Passionate
I am feeling rather passionate about Aid and Development again today. It’s been a while since I’ve kind of felt the level of passion that is just fun. Today I went to the launch of a voice mail and call back service called Soochna Se Samadhan designed to enable farmers to get advice on their crops through simply calling a number, leaving a message and then calling back the following day for the recorded answer. I found the presentations of which there were half a dozen a little lack luster, but I could get the passion for using Information and Communications Technology appropriately.
During the question time a women pointed out something that I had noticed, that in the pictures and all the slides they only showed men interacting with the project. She questioned the gender equality of the project, the two female leads of the project said they had noticed the mistake. It was fun because all the people involved were really passionate about the gender equality issue. It’s great that gender equality is accepted as something any development project requires. Another interesting thing about the project was the low tech nature of it from an end user point of view, they are even hiring locals to help farmers dial in.
A big issue with this project though is the cost to the farmer for this advice. They haven’t work out a model yet but it’s not going to be a free service. One of the partners is called TARAhaat who are basically a group all about making money in socially responsible ways.
Other thoughts to come out of the morning for me, was getting expert advice vs leveraging community based knowledge. Data vs Information vs Knowledge, which is too big a topic for this blog post. It was a good reminder to me of the human nature of development work and how it is OK to make mistakes. The ethics of having a posh launch for an NGO based project, the morning was at a convention centre place and a large buffet lunch was provided, as well as a conference gift. Which also raised the question for me of what is acceptable administration cost and what is waste. It was a good reminder that their are other people working on different problems in India and it also reminded me of why I like EHA and TEAR so much.
Work is gaining momentum finally as well which is good. I now have a vendor working at a pace I am happy with to sell me my servers for the hospital. Those who have talked to me lately may have heard how frustrated I was getting so it is a big relief.
Tonight I went out with Rob and Nicole both from St Stephen’s Belrose for dinner which was nice. I got in to two big passionate social justice rants, it had been too long a time since I have done a good just rant so I was happy. One was about the injustice both perpetrated and perpetuated by Australia, and the second was that India’s problems are not unsolvable and that the main real problems are silver bullet attitudes by government and some NGO’s, and a lack of transparency in many projects. It was such good fun.
Now I really should head off to bed as I have a meeting in the morning.