Innovation for Global Dev @ The White House

On my way back from Washington DC, I am contemplating the Science, Technology, and Innovation for Global Development event at The White House. 

The train to Wasington DC left at the crack of dawn. Penn Station in the early hours of the day is crowded with homeless people, which made me think about Mitt Romney's remark that he is "not concerned about the very poor [because] we have a safety net... ." 

 

At Union Station in DC, I finally find a taxi driver who'd accept credit cards but insists on an extra $5 charge. On the way to the White House, I noticed an imposing building of the otherwise very much virtual University of Phoenix. What a coincidence.  

 

Next, I find myself entering the Eisenhower Executive Building on the The White House grounds, which does not look unlike my former gymnasium in East Berlin; a majestic building with tall weighty oak doors and long white-tiled aisles. 

 

At the security screening I am handing over my ID for inspection and receive a large pink badge that identifies me as a foreign national and that signals that I have to be accompanied by an escort at all times. Gayle Smith, Special Assistant to the President & Senior Director of the National Security Council, later asked forgiveness stating that if she'd visit my/our country she'd be willing to wear a badge also. Fair enough.

Soon after entering the South Court Auditorium where the Development event took place, wireless Internet access became unavailable and cellphone reception cut off, preventing visitors from live blogging. 

The event started with presentations by government officials, followed by seminar-style breakout sessions, led by White House advisors who consulted invited guests on a set of topics related to global development.

 

John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy welcomes the more than one hundred people in attendance. He starts off by celebrating the second White House Science Fair that included more than 180 students. 

 

Director Holdren welcomed students from a middle school in Indiana who, promoted by the news about the earthquake in Haiti, had designed a lightweight, portable disaster relief shelter, complete with a water purification system and a renewable energy source to power an LED light for displaced persons.

 

Dr. Holdren invites Marian Bechtel, an eloquent and assertive 17-year old Hempfield High School student from Lancaster, Pennsylvania to talk about the Mine Detecting Device that she devised. "Marian’s design could lead to a simple, cheap, and reliable humanitarian demining tool," the White House blog states. It was definitely inspiring to experience these young innovators who have not seen the boundaries of impossibility. 

 

Holdren identified a few global challenges- from global malnutrition and the fact the 920 million people go to bed hungry every night to the 1.9 million people who die because of indoor air pollution every year. How does government respond to these and other global challenges? USAID aims to grant start-up support for businesses that can offer inexpensive, safe cooking stoves to economic developing countries, for example (pdf). Dr. Holdren pointed out that when President Obama took office, he called for an all-hands-on-deck approach to science, technology, math, and engineering. Holdren and others accenctuated a shift of the government's position toward development from empathy to opportunity, a move from philanthropy-based development to the search for entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges. 

 

Mobile money was one of the topics of the event. The prominence of the mobile money discussion goes back to the fact that 5.3 billion people have a mobile phone and by 2016 the number of people with a mobile phone subscription in Africa is estimated to grow to 1 billion. If you are not familiar with the concept of mobile money, just read up on M-Pesa, a system for everything from sending remittances home across the country and making payments. M-Pesa has over 6 million customers. 

Dr. Holdren provided an example of the use of mobile money in Afghanistan where police is now paid via cell phone receiving 30% higher salaries not because of a splendid governmental incentive program but because middlemen (and their demand for bribes) are eliminated from the process. 

Bill Gajda, the head of Global Mobile Products of Visa talked about “banking the un-banked and underbanked," starting with the two billion people who have a cell phone but no bank account. With that goal in mind, Visa acquired Fundamo, he said. Visa's objective is to be able to introduce virtual visa accounts into cash-based societies in order to draw large numbers of people into the global banking system. If you follow this vision, the cell phone may soon become your mobile wallet. Gajda described the process as one where mobile phone operators and banks have to move closer together. The third-largest office of Visa is now located in Cape Town, South Africa. 

The CEO of Kickstarter talked about the work of his crowdfunding company and posed that "what poor people really need is money." Really.

 

In the brief Q & A session, David Kappos, Under-Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, was asked if there is any consideration of removing patents from software to help economically developing countries. Kappos responded by explaining that software is simply a language like French or English. In and of itself software is not the issue. It's about finding inventions that are just so exceptional that they deserve to be patented. Minor improvements in software should not be patented. 

