Read the full blog – UNICEF Challenges CUNY Students to Save Lives Globally

UNICEF’s Innovation Unit (www.unicefstories.org) is hiring two people – a researcher/administrator and a project coordinator/lead – to help us capture some successes from ongoing, open-source innovations initatives (not only in emergencies) and package them so that UNICEF and partners can use them in emergencies.  The links for both positions are below

Both candidates should be self-starters, super clear, concise communicators, and not mind the world changing very quickly around them – and be able to keep up with those changes.  They should have a very good handle on open-source technology and humanitarian work, and be willing to change your views on things, or to argue them when necessary.

Both contracts are for 11 months, full-time, on an “SSA” or “consultancy” type contract and will be located in New York.  It will be part of a fast-paced, start-up-like team working in a large and interesting global system.

1) Assistant/researcher in emergency/humanitarian innovations goo.gl/ccwSc 

2) Project Lead for open-source innovation in emergencies with  goo.gl/QQjkt 

Jorge discusses registration with FEMA after Hurricane Sandy

Where we are today

UNICEF Innovation is supporting new approaches to development problems in more than 20 countries today – the majority in sub-Saharan Africa.

Country offices with self-identified innovation leads

To date, many of these innovations focus on health, nutrition, and HIV/AIDS.  These initiatives have taken two to three years to reach national scale.

UNICEF innovations fall roughly into four categories – ranging from pilot to national scale

Examples of initiatives include:

• Real-time information for programme management:  7 million young people registered using national-scale RapidSMS in Nigeria

• Hearing from young people to create real-time policy changes: 190K+ Ugandan youth using u-Report.  The 41-million strong Scouts and Guides movement will adopt it globally in 2013

• Building new models for South-South / global collaboration: In 2012, UNICEF set up 7 Innovation Labs to share knowledge and experience across countries and regions, with another 8 to follow in 2013.

We are very honored to have made the TIME 100 List of the “World’s Most Influential People” in 2013. This is fantastic recognition for our global team’s work in harnessing technology, design thinking, and innovation to strengthen UNICEF programmes on the ground and transform international development practice. For UNICEF,  this public recognition shows that we can develop and support solutions that are transformative – at scale – for the world’s most vulnerable children.

- Erica and Christopher

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Today, UNICEF issued a press release (below) and at http://www.unicef.org:

Christopher Fabian and Erica Kochi recognized for “changing the world” through innovation

NEW YORK (April 18, 2013) – UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake congratulated Christopher Fabian and Erica Kochi, co-leads of UNICEF’s Innovation Unit, on being selected for this year’s prestigious TIME 100, the magazine’s annual list of the hundred most influential people in the world.

Fabian and Kochi drive new technologies and strategies at UNICEF that are leading to significant gains in child survival and development worldwide.

“I’m proud to be their colleague. This is a great recognition of how 21st century ideas and tools can transform ordinary people’s lives in an extraordinary way,” said Anthony Lake. “Erica and Chris are working with partners across the world to test ideas, push decisions and help scale up innovations. Thanks to this work, we’re doing more to reach the hardest to reach children with lifesaving and live changing programs.”

Fabian and Kochi spearheaded the development of open source technology known as RapidSMS, a free platform for data collection, logistics coordination and communication. RapidSMS employs simple cell phones to deliver real-time information critical to improving the health and protection of children.

This work has helped UNICEF deliver prenatal care to thousands of pregnant women across Rwanda, improved the diagnosis and treatment of children with HIV in Zambia, registered the births of more than 7 million children in Nigeria, tracked the distribution of 63 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets, and created a direct feedback loop for more than 190,000 young Ugandans to engage with their government and change policy in real time.

Since the development of RapidSMS, organizations across the developing world have used the technology to create better communication and coordination.

“I am honored to be included in the TIME 100 list and know it is also a tribute to all UNICEF colleagues who work every day to reach all children,” said Christopher Fabian.

