In 2007, Peru announced it would distribute tens of thousands of XO laptops from One Laptop Per Child to children in rural schools across the country, and expanded the program every year since. Almost 1 million laptops later, the program is now the largest XO deployment in the world and one of the most faithful to OLPC's technology-centric Constructionist principals.

Teacher training was downplayed, with the belief that exposure to XO laptops alone would create a learning environment where children were excited and inspired to learn learning. Rather than developing relevant digital content, the focus was on how to use existing "Activities" (software applications) on the XO laptop to teach different subjects.

This was a radical change from existing ICT4E best practices, which tend to focus on teacher professional development and locally relevant content as equal or greater in importance than hardware, and invited close evaluation. The Inter-American Development Bank responded with a multi-year randomized evaluation of the impact of the OLPC project in Peru - the first rigorous attempt to examine the impact of the largest "1-to-1 computing" initiative in a developing country.

Results to Date

So far, the IDB has issued two synopsis examining the academic achievement and impacts on cognitive skills that XO laptops facilitated in a 15-month randomized control trial with 21,000 students in 319 schools - an initial report in 2010, and a second report earlier this year. The summary findings should not be a surprise to ICTworks readers:

The effective implementation of the "One Laptop per Child" program was not enough to overcome the difficulties of a design that places its trust in the role of technologies themselves. The use of technologies in education is not a magic and rapid solution through which educational problems and challenges can be solved with the simple acquisition of technological devices and systems.

The IDB did find some positive and significant results in cognitive ability - a five-month lead over non-XO students - but no overall significant differences were found on Mathematics and Language standardized tests 15 months after the implementation.

What Does This Mean for ICT4E?

We took a deep dive into OLPC in Peru with the Inter-American Development Bank during a Technology Salon to figure out what these results mean for OLPC in Peru, "one laptop per child" projects regardless of technology, and ICT in education in general.

In the discussion, several good questions came up in relation to this study on OLPC in Peru that we should all think about.

Since IDB did not find educational outcomes from OLPC:

1. Do any ICT interventions have impact? Or are we all just wasting our time with technology?
2. Do we actually know how to measure the impact of ICT on education? Or are we testing the wrong things to see impact?
3. Can any single ICT intervention have impact? Or do we need to have more interventions over longer timeframes for impact?
4. Are all laptop programs doomed? Or was Peru's approach itself the problem?

During this month's Educational Technology Debate, distinguished members of the ICT4E community from around the world will give context to the report and expand on these and other questions the report raises. I invite you to join us there for a spirited debate all month long.

Go To EduTechDebate Now.

Add your feedback on the EduTechDebate site, comments are closed on this post.

Civil society has been working for years on participation, transparency, accountability and governance issues. Plenty of newer initiatives (small and large) look at new technologies as a core tool in this work. But are these groups talking and learning from each other?

What good practices exist for using new technologies to improve transparency, accountability and governance? What are some considerations and frameworks for thinking about the role of new technologies in this area of work? What needs consideration under this broad theme of good governance?

Tuesday's Technology Salon* in New York City focused on those issues, kicked off by our two discussants, Hapee de Groot from Hivos and Katrin Verclas from Mobile Active. Discussion ensued around the nuances of how, with whom, when, why, and in conjunction with what do new technologies play a role in transparency, accountability and good governance. Some of the key points brought up during the Salon:

Please join us for the next Technology Salon

What is "good governance?"

The overall term could be divided into a number of core aspects, and so the discussion is a big one and it's complicated. Aid transparency is only one small part of the overall topic of good governance.

The World Bank definition includes aspects of:

• Participation of citizens in political processes, freedom of expression and association, free media
• Political stability and absence of violence
• Government effectiveness in the delivery of services
• Regulatory quality, rule of law
• Control of corruption

There's a need to look at governments and aid, but also to look at the private sector. Some commented that aid transparency is in vogue because donors can drive it but it's perhaps not as important as some of the other aspects and it's currently being overemphasized. There are plenty of projects using ICTs and mobiles in other areas of governance work.

More data doesn't equal more accountability.

