Technological solutions in the world of aid

This semester I've felt the presence of technology and the drive to solve problems with technological solutions stronger than ever. We often use the phrase "There's an app for that!" as a joke, but to be really honest, it really does feel like that sometimes. Especially after taking my mobile health technology class this semester, I feel that the options are pretty much are limitless when trying to design an innovative solution with technology for underserved communities, both locally and globally. As a 20-something going to school in the Bay Area, with the hub of technological innovation in my backyard, I get extremely excited when I hear about the latest app or mobile health solution that rolls out. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when my group for our class project decided to work on a sexual health SMS text service for local youth. But when pitching our idea in class in a small group discussion, Professor Talwalker brought up the very important question of how participatory these innovations can be. 

Technology has permeated markets everywhere. From 2010 to 2011 alone, there was an increase in mobile-cellular subscriptions by 600 million users, with most of these in developing-country markets (http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-d/opb/ind/D-IND-ICTOI-2012-SUM-PDF-E.pdf). And as of 2012, 85% of US adults were reported to own a cell phone (http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Mobile-Health/Key-Findings.aspx). And that's just looking at mobile phones. Internet, tablets and other forms of technology are also being utilized. And the development projects they are being incorporated in range from health, emergency and disaster relief, community organizing, education and so much more. 

It's not that difficult to see the pull of using technological solutions. Interventionists can quite literally put aid in the hands of beneficiary communities anywhere or connect people to resources or people that they otherwise would not have access to. Disaster struck areas can be 'crowd-mapped' (www.crowdmap.com) to map out areas in crisis where resources are needed or even available to make the relief efforts more efficient and coordinated. Health screenings can be automatically administered through IVR (interactive voice response) where women are called and asked questions through an automatic voice service and women respond back by pressing keys on their phone (http://instedd.org/baby-monitor/). Cool, right? 

But what about the drawbacks to information giving and resource connecting through these means? They can be extremely impersonal and there are accompanying issues of ownership, ethics and, of course, participation. Technology use hasn't permeated global markets enough for these solutions to be introduced and implemented at a grassroots level. They're made by coders and developers of privilege and power. They make assumptions about technology use, uptake and learning curves. They even can pose a risk to the people that use them (i.e. putting these products in the hands of poorer communities can put users' safety at risk; widening existing disparities). 

There are design methods nowadays that have been formalized and are very thorough. Human-centered design (HCD) and participatory design processes are popular strategies that help innovators come up with solutions by listening to and learning from the communities in need. HCD helps balance the need, as voiced by the beneficiary community, feasibility and viability. Participatory design actively involves stakeholders in the development process. (Basically, HCD: designing FOR users and participatory design: designing WITH users.) 

But is that enough? 

Thinking about this issue took me back to our discussion of the Munro and Butt piece on 'rendering technical' in which we talked about interventions being too practical and generalized, often ignoring the nuances of the beneficiary community. All development projects and interventions as we have been discussing have recommendations and guidelines to make them more participatory and culturally sensitive, because as we all know by now, this is a never-ending struggle. With time, technology use will be even more prevalent and these issues I have discussed could be a thing of the past. But for the time being, are there extra measures we can take to make these more participatory? 

How Suitcase sees the poor

The entirety of 105 is an effort to modify how we see the poor. There are rules and codes of conduct that we are meant to internalize in order to visualize and reproduce the realities of poverty as it lines up with how the liberal minded and educated sect of Berkeley society sees it.  But how do the poor see themselves? The development world has helpfully created terms such as welfare queens, the deserving needy versus the undeserving needy, and the passive poor to categorize and feed into the development discourse. However, we don’t have articles or academic papers on how the poor perceive themselves.

