ICT4D: Making History in Nairobi!

Last month, Emily Tucker, CEO and Erin Yamaoka, Technical Account Manager attended the ICT4D conference in Nairobi, Kenya, hosted by CRS. The multi-day event was the largest tech for development conference the industry had ever seen. Over 700 experts from disparate fields shared and learned how information and communications technology solutions can be applied to a range of development issues such as remotely assessing disaster areas to more accurately monitoring the weather and water levels at boreholes or assisting farmers in the farthest rural hinterlands having trouble with their crops, using distance learning and digital advisory systems.

At ICT4D, we were lucky to have Emily and Erin both speak at the conference covering ‘Strategies for Ensuring Field Staff Adoption’ and ‘Deploying Mobile Tech to Scale Impact.’ For those of you wondering how to have successful field staff adoption of mobile data collection, check out this blog post. For more info on how to use mobile to scale impact, email us at hello@taroworks.org!

Overall, what did we think of the conference? Check out a few highlights for Emily and Erin below…

• Hillary Miller-Wise, CEO of Esoko’s talk on innovative business models for ICT4D – categories of ways to radically change your business model. What struck a chord in Hillary’s talk was that organizations that are actively trying to solve for the sustainability issue are still the exception rather than the norm.
• A number of organizations have guiding principles to get the data collected back out to the communities they’d collected it from with a full disclosure of how it would be used and by whom. However, this action is showing to be logistically challenging in remote places where there is no connectivity and low literacy rates. Our observation is that this seems vital for community engagement and for effective development.
• Paper is not finished…if you’re not ready to give up paper, ODK (open data kit) scan provides an interim solution by using their forms for instance with their tool allowing you to take a photo of the form and it will digitize the data. It’s still early days but shows how there are some number organizations out there that aren’t ready move to mobile data collection.

Did you attend ICT4D? What were your highlights? Comment below!