Israeli Hackers with a Conscience - by Caylee Talpert

Tel Aviv hackathon aims to show that technology can help the world's poorest people - and make a profit.

(This Op-ed was published in the Haaretz on November 14th: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.557942)

When you look at a satellite map of the world at night, you are struck by the vast contrast between the “developed world” with its brightly light skyscrapers and “the rest”, the developing world that largely remains in darkness. There, people live without access to energy to light up their homes, warm themselves in winter or cook for their families. The astute businessman would recognise that such a disparity must represent an opportunity, a vast undeserved market with limitless growth potential.

Increasingly, forward thinking businessmen and multinational companies are doing just that and beginning to notice that perhaps as the late business thinker C.K. Prahalad predicted there may be a “fortune to be made at the Bottom of the Pyramid” (BoP), the term that has come to refer to the economic segment of the world’s poorest people. These people - who live on less than $2.5 a day - comprise nearly half the world’s 7.1 billion people, a market estimated at having a purchasing power parity of over $5 trillion.

But even once a potentially huge market of consumers has been identified, it doesn't necessarily flow that businesses schooled in developed world markets can simply replicate their products and strategies in a very different environment. There's no “business as usual” in this field: Indeed, unmet needs can’t automatically be equated with ‘demand’ in the way the developed world sees it. Serving these markets means that innovative business models as well as technologies are often a pre-requisite for success.

How do you manage distribution channels that are based on thousands of micro-entrepreneurs to reach “last mile” villages in rural areas? How do you convince communities that have been drinking from the same well for generations that if they were to buy water purifiers their children would no longer suffer from diarrhoea? How do you partner with NGOs or use micro-financing to increase the affordability of your products?

Last month’s BoP Summit at Michigan University brought together 200 business leaders, academics, impact investors, social entrepreneurs and international development practitioners to discuss what has worked and what hasn't when building scalable and sustainable developing world businesses and how to use this experience for the next decade.

Now it's Tel Aviv's turn to turn its technological talents to the developing world. 150 developers, business and international development professionals will be coming together today and tomorrow to 'Develop apps for the developing world' at the Dev4Dev Cleanweb Hackathon.

The hackathon, organised by the IsraelDev Network (a grassroots movement of young entrepreneurs dedicated to the developing world, supported by the Pears Program for Innovation and International Development) and Terralab Ventures. Terralab Ventures aims to expose Israel’s business and technological community to the opportunities both to make profit and create social impact in the developing world. The challenge for the teams of Israeli hackers will be to find ways to produce low margin, high volume technologies – the exact opposite of the aims of most Israeli innovations.

On the developer side, this 'frugal innovation' means learning to innovate without all the gizmos and gadgets that the latest iPhone 5 provides. The hackathon will kick-off with a workshop on innovation for feature phones, the basic version of smartphones, which comprise around 70 percent of mobile phones sold worldwide and are the primary source of connectivity for the majority of the developing world. On the business side teams will have to think of business models that make their products accessible and desirable to people with low individual/personal spending power.

More than 25 specific challenges for the Hackathon have been submitted from Africa, Asia And Latin America, from applications that provide advice on basic nutrition, disease or family planning (submitted by fieldworkers in Tanzania and Malawi) to a simple translation device for fairtrade growers in India.

The teams working on these challenges are made up of experienced “techies”, business development and seasoned international development professionals. Already we have seen a merger between the “Start-Up Farm” team, looking to create out-of-the-box farm kits for small-holder farmers that will be paid for in instalments through cell phones, with the “Aquaponics App team”, a team of developers working on an app to teach farmers how to use waste produced by fish to grow agricultural produce. Another team will be flying in all the way from Ghana and will be working on a patient drug and monitoring application while also learning more about the Israeli entrepreneurial eco-system during their visit.