Kappos looked back on the understanding of intellectual property and patents, which have been fought about in terms of protection. Instead, Mr. Kappos called for an opportunity rather than threat-based narrative. The United States intellectual property system today also considers intellectual property as a humanitarian issue. Concretely, this means setting up programs that lead to an expedited technology transfer of federally-funded inventions; a program to reward inventors who use their patented technologies to address humanitarian needs, and "initiatives to leverage advances in Internet and communications technologies to provide new development tool." (source) The world's problems must be solved through innovation, he said. And investing in innovation always comes with the danger of investing in failure. It took 15 years for the cell phone to be adopted on a mass scale and Amazon.com, founded in 1994, turned its first mild profit in 2001. 

A Cambodian woman with tears in her eyes discussed being kidnapped at the age of 10 and then being held for 10 years in a brothel before she escaped and founded an initiative against Sex Trafficking. Every year over 1.2 million children and young people are trafficked globally. She talked about her work with NYT columnist Nick Kristoff and his book (and documentary) Half the Sky that also tells her story. I was happy to learn that one of my students at The New School, Fan David, collaborated with Kristoff on the documentary. 

 

James Habyarimana, a Georgetown professor born in Uganda, described his project focusing on the reduction of car accidents in Africa. In most of Africa, bad street conditions, horrific driving habits, and deficient cars lead to countless road fatalities every year. Habyarimana's project is easy to explain. Stickers placed in cars ask co-drivers to tell the driver when they don't feel safe if they drive too fast. Soclally sanctioned back seat driving? In one study in Kenya, Habyarimana showed how more than a third of car deaths were avoided because of these stickers.

 

For me, the most fascinating part of the day was the seminar-style breakout session in a smaller room on the third floor. Walking by the open doors of White House counsels and staff, it was somehow unexpected to find literally doznes of campaifn photos in each office. Our session discussed the ways in which we can "harness the energy, idealism, and expertise of university students and faculty to generate, implement, and evaluate new solutions to critical development challenges." (source)

 

I especially enjoyed the jovial and insightful Calestous Juma, Professor of the Practice of International Development at the Kennedy School of Government- who also had to wear the pink badge identifying him as a foreign national (@calestous). Juma portrayed universities as agents of community building. The dynamic and sharp-witted Phillip Auerswald (@auerswald), a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation (@kauffmanfdn). Auerswald is the author of The Coming Prosperity. Auerswald summed up the situation of Higher Learning today: Higher Education is in the situation of the newspaper industry in 1995 and the real estate industry in 2005. He asked how we can meet the opportunities of the 21st century and that was, of course, also central to MobilityShifts where we asked how learners can escape a situation where the cost of education is rising and students seeking a formal degree are increasingly caught in a "debt trap."  

 

Now, how to respond to this assessment is a different question. My own emphasis is on do-it-together models of learning as they emerged largely in Europe but also the United States. Many MobilityShifts (..) discussions focused on that topic. A recent article in The Atlantic, shows "How One Kitchen Table in Brooklyn Became a School for Coders."  

 

The breakout discussion centered around the question how universities can help to engage youth with global development. I asked how models of participatory learning can be applied in a developing context. MobilityShifts explored the changing locales for learning, from libraries, after school programs, and museums to abandoned barbershops. This discussion is definitely relevant also to developing countries. The free online Artificial Intelligence course offered by Stanford University came up several times during the day. The course enrolled over 100,000 students. 

 

In conversations, I was especilaly curious how we can move from a narrow focus on disciplinary thinking to a problem-focused, cross-disciplinary perspective. How can we bring Do-It-Together learning to developing countries? What are new pedagogical approaches for real-time mobile learning that make full use of the potential of mobile phones, iPods, laptops, PDAs, smart phones, Tablet PCs, and netbooks in informal contexts?

 

Lots of questions that need further discussion. I was amazed by the passion, energy, and thoughtfulness of the members of the administration whom I met. It was auspicious to see how the Obama administration is reaching out to academia. At the same I was definitely not persuaded by all presentations. Should big American banks really be the ones to dominate the last edges of emerging (mobile) markets and all its "underbanked"?

Should the overdeveloped world simply transfer their instructional models to the developing world? 

Is innovation really the answer to all global challenges? 

After the event I had some time left and so I walked back to the train station. Half way, I came across a momument that read "To the more than one hundred million victims of communism and to those who love liberty." Though I lived for some twenty years under socialism (I don't think any country of the Eastern block ever declared "communism"), my life was not a fatality. To liberty.