I had an experience a few weeks ago in Suitcase Clinic that I’d like to share. A client and I were exchanging our thoughts on the efficacy of Suitcase in alleviating poverty. It started off as it always does in these kinds of conversation. The client was appreciative. He marveled at our kindness and proclaimed that Suitcase was now his second home and that the caseworkers were his family. But the conversation gets more interesting when we come to the issue of caseworker and client interaction. He believed that there is an internalized condescension in the treatment of clients by caseworkers because as educated students, we are inundated by a certain image of poverty. Instead of seeing the poor as lazy and responsible for their plights, we take away their agency and remove them from their personal failings and recast them as people who suffer from the system. The homeless, at least within Suitcase Clinic, are no longer culpable as all their actions, no matter how destructive, are set at the feet of the system and in doing so we infantilize our clients. We baby them and allow them to say or do things that we usually would not allow “ordinary” people to do. This is our version of the poor and it is no truer than the version dreamed up by the academics or the media.

It is true that the pictures we take to depict the poor capture only a segment of their personalities and struggle but we also do them a disservice by the mere act of labeling. We speak for the poor and that should not be so.

Behind the beautiful poverty alleviation strategies

Recently I began reading Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity by Katherine Boo for another class. The book is about life in the Annawadi slum outside of Mumbai. The book has given me quite a bit to think about given that it is about slum-living and my PE org works in slums. One aspect of the book that I find particularly thought-provoking is that it touches upon various slum poverty alleviation strategies adopted by the government and describes how the strategies become subverted in their actual implementation.

One example is a government program designed to "encourage financially vulnerable women to pool their savings and make low-interest loans to one another in times of need." Boo describes how Asha, one of the more powerful residents of the slum, and her self-help group began a scheme to lend their pooled money to even poorer women at high interest rates in order to reap a profit. Boo also describes how Asha is often used by government officials as a poster child to demonstrate how successful the program is to foreign female journalists. Asha knows what the officials want the foreigners to think about the program, and so she puts on a performance playing to the emotions of the foreign women, describing how she has been empowered by the government scheme. On the side, to her children, however, Asha says, "The big people think that because we are poor we don't understand much." But as Boo describes, "Asha understood plenty."

My PE org similarly attempts to establish women's collectives through which slum-dwelling women can support each other. What strikes me about the anecdote from Boo's book is that no matter how good poverty alleviation programs sound, the truth is that they are often inherently condescending in so far as their goal is to "empower" women. It is impossible to ignore the power dynamics inherent in poverty alleviation programs which attempt to uplift the poor. What this example demonstrates to me is that life is complex and poverty is even more so. It's easy to use this case to demonize the poor as manipulative or to dismiss government welfare programs as inevitably ineffective. However what also strikes me about this case is that it helps to deconstruct the quintessential image that gets painted of poor women as passive victims who need help rising up. If rich financial players like Bernie Madoff can construct lucrative money making schemes to scam people out of money, so too can the poor. However, the argument that often gets ignored is that unlike Madoff, perhaps the poor have an even better reason to try to steal people's money - namely to lift themselves out of poverty. Of course that's not the best argument to make, but it is one which can't be ignored. One take-away might be that such government programs should be done away with in order to circumvent manipulation. Another take-away might be people are creatures of circumstance who do what it takes to navigate those circumstances, regardless of their socioeconomic status.

But the questions raised by the scenario described by Boo persist: Knowing that these government programs can be subverted, should we get rid of them? Or should we impose more stringent criteria for participation in the programs, potentially excluding some participants (like the arguments in favor of drug testing welfare recipients in the US)? Or should we just accept that some manipulation of financial systems occurs at every level of society and continue to provide the programs as they are?