While these initiatives may be new to Israelis, innovating for Bottom of the Pyramid markets is something that is growing steadily elsewhere in the western world, where companies such as General Electric, Procter and Gamble, Google and IBM recognize that demographics and growth rates mean they have to grapple with these markets' needs. Leading aid agencies have also began to recognise that market- based solutions offer the best opportunity for achieving sustainable impact and scale.

As the overwhelming positive response to this hackathon has demonstrated, the BoP buzz is starting to spread in Israel.

Israel's technology sector and recognised expertise in the fields of water, renewable energy, health and agricultural technologies is well suited for working at the Base of the Pyramid. These new markets could offer Israeli start-ups and companies immense opportunities if they can adapt to the appropriate technologies for these markets and if they can develop the new business models necessary to successfully serve poor customers in these countries.

Slowly we are working to build the infrastructure in Israel that supports and promotes Israeli businesses working at the BoP in developing countries. Hopefully, when the time comes to host the next decade’s Global BoP Summit, successful Israeli entrepreneurs will proudly occupy a healthy share of the seats on the stage.

Caylee Talpert works at the Pears Innovation and International Development Program at Tel Aviv University. She recently returned from the BoP Summit in Michigan and is one of the co-organisers for the Dev4DevCleanweb Hackathon which is being held at the Google Tel Aviv Campus.

The Pears Innovation for Development Challenge based at the Hartog School of Government and Policy at Tel Aviv University will be launched in March 2014 to provide mentoring and support to ventures focussing on the developing world.

Imagining a Successful DevTech Industry - by Gaddy Weissman

Creating a new industry is never an easy proposition. Part of the work is building a tangible vision that people can ascribe to. I was thinking about this in a recent conversation with a founder of a great Israeli start-up who compared his work with that of friends in high-tech.  When Israeli high-tech start-ups need strategic partners, Silicon Valley is next door.  Google, Apple, Microsoft, HP, eBay, IBM and many more are just up the street in Herzliya, Tel-Aviv, Petach Tikva, and if you need to go really far, Raanana. 

DevTech entrepreneurs don't have it so easy. The Gates Foundation has given out prizes here, like this one for malaria diagnosis, but there is no R&D center like Microsoft's in Herliya. The large development aid consulting firms don't have back-offices in the holy land. Corporate titans and minnows are only slowly discovering the start-up nation.

He's right, but things are beginning to change. TATA invested in TAU's Ramot TTO. The IFC just invested in Kaiima. At WATEC, a number of integrators focused specifically on addressing the challenges faced by developing countries were in attendance. From Global Health to Food Security, the biggest NGOs and MNCs are dipping their toes in Israel.      

In 10 years, when we've succeeded, there will be hundreds of start-ups focused on DevTech, and the biggest names in International Development will have innovation labs, venture operations, and technology scouts in Israel. 

Branding the “Unbrandable” - by Elana Kaminka

How do you brand listening and complexity?

Hey, why don’t YOU change…...

The question of how to motivate people to change is one that philosophers as well as practitioners from a variety of disciplines have been battling with for centuries. History has shown how resistance to new ideas and technology can cause both individuals and entire communities to perpetuate self-inflicted disaster. In the developing world, this tendency can have particularly harsh consequences. In her book “However Long the Night”, Molly Melching describes her campaign to convince rural Senegalese women to abandon the deeply-ingrained tradition of female genital mutilation that leads to the death of thousands of girls every year, in addition to immeasurable human suffering. Rather than addressing the issue, which was strictly taboo, her staff began working with a group of women in an isolated village on issues such as empowerment, health education, literacy, and human rights awareness.  Only after several months in the village, during which they were able to establish a true rapport with the women and gain their trust, did the staff broach the loaded topic of genital cutting. Surprisingly, after several discussions on the dangers of the practice, and after involving a Muslim cleric who was able to confirm that the practice was not mandated by Islam, the women agreed not only to cease cutting their own daughters, but to come out publicly against the practice.