Data does not equal participation. Can mobile phones and other ICTs or social media reduce corruption? Can they drive new forms of participation? Can they hold power accountable in some ways? Yes, but there is no conclusive evidence that the use of new technology to deliver data down from governments to people or up from people to governments improves governance or accountability. The field of tech and governance suffers from 'pilotitis' just like the field of ICT4D. Some participants felt that of course open data doesn't automatically equal accountability and it was never the idea to stop there. But at the same time, you can't have accountability without open data and transparency. Opening the data is just the first step in a long road of reaching accountability and better governance.

Efficient vs transformational.

Transactional efficiency within a system is one thing. Transformation is another. You can enhance an existing process from, say, writing on paper to calling on a landline to texting in information, thereby improving accuracy and speed. But there is something more which is the transformational side. What's most interesting perhaps are those ways that ICTs can completely alter processes and systems.

Again, there are a lot of promising examples but there is not much evidence of their impact at this point. One participant noted that current evidence seems to point toward the integration of mobiles (and other ICTs) into existing process as having a greater impact and quicker uptake within large, bureaucratic systems than disruptive use of new technologies.

But the question remains - Are the systems good systems or should/could ICTs transform them to something totally different and better or can ICTs help do away with poorly working systems entirely, replacing them with something completely new?

Is open data just a big show?

Some alluded to opaque transparency, where a government or another entity throws up a bunch of data and says "we are being open" but there is no realistic way to make sense of the data. Some felt that governments are signing onto open data pacts and partnerships as a fake show of transparency. These governments may say, "The data base is available. Go ahead and look at it."

But it costs a lot of money and high level skills to actually use the data. In addition, there is a need for regulatory frameworks and legislation around openness. Brazil was given as an example of a country that has joined the open government partnership, but as yet has no regulatory framework or freedom of information act, even though the country has a beautiful open government website. "Checks and balances are not inherent in the mobile phone. They need to be established in the legislation and then can be enhanced by mobile or other technology."

Open Data Hackathons can help turn data into information. The question of "what does open data actually mean?" came up also and the "cake test" was recommended as one way of defining "open".

Is open data an extractive process?

Some at the Salon cautioned that the buzz around Open Data could be a bit false in some ways, and may be hyped up by private companies who want to make money off of nice data visualizations that they can sell to big donors or governments. The question was raised about how much data actually gets back to those people who provide it so that they can use it for their own purposes?

The sense was that there's nothing wrong with private companies helping make sense of data per se, but one could ask what the community who provided the data actually gets out of this process. Is it an extractive data mining process? And how much are communities benefiting from the process? How much are they involved?

Mikel Maron wrote a great post yesterday on the link between open data and community empowerment - I highly recommend reading it for more on this.

Whose data?

A related issue that wasn't fully discussed at the Salon is: who does the information that is being "opened" actually belong to (in the case of household surveys, for example)? The government? The International NGO or multilateral agency who funds a project or research? The community? And what if a community doesn't want its data to be open to the world - is anyone asking? What kind of consent is being granted? What are the privacy issues? And what if the government doesn't want anyone to know the number of X people living in X place who fit X description? Whose decision is it to open data? What are the competing politics?

For example, what if an organization is working on an issue like HIV, cholera, violence or human trafficking. What if they want to crowd source information and publicly display it to work towards better transparency and improved service delivery, but the host government country denies the existence of the issue or situation?

In one case I heard recently, the NGO wanted to work with government on better tracking and reporting so that treatment/resources could be allocated and services provided, but when the government found out about the project, they wanted control over the information and approval rights. Government went so far in another case as to pressure the mobile service provider who was partnering with the organization, and the mobile service provider dropped out of the project.

These are good reminders that information is power and openness can be a big issue even in cases not initially identified as politically charged.

Privacy and security risks.

The ubiquity of data can pose huge privacy and security concerns for activists, civil society and emerging democracies and some at the Salon felt this aspect is not being effectively addressed. Can there really be anonymous mobile data? Does the push/drive for more data jeopardize the political ambitions of certain groups (civil society that may be disliked by certain governments)?