“It’s wonderful being part of UNICEF’s work to harness innovations at the forefront of scientific, technological, and programmatic fields and to see how they dramatically improve children’s lives,” added Erica Kochi.

© UNICEF/2013/Susan Markisz
Innovation at UNICEF Takes Flight: UNICEF’s Innovation team members Erica Kochi and Christopher Fabian work together on mapping the future of innovation at UNICEF House, New York, New York on 10 April 2013.

UNICEF began focusing on innovation as a tool for humanitarian change more than 40 years ago, increasing immunization rates by more than 60 per cent since the 1980s; creating low-cost, lifesaving interventions like Oral Rehydration Salts (an inexpensive mix of salt, sugar and water that helps save children who have acute diarrheal disease); and boosting competition and driving down prices in the vaccine markets through transparency.

The work of the Innovation Unit has won global recognition. The Digital Drum was chosen as one of TIME Magazine’s best inventions of 2011 and was featured as part of an exhibition by the American Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Made locally with low-cost drums and solar panels, the computer kiosks provide pre-loaded health and education content for children living in rural, isolated communities in Uganda without access to the Internet. In addition, the team has developed an innovative partnership with FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) to share open-source innovations for emergencies.

The Time 100 list is comprised of people whose power, talent, discoveries and philanthropy have made a difference in the world. Past honorees recognized for their humanitarian work include Muhammad Yunus, Aung San Suu Kyi, Graça Machel, and Bono.

For the TIME 100 “most influential people” list, visit www.time.com/time100

For more information on UNICEF Innovations, visit www.unicefstories.org

Twitter: Erica Kochi @ericakochi , Christopher Fabian @unickf

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About UNICEF

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) works in more than 190 countries and territories to save and improve children’s lives, providing health care and immunizations, clean water and sanitation, nutrition, education, emergency relief and more. The U.S. Fund for UNICEF supports UNICEF’s work through fundraising, advocacy, and education in the United States. Together, we are working toward the day when zero children die from preventable causes and every child has a safe and healthy childhood. For more information, visit www.unicefusa.org.

For further information, please contact:

Susannah Masur, U.S. Fund for UNICEF, 212.880.9146, smasur@unicefusa.org

Kiní Schoop, U.S. Fund for UNICEF, 212.922.2634, kschoop@unicefusa.org

A dusty youth-center basketball court. A Member of Parliament’s office. A wire-strewn nerve center in UNICEF headquarters.

Three places which would be unlikely to host the same crowd of people on an average day, yet each bears witness to the changes wrought by a single, quietly revolutionary new tool: U-Report.

A potential future u-reporter skates by at the TLC youth center. Credit: UNICEF

Developed in conjunction with the Scouts, the Girl Guides, and six other partners, UNICEF Uganda has created a free, SMS-based social monitoring service which currently links 180,000 Ugandans to health information, government services, and, most importantly, each other.

On our #uinnovate trip, we got an up-close look at how the community that U-Report helped build is taking action. Fueled by short, simply worded polls sent out twice a week — and sophisticated algorithms that sort and track replies by content and geography — SMS messages from U-Reporters are linked to radio and newspaper reports that aggregate and share their opinions with political leaders and the general public.

Free to join and simple to understand, the system has revealed applications as varied and exciting as the community of U-Reporters themselves: as early-warning system for epidemics, as monitors of corruption and absenteeism, as a conduit for peer-to-peer education, as advocates for child-friendly policies, and much more.

The #uinnovate team gets a briefing from young U-Reporters in Kampala. Credit: UNICEF

Thanks to the UNICEF-Uganda team, the #uinnovate guests (myself gratefully included) had a chance to visit three places around Kampala where U-Report is being put to work.

1) The Nerve Center.

Alongside his team of programmers, outreach assistants, and data analysts, James Powell walked the #uinnovate delegation through the strategy that he and the UNICEF-Uganda team put in place to build a network of 180,000 members in just 15 months.