Why was Tostan able to change deeply-entrenched behavior patterns in the community? Why was this intervention successful when so many others failed? One of the reasons, if not THE reason, was that Tostan took the time to create relationships, listen to and empower the community in its entirety, rather than focusing on the specific problem or outcome. One of the women in the first group that decided to speak out said “Nothing would have changed were it not for our new understanding of human rights and a discussion of our responsibilities in relation to those rights. There was no going back after that. It was this knowledge that made us confident in our right to choose for ourselves what happens to our bodies, to preserve our bodies as they are without changes. And we feel confident we can defend this decision if necessary.”

We’re addicted to the Quick-Fix…...

The Western world, which funds almost all development projects, loves the idea of a quick-fix. We love the thought that with the right innovation, technology and media, we can (and should) immediately change the way people think and fix problems that have developed over centuries, if not thousands of years. Our own cultural norms lead us to look for cost effectiveness, speed, clear work plans and pre-determined measures of success in everything we do, including in the complex world of development. Melching describes the problems,“It seemed that many development officers arrived with a clear plan of what they wanted to accomplish and the results they desired without ever asking the villagers if they shared these goals. To make matter worse, most development projects did not include a basic education program the communities needed to effectively manage the projects once the so-called experts left. without the knowledge of how to sustain the projects, they lay dormant, and years later, when representatives of the organizations returned, they would discover rusty vehicles, broken-down millet grinders and pumps, and nonfunctional health centers.”

Melching isn’t the only development professional trying to change this tendency. Tevel is currently phasing out its work in the Mahadev Besi village in the Dhading district of Nepal, where we have had local staff and international volunteers on the ground since 2009. Our work focused on members of the Danuwar Rai, an ethnic group that traditionally settled on the banks of rivers and fished to make a living. For hundreds of years they preserved a unique culture, language and tradition. All that has changed in the past 50 years as the river dried up due to climate change and was re-routed due to the stone quarries built in its path. “Our grandparents used to support themselves solely from fishing”, one villager told the Tevel staff. “Now there are no more fish. We have no way to support ourselves.” When Tevel arrived in the area, the majority of villagers were doing harsh manual labor breaking stones into gravel. The crushed rocks they produced were sold by middlemen to create construction materials. Many community members were malnourished, and children were forced to leave school in order to help support their families.

Helping the community achieve its own goals…

One of the first things that the Tevel staff noticed in Mahdav Besi, was that the Danuwar Rai had land, but it was only being used to grow one crop of rice a year. In initial dialogue with the community, its leaders expressed an interest in learning better ways to utilize their land and increase their yield. Therefore one of the first interventions was to create a demonstration farm, supported by the Israeli Embassy and Mashav, where farmers were introduced to new crops and taught organic methods to expand their yield. The farm wasn’t created by Tevel. Rather the international staff used the project to catalyze the entire community into action - local staff, international volunteers and community members working side by side on the project. Tevel also placed an agricultural expert in the community full-time to lead the training and help farmers implement new methods in their own fields. The work in the demonstration farm was supplemented by the introduction of an irrigation system, a bio-gas technology project and improved cow sheds for clean cooking gas and compost. Tevel also worked with the village’s women, youth and children in women’s groups, youth groups, child clubs and schools to strengthen community leadership and empowerment and create community mechanism to manage the projects.

Community-lead Success

Now, less than four years later, the Danuwar Rai are growing a variety of crops, year round. There is an active branch of the Hami Yuva youth movement (Tevel’s youth movement in Nepal) active in the village, led entirely by local youth who have had leadership training and mentoring from the Tevel youth staff. Health and hygiene have improved significantly through the use of bio-gas toilets. Bio-gas toilets both provide a method of disposing human waste and a source of cooking gas preventing the respiratory problems due to smoke inhalation caused by cooking with wood. There is an active Village Development Council in which all sectors of the community, including women and youth, are represented. The council is responsible for the ongoing management of all projects.  Kids are staying in school, and the youth leaders in Hami Yuva even receive scholarships to continue their education. The community members believe in their ability to improve their lives.