San Jose State University's successful campaign to raise the minimum wage in the city of San Jose

http://blogs.sjsu.edu/today/2012/ktvu-2-35000-sign-student-petition-to-raise-the-minimum-wage/

This article talks about the successful student campaign at San Jose State University to raise the minimum wage from $8 to $10 in the city of San Jose last year. What started as a class project became a mass movement and the students involved in this campaign managed to get 35000 signatures and put the issue on November ballot.
This is amazing. I think campaigns like these really expand our ways of thinking about WHAT IS POSSIBLE FOR THE STUDENTS TO DO? and opens up new space for discussing how we can tangibly tackle poverty. What I mean by the former is that socioeconomic statuses have shaped what is possible and not possible in us (echoing Bourdieu's idea of Habitus...) At Cal, a majority of students have grown up in privileged areas (In my fraternity, it is really not difficult to find people who have grown up in Westlake, Calabasas, Santa Monica, New Port Beach, Danville, Palo Alto and Cupertino). Studying hard and getting into good schools, this linkage between one's individual effort in academic achievement and one's obtainment of social and economic benefits - good jobs, high pay, cozy apartment in San Francisco and a new car, is patent and embedded in us. We may think this is the best way to succeed. We may think that this is the best way even for the poor to succeed. "Work Hard and it will pay off". But the article has demonstrated that there are more issues at stake - minimum wage may not be enough. Despite this, students can change the circumstance for the poor by changing the law.
       Currently, Asian Law Caucus, my PE organization is deeply involved in the employment issues in San Francisco. The city's minimum wage is $10.55 and it will increase again next year and so. The city also has various employment regulations. To name a few, 1. workers must be paid extra after working more than 40 hours 2. workers must get at least 30-minute lunch breaks and breaks every four hours of working (I think... the essence here is the guarantee of resting time and lunch time).
On these grounds, the East Bay, especially Alameda (largely Berkeley and Oakland) lack these measures. The minimum wage is still $8. Governor Brown signed the bill that will raise the California state minimum wage to $10 by 2016. This is not enough. Julia and I are doing our group projects on raising the minimum wage in Alameda to at least $11/hr because a family of 4 needs at least $22/hr wage to live adequately in Alameda (if both partners in the family work then $11*2 = $22, hence enough wage)

       But, what I envision in a change is the model that San Francisco city has in that the worker's rights program is not limited to one-time raise in the minimum wage. There are measures for the worker's resting time and measures for the continual raise of the minimum wage and many other measures. These measures show that the minimum wage is not the only issue for protecting workers' rights. They are more expansive. Putting together the case of San Jose State University's success in raising the minimum wage in San Jose and the significance of expansive protection for workers' rights, I  believe Cal students should also carry out these reforms here in Alameda county. A lot of students volunteer to teach, to feed the homeless, to protect one's rights by working in legal services organization or to work in a hospital. This is absolutely better than doing nothing. However, this is not the only way of alleviating the poor. Some students here tend to think that (according to my observation based on being at Cal for four years) the poor are usually lazy or lack skills for jobs and therefore need education. Some students blame the Republicans. A lot of students are annoyed or horrified by such large number of homeless people on the street. My worry here is that students here cannot think outside the box of piecemeal reform.
     However, GPP 115 class has taught me policy, not charity. Poverty will never wither away unless the society (here the city of Berkeley and even Oakland) takes steps to change the structure. I'm glad that I am working in the legal services organization because I get to protect the rights that any individuals deserve and are entitled to. Still, this is not the best or ultimate solution. Maybe the law is not fair. Maybe we should change the law. This article and GPP 115 class have taught me that we, Cal students, are capable of changing the structure. My question is who will..? Will you?

The American Welfare State

There has been long standing criticism over the American welfare state-especially from fiscally conservative Republicans (http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/05/denmarks-work-life-balance/when-welfare-undermines-work-ethic). The basic argument is that the American welfare system encourages people not to work by giving people too much aid. For example, a jobless, single mother of two would receive approximately $49,175 worth of benefits in Hawaii, the most generous state. A study conducted by Tanner and Hughes of the CATO institute (libertarian think tank) claim that welfare is much too generous—in 39 states, welfare would give this hypothetical mother more benefits in aid than an average secretary does from a year of work (http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21585010-americas-welfare-state-not-working-nearly-well-it-should-taxing-hard-up-americans). However, that same hypothetical mother would only receive $16,984 if she lived in Mississippi. Thus, the welfare state is too complicated to have universal reductions or increases.