The guiding principles for getting U-Report started were simple. First, use the technology young people could already access; in this case, though newspaper circulation in Uganda is around 33,000 and Internet access estimated at 13% nationwide, most young people have a mobile phone at their disposal. Second, tap into networks with built-up good will; in this case, the Scouts, Guides, and other community partners, who helped James’ team build a critical mass of U-Reporters quickly. Third, make the barrier to entry as low as possible; to join the free service, new users simply text “JOIN” to 8500, and can opt out at any time. Fourth, be selective and focus on the most useful information; the U-report team found that more than three texts per week saturates U-Reporters, so the partners choose the highest-impact polls and region-specific alerts to maintain interest.

A recent U-Report poll on water availability tracked responses across all regions of Uganda

“The best thing about this tool,” James declares, “is that the U-Reporters come up with better ideas than we ever could.” He mentions a reforestation initiative conceived and organized through regional SMS networks, with no outside donors sought or needed. During Family Health Days, where birth registration is provided free for children under five, U-Reporters helped identify non-functioning birth registration printers, which UNICEF and Ministry of Health were able to get fixed within the week to get the service up and running again.

2) The Halls of Power.

Honorable Huda speaks softly and carries a big SMS. As one of the Ugandan Parliament’s “U-Report superusers,” Honorable Huda is leading the way in employing this tool to mobilize her constituents and help Uganda’s government deliver on its promises.

A former schoolteacher and community organizer who herself spent eight years in a refugee camp as a young girl, Honorable Huda carries herself with the gravitas of a committee chairwoman, tempered by the quiet kindness which suggests a familiarity with life’s struggles.

Honorable Huda explains how U-Report has helped her serve the public. Credit: UNICEF

“Where I come from, near the border with Sudan,” Huda explains, “we have a great difficulty in providing high-quality education for our children. Many children don’t have access to a trained teacher, and those that do are often too hungry to pay attention in class.” With the help of U-Report, Honorable Huda commissioned a poll targeted at her constituents to find out which educational needs in her district were the most pressing to them.

Armed with over a hundred of these responses, she convened a face-to-face community meeting with almost 400 citizens — many of them U-Reporters — in attendance. With the momentum generated by this meeting, and the poll’s hard numbers, she got the attention of the Education Minister and regional administrators, lobbied successfully for two of her district’s informal “community schools” to be integrated into the regular public system, and partnered with local authorities to educate parents on providing low-cost, high-energy school lunches for their kids.

As impressive a story as this is, Honorable Huda is not alone: according to the UNICEF team, despite a scant history of this kind of constituent service in Uganda, parliamentary initiatives for child-friendly policies — backed up with U-Report data and U-Reporter energy — are finally starting to proliferate. Recently, MP’s withheld their approval of the government’s budget until an additional US$18 million was allocated to maternal and child health, a position strongly advocated by UNICEF and shared by U-Reporters. The Amendment to the Children’s Act of 2005, which would offer new protections to Uganda’s most vulnerable kids, has also been propelled forward in recent months as over 50,000 U-Reporters added their voices to the debate.

“The greatest problem I have with U-Report,” Huda confesses, “is that now the people in my district are so engaged, their expectations of government are growing fast! It’s our duty now to answer those expectations, and I take that duty very seriously.”

3) The Neighborhood.

At around 3pm every weekday, the Youth Life Center bursts audibly to life. A crowd forms around the water pump, the Digital Drum kiosks beep and whirr, and a pickup basketball game quickly and laughingly takes shape. Off to the side, Jimmy, one of the youth leaders, introduces me to two of the most avid U-Reporters, Diana and Fiona.

Before I can even form a question, Fiona jumps in eagerly: “You know, I just U-Reported earlier today.” (When a noun becomes a verb, you can tell a certain youth cachet has been achieved.) When I ask what she reported on, she explains that access to clean water is a big problem in her Kampala neighborhood. “The local council is supposed to fix the water pumps,” Diana offers, “but I see little kids drinking dirty water all the time. It’s not cool at all.”