Branding Complexity and Listening

“It would have been nearly impossible for us to map out the specifics of our intervention in Mahadev Besi when we entered the village in 2009” says Micha Odenheimer, the founding director of Tevel b’Tzedek. “We had general objectives such as improving the agricultural yield and empowering the women in the community and we have succeeded in those objectives. However the only way to create a truly sustainable intervention was to spend a lot of time listening to the villagers themselves, and learning from them. By helping them do what they wanted to do, we were able to ensure that they would be committed to the ongoing success and sustainability of the work. And it has worked. ”

The current challenge for Tevel and other similar development organizations is how to best brand that model of flexible intervention according to community needs. “It’s really hard to brand a complex process. The fundraising campaigns that are doing really well are those that speak simplicity, like Charity: Water for example. It’s easy to grasp, it seems so easy. Give people clean water and bang, their lives will be better. But we know from our experience in the field that it isn’t that easy. If you don’t listen to the communities, they won’t listen to you. If you don’t build community mechanisms to support projects, they will fail. Our challenge now is how to express that idea to potential donors and supporters,” says Odenheimer.

Author: Elana Kaminka- Director of the Long-Term Service Initiative, Tevel b'Tzedek

Elana was born and grew up in the United States, and has been living in Israel for the past twenty years. She served in the IDF as a basic training commander for at-risk soldiers after which she worked in a variety of capacities in international education including coordinating international programs in the Jewish Agency such as Marva, summer volunteer programs and the Magen David Adom Ambulance Volunteer Program. She then founded and served as the Director of the Career Israel program that places hundreds of college graduates from abroad in internships in Israeli organizations and companies annually, and later became the Deputy-Director of the Long-Term Program Division of the Israel Experience Ltd. before joining the Tevel team last year. In her spare time she tries to write, run and take care of her four amazing kids.

Assets-Based Development: A Sustainable Development - by Guy Cherni

Development is not an easy subject to write about since it is a field imbued with several question marks; like every other economics-related issue, it is something that we understand in retrospective, and it is very hard to predict what will be the impact of our actions. In this blog, I'm going to write about some of my modest experiences working in the development field in Ethiopia.

A little background information: the field of International Development is constantly in fluctuation and has changed a lot since I first became involved; during the 1950s, local governments were seen as the key to development given their power to influence civilians through top-down solutions such as building infrastructure and industries. This did not succeed due to factors such as corruption ineffective governance as well as the need for long-term maintenance. The 1980s brought along the spirit of neoliberalism, with the next solution deemed as having to involve the free market such as pursuing macroeconomic stability, open trade according to the comparative advantage of each country, and privatization in which the agenda was set by developed countries in exchange for World Bank grants. The belief was that the outcome of these actions would be GDP growth, which would then lead to poverty reduction. However, this strategy proved inefficient and raised socio-economics gaps. The rich became richer, and the poor? Well, they remained very poor. Today, after many antidevelopment movements and significant critiques, development discourse has turned to sustainable and local assets-based programs, bottom-up solutions, a human focus and a capabilities-enabling approaches. This is where I come into the development picture, and this is how my fiancé, Hagit, and I, came to work in Gondar, Ethiopia.

We intern in a small organization called Yenege Tesfa that works with street children in Gondar. There are about 4,400 orphans and vulnerable children in Gondar, and 800 children who sleep on the streets every night. They live in extreme poverty that matches the UN’s definition of less than U.S. 1.25$ a day.

We came here to work with the community, and effective community development has three qualities: it is assets-based, internally-focused and relationship-driven.  According to this theory, I began my work in evaluating the organization’s assets according to the Assets Based Community Development approach invented by Kretzmann & McKnight. Every organization has assets: personal assets, civil society assets, local economy and institutions, which take part and contribute money and physical assets. Our organization is blessed with many assets and relationships: professional staff, skilled volunteers, partners such as the University of Gondar, a free of charge territory from the government and much more. Assets-based solutions are sustainable because they depend only upon things that are available in the community. In addition, I met with the organization stakeholders and asked them what they think has to be changed in their community. Bottom-up, internally-focused solutions are a very important aspect in this growing field of community development.

