ground right now that are trying to tackle some of these questions do not have the technical depth to be able to take advantage of the actual technology. It is nice to see groups like UNICEF that have invested in creating a dedicated tech team internally. If you silo your tech and outsource it, you're just not gonna be able to get the wins out of it. Is that say we should be investing a lot more in technical training in country? Is that what you're trying to say? That too, but also in DC. No, like, okay, so maps, like this is a room full of map lovers, just I'm sure. How many of these NGOs are actually able to put their projects on the map? Like can actually just work with some basic GIS data? Like I managed to get out of grad school without ever opening something like ARC. Like I've only learned this in the last couple years. Like this is starting to get really silly that so many of us are able to be tackling some serious problems without having basic competencies. You know, you look back 20 years ago and certain managers were not properly able, maybe 20 years ago is a little too long. But you know, certain managers were not able to actually use an Excel spreadsheet or actually be proficient in a computer. Some of the problems that we're talking about trying to solve actually require a certain level of proficiency. And if you don't have this on your team, you're just gonna be cut up the knees here. I'd like to add on to that. I mean, structure so that they can make things better all the time. I mean, I really, you can find an infinite number of people, contractors who are willing to sell you these services. I have to admit to having been in the contracting consultancy community for about seven years at one point will sell you anything. But if you really want to end up with these tailored solutions to something, you need at least a few people in-house. You really know what they're talking about and how to manipulate this stuff or you can't get tailored to words. It's actually delivered to your client. No, exactly. And then back to Sheldon, your point about in-country expertise, yes. And the only way to actually have real in-country expertise that is technical is to actually work with open source software where people can actually put their hands in code. It's already oftentimes more superior and more secure. You start throwing in the sustainability factor. It just needs to be better reflected in proposals. Sheldon? I think that, you know, a lot of stuff is going on and a lot of organizations that are on the ground are talking to the people on the ground. And let me just try and explain what I mean by that. You know, here's telemedicine. I mean, telemedicine started because in my role, I went and visited hospitals and they've got MRI machines, X-ray machines, and they're collecting dust. They don't have power to operate it. They don't have the expertise to operate it and they get it donated. So how do you address that issue? Security's a problem. Language is a problem. How do you get doctors, trainers on the ground to teach people? That's expensive. So you sit there and you say, okay, the medical experts know this, the ministry knows this and can facilitate certain things and the technology partner knows this. Let's put together everybody and come up with a program that helps. Now, telemedicine was put together to get e-consultation, teleradiology because radiology was lacking and e-learning. And now after three years looking at the numbers, we have seen the spike in the capacity that's been built as a result and this has now expanded to Bamiyan and Faizabad and we're looking at roving ambulance spikes which have a carp for an ambulance that have an embedded mobile phone which is a public call phone, a public call office and a cash-in, cash-out point so that there's a revenue generation model but rural villages can have these bikes and move around. Now, you're creating jobs, you're dealing with a health problem, you're helping the health community and NGOs deliver what they need to deliver but you're using their expertise for what they do best. You're not getting them to write the technology or think up the business plan or get it financed. And I think this is where some of the frustration exists with people on the ground because so much money goes into a variety of initiatives whereas if people could really sit around the table and consolidate some of this so that people working in the health sector were focused, people working in the farming sector were focused, people working in the financial sector were focused, then we could leverage everything we have to actually deliver impact. If we look at the results of something like telemedicine and one laptop per child where Afghan curriculum is now digitized and Afghan kids are getting computers, we can show the impact. Why can't we roll it out? Because as one private organization with a government that has very little funds and the ability to access funds from agencies is three to one because we're a private sector entity. So if I go to Adam, I have to put up three times the money and he'll give me one if I'm lucky. I'm very nice Ed and you should give me one. I'll give him only one. Oh, put that on record. So I think the point here is that it would really help if the right people came around the table and we could really focus and deliver some of the things that are working rather than duplicating and starting. Maybe you need a mobile summit for development in Kabul or somewhere else. Yeah, I mean, look at Malamat. We started tradenet.com, which was market prices for farmers. You know, USAID came along with idea, a new idea and basically there were two systems working parallel. So we sat down. Yeah, we sat down together and we put it together. So we're paying for IVR, we're paying for an upgrade of the platform with them with Mercy Corps and now we'll have one service that looks at everything and a greater impact. So I think that's really critically one of the challenges. Oh, I would argue that we're still in this phase where a thousand flowers can bloom, right? Where different attempts can be made at different things as long as they are communication about what are we learning? How can we, you know, leverage each other's platforms? How can we leverage each other's networks? How can we leverage certainly? Yeah, I think the mosaic is so complicated. You see, you've got some decision makers in the field. You've got some policymakers here in Washington. You've got private sector, some that are interested in development as well as profit, others that are purely interested in getting as much profit and nothing wrong with that and taking it out of the country and you need to get, you know, some of these people round the table and really think about what's happening on the ground. We really need to get out of the urgent fix crisis management mindset. And so when I hear, and I'm