Furthermore, it is worth noting that because Congress is so starkly divided on welfare there has been little discussion on the possibility of completely changing the system. Generally, Republicans want to cut programs and Democrats want to expand them (a simplification for discussion’s sake). Other countries, such as Britain and Germany, have changed the welfare structure in their countries. Britain has combined benefits and placed a cap on the total amount an individual can receive, to increase efficiency, and Germany has combined welfare with job trainings and has had considerable success bringing down the unemployment rate as a result. Because Congress has been so polarized, America’s welfare state has become stagnant, and as a result, there may be considerably better options that are overlooked.

Alternatives to welfare that have been suggested have been large increases to the minimum wage, bringing it up to 15 dollars per hour (Robert Reich had previously suggested this). This would encourage those on welfare to work as the benefits of welfare would, in most places, not exceed the benefit of working (remember aid through welfare is not taxed, whereas income from working is). Other ideas have included providing more job training programs and more aid for education programs.

Regardless of what the alternative is, I believe alternatives should at least be discussed. Accepting the welfare state, as is, will encourage static solutions that may not be the best suited for the time. As many of our practice experiences work in communities that are dependent on welfare, this is not only an extremely pressing issue, but a very relevant one as well.

My Encounter with Poverty in Berkeley.

This time, I want to share a rather hard experience I witnessed regarding hunger, and my exposure to poverty. Going back to GPP 115 material about middle-class everyday interaction with the poor, ‘zones of interaction’, and the visibility of poverty, I was presented with a rather uncomfortable visible image of the struggle of poverty recently. Anaya Roy explained how poverty in the U.S, tends to detach us away from it, because we feel uncomfortable and distanced from it, unable to understand or acknowledge our own space and relation to the problem. I thought I had a had a rather critical perspective about that notion, that I could experience and perceive everyday poverty because I myself experience some sort of financial/social struggle, and have seen and worked in Mexico’s slum towns. But I had never witnesses such an uncomfortable image about the struggle of poverty until recently. I was walking down Bancroft with my cousin, near Urban Outfitters around 11:30pm, when we both saw a homeless person bend down, eating dog shit off the sidewalk. As we passed by him, he kept eating it, telling us to “stay in school, or shit you will eat.” It was a really hard sight for both of us. At that moment, I could not even judge or look down on him, how could I? I just felt great sorrow and guilt. Guilt that I, unlike him, had the option to go to a cozy home and fix myself a warm meal. I had the urge to go to a store and buy him food, but nothing was open at that time, so I just walked away. I still feel horrible, knowing I didn’t not so anything, and worst, about my own privilege. I still do not know where I stand in this encounter, but know I cannot judge what he was doing because I have never been forced to such a combination of human suffering. I just wonder what the man perceived that act as:  luck ‘having found food’ to feed his hunger, or suffering, degrading himself to eat animal excrement because of his economic situation, or perhaps something else to hard to understand

Disaster Capitalism Today: The Lower Ninth Ward Village in New Orleans

I was recently made aware of a fundraiser taking place for the Lower Ninth Ward Village, a community center in New Orleans in the Ninth Ward, one of the poorest neighborhoods the city and and one of the areas devastated most by Hurricane Katrina.  The center "serves as a hub where all community members can access or create essential resources to empower themselves, be self-sufficient, become whole after Katrina and beyond, and sustain an equitable quality of life." 
It has hosted town hall meetings where residents could raise their voice on issues that are important to them, hosted community field trips for youth to do things like ride horses and experience things they have never done before.  It serves as a space where the whole community is welcome, and in a community that has seen as much neglect and difficult times as the 9th Ward in New Orleans, it is evident that a community center like this wold be an invaluable resource.
This community center has a special connection to UC Berkeley, as the Village has provided a place to stay for student volunteers from Berkeley who are part of Magnolia Project, a Cal Corps Public Service Center program that sends student volunteers and interns to New Orleans.  I was a Magnolia Project intern during the summer of 2012, and while I didn't stay at the Lower Ninth Ward Village, many of my friends who were part of the service trip earlier that summer did.  For a community center to open their doors to outsiders, to strange college students that come from very different cultures and backgrounds than the community members, aiming to get involved in their lives and issues, and to provide them  place to stay, shows the center's generosity and openness.
So when I recently heard that there was a fundraiser taking place in order to save the center from closing, I was immediately concerned.  I assumed that the reasons that the center might have to close might be the expected reasons, simply a lack of resources and funding in an impoverished neighborhood during hard economic times.  However, when I read more, I found a much more troubling reason for the center's closing.  According the the Lowe Ninth Ward Village's website:

