Build for Sustainability Guides
Catholic Relief Services (CRS)/NetHope
Organizational Guide for ICT4D
This guide gives practical guidance to building organizational capacity in ICT4D. Drawing from the experience of the international development community, this guide connects established principles with processes for implementing new technology. The world faces many challenges that require academic understanding, technological application, and program implementation to address. This guide is intended for internal change leaders and lays out an approach to using technology to improve development outcomes by a variety of stakeholders.
Key Questions:
1. Why should I be interested in ICT4D and what does it mean for my organization?
2. How do I build ICT4D capacity within my organization?
3. What are the practical approaches and best practices I can implement to improve success?
Inveneo
Inveneo specializes in delivering sustainable information and communication technology (ICT) solutions for challenging rural and underserved environments. We design and build affordable, robust and reliable ICT systems for locations that have little power or Internet service. These areas often lack the local expertise necessary to successfully deploy and maintain technology. Therefore, we devote a large part of our efforts toward skills development through our Inveneo Certified ICT Partner program, now active in 24 countries, and ICTworks where we share our expertise publicly.
Our efforts have paid off handsomely. Since 2006, Inveneo and our Certified ICT Partners have delivered innovative information and communication technology (ICT) solutions reaching more than 1,500,000 people in over 500 communities in 25 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Haiti.
We’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way on how to make an ICT project sustainable in resource-constrained environments, and we’re like to share them with you. Our goal with the Inveneo ICT Sustainability Primer is to present these lessons as guidance to those planning ICT-intensive projects in lowesource settings in order to help them avoid common pitfalls. We cover everything from project management to ICT and power infrastructure, to support and facilities.
PATH
Planning an Information Management System
This toolkit can help public health managers to plan for the implementation of information and communications technology (ICT) in health information systems. It draws on lessons learned during project Optimize, a five-year partnership between the World Health Organization and PATH to help optimize the vaccine supply chain.
The toolkit focuses on the planning phase of an information systems project. It proposes an eight-step process that can help decision-makers:
• Choose the solution that best fits their needs and context.
• Obtain the external help and expertise they need.
• Develop, scale, and then sustain their chosen solution.
World Bank
Closing the Feedback Loop: Can Technology Bridge the Divide?
Recent experiences of the Arab Spring and other citizen movements from around the world have highlighted the urgent need to fundamentally rethink traditional governance models toward a new approach that is based on a more open, direct, and inclusive engagement with citizens, including the most marginalized groups. Enhanced transparency, accountability, and government/donor responsiveness to people’s needs are imperative to achieve better and more sustainable development results on the ground.
Closing the Feedback Loop: Can Technology Bridge the Accountability Gap?brings together new evidence from leading academics and practitioners on the effects of technology-enabled citizen engagement. The report aims to address the following four main questions:
• How do new technologies empower communities through participation, transparency, and accountability?
• Are technologies an accelerator for closing the accountability gap—the space between supply (governments, service providers) and demand (citizens, communities, civil society organizations) that must be bridged for open and collaborative governance?
• Under what conditions does this occur?
• What are the experiences and lessons learned from existing grassroots innovators and donor-supported citizen engagement and crowdsourcing programs, and how can these programs be replicated or scaled up?
mHealth Alliance and Vital Wave Consulting
This Sustainable Financing for Mobile Health (mHealth) report focuses on the use of mobile technologies to improve health care; it is not an exhaustive list of projects and potential applications of mHealth solutions. Rather, it is an assessment of how mHealth products and services in a specific set of application areas can be financed sustainably. It offers practical guidance for project managers and donors who see the real (or potential) value of an mHealth solution, but are struggling to keep it alive. New mHealth products and services face many challenges that can lead to failure; they can be too complicated, incompatible with other systems, under-funded, unsupported by a key government agency, or lacking a corporate champion that is willing to fund an expansion from a small pilot project to a national or regional service. Fortunately, there are many ways to help a new mHealth solution thrive. This report provides a clear view of best practices and strategies for financial models of mHealth in low and middle-income countries and analyzes the actual or potential use of mHealth with respect to the Commodities Commission recommendations.