This can also be an issue for external donors supporting organizations in places like Syria or Iraq. Being open about local organizations that are receiving funding for democracy or governance work can cause problems (eg., they get shut down or people can be arrested or killed).

Can new ICTs weaken helpful traditional structures or systems?

Is new tech removing some middlemen who were an important part of culture or societal structure? Does it weaken some traditional structures that may actually be useful? The example of the US was given where a huge surge of people now engage directly with their congressperson via Twitter rather than via aggregation channels or other representatives. Can this actually paralyze political systems and make them less functional?

Some countered, saying that Twitter is somewhat of a fad and over time this massive number of interactions will settle down, and in addition, not everyone gets involved on every issue all the time. Things will sort themselves out. Some asked if politicians would become afraid (someone - help!! there is a study on this issue that I can't seem to locate) to make some of the secret deals that helped move agendas forward because they will be caught and so openness and transparency can actually paralyze them? In other words is it possible that transparency is not always a good thing in terms of government effectiveness?

The example of paying Afghan police directly by mobile phone was given. This initiative apparently ended up failing because it cut decision makers who benefited from bribes out of the loop. Decoupling payments from power is potentially transformational, but how to actually implement these projects when they disrupt so much?

Does new technology create parallel structures?

Are parallel structures good or bad? In an effort to bypass inefficient and/or unaccountable systems, in one case, private business owners started their own crime reporting and 911 system to respond and accompany victims to report to the police and follow up on incidents.

Questions were raised whether this privatization of government roles was taking justice into ones' own hands, forcing the government to be accountable, allowing it to shirk responsibilities, or providing a way for government to see an innovation and eventually take on a new and more effective system that had been tried and tested with private funds. This same issue can be seen with parallel emergency reporting systems and other similar uses of ICTs.

It may be too early in the game to know what the eventual outcomes of these efforts will be and what the long term impact will be on governance. Or it may be that parallel systems work in some contexts and not in others.

And...

The Salon could have gone for much longer but alas, we had to end. Dave Algoso covers some of the other ideas from the Salon in his post Technology for Transparency, Accountability and Governance, including how to approach and define the topic (top down vs bottom up? efficiency vs transformation?) and the importance of measuring impact.

Thanks to UNICEF and Chris Fabian for hosting the Salon. Thanks to Martin Tisne from the Transparency and Accountability Initiative for sparking the idea to choose this topic for the first Technology Salon in NYC, and thanks to Wayan Vota for inviting me to coordinate the series.

Open your wallet right now. Most likely, you have a debit card, a credit card, a health insurance card, and access to the massive financial infrastructure that these three cards represent.

The ability to store, save, use, and borrow money anywhere in almost limitless fashion, without worry about amount, theft, or even making change. Add in the freedom from a direct worry about health costs, and these three cards represent a level of financial freedom unknown to anyone in the developing world... today.

Mobile Money Revolution

Yet by tomorrow, there will be more people who have similar access to financial services, via electronic transactions on mobile phones. In fact, over the next five years there will be a mobile money revolution at the bottom of the pyramid as international financial institutions like VISA, Mastercard, and the like move in forcefully to service the next billion customers.

They see M-PESA transferring 20% of Kenya's GDP and the money that can be made offering mobile financial services to the BoP. But its not just payments and credit, there are also opportunities in many other types of financial services.

Here are two examples with insurance, which is usually the providence of in-person sales worldwide:

• In Ghana, Tigo Family Care Insurance provides life insurance for prepaid subscribers and their family members in the event of a natural death.
• In Kenya, the Syngenta Foundation's Agriculture Index Insurance Initiative uses mobile phones and weather stations to offer farmers affordable crop insurance.

Now we could go on, but listing examples of mobile money was not the focus of the Technology Salon on how mobile financial services are transforming the economics of international development. What really captured our attention was the realization that mobile phones are merely a conduit to the larger experience of electronic transactions, which include mobile money, but also the full gamut of wealth that is created, stored, and exchanged digitally.

