Geek Heresy (18 page)

Amplifying People

The Importance of Heart, Mind, and Will

I
first met Rikin Gandhi in 2006. He was a software engineer at the time, and Digital Green was still in our future.

Gandhi was a dreamer whose chiseled facial features belied a methodical intensity. He had always wanted to be an astronaut, so he studied the biographies of men and women who’d gone to space. He could recount the intricate details of every Apollo mission. And he knew that one of the best ways to be selected by NASA was to have an engineering degree and to be an Air Force pilot. When we met, he had just completed a master’s in aeronautical engineering at MIT and was working at Oracle while waiting to be admitted to the US Air Force Officer Training School.

But the wait was long, and while he waited, he also noticed a theme in those space-traveler bios. “Astronauts get a chance to see our world as the small blue marble that it is,” he told me, “and they come back with new love for humankind and for the earth itself.” A friend of Neil Armstrong’s once explained, “You understand that you’re a short-term phenomenon, like the mosquitoes that come in the spring and the fall. You get a perspective on yourself. You’re getting back to the fundamentals of
the planet.”
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Some, such as Armstrong himself, retired from NASA and went into farming. Others, such as John Glenn, took up public service. And all of this awakened something within Gandhi.

Gandhi decided to merge the astronauts’ love of land and people by working on behalf of poor farmers in India, where his parents came from. And, in the fashion of so many engineers who want to support social causes, his plan was to apply technology. He wanted to run “rural telecenters” – something like Internet cafés but meant for poor communities. Proponents envisioned that the world’s villages and slums, once connected, would have access to better health care through telemedicine, better education through distance learning, and better agriculture through online research.

In India, telecenters were held out as a panacea. Through them, entrepreneurs, academics, and policymakers thought they could spread the success of the technology sector to the vast rural population. M. S. Swaminathan, hailed as the father of India’s Green Revolution, wanted to put “Village Knowledge Centers” in each of the country’s 600,000 villages.
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The government also initiated its own project to set up “Common Service Centres” nationwide.
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Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala, a member of the prime minister’s science advisory committee, claimed that rural telecenters could double household incomes in remote villages.
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Still others argued that there ought to be universal access to the Internet, and that it ought to be considered a human right.
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Gandhi was caught up in the excitement but shrewd enough to sense that improving lives through digital services would not be easy. He wanted to speak with people who had direct experience. He found me through a report on telecenters I had written with a colleague, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, and the three of us arranged to meet.
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Unfortunately, the research Veeraraghavan and I had done showed that telecenters rarely met their business or social-impact goals. I had visited about fifty telecenters throughout South Asia and Africa, and the vast majority of them saw little footfall. Most telecenter operators didn’t have the marketing skills to sell their services, and their would-be
customers saw little value in impersonal medical advice, teacher-less learning, or academic papers about agronomy.

In the face of these problems, supporters proposed further technological fixes. If telecenter operators lacked skills, they would design online communities to share best practices. If rural patients wanted to see real physicians, video teleconferencing was the answer. If there were barriers of language and literacy, they called for more user-friendly content tailored for local needs, translated into local languages and shot as videos that didn’t require reading. And on and on.

But little of that addressed the underlying problems. The very people whom the telecenter advocates wanted to reach – people with low incomes and little education – were the ones least likely to be able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps of abstracted knowledge or anonymous communication. Even well-educated self-starters prefer the formal structure of classes, insist on face-to-face appointments with doctors, and seek professional advice from warm-blooded mentors. All of this was lacking from the telecenter experience.
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The few telecenters that weren’t total failures fell into three categories. Some rebranded as Internet cafés, gave up on social causes, and succeeded as commercial businesses.
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Some saw a demand for computer-literacy certification and turned themselves into IT training schools that mostly catered to the relatively well off. Some were indefinitely supported by dedicated nonprofit organizations that viewed telecenters as a part of their charitable work because they buttressed existing programs. Telecenters amplified the underlying intent and capacity of their operators, but in themselves they did little to address deep social challenges.

As Veeraraghavan and I relayed these lessons, Gandhi’s shoulders sagged. He had invested a lot of hope in his project. He was crestfallen.

But not destroyed. Gandhi kept in touch, and each month for several months, Veeraraghavan updated me about their conversations. Much of what they discussed came down to this: If widespread dissemination of cookie-cutter interventions such as telecenters weren’t the right way to address social causes, what was?

The Birth of Digital Green

After a few months, Veeraraghavan came to me and said, “I think we should hire Gandhi. He’s committed to supporting smallholder farmers, he has great technical skills, and he’s tenacious. If you agree, I have an idea he could try out.” We brought Gandhi on board to find a way to use video to help teach farmers. He came up with Digital Green, which went on to become one of the lab’s most effective projects.
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Digital Green, in turn, provided ample support for technological amplification and influenced my thinking about packaged interventions.

