When world leaders at a United Nations conference agreed last month in Addis Ababa on how to finance international development over the next 15 years, the news made scant headlines.
Fundamental questions remain regarding how the international community will achieve the new sustainable development goals, which will be formally adopted by the United Nations in September. And an even more crucial part of international development has been left unexplored: how to improve the efficiency and impact of the money spent on projects on the ground.
New technology can help increase efficiency as we move toward the SDGs, but only if the development sector is willing to embrace some fundamental reforms to the long-standing structure and approaches that have evolved during the last 60 years, largely during a non-digital era. To help put this change in technologies into perspective, imagine you live on a mountain slope. You’ve lived there all your life and over the years, you have perfected the art of getting down that slope on your feet, quickly and without falling.
Then, one day someone in your village returns from a trip abroad and brings back a gadget no one in your village has ever seen: a pair of skis. Your village is really excited about this new tool, but upon trying it, you trip, fall and break your legs. It’s true you are not used to it, but there is a more fundamental problem: The slope is covered with grass, not snow.
The world of international development faces a similar dilemma today. We are bringing new technologies to the field and while people are eager to learn how to use them, there are bigger challenges than just understanding operating technology; the organization and approaches that guide development policy must be updated.
One technology that could benefit development is the use of mobile phones to monitor projects instead of random site visits. For over a decade, large private sector supply chain and logistics operations have been using mobile phones to monitor the workforce remotely and optimize use of time. The same approach could be applied to the development sector.
For example, GPS-stamped photos of field visits or community events could be sent by mobile phone to project supervisors to remotely monitor activities. This data will be faster to gather and process, and much harder to falsify, while saving large sums of money in travel expenses and staff-time.
Similarly, real-time dashboards and analytics that continuously track data and progress have reached unprecedented sophistication in manufacturing, retail and industrial agriculture.
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