Please join us for the next Technology Salon

Better than Cash

First let us agree that electronic payments systems (bank accounts, Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), pre-paid cards, smart cards, mobile money) are a great benefit for everyone involved. Electronic payments systems:

• Increase access to basic financial services, including savings, lending, and e-payments.
• Reduce barriers to entry for fee-for-service business models
• Reduce the risk of money theft and increase personal control over financial resources
• Increase speed of payments both to and from consumers, businesses, and government
• Improve transparency, mitigate corruption, and reduce leakages in the disbursement of government funds.

A great example of all five of these benefits is the ability to pay for municipal water and electricity services via mobile money in multiple African markets. By making payments electronically, both consumers and government have more accurate records, consumers are able to save for and manage payments, and service providers can expand services with a higher expectation of payment, and more timely payment, therefore serving more customers, more efficiently.

In their Better than Cash program, USAID's new Mobile Solutions Office seeks to expand electronic payment system use by governments, for utilities but also government payments in everything from conditional payments (welfare, healthcare, etc) for citizens, to payroll payments for government workers, to pension payments for retirees.

The net effect of this shift to electronic payments will be much more efficient government programs. Yet the Mobile Solutions team isn't stopping with other governments, its goal is to transform the way USAID does it's programming as well. With language already in RFP's to encourage implementing partners to use electronic payments in their work, USAID will be pushing a move from cash payments to electronic payments for all its beneficiaries.

Barriers to Adoption

Before we get too far around the hype cycle, there are issues that will retard the growth of mobile financial services and the larger electronic payment systems. First, policy makers may have a grasp of what works to encourage electronic payments and use mobile financial services first-hand, but they don't often know how to steer their countries from the theoretical to the practical.

Next, at the business level monopoly mobile operators may be just as hard to convince to innovate as a highly competitive mobile phone marketplace with multiple players. Neither situation lends itself to interoperability, which is key for large-scale electronic payment systems and the mobile financial services they support.

Finally, not everyone has a mobile phone. Yes, shocking but true. So simpler systems like scratch cards and offline intermediaries will co-exist with electronic payment systems for years to come. Better that we recognize and welcome them than limit any payment system to one hardware delivery mechanism, no matter its revolutionary benefits.

Terms like mobile money, mPayments, and M-PESA are all the rage in International development these days, but what do they really mean for the national development of countries we attempt to help?

Menekse Gencer of mPay Connect will lead us in a discussion of mobile financial services, the full gamut of finance that is now taking place on mobile phones: mobile payments, mobile microfinance, and mobile banking.

She will showcase ways in which mobile financial services are (and will be) radically changing emerging economies, shifting the economic landscape in ways we are just now starting to see but as yet cannot fully understand. Here is one example of that shift:

• mPay Connect research shows M-PESA saves 3 hours per day for every Kenyan subscriber in reduced shoe leather costs - the cost of walking money from place to place. If we multiply 3 hours per day, by 13.2 million subscribers, by 365 days, that's 14.4 BILLION hours saved per year. Add in the average wage per hour in Kenya, and the time savings start to make you gasp in savings shock.

Priya Jaisinghani of the Mobile Solutions Office at USAID wants to bring savings like that to both the host country governments that USAID works with and to the USAID system itself. She'll continue with Menekse's theme and bring the discussion home:

• How can USAID and its implementing partners also leverage mobile financial services to increase the efficiency of foreign assistance? Two simple suggestion to start: contractors using mPayments to pay host country national staff and national pensions paying through mobiles.

Of course there are many more, and more ways in which mobile financial services are radically changing the world in which we work. Join your fellow Technology Salon professionals in a deep dive on the impact all of this will have at the next Salon:

Mobile Financial Services in USAID Programming
December Technology Salon
8:30 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
RTI International
701 13th Street NW, Suite 750
Washington, DC (map)

We'll have hot coffee and Krispe Kreme donuts for a morning rush, but seating is limited and the UN Foundation is in a secure building. So RSVP ASAP to be confirmed for attendance or you are on the waitlist.

In theory, making information open and available leads to more transparent decisions of governments, aid agencies, corporations and other such institutions because stakeholders at different levels push for accountability and better governance. That is why civil society actors have been working on transparency, accountability and good governance for years. Now new actors on the scene are developing technology tools and applications for use in this area.

