Geek Heresy (19 page)

To counteract these problems, Partner X could hire medical staff, train its staff in health care, or set up collaborations with local health-care organizations. Any of those options would be the right way to go. But these are deep changes to the kind of organization Partner X is, not just to the intervention itself. In fact, today Digital Green is slowly expanding into health care, but not by asking its agricultural partners to take on health videos. Instead, it works with new partners who are experts in health care. Digital Green’s video sessions are effective exactly in those topics where its institutional partners have expertise.

Scaling Up

In 2008 Gandhi spun off Digital Green into its own nonprofit organization, and Veeraraghavan and I joined its board. From the outset, our model was to amplify existing positive forces in agriculture.

What does this mean at larger scale? Though Gandhi has absorbed a lot of agricultural knowledge over the years, he is by no means an expert. Nor are most of us on the board or among Digital Green’s senior leadership. Our strengths are in nonprofit management, technology, and international development. None of us has special relationships with large numbers of smallholder farmers.

So Digital Green seeks out partner organizations that are deeply, capably invested in aiding poor rural farmers. Videos amplify their mission and expertise.

Over the years Digital Green has worked with a range of nonprofits and government entities. It has extended its reach to 5,000 villages through thirty partner organizations. It works in nine Indian states as well as parts of Ethiopia and Ghana. Over 400,000 people have viewed at least a few of the 3,000 videos produced in one of twenty languages. Some have seen their income more than double.
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And on the whole, we find just what amplification would predict: The stronger the partner, the better use they make of Digital Green, and the greater the impact on farmers. In other words, Digital Green’s success at large scales is entirely dependent on the presence and reach of good partners.

The flip side of this is that there is no Digital Green without a partner. Many tech-centric projects hold themselves out as comprehensive solutions, or, if they’re slightly more careful, as a primary solution that requires a little human support. In contrast, Digital Green is keenly aware that its staff and its partners do the hard work of building relationships with farmers and identifying appropriate agricultural practices. Like all well-implemented packaged interventions, Digital Green piggybacks on human forces, which are the primary agents of change.
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Because Digital Green doesn’t substitute for agricultural organizations where they’re either missing or dysfunctional, Gandhi doesn’t lobby to make video access a universal right for farmers. Nor is he in a rush to provide Digital Green content to every farmer on the planet via mobile phones or drone-delivered iPads. Not while so many countries lack institutions that farmers trust.

Digital Green’s method of working captures the right way to apply technologies: It identifies or builds organizations and social trends aligned with its goals and then targets packaged interventions to amplify their impact.

Heart, Mind, and Will

Since partners are essential, they must be chosen wisely. In my experience across a range of projects beyond Digital Green, I’ve found that three qualities make a good partner: good intention, discernment, and self-control, or what I’ve come to think of as
heart, mind, and will
. These qualities are what technologies amplify, so when those human qualities are at their brightest, packaged interventions also shine.

With Digital Green, heart, mind, and will start with Gandhi. He wants to help farmers (intention); he has solid technical skills and seeks constructive feedback (discernment); and he perseveres when his interests are on the line (self-control). His devotion to developing-world farmers is unwavering; he’s a shrewd CEO for Digital Green; and his employees marvel at his nonstop work ethic.

Heart, mind, and will are also what Digital Green seeks in its implementing partners: commitment to supporting smallholder farmers (intention), agricultural expertise as well as knowhow for building rapport with farmers (discernment), and the tenacity required to follow through (self-control). “We work hard to vet our partners,” Gandhi says, “to make sure that they’re good at what they do, because Digital Green’s success depends on them.”

Beneficiaries, too, need heart, mind, and will. Farmers must have some desire to improve their own lives (intention), basic agricultural knowledge and the ability to pick up new practices (discernment), and the willingness to expend effort to learn (self-control). Where they need support, Digital Green’s partners provide it.

Two things about heart, mind, and will are worth pointing out. The first is that, at the very least, they are necessary
complements
to packaged interventions. Even vaccines and medications – which are as close to a complete solution as packaged interventions ever get – require
the heart, mind, and will of willing patients, caring nurses, and expert doctors.

The second point is that heart, mind, and will are also the
cause
of packaged interventions, both in their invention and provision. The Digital Green methodology would never have been invented without Gandhi’s dedication, discernment, and self-discipline. And Digital Green would not be implemented properly without those same traits in partners. The same can be said for vaccines. Their inventors require heart, mind, and will. And so do the governments, large foundations, and multilaterals like the World Health Organization that disseminate them.

It may seem obvious that packaged interventions work best when leaders, implementers, and beneficiaries have great amounts of heart, mind, and will. But plenty of smart, influential people behave otherwise, as if spreading technologies and packaged interventions indiscriminately were the way to cause social progress. To do so, though, is to make an idol of the easy part and neglect the rest – the finding or nurturing of the right heart, mind, and will.

Amplification Under Conflict

Sometimes leaders, implementers, and beneficiaries aren’t aligned. What then?

Soon after recruiting Gandhi for Digital Green, Veeraraghavan left for his own quest: a PhD at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. He returned to India for his fieldwork, where he studied how digital technology might support democratic governance, focusing on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). “NREGA is a national program in which people below the poverty line are paid a fixed wage,” Veeraraghavan explained. For about US$2 a day, up to a hundred days a year, workers do “menial jobs like road building that are chosen by local village governments. The idea is to guarantee some amount of work for India’s poorest people while also building local infrastructure.” But as with any national program in the world’s messiest democracy, what happens on the ground frequently differs from what policymakers intend. Village- and block-level leaders often submit falsified work records
and pocket the payout. The intended beneficiaries don’t get paid, and infrastructure doesn’t get built.