After the evaluation, I started working with two of the organization’s staff on ideas of how to utilize a specific local asset. We found out that there is a vast amount of organic waste that is being thrown away without utilizing its benefits. Our goal is to use it as an alternative source of energy for cooking that will be more environmentally friendly and more economical for the community. Today there is vast usage of charcoal for cooking in Ethiopia, which is harmful for the environment (6 kg of wood are needed for one kg of charcoal), very expensive (160 ETB per sack) and not fully utilized, due to the low performance of the traditional cooking stove. We use organic waste for the creation of Bio Fuel Briquettes, creating them with a simple and primitive pressing machine that we build.  Along with the briquettes, we are trying to promote the usage of a new stove that will utilize the energy of the charcoal / briquettes and maximize the energy production of every household.

We have an opportunity to address some of the community’s needs (high expenses, pollution) and to create a sustainable source of income for the organization and a group of single mothers that will manufacture and sell the inexpensive and environmentally-friendly briquettes to the community. All that with a sustainable resource that is not dependant on developed countries. Finding local assets and local partners was the most important stage for this project’s success and now we need to work hard and make this opportunity a community success

.            

The organic waste and the pressing machine

Guy Cherni is an ID² alumni, and an MA student in the Glocal Community Development Studies program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is interning in Gondar Ethiopia in the Income Generating Activities program of a local NGO by the name of Yenege Tesfa.

Me with a Bio Fuel Briquette

Getting my Tech into the Field - by Gaddy Weismann

You've got a great solution and want to install it in East Africa. Where to turn? You have two options: public sector and private sector.

The public sector:

·      "The World Bank" – Over $100B is distributed by bi-and multilateral aid agencies every year. Some examples of such agencies with which Israelis companies can work are the World Bank and the Inter American Development Bank.  Every Western country has a bilateral agency as well. These agencies are tough to crack, and for a small company, it is very difficult to get in the door.

·      Government contracts - You could skip the Western agencies entirely and go directly to an East African government for a contract.  This requires significant time on the ground and a very deep understanding of the political and bureaucratic challenges.  It's good to have a "matcher" on your team.

The private sector:

·         Aid consultancies - These large companies win the lion's share of aid contracts from multilateral and bilateral aid agencies.  Instead of winning a contract directly, you become one of their sub-contractors.  If you are a consultant, this is a great way to go. Try a website like DEVEX to get started. However, if you have a product, they may not be the best path to take.

·      Multinational corporations (MNCs) - As these markets grow, companies like GE, TATA and IBM are entering with force.  Just as Israeli high-tech firms sell to and are sometimes acquired by MNCs, the same is beginning to happen for the developing market, focused products as well.  

·      A local partner - Set up a JV with a local partner. You'll want to find someone you can trust.  Two things to look for are existing contracts with Western companies or investment from Impact Investors.

I am happy to have helped a number of Israeli firms expand through private sector methods by finding the right MNC, the right local partners or the right impact investor.

A Community-Centered, Process-Driven And Locally-Led Approach To Development - by Inbar Ziv

What do we mean by the term ‘development’?  It is so commonly used these days, but yet I think it is reasonable to assume that a single person may use this term in several different ways, and that across people, even further variation may be found. I believe this is a critical question for one to answer, especially while engaging in work with organizations aiming to ‘develop’ others.

The answer I consolidated for myself, before embarking on a four-month internship in Rwanda, was somewhere along the lines of Amartya Sen; for me, ‘development’ referred to the capability of people to lead the lives they choose, to be the authors of their life story and not just passive characters in it. And now, half way through my internship in Spark MicroGrants, I am being exposed to the way this theoretical definition is realized in practical terms through Spark’s unique and inspiring working model with vulnerable communities in East Africa.