"In 2012, Mountain Dew agreed to build a skate park to serve as 30% of the community center’s operations. The original plan was to build this skate park for the youth in the Lower Ninth Ward where Glu Agency (Mountain Dew’s public relations agency) contracted to pay off the center’s mortgage and help insure the building.

Unfortunately, after building the skate park, Glu Agency left our community center unfinished: they never finished the electrical wiring. The Village must bring the entire electrical system up to code (45) as mandated by the City, or the Electric Meter will be revoked. As of current, the lights are cut off due to lack of monetary support. What was believed to be the solution for finally providing a safe space for the youth has halted our abilities to combat the issues within our neighborhood.

The community suffers the most from this unfinished business. Since the Village has been closed, the community has lost 3 young people that used to frequent the Village often. Could their lives been saved? No one can be sure, but the Village provided an invaluable space for the youth of this community."

This situation was incredibly reminiscent to me of the ideas Ananya Roy discussed in GPP 115 during the "Disaster Capitalism" section of class.  Roy presented the idea of the poor constantly being failed by private corporations or other groups aiming to "help" but never coming all the way through and often making the problem worse.  I was reminded of the people we learned about whose homes were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, who spent year after year in formaldehyde filled trailers, which were managed by private businesses, always being told their home would be rebuilt by a certain date, but it never happening.  While the situation with the Lower Ninth Ward Village is different from that of the homeowners, it has the same theme of abandonment.  The Lower Ninth Ward Village agreed to partner with Mountain Dew in order to provide a safe place for youth and to help support their community center, but now might have to close because of unfinished business on the corporate end.  Mountain Dew and its partners got their moment of publicity that made them look good, complete with an appearance by Lil Wayne at the opening of the park, which can be read about here: http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2012/09/lil_wayne_skated_and_celebrate.html.  Yet after this, they felt no need to actually complete the work needed to keep the community center alive.  It is maddening to hear how these patterns and situations of disaster capitalism continue, even 8 years after a disaster.

I guess my question regarding these situations, is how can we, as community member or general citizens, keep corporations and private groups responsible for promises they make in these kind of situations?  When reading about the fundraiser, I only heard of efforts to raise money from the community to fix the problem, and nothing about efforts to hold Mountain Dew responsible, or to get them to help pay for what needs to be done.  I wonder why this is.  Would legal intervention be necessary?  Is there a way to hold Mountain Dew responsible, or would the battle be too expensive and time-consuming to even attempt?  I think these questions are essential to consider as these situations continue constantly and big corporations gain more and more power.

If you would like to learn more about the Lower Ninth Ward Village and its fundraiser, you can read about it here: 

