Excerpts from an outstanding blog (IMO) by Ann Mei Chang, Executive Director at U.S. Global Development Lab at USAID:
"despite the potential impact, distorted incentives encourage one-off, flashy pilots (many sourced through hackathons, contests, and PR opportunities), undermining the potential for sustainable and scalable digital solutions. In fact, the proliferation of duplicative and uncoordinated mobile health applications caused an overwhelmed Uganda Ministry of Health to call a moratorium on further efforts in 2012, to ensure a focus on interoperable and sustainable systems... (in developing countries, there is) a lack of relevant platforms and infrastructure (that) means that developers end up spending the vast majority of their time rebuilding similar components from scratch, ending up with less time and money to truly innovate. Too much time and effort is wasted on duplicative work like beneficiary registration and tracking, negotiating and integrating with mobile operators, and promotion and distribution. The result is one-off systems that are fragile, unintegrated, not designed to scale, and unsustainable."
"This cannot continue. The development community needs to invest in reusable systems and the collaboration necessary to build and use these systems. This will mean smarter solutions designed for scale and sustainability. They may require more upfront investment, but doing so will pay dividends in far greater impact over time. One example is the work USAID's U.S. Global Development Lab is doing to build interoperable health information systems that failed during the Ebola epidemic.
"The good news is that the needed platforms are starting to emerge. Digital payment systems are lowering the costs for companies delivering services like loans, savings accounts, and insurance to the poor. Companies like Segovia are building robust solutions to track and deliver aid. And, RapidPro is an open-source platform that makes it easy to build interactive SMS services to collect data and interact with users for more adaptive, participatory and effective development."
"In short, to realize the potential of digital technologies for global development, we need to change how technology solutions are both funded and implemented. This is why we helped draft the Principles for Digital Development - a set of best practices for building technology-enabled programs, starting with the user. The Principles have been endorsed by over 50 development organizations, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Sida, UNICEF, WFP, and USAID. Today, we are launching a report based on conversations with donors, implementing partners, and development practitioners to better understand how the Principles work in real-world contexts and how we can best integrate them into our organizations."