sorry, I wish Vikram were still here, but when I hear that we have to have, if we could only find the one thing that leverages a solution, I just, I want to say we just need to, maybe we need to slow down on some of that because the considered approaches, it might be a little bit slower up front, but we'll end up with a vastly better solution. Well, we don't have Vikram here, but we do have Adam here who struggles with these questions all the time within USAID. Adam, any thoughts? Adam works for OTI, who has only had a short-term mandate and he just doesn't know what to say. I know, I'll try to do that. And he's promised me all his budget. There you go. Not that I have a budget. I'm an advisor and don't actually control any funds at all, which is part of the reason I could make that quip. Afghanistan presents, I think Afghanistan presents a significant conundrum here. I mean, there are clearly long-term needs that are desperate and that have relevance to the immediate. That said, there are also immediate needs and very pressing concerns right now, both of a developmental nature but also of a political nature that require very quick and cogent and focused action. We aren't in a place where we can divorce ourselves from one or the other. We have to deal with both. And the best approach that I can think of, and this is one that I try to take on in the way that I go about the things that I consider as being reasonable and relevant and worth doing, is how do we respond to that immediate with our eye on the medium and longer term so that we aren't necessarily making our lives worse later but potentially also improving the ground for further development later. And it requires, I think this particular environment requires you have to be willing to fail. You have to be able to experiment. You have to be able to see things as they are and engage in it as targeted in a specific way as possible, making room for good things to either come about or good opportunities to emerge that you can then act on later. And OTI has underwritten private entities. We gave money to the Massenis, wrote them a check. Now there's TOLO TV and Arman FM. Arguably the strongest single media player in Afghanistan to date, and the pioneer in Afghanistan, a bunch of this other technology. Roshan partners with them. Roshan is everywhere. Right. And there are now a dozen television stations in Kabul that are providing information to the Afghan public. So you figure out what your best play is here and then you try to figure out how you're gonna make that impact the future. All right, we are at the end of time here. Is there anybody out there who has a burning question for the panel before we close out? And Anand, is there anybody online? Any conversation online that you could share with us here? Give us a final thought. Yeah, there's been some interesting talk, especially based on Siddhartha's comment about a particular part of the audience that we're trying to engage, which is women. And what are the programs that are being used if at all? Is that a gap that we're really failing to fill? There's a lot of concern about that. I think that's probably the most burning question online. I have an interesting anecdote on this. I was sitting with some field workers who are involved in what the bank calls the poultry program component of the Hottie Culture and Livestock Program, which is under the Ministry of Agriculture Irrigation and Livestock. Let's talk about long titles. And we were talking about a market price information system and how this might work and so on. And they said, well, you know, the computer has to be a woman. And I was trying to understand what that meant. And of course, I understood what they were trying to say, but I didn't understand the whole computer must be a woman thing. And basically, the explanation was that obviously, as all the beneficiaries of the poultry program are women, they can only receive messages from women. And receiving a message from anything that seems remotely like a man, like a computer, I guess, hell, 2000 or whatever, will of course be frowned upon and may result in God knows what. And so we decided to come up with an interesting name for this, which is the Hand Information Network of Afghanistan, or Hina. All right, and on that note, I think, you know, we've talked about, there's been great ideation here around innovation, but really grounded in practicality and the challenges of working in Afghanistan. If there's one big idea that seems to have kind of taken on a life of its own across the day, it is, seems to me, that we should be having a conversation just like this in Kabul. I think that seems to be a really strong push. Anybody on the panel disagree? I know you've just had something like that, so. No, I was actually gonna say that, not that I can fund this thing, but I'd be happy to have organized it. Good. So I don't know if mobile apps- That's not what we wanted to hear. We wanted to hear the funding part. No. If you can make me the check, I don't mind. We don't do panels. No, but if you wanna get together for a summit, which you suggested, then I'd be happy to work with you on that. We have a little more interactive event than that. Any other thoughts on that idea of- How about a mobile bar camp? At the Taj. Sorry. Well, let me just tell you what we're gonna do is, we're going to sort through this discussion. We are going to post the entire video archives online. It'll be on usip.org. We will also be culling kind of the good ideas and creating a key takeaways document that we will make available to everyone. In the hopes of the idea here is to help influence future decisions in policymaking, prioritizing around funding and so forth. And there have been lots of really interesting thoughts here. So we'll be out there for anyone to access and you'll be able to reach out to any of the panelists after that. Before you all leave, let me just say one thing. I wanna thank all of you for being such a great audience. My dad was a school teacher. He used to say that the key to a really good meeting is the audience listens, the speakers deliver useful information. The audience listens carefully and we both finish our jobs at the same time. And I think we've sort of met that bar here. But a meeting like this doesn't happen without a lot of people who are behind the scenes and I wanna make sure to call them out. The USIP staffers here of Tyler Peterson and Gerard and Christopher New who's hanging out there behind the glass. And last but not least, Anand Varghese who's been kind of the point man on today. I promise you these are the hardest working guys I also want to again thank our co-sponsors, Nick and Tech Change, UN mandated University of Peace, the NDU, Mobile Accord, James Eberhardt and I think I've included them all. So thank you again. Let me now declare the meeting officially adjourned. Appreciate you. Thank you.