The epochal mission of local innovators

By John Warnes, Innovation Officer (Connectivity for Refugees)

Over the past couple of years, I journeyed down to UNHCR’s branch office in Lilongwe, Malawi multiple times, working across projects from connectivity to community radio. The communities of Dzaleka refugee camp, approximately half an hour drive from Lilongwe, have been learning to create mobile apps and finally received their licenses to broadcast radio last year. More and more young refugees are aiming to undertake tertiary education courses as part of the promise education brings for a brighter future.

While there are a lot of young people taking up the courses, one of the most striking things to consider is how it all got started. Getting community buy-in and ownership is something of a holy grail for humanitarians looking to build out forward-thinking programmes with communities, particularly those that leverage new or even old technology.

In the case of Malawi, and countless others, it was primarily down to a small number of individuals; the aficionados. I’d define these aficionados as innovators who have been using technology in new and creative ways to support themselves and their community. These innovators are on their own epochal mission that I liken to the spacecraft known as Voyager 2 that recently crossed the neighbourhood of our solar system. The aficionados are extending exploration outside the known and this matters because it influences people beyond the small group who actually do it. They’re the ones at the edge of what a community is and bringing in new experiences, ideas, and technology that will make it evolve.

Sometimes technology gets singled out or siloed into something separate for the mainstay of society but actually, it is part of a broader technology adoption lifecycle, originally documented in Everret Roger’s diffusion of innovations theory. This theory outlines how new technologies get adopted by communities organically, with a small group of early adopters leading the way before broader adoption takes hold. For instance, at one point in the distant past — the wheel — was literally ground-breaking technology. Do you think the organizations of the day had bureaucratic hurdles to overcome in getting people using wheels? Were there dedicated wheel divisions or teams promoting the use of wheels? Unlikely. Rather there would have been a group of people who were the first to try and understand its relevance, and adopt it before it became mainstream, and champion it beyond.

Another example of aficionados and the important role they play would be for instance those who were investing time and effort on the internet prior to the dotcom bubble. They have become the founders of some of the biggest technology companies in the world, like Zuckerberg of Facebook or Brin/Page of Google, now Alphabet. Or at the very least will have led the way in their communities evolving around these new technologies.

This same diffusion theory applies across all societies, including refugee communities. Taking some terminology from Roger’s process, just like in any society there are a small number of refugees who have grown up with some of this technology, and whose curiosity has led them to experiment, explore and share. They are leading their communities in a society evolving to a dramatic technological shift that will bring them into the digital era and in time through the fourth industrial revolution and beyond.

Take Remy for instance, a refugee at Dzaleka camp in Malawi, whose story has been documented on the UNHCR web portal. The way that technology has impacted his world is paralleled much of mine (given my job and area of work no surprise that I began my internet life in the dial-up age rocking Netscape Navigator as my browser in the mid-90s). Remy is boosting his own knowledge and skills through his TakenoLab endeavour, which teaches coding to the community and provides avenues for them engaging with technology. He is supporting his community and filling life with things important to him through his engagement with technology.

Remy isn’t the only one. These aficionados exist in every community, and what is most fascinating is that their approaches, and activities no matter how few or small, often set the stage for more widespread adoption and advancement of technologies amongst populations for years to come.

All of this is also mirrored in global trends. According to the GSM Association (GSMA), the percentage of total smartphone connections in Sub-Saharan Africa will double from 34% to 68% by 2025. Aficionados like Remy are taking their approaches mainstream with ever-increasing numbers of community members wanting to learn more and adopt what the aficionados are championing.

The humanitarian journey since the advent of the connected age has been somewhat perilous. The nature of the challenges posed by technological evolution is only now starting to be systematically addressed, and there are still mountains to climb across the board. But if we look up we can see the path upwards. We can see a path trodden by the private sector, where startups have grown at phenomenal rates, and incumbents behemoths are forced to take extremely difficult decisions.