From efforts such as Huduma, Twaweza,Cuidemos el Voto, CGNet Swara, Fix My Street, Sunlight Foundation, World Bank's Open Data, the Open Government Partnershipand the International Aid Transparency Initiative(IATI), and a wide range of others; new technology and social media are playing an important role in making information more accessible, holding leaders and decision makers accountable, and mobilizing citizens to participate and have their say.

But are these groups talking to each other? How do grassroots initiatives shape and feed into larger scale efforts and vice versa? What can existing efforts learn from these new entrants? What lessons and good practices learned over the years, should be upheld? Or discarded? What technology tools best support work in this area? What are the risks and challenges?  Where there are gaps and opportunities? And what are the best approaches for donors and key decision makers in the field?

We'll have two lead discussants start the conversation on these issues:

• Hapee de Groot from Hivos will talk about several initiatives that support openness and transparency along with engaged participatory citizen action and politics, including the work of some Hivos' partners, the Transparency and Accountability Initiative(TAI), IATI and open standards, and the Hivos/Omidyar collaboration through the ATTI fund.
• Katrin Verclas from Mobile Active will share highlights from the upcoming report mDemocracy: Power in the People's Hands. The report assesses the state of the field of mobile technology, good governance, democracy, and accountability, including aspects of human rights, elections and electoral processes, government services to citizen, and citizen action and advocacy. Copies of the report will be available to participants.

Please join your Technology Salon colleagues at our first (of many) Technology Salons in New York City organized by Linda Raftree of Plan International USA:

Transparency and New Technology
November Technology Salon
9 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
UNICEF House
3 UN Plaza East 44th Street
(between 1st and 2nd Avenue, south side of the street)
New York City, NY

We'll have hot coffee and donuts for a morning rush, but seating is limited and the UNICEF House is in a secure building. So RSVP ASAP to be confirmed for attendance or you are on the waitlist.

For those attending, please arrive 15 minutes early to clear security and be sure to bring photo ID. You will be escorted to the meeting room.

Is this the library the future of public access ICT after cybercafes and telecenters?

Back when Bill Gates was young, he had multiple opportunities to geek out - he had access to computers at home and at school - but he would sneak out of his house to go the library. Why? Because he loved the wealth of knowledge, curated and guided by libraries.

With that background, it's easy to see why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a strong focus on libraries. And that many communities have a library and it's seen as a knowledge repository already, makes it also easy to see why the Gates Foundation has added public access to ICT as a tenant of their library support. ICT-enabled libraries can provide guided access to the wealth of information that computers and the Internet can bring to young minds.

"Library" as a dirty word

Yet, let's be honest - what comes to mind when you read the word "library" or "librarian"? Long nights spent in the library as a youth, with an ever-present librarian quick to squelch any study-break frivolity. Not as a 21st Century guide to personal life-long knowledge or greater community development. This is true around the world, as EIFL found:

Most people in six African countries believe public libraries have the potential to contribute to community development in important areas such as health, employment and agriculture. However, libraries are small and under-resourced, and most people associate them with traditional book lending and reference services rather than innovation and technology.

In fact, say the word "library" in international development or technology circles and instantly half the room is bored or tunes out.

Libraries are the most effective public access to ICT

Communities need access to the benefits and services only found online but the ICT infrastructure is often prohibitively expense for individuals to buy for themselves. Mobile phones, while ubiquitous, do not provide for any meaningful depth of information acquisition - certainly not when compared to a computer. So we are looking at computer labs where the costs are best aggregated over entire communities.

As we all know, telecenters are not sustainable without donor funding, and local governments are loathe to add yet another infrastructure support demand onto their shrinking budgets.

Enter the library. Of all the public access to ICT models discussed at the Future of Public Access to Information Technology Salon, it was the library, or similar government-supported information infrastructure, that is the most viable, sustainable, and compelling model.

Governments already understand the need for libraries and their role in supporting them as a government-funded service. Adding ICT to the library model is a small marginal cost with great community development potential - even when the model doesn't look like a library at all.