In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, however, government leaders were determined to make NREGA work. “They knew about corruption within their own administrations,” Veeraraghavan says, “so they did two things to address it. First, they imported a concept called ‘social audit’ that was a part of NREGA legislation.” Social audit – championed by Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a nonprofit that has long worked for the civil rights of low-income workers – is, Veeraraghavan says, “a process by which local citizens publicly review government books to make sure that government projects are being implemented without corruption.”
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In MKSS’s home state of Rajasthan, they implement intensive processes. Village-wide meetings, door-to-door verification, and follow-up with government all ensure that improprieties are corrected. But MKSS routinely deals with recalcitrant local officials who resist opening up their books. And many a balance sheet is filled with illegible scribbles. According to Veeraraghavan, in Andhra Pradesh “the government also installed an online system in which all NREGA activity was supposed to be logged. The data was open to public scrutiny, and corruption was supposed to decrease.”

Veeraraghavan found, however, that the effect of digitization was mixed. In some cases “social audit and digital record-keeping shined a spotlight on corruption, and corruption came down drastically.” But in other cases, corruption and inefficiency continued and were even exacerbated by the technology. For example, a plan to monitor low-level officials by GPS foundered because upper management was unwilling to enforce penalties for noncompliance. One manager said, “If everybody is misbehaving . . . how many [officials] can I suspend?”
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Low-level bureaucrats would occasionally shift the blame for their corruption, telling villagers that “the computer has not assigned them work.” And sometimes, Veeraraghavan says, villagers not only failed to hold bureaucrats to account but colluded with them to cheat the system: No one did any work, but everyone agreed to log false records so as to be paid.

Amplification is the best explanation yet again, despite the conflicting politics. Veeraraghavan says that for the government leaders, the
technology was “an amplifier of their intention to curb corruption.” But the technology also amplified the intention of local officials and villagers to game the system. Overall, much of the leakage was sealed, but full accountability wasn’t achieved.

The challenges of democratic governance require a far more patient approach of a kind discussed in
Chapter 9
. For now, it’s worth going back to education, where we have more immediate power to apply technology well.

Raising Digital Natives

No sooner had I turned away than I began to hear the music again. It was the synthesized soundtrack that accompanied Exit Path 2, a video game I had grown all too familiar with over the previous weeks. Vincent, a bright, energetic nine-year-old, who wore a baseball cap that would point every way but forward, had reactivated the game on his laptop.
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Minutes ago I had scolded him for starting the game in the first place. He was supposed to be using a piece of educational software called Scratch that taught children the basics of programming.

Vincent was a student at the Technology Access Foundation (TAF) in Seattle, where I taught an afterschool course during the spring of 2012, following my return from India. I was curious about what I could do to support social causes, if simply inventing and disseminating new technologies wasn’t the answer. At TAF, I hoped to verify a hunch I had: that teaching about technology was fundamentally different from providing new technology. That turned out to be true, but the real lesson was something else entirely.

TAF’s founder and CEO is Trish Millines Dziko, one of the few black women in the 1970s to graduate with a computer science degree. Upon joining Microsoft in the mid-1980s, she saw firsthand that some racial minorities were dramatically underrepresented in the high-tech industry. Thus, TAF’s mission is to “equip students of color for success in college and life through the power of a STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] education.” On Mondays and Wednesdays, I had two classes each with twelve third- to fifth-graders. Every student was allocated a
laptop, and the curriculum called for hands-on activities to explore computer programming, audio editing, and robotics – topics that TAF’s students weren’t exposed to in their underfunded public schools. TAF’s staff and I worked hard to come up with fun, engaging activities. Students produced their own YouTube videos, programmed interactive animations, and built Lego robots. But as much as the students enjoyed these activities, far greater pull was exerted by video games.

Children have a flair for sniffing out games and playing them behind the backs of supervising adults. They also have a sixth sense for educational content, and they avoid it like they avoid broccoli. In my class, the students preferred two-dimensional games in which colorful characters trot and leap through a cartoon-strip world. As innocent as these games were, even ardent video-game proponents – such as Jane McGonigal, author of
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
– would be hard-pressed to identify their nutritional value. At best, they had some minor incidental benefit to hand-eye coordination.

Whatever the case, even the most beguiling educational software couldn’t compete with the allure of Exit Path 2.
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So there I was, hoping to increase children’s understanding of technology, and technology itself was the obstacle.

My predicament at TAF was a version of the same problem that confronts parents and school systems around the world: How do we best prepare our children for an increasingly technology-rich world, while avoiding the perils of the technology itself? Once again, the first thing is to align human forces.

People First

My boss at TAF was Toyia Taylor, the program’s manager. Taylor was at least a decade younger than me, but she commanded respect from children in a way I didn’t. Spines straightened when she walked into the classroom.

Taylor’s desk was just a few feet from my room, and after my second day at TAF, she pulled me aside. She hinted that I may want to be a little
stricter with the students. She could hear commotion through the wall. This was the first time I had taught eight- to eleven-year olds, and I had quixotic notions about letting the students discover what they wanted to learn. What they discovered instead was that they could run all over me.