The aid sector and ecosystem haven’t evolved a great deal. Innovation, technology, and connectivity remain peripheral topics in a crowded space with many new work thematics jostling for position in a complex age. Frequently these are used as a vehicle for engaging with the private sector, read: accessing private sector funding/financing. And now, for some reason, articles like that above highlighting Remy’s story are still common. It is almost as though the sector is surprised that aficionados exist, or that societal evolution will occur through an amalgam of the private sector and humanitarian intervention, rather than communities themselves and those aficionados at the cutting edge.

UNHCR’s footprint of connected community centres in 2010 spanned only 24 centres across all operations. In hindsight, this doesn’t only seem limited in ambition, but also that such interventions will be somewhat ‘exclusive’. A 2013 evaluation of the project highlighted a number of challenges relating to the implementation of such centres in truly stimulating enhanced use of digital technologies and facilitating a cycle of diffusion into communities.

Now let’s rewind to the GSMA’s African Mobile Observatory report of 2011. This report states that in the five years prior to 2010 mobile penetration in Sub-Saharan increased from 15% to over 50%. These statistics demonstrate the gulf between the reality of what is happening in these societies and our reactions as a supportive humanitarian sector. The CTA intervention when transposed onto that trend of mobile penetration to me implies something inorganic i.e. not built out of the natural evolution many of these communities were going through in respect to ‘technology access’.

Given that the majority of humanitarian aid is provided to developing countries, the implications of these sort of statistics on the future delivery of humanitarian aid and development is profound. The aficionado’s today is the general population’s tomorrow and we are lagging behind.

The GSMA Mobile Economy Report 2018 outlines that the major trend facing the developing world is that “smartphone users will gradually transition to higher levels of engagement.” In addition, according to Ericsson (in its Mobility Report), global mobile data traffic will increase to 136 exabytes per month (136 billion gigabytes) by 2024, which is 1.3 times more than traffic today. The change is massive.

Furthermore, ideas around what connectivity means are continually shifting. Georgetown and Berkley academics Mayo, Macher, Ukhaneva and Woroch outline a redefinition of the universality of telecommunication services from household access (think Community Technology Access Centres) towards individual access across space and time.

Our understanding of these issues needs to evolve with the trends and if we want to realise our added value to the future of these societies as humanitarians our positioning in our strategies need to frame these appropriately, and our investment and support need to match this direction.

The Connecting Refugees report of 2016 was UNHCR’s first step in moving the needle to where it needed to be. Research undertaken by Accenture helped bust some myths around refugee phone usage and its importance and this has been widely cited by Broadband for Refugees, the GSMA and others. This was a much-needed update to some approaches that had been floating around for decades, like the Community Technology Access Centre. But even then we didn’t fully unpack future trends in this strategy. In fact, the word is mentioned once in the report. It states:

“Downward trends in the cost of devices and services, thus increasing refugees’ ability to afford connectivity over time.“

Essentially making everybody’s life easier. The fantastic thing about technology is that it is continuously evolving. The original Connecting Refugees report highlights percentage figures around refugees that were either ‘connected’ or ‘not connected’. The reality we’ve learned is a lot more nuanced than this implicit binary. Connectivity will continually evolve and what it means to people will continually evolve.

Due to decreasing costs of components and innovation taking place on an unprecedented scale within the industry, it is likely, that within the coming decades we’ll move towards universal connectivity.

But there are a number of other trends that have an impact on our strategy that weren’t covered in this report. And to understand them we don’t only head over to Silicon Valley and other western tech hubs, but we need to speak with the aficionados that exist where we are working.

We have reflected on this through a series of blog posts more recently that highlight some of the challenges, but also touch on emerging issues that are getting UNHCR and our operations to think about the strategic implications of some of these technological developments.

It’s clear with hindsight there was a mismatch between what UNHCR was trying to deploy as a solution at the time and the overarching societal shift that was taking place that was grounded in the adoption of connectivity by the unconnected en masse.