Library Parks - a new public access model

Enter the Parques Biblioteca or "Library Parks" of Medellin, Colombia. There, libraries are the anchor for multiple municipal knowledge and community building services (public park, library, information center, cultural center, and entrepreneurship incubator) to bring a concentrated development impact to the city's poor areas.

ICT access is a central resource that supports these activities, but not the only one. In addition, there is an acknowledged role for the librarian as a knowledge guide with technology. Colombians, just like others around the world (including "digital natives"), may not have the greatest media literacy. The librarian is seen (and trained) to be a modern knowledge guide, conversant in books and bytes, to help users navigate the still wild online world.

Do libraries need better marketing?

But if libraries are to be more than book repositories, should we start calling them something else besides a "library"? Could there be a need to re-brand the library as a "community knowledge center" or "life-long learning center" to show they are for more than just students studying? Or maybe "media centers" or "knowledge factories" to show they are more than just a collection of books? And can librarians move beyond being "martyrs to knowledge" and be more the learning facilitators we also hope teachers to be in 21st Century schools?

Knowledge is power and therefore libraries should be the cool thing in international development and technology circles. The still-open question is how can we get from the dim mental image of the past to the dynamic reality of the future?

Access to information has been part of the development discussion since the Internet arrived. Previously, many saw community telecenters as the way to bring technology to the developing world. Yet telecenters are not sustainable without donor funding and the concept of public access hasn't kept pace with advancing technology.

The global penetration of mobile phones calls into question the need for public Internet access at all. Until you realize that mobile devices are limited in functionality and there is more development information than is convenient for a phone screen - such as government open data and transparency initiatives.

So the question remains: how can people participate? It is time to reconsider the question of public access. What works today? What makes most sense for the future?

We will explore the need for public access to information as a part of development and new approaches to provide it with two thought leaders on the subject:

• Sandra Fried, a program officer in the Global Libraries program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Catalina Escobar, director of Makaia, which is involved in the Digital Medellin project.

Please join your Technology Salon™ colleagues for this conversation at the next Technology Salon in Washington, DC:

What is the Future of Public Access to Information?
November Technology Salon
8:30 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
Wednesday, November 9th, 2011
UN Foundation
1800 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC

We'll have hot coffee and Krispe Kreme donuts for a morning rush, but seating is limited and the UN Foundation is in a secure building. So RSVP ASAP to be confirmed for attendance or you are on the waitlist.

Fail Faire DC 2011 is a celebration of failure. We will have great speakers with fun, fast, Ignite-style presentations of their professional failures. Audience participation is not only encouraged, it is mandatory! We are all peers and none of us is perfect. Expect much laughter as we navel-gaze at where we have all gone wrong in ICT and international development.

Yet we will LEARN from failure. Failure is no reason to be ashamed, and there is great value in examining our mistakes. So while we encourage irreverence and humor, we will be improving our profession too.

We will have light refreshments to lubricate the conversation and there will be an after-party to continue the celebration. However, an RSVP is mandatory for attendance and space is limited, so sign up today!

Fail Faire DC 2011 will happen on October 13th at the World Bank.Those that RSVP will be sent the specific room location just before the event.

Fail Faire DC 2011 is brought to you by theWorld Bank, Development Gateway, and Inveneo.

Agenda:

• 6:00pm: Welcome and drinks
• 6:30pm: #FAIL-Slam
• 7:30pm: Open Discussion
• 8:00pm: Mingling, learning, networking, more drinks

Featured Speakers (so far)

• Dr. Tessie San Martin, CEO, Plan International USA
• The World Bank on their 70% ICT4D failure rate
• Ian Schuler, Internet Freedom Programs, U.S. Department of State
• You? Apply today!

Remember, you must RSVP to attend.

This month's Technology Salon ICT4Ag - Enriching rural coffee farmers via iPads raised a couple of eyebrows from the outset. How can Exprima Media and Sustainable Harvest realistically improve rural coffee farming via iPads?