What Spark is doing is solving global problems with local solutions, exactly as the name of the graduate program I’m studying in at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests - Glocal. Spark is pioneering a novel approach to community development; an approach based on the belief that communities facing poverty have the intrinsic capacity to solve the problems they face by themselves and that our role as NGOs is to equip them with the tools and funding necessary to launch their own local projects.

Spark’s model is based on three pillars; it is community-centered, process-driven and locally-led:

Being community-centered means that the community is regarded as the primary agent of change and as such, the community as a whole has the responsibility to drive its own development. The choice to work with communities, rather than with individual people, is based on the strong belief in the power of a group to generate social change that has a higher potential of impacting the lives of many individuals.

Being process-driven means that the project itself is not necessarily the most important component of Spark’s model; it is the process that the community goes through that is the essence of the approach. Throughout a five month process, Spark MicroGrants assists the community in mapping and utilizing their existing resources and assets in order to plan, implement and manage their own project aimed at addressing a pressing problem they have identified in their community. Other significantly unique aspects of the process are the time community members contribute to the project, both during and in-between the community meetings, an average of 1,600 hours, and the democratic community elections of a committee, composed of an equal number of men and women representatives, which serves as the leading body of the community throughout the process with Spark.

Lastly, being locally-led means that the ones guiding and leading the process with the communities are not “Muzungus” (the African term referring to white-skinned foreigners), to whom the local culture, language and traditions are foreign, but rather young, motivated, passionate and visionary local facilitators. Even Spark’s story of “how it all began” reflects this value and makes it stand out in the landscape of development NGOs. Spark MicroGrants was established through a connection formed between the three co-founders, two Americans and one Rwandan, whose life paths intersected by chance and led to the creation of this inspiring organization. With Sasha Fisher’s experience in NGOs in South Africa, South Sudan, India and Uganda, with the knowledge in the microfinance field of Neil Lesh, with Ernest Ngabonzima’s familiarity with the local context of Rwanda, and with the great passion they all shared to find a way to mobilize communities to be their own agents of change, the three of them built Spark MicroGrant’s unique model.

Today, Spark has partnered with 71 communities in both Rwanda and Uganda, impacting the lives of over 30,000 individuals. Community projects that were planned and implemented over the past three years include agriculture projects, nursery schools, health centers, animal rearing projects, honey cooperatives, grinding machine projects, vocational trainings, and latrine construction. Perhaps the most outstanding figures are that 97% of the projects have proven to be sustainable over a one year time period, and that many communities have initiated more projects on top of the initial one they designed during the Spark process.

When I chose to intern at Spark I was extremely excited that I finally found an organization that seemed to fit my exact definition of ‘development’. However, I must admit that I was also a bit skeptical, not because of doubts that I personally had, but because other people expressed disbelief in the ability of such a model to work so well. Now, when I am part of this incredible organization, I think that I might have become their best advocate.

I recently had the opportunity to ask some of the Spark staff what excites them the most about Spark;  “The high priority Spark gives to the community’s will”, “The fact that Spark provides a voice to the most vulnerable people”, “The smiling faces of community members when they implement the project they designed by themselves” were some of the answers I got. And what about me? I completely identify with the answers my co-fellows provided, but I think that what excites me the most is the thought about the potential this model has of scaling up and creating an amazingly significant and needed change in the field of development work; a change that will mobilize more and more NGOs to adopt and utilize Spark’s community-centered, process-driven and locally-led approach to development.

ABOUT THE BLOGGER:

Inbar Ziv is currently doing a four-month internship in Spark MicroGrants, in the framework of her graduate studies in the Glocal Community Development Studies program in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Inbar has extensive background in social activism and entrepreneurship. In 2011, she was the Head of the Social Activism Department in the Hebrew University’s Students Union. In 2012 she co-founded and is since the Co-Director of an entrepreneurship center in Jerusalem, named SifTech, which operates the first and only start-up accelerator in the city. She is writing her own blog on her internship website and welcomes everybody who’d like to read more about her experiences in Rwanda to take a look!