We have a responsibility to acknowledge trends and work cognisant of their evolving nature. We need to be more strategic in our approach and more adaptable to pivot as and when the direction shifts.

Humanitarian innovation practitioners are pretty guilty of being drawn to the buzzwords. Will blockchain help us make breakfast? Are drones going to repair my bicycles? The interventions around these nascent technologies have a slightly bizarre effect on the technology adoption lifecycle. Practitioners are starting to push back against this mantra and the (lack of) evidence they’re gathering speaks for itself.

The thing is, as humanitarian organizations we’re not the purveyors of technology solutions. We don’t design and build it, something that could be easily assumed when hearing the way some speak on the topic. Will we need to become an organization that has significant capacity for developing technology products in house? I think the verdict is still out on that one but regardless there’ll be an impetus for humanitarian organizations to invest more in staff who at the very least understand issues around technology adoption and bridging the digital divide from social, economic and anthropological standpoints, and not only technologically.

This is absolutely imperative when the future of our approach to technology will be significantly more integrated into our work. Commentators theorising about or employing information and communication technologies to tackle development problems (ICT4D practitioners) note the emergence of a ‘digital development’ paradigm that brings adoption of technologies closer to the mainstay of programming, activities, and approaches, rather than as a dedicated sub-area or field in itself. On this journey, we are at a critical fork in the road where those with a responsibility in humanitarian agencies for delivering ‘connected programming’ need to listen to the trends and pull the aficionados closer to humanitarian intervention. In some areas, humanitarian protection frameworks will manifest themselves digitally. In others, we’ll see synergies building with universal service mechanisms delivered through national telecommunications planning.

We are braced for intense market disruption in the connectivity space within a decade. It has been well documented that the satellite industry is being revitalized through the promise of cheaper spaceflight and cheaper satellites. Satellite connectivity — contra to that provided through ground-based mobile network operators will be more difficult for governments to control over. We’re seeing the technology, media and telecoms sector evolve in that network operators are expanding and diversifying their incomes streams. They are looking more closely than ever at security, Software as a Service, advertising, e-commerce, media and content but to name a few which will further disrupt.

I believe the Connectivity for Refugees initiative can play a supporting role throughout the technology adoption lifecycle but specifically at the start and the end of the cycle. UNHCR has a role in enabling aficionados and innovators to push the boundaries of how their communities are engaging with technology in ways that suit them. The restrictions refugees face whether accessing SIM cards legally or the other barriers like the cost of devices slow and sometimes halt technology adoption lifecycles. Our interventions through connectivity for refugees are designed to be a catalyst that supports this cycle. Likewise, at the end of the cycle, those on the other side of the digital divide, the slow adopters and those likely to be excluded often require support from non-commercial entities.

It is this reason why the Connectivity for Refugees initiative will be actively exploring these areas in 2019, not only how these areas will disrupt technologically, but across a number of different disciplines to see what impact this will have on our aficionados who are leading the charge locally.

We’ll look at developing our approach to addressing issues of digital risk when connectivity is provided or supported as part of an aid and development agenda, building off the ICRC’s recent report on Humanitarian Metadata. We’ll be looking at different types of challenges, from business models around device access to ways we can support aficionados in achieving their goals.

I don’t believe that the direction our humanitarian innovation needs to take is that of directing Silicon Valley’s latest and greatest to the communities we look to support. In all honesty, they don’t need our support with that. What we can do as humanitarians though is empower these aficionados and ensure that our interventions can map onto the broader societal trends we’re seeing — linking with that adoption lifecycle, and ensuring that our interventions are supporting these organic dynamics as opposed to running counter to them.

UNHCR Innovation Service wants to make sure that our Connectivity for Refugees initiative brings that futures thinking in its approach, working with refugee aficionados across the globe to help them push the boundaries of their and their communities’ adoption of ground-breaking technologies that will bring countless adventures with all their opportunities and risks. As humanitarians, our interventions need to give these aficionados the space to shine, rather than run counter to their aspirations for their community.

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