Initially, it struck me as another attempt to use the latest and greatest technology to tackle longstanding challenges within the value chain, rather than making use of simple and often effective locally generated tech as we have seen with M-Pessa and other innovations.

But there's more to this project than merely exporting a glitzy trend to coffee farmers and suppliers in far-flung places. Two features appeal to me most: a) the range and utility of the apps; and b) the business model.

Relationship Information Tracking System App

Exprima Media and Sustainable Harvest partnered to develop a suite of traceability and efficiency tools called a Relationship Information Tracking System (RITS apps). The RITS Producer app promises to rapidly improve the operations of coffee co-ops. It functions as a set of supply chain management tools designed to record and track who produced specific quantities of coffee, how they produced it, how it is milled and where it ends up.

This is transformational because logistics is one of the more intractable challenges in the value chain. These traceability functions will enable better quality control because farmers who need to improve production practices can be pinpointed and aided.

The suite of apps also tackles the need for improved training opportunities for coffee farmers and co-op personnel. The RITS Ed app delivers instructional content in video format. Video is a great educational tool because it eliminates the risk of lessons being lost in translation. This exposure to best practices in agronomy, organic compost production, financial literacy among other topics, is likely to improve the quality and quantity of crop yields. To top this off, there's the RITS Matrix app which simplifies and walks coffee farmers through the often complex organic certification process.

The RITS app design highlights the value of an anthropological approach to ICT4D. The apps were specifically fashioned for cross-cultural use (varied languages, cultural and industry imperatives considered).

Furthermore, the iPad was chosen because its the most intuitive and rugged platform to get the big benefits of computing (automation, info sharing) in the hands of farmers. The simplicity of the user interface also enhance usability by those with limited computer literacy, thereby reducing the need for heavy investment of scare resources (money and time) in training.

RITS App Business Model

However, it is the business model that appeals to me most. According to the project pioneers, "iPads are not expensive toys, they are a business tool". The iPads are expected to pay for themselves in increased co-op productivity (supply chain management and higher quality coffee).

The project doesn't aim to get an iPad in the hands of every coffee farmer. In fact, the aim is to place it within existing infrastructure. For instance, equipping cooperatives and extension centers, which will enable greater support for farmer training, advisory services, cooperative planning and management.

Though still a centralized model, this approach tackles the seminal issue of affordability. While the cost of an iPad might be onerous for an individual coffee farmer, a co-op would fare better: Two bags of coffee weighing roughly 300 pounds, contributed by a large group, is equivalent to the cost of an iPad.

But the issue of cost goes deeper. App creation, especially on the iPad, is still expensive. The suite of RITS apps boasts a price tag of several hundred thousand--far too expensive for the co-ops to afford. Sustainable Harvest is looking to subsidy from its partners (software developers, coffee buyers etc) to combat this.

We all lust for iPhones, iPads, and the like, and yearn for the day the developing world can use the same cool gadgets we geek on. But did you realize that iPads could be used in remote areas today? That rural coffee farmers in Mexico, Peru, and Tanzania are enriching themselves and their communities through an enterprise iPad app.

At the September Technology Salon, we will hear from Corey Pressman of Experimamedia and David Griswold of Sustainable Harvest on how they developed iPad apps to help coffee growers become more efficient, reliable, and quality-focused.

Corey will talk about delivering multilingual coffee agronomy, food security, and coffee business information to app-enabled coffee farmers around the globe. David will detail the impact technology like iPads and iPhones have on Sustainable Harvest's coffee supply chain - from the farmer to the final consumer - and on the company's triple bottom line.

Here is a sneak peek video of the iPad app to get you excited.

Please join them and your peers to share insights on how ICT is increasing agricultural outcomes at the next Technology Salon™:

ICT4Ag: Enriching rural coffee farmers via iPads
September Technology Salon
8:30 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
Thursday, September 15th, 2011
UN Foundation Conference Room
1800 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036 (map)

We'll have hot coffee and Krispe Kreme donuts for a morning rush, but seating is limited and the Development Gateway is in a secure building. So RSVP ASAP to be confirmed for attendance or you are on the waitlist.