Has U-Report helped change their attitude toward this kind of problem? “Oh definitely,” Fiona answers. “First, it’s nice just to be listened to for a change. Then I get a lot of interesting ideas from other parts of the country I’ve never even been to, and hear what their problems are too.” Diana nods, and jokes that some of the regions were places she had never even heard of before — now, she not only knows where they are, she’s hearing about what U-Reporters in these faraway places are doing to improve their own communities. “It helps to know that everyone in Uganda is struggling against the same hard things,” Fiona adds. “If one place has a breakthrough, now we can share it with the others.”

The #uinnovate team in a U-Report encounter at the TLC Youth Center / Credit: UNICEF

As the #uinnovate team says its reluctant farewell to the bustling youth center, I ask the girls if they think their U-Reporting will lead to a more concerted movement for change. “It’s already happening,” Fiona asserts. Jimmy tells me about the trips U-Reporters have taken on the group’s behalf, to Rio+20 and the Doha climate negotiations. “We would just get frustrated by all this nonsense before,” says Diana. “Now I feel like I can really be part of something to change our country.”

It profiles Mwana as one of the mHealth systems that has scaled and also has evidence behind it and brings home the point that technology is the easy part, and co-creating and building a system that is useful to the end users is the key.

If you have just joined, our small team of innovation leads have spent the last week working with UNICEF’s innovation labs in both countries.  On our last day of the trip, we went to see a village-based microfinance group.

Lots of people have lots of problems with microfinance.  It’s hard to monitor.  It gets used to finance things the donors might not want to finance.  This group of villagers has about 800USD in financing.

Of that, 500USD is “out” in credits (of around 100USD each) to the community.  If you weren’t calling it “microfinance” and were just calling it “good business” it would make pretty OK sense.

This picture is just a reminder of how green, lush and (tragically) hilly Burundi is.  For context.

Young men on bikes move heavy loads of coal and vegetables up and down the hills – often grabbing onto trucks that are going up the steep inclines (paying a small fee for the lift) and frequently getting in terrible accidents.  This is a village bike-man.

We sit in a circle and are given an overview of the village’s microfinance programmes.

We hear, over and over in Burundi, that charging devices – particularly mobile phones – is the single greatest need.  This is what we hear again, today.

Even for a country with 3-4% of people on the formal electrical grid – there are a lot of phones:

While getting this overview, I looked at the desk I was sitting at – it was covered with scratchings of sums and ticks:

In addition to phones (though it seems like a lower priority) is the need for indoor lighting.  This is a house roof – notice the few small cracks and openings that midday sun can sneak in through.

In order to create light, wood is used as a fuel  - or kerosene – either (both) resulting in respiratory infections and in-house fires.

I had a fantastic time on this trip – working with smart people and trying to attack very interesting problems.  One of the most inspiring things I saw was this game of marbles.

Remember, in this country with some of the worst human development indicators – there is very little sense of hope among the development community.  But these kids were full of hope, and excitement about what used to be one of my favourite games.   

Olivier, Eddie and others posed for the back-facing iPhone camera – getting to see themselves in the display

And, while we listened to discussions of microfinance and community savings in the large, open circle – these kids and I were causing enough trouble that we almost stopped one of the presentations due to laughter.

I look forward to supporting the amazing work of the UNICEF Burundi office, and its innovation lab

Christopher Fabian

Gitega, Burundi

Saturday, 9 March, 2013

(Posted from New York, 12 March, 2013)

I was interested that we had a few comments from our group regarding how nice it was – and that maybe we could see a more distressed clinic (of which there are many…many).

But I think it’s good to see what is possible too.  The administrator here estimated that this place cost several thousand USD / month to keep running.  It’s not much, knowing the types of serices proided.

And sure – it wasn’t the most run down or beat-up place – but it points to a certain future which we should keep in mind and work towards (note all the phones being charged…every electrical outlet had a phone plugged in, charging away.  Power is the greatest need.

Here, Evan looks at a bar of ready-t-use therapeutic food

After the health centre, we went to visit a village – and a whole community – which had built 7,000 latrines in the last year.  Each latrine was connected to a household, and they were very proud of their work.