When Gandhi began, we put him in touch with a small nonprofit called Green Foundation. It performed agricultural extension – training for farmers – in a block of villages about two hours south of Bangalore. For the next six months, I barely saw Gandhi. Most weeks, he stayed in the villages. He worked alongside Green Foundation staff and got to know farmers in the area. Every once in a while, he’d pop into the office, and we’d talk about what he had been up to and what he could do next. One week, he told me, “I think I now understand Green Foundation’s agriculture programs, so I’m moving on to capturing their advice on video.” Another week, he told me how he’d tried everything from “how-to videos featuring staff, how-to videos featuring local farmers, and testimonials by respected villagers. I’m also trying to see if local entertainment like children singing folk songs will draw people in.” Video in hand, he set up events at people’s homes, viewing sessions in the local school building, and screenings by laptop in the very fields where people were farming. “I’ve tried everything,” he told me. “Here’s a photo of a television I set up in the middle of the main road. I wanted to see who would show up.”

Eventually, he settled on a set of practices that seemed to work. The core concept was to use how-to videos featuring local farmers as teaching aids during scheduled weekly screenings. At the session, a village resident – sometimes accompanied by Green Foundation’s agricultural extension staff – would hold a discussion. “It’s important that the videos feature local farmers so that the audience can immediately identify
with them,” Gandhi explained. “What we’re doing is very different from the farming shows on TV,” which the farmers watched but mostly disregarded. In contrast, Gandhi’s actors spoke the same dialect, wore similar clothes, and lived in the same environment as the viewers. “Also, an active mediator is critical,” he told me. “The farmers engage more when provoked into discussion, and if there’s someone there to take questions.” And so, Digital Green was born.

At that point, we ran a controlled experiment to verify the initiative’s impact. The trial ran for a year and a half. Eight villages ran Digital Green, another eight ran a classic style of person-to-person extension known as “training and visit,” and four villages ran Poster Green – just like Digital Green, but with lessons in poster form.
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Gandhi and Green Foundation staff painstakingly tabulated what happened at every video session and went field to field in the villages to record adoption of practices. The results showed that Poster Green performed quite a bit better than classic extension programs, but that the advantage faded after about five months. The audience grew bored of posters, yet the farmers often needed the content repeated to remember it. Digital Green, however, outperformed Poster Green even at its best, and its performance never flagged. Farmers were willing to watch what amounted to the same content as long as we rotated in new videos with different farmers in them. Overall, Digital Green caused seven times more adoptions than classic extension, and it was ten times more cost-effective. With Digital Green, a single extension officer – whose salary was the expensive part – could serve more villages than he could have meaningfully addressed one-on-one. With video as a focus, it was possible to hold discussions with many farmers at once.

In Digital Green, we see the Law of Amplification’s positive power. Offering videos to poor, nonliterate farmers is largely meaningless by itself. That’s why little of the agricultural content offered through telecenters ever sees much use, and why broadcast programs on Indian public television have scant impact. But farmers are swayed by in-person interactions with peers and extension officers. Digital Green’s videos amplify those human-to-human interactions by making them more memorable
and enabling more of them at once. They allow a partial substitution of experts with nonexpert facilitators. They leave a stronger impression on farmers.
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The Three Habits of Highly Effective Technology Use

Digital Green shows us that the best use of packaged interventions is selective and targeted. Its lessons can be condensed to three rules:

Rule 1 – Identify or build human forces that are aligned with your goals
. Even without digital technology, Green Foundation was committed to farmers and capable of supporting them. For packaged interventions to have positive impact, they need a positive human force to amplify.

Rule 2 – Use packaged interventions to amplify the right human forces
. Gandhi observed what Green Foundation was already doing and used technology to amplify its work. It’s also possible to amplify the impact of unorganized social trends. In Kenya, for example, a mobile money transfer system called M-PESA famously increased the flow of money from urban to rural areas because there was already an underlying culture of urban migrants sending cash back home.
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Rule 3 – Avoid indiscriminate dissemination of packaged interventions
. Digital Green doesn’t work without a strong partner that has rapport with farmers. And Digital Green didn’t branch out into, say, children’s education, because its partner organization had no expertise in that area. Seeking mass dissemination of technology for its own sake is a waste of resources and often counterproductive.

Tech-centric social projects most often violate the last rule. It’s tempting to think of Digital Green as an all-purpose tool for knowledge dissemination. Some donors and partners see this potential in Digital Green just as they previously did with telecenters and currently do with mobile phone platforms. It’s an understandable impulse – why not use the full potential of the technology to address health care, home economics, governance, nonfarming vocational training, and everything else in a single stroke?

But that’s technological utopianism. There’s a wrong way and a right way to work with the underlying intention.

The wrong way is to believe that the packaged intervention itself solves the problem. Say we collaborate with Partner X whose sole expertise is in agriculture. Partner X, however, notices a new demand in the communities it works with: Expecting mothers want advice during pregnancy. This appears easy to solve with videos, so Partner X looks up maternal health information online, produces new videos, and screens them for the community. But the technology doesn’t substitute for Partner X’s lack of expertise in medicine. If, after watching the videos, the mothers have questions, Partner X can’t answer them. The staff has no real knowledge, and websites contain conflicting advice. If a woman has a difficult labor, Partner X doesn’t have the connections to know which local clinic is best suited to help her.
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There’s a heightened chance that Partner X unintentionally provides bad information, which could end in tragedy. Even assuming Partner X is comfortable with what is starting to look like an ethical breach, over time its lack of expertise is noticed. The local community starts losing faith not only in the health-care information, but also in Partner X and in the original packaged intervention.
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