http://www.lower9thwardvillage.org

How do we know what we know, the media, and the single story from the TED talk

I thought Adichie's TED talk was extremely powerful and thought provoking. Her stories were powerful, she delivered it with amazing poise and brought up some very important issues. I was amazed that even as a student at UC Berkeley, minoring in global poverty, I had completely bought into the single story of Africa. I cannot think of a single positive thing about Africa, except maybe the world cup in South Africa. I instantly think about war, starvation, refugee camps, revolutions, the conflict in Egypt, blood diamonds and colonialism.
Adichie spoke about how these were the topics that dominated American literature about Africa. I do not know whether she would consider news and popular media to be part of literature, but I think she would agree that the media continues to propagate the single story of Africa.
I have an app on my phone called Flipboard. It gathers together different news outlets like NPR, BBC, the New York Times, CNN, and more, and gives you links to their stories. I like to focus on the "world" section. I cannot remember reading an article about a positive event in Africa. The world section is saturated with state failures, a story about how not a single one of Africa's leaders was deserving of some good governance prize, underfunded aid organizations and pirates in Somalia.
This cant be the whole story, can it? Somewhere in the country, er continent of Africa, there must be successful elections, growth in industry or an end to war. Why don't we hear about those? I can think of two possible reasons.
First, first world media is purposely demonizing the African continent. Yes, this is kind of a conspiracy theory. The stories run are purposely negative to paint a negative picture of the country. This negative picture is utilized by politicians, corporations and governments to justify military and economic interventions in the state. This one sided negative picture also causes first world citizens to view Africans as a homogenous group of animalistic barbarians. Rather than seeing them as other people, as 'self' in anthropological terms (Dani correct me if thats wrong!), they see them as 'others'. This construction of otherness allows for the continued exploitation of these people and their resources.

That was the conspiracy theory. The second reason, and not exclusive from the first, is that the media just runs what people want to read. I think it is a generally accepted truth that sensational stories of disaster and death are more successful than positive stories about human goodness. Violence and despair are consumed by the public, and the media, acting as a good for profit corporation should, is just supplying the good for which there is a demand. If this is true, is the problem of the single story the fault of the citizenry of first world countries? Is our taste for disaster keeping us from understanding the complexities of Africa because we just don't want to hear it?

Media is very interesting to me. Especially with the addition of social networks, instant transfer of information, I think it is important to consider how we come to know what we know. Are we receiving unbiased information that we can make educated decisions upon? Or are we consuming a product that was produced with very specific intentions? Is it our responsibility to search for the different perspectives on an issue, to seek out and find more than one story, or should we be forced to confront the complexities of the world in the media we see every day?

On cultural sensitivity

Cultural sensitivity. 

It's the dream. The gold standard of aid work that gets us global pov-sters weak in the knees. Recently, I feel like I've been talking about this idea a lot, not just in GPP 105 and 115, but also my public health classes and organizations. I wholeheartedly appreciate the idea and laud its aims. Studies have shown that culturally sensitive methods lead to increased acceptance and retention of education and interventions. And I admit, I am undoubtedly, completely convinced that being culturally sensitive fosters an attitude of respect and humility which encourages cooperation and participation. 

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I was drawn to India Smiles for several reasons, one of the most important being that the project partnered with NGOs in Mumbai and is dependent on community health workers that were residents of the community they were serving. One of my main tasks this semester is to develop an education station. To do so, we have heavily relied on information gathered from this summer's focus groups with mothers and community health workers. Trying to figure out what nutrition information to reinforce and which aspects of oral hygiene to focus on. For being Berkeley based project partnered with NGOs around the globe (Referring to the network of oral health projects that my PI has implemented), I feel like we do a pretty good job at being culturally sensitive. Despite having a core model and structure, every project tries to adapt as much to the individual country and before every trip, we reinforce that student volunteers must go in without any assumptions or pre-conceived notions. As the project is continued throughout the years, the team relies on information gathered from the community and NGO and community health worker feedback. 

One day after our discussion about culturally sensitive methods, however, I was struck by an odd feeling, followed up by an even more unsettling question: Isn't the very implementation of an intervention a culturally insensitive move? The idea of an intervention implies that there is something to be fixed or adjusted in the community in question, and this is something that even the most neutrally phrased questionnaire and culturally specific survey can't change. 

I know this speaks and alludes to the bigger questions surrounding aid work in general, of who should carry out these aid projects and whether we are a piece in this puzzle. But I must put out the disclaimer that even though I feel the neuropathy in my fingers, I am in no way at the paralysis of cynicism. This is just something that I've been mulling over the past few weeks and wanted to open up for discussion.