Author: DFID

It is quite fitting that as the holiest month in the Muslim calendar, Ramadan, draws to a close this week and Muslims around the world celebrate the arrival of the new moon, we at lendwithcare.org will be celebrating the successful inclusion of our first Islamic Microfinance partner, Akhuwat in Pakistan.

Like ‘traditional’ microfinance, Islamic microfinance is the provision of basic financial services to the poor or those on low incomes. However, what differentiates Islamic microfinance from its more ‘traditional’ form is that these basic services, be it loans, savings or insurance, must conform to Islamic financing principles. More specifically these principles include, financial support for socially productive activities only, no speculation or excessive uncertainty, prohibition of Riba or unjust gains, which includes, but is not limited to, interest and no exploitation by the stronger party against the weaker

And although lendwithcare.org, as part of international development charity CARE International UK, has been supporting microfinance institutions across the developing world since September 2010, our partnership with Akhuwat now lets people in the UK lend their money to an organisation that specifically complies with these principles.

Since April 2013, people in the UK have been lending small sums of money to micro-entrepreneurs in the Punjab region through our peer-to-peer lending website and so far the partnership is proving to be a great success and incredibly popular with the UK public. In fact, in just 4 months lendwithcare lenders have supported 230 self-starting entrepreneurs in Pakistan to grow or start a small business, providing them with the opportunity to lift themselves, and their families, out of poverty.Naseem Akhtar is an example of one of the entrepreneurs supported by lendwithcare lenders over the last 4 months.

Naseem has faced many personal and financial difficulties in her life. Her husband had substance abuse issues and frequently sold valuable domestic household items cheaply in order to finance his addiction. Eventually her husband abandoned the family and has never returned. With help from 2 daughters Naseem now runs a tailoring business from her home. She earns around 28,000 rupees per month (around £200). However, there are 10 members in her family and Naseem finds it difficult to adequately clothe and feed everyone. She wants to expand her business and requested a loan of 15,000 Rupees (approximately £150) in order to buy an additional sewing machine.For Naseem, like most of the micro-entrepreneurs supported through lendwithcare, small and reliable sources of credit can create a virtuous cycle of investment and increased income and thereby break the cycle of poverty in which many poor people like Naseem, are trapped.

With 2.5 billion adults, predominantly in developing countries, currently considered ‘financially excluded’ we at CARE are working very hard to create access to basic financial services more readily available. However, in addition to this forced exclusion from the formal financial sector due to social or economic conditions, there is an additional aspect to this exclusion that is not being addressed with perhaps quite the same gusto and this is that many Muslims (estimates vary from one-fifth to half the population) refrain from accessing interest based finance for fear of breaching their religious beliefs. And when we consider 650 million Muslims live on less than $2 a day, it is reasonable to conclude that the unavailability of Islamic microfinance constrains the development of many Muslim owned micro-businesses and therefore the creation of sustainable livelihoods.

In a context like Pakistan, where we have recently started working with Akhuwat, these figures become all the more significant when we consider a third of the population live on less than 30p a day and the majority of the population (95-97%) are Muslim.

Since teaming up with Akhuwat (meaning brotherhood), an organisation in Lahore, to offer Islamic, or Shariah-compliant loans, our lenders have been able to support some of the poorest people in Pakistan with their businesses by providing loans that comply with their religious beliefs. Through our partnership with Akhuwat we are able to target the poorest and most marginalised people living in Pakistan, who traditionally have the most difficulty getting money for their business – especially women.The World Bank recently found that access to finance remains one of the biggest challenges to Pakistani women who want to grow a business, with less than 25% of Pakistan’s businesswomen being microfinance borrowers. Whilst offered on Islamic principles, the loans are not limited to Muslim borrowers and many Christians (a minority group in Pakistan) are also able to take up these loans.

Expanding lendwithcare’s reach to Pakistan, and our first Islamic microfinance organisation, has been a great addition to our microloan initiative and definitely a cause for celebration for us at CARE. In the words of one of our lenders ‘Lend with care is one of THE BEST practical ways to do something worthwhile with our money. Find out more!’

Eid Mubarak everyone!

Over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting our development support to Pakistan and how we’re helping to push for change. We’ll be linking up with partners from across the British Pakistani community who are making a huge contribution to Pakistan’s development and promoting the positive voices for progress in country. To get the latest Pakistan development news straight to your inbox sign up for our quarterly newsletter. 
—————————————————————————————————–

Please note, this is a guest blog. Views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of DFID or have the support of the British government.

Community led climate change adaptation

Climate change has already created many issues for communities around the world, perhaps no more so than in Pakistan. Productivity of crops is at risk of decline due to increasing land desertification, increasing temperatures and loss of soil fertility. This sort of vulnerability makes adaptation to climate change a priority for the farmers in Pakistan. The country has a national climate change policy that was developed taking into account increasing incidence of floods especially during the monsoon season period. However, progress has been slow. Meanwhile, communities at the local level across Pakistan are continuing to be put under pressure and