This was part of a larger actionAid project – but the conceptualization, location of latrines, and implementation was done (and paid for) by the villagers.

They told us that their biggest challenges were

1) getting other communities to take up the same model

2) basic (hardware) tools for getting the water closer to the village and

3) some ways to show that the latrines were having a positive health effect (i.e. an evaluation instrument to link latrines to improved health outcomes)  

They want to extend this practice to other “hills” around them.

These tiles are made in the village

There is no smell at all in the latrine

Here is a simple sink, which you don’t have to touch with your hands (food-pedal operated)

Here is a video of this moment:

Evan and Emeline duck into a latrine…

..and deem it good.

Halfway through our tour, heavy rain started coming down.  We all rushed for shelter

Which was in a fairly large building – kindly shared with us by the community

Where we stayed for about half an hour until the rain let up a bit…

And we were on our way.

Christopher Fabian

Gitega, Burundi, 8 March, 2013)

(posted from Amsterdam, 11 March, 2013)

Sorry that the sound is a little low on this – I’m just getting used to filming with the iPhone.

Christopher Fabian

Gitega / Amsterdam

March 2013

Today we are driving in convoy to Gitega, with a group of UNICEF staff from the various programme sections, as well as the new innovation lab.

Below you will see how green the country is.  This blog post should be read with some thoughts of the cooks and eaters like Jamie Oliver, Michelle Obama and Jose Andres who are trying to help people be nourished in the modern world.

There are two big problems in Burundi.

Burundi Problem One: land is scarce and vertical.  Ownership of land has gone from 2 hectares per family to 0.2 in the last 10 years.  It’s also all on mountain sides.

Burundi Problem Two: years of civil war have had people fleeing violence, running at night and hiding during the day, and destroyed any ability to relate to the land or two know what to eat for good nutrition.

We arrive at a growth monitoring clinic in Gitega.  This is about a two-hour drive up the hills.

Here, women come once a month to weigh their children (on the scale) so that the whole community can be checked for malnutrition, children who are suffering can be triaged for care, and data can be collected.

It’s a long queue, and weighting a kid is a tough thing to do.  They wiggle, and pee on you – pretty consistently.

The MUAC (mid-upper arm circumference) band checks a kid’s nutritional status.  Green is OK.  Red and yellow need followup.  Data are collected in these log books, and referrals are made to feeding centres (see below).  A child’s upper arm stays roughly the same circumference for its first five years.

This type of growth chart helps a mother track the growth of their child.  Each visit gets a new mark.  It makes sense to me, but Cartesian plotting is not, necessarily the most intuitive thing – and I always wonder how this is really interpreted by an illiterate mother.

We spend some time talking with the women about their phones.  This phone costs about 10USD (and is often given free as a promotion.)  Women in the group have phones (not all of them) and say that keeping them charged with battery is their biggest struggle.   (10-15% of daily income can go to charging)

After the Growth Monitoring, we go to the place where treatment happens.  For kids that are moderately malnourished, the feeding centre is a place for their mothers to learn how to combine local foods and provide a balanced meal.

The amazing staff of this centre explain how they ask every mother to bring what they have – a sort of stone soup  process – and, with them, cook balanced, healthy food and share the recipes.

Our team asks questions, and is particularly struck by the low-tech aspects of this project.  It is about re-building knowledge, and not about building new technology.

The kids and mothers also get a chance to learn to play – and to discover various child-rearing tips.  The entire experience lasts about 15 days.

When asked how many children they would like to have, the mothers replied that three was a good number.

This is where some of the cooking happens.

We spent about two hours talking with the staff and mothers

I was pretty hungry by the end – partially because the food looked so tasty. 

For the next two days (this post is written slightly after the event) we will continue to be struck by the verdant background and the seemingly incompatible foreground of poverty, malnutrition and stunting.

I want to thank the women who run this feeding centre for spending their morning with us and teaching us about the work that they do.

Christopher Fabian

Gitega, Burundi (posted from Kampala, 10 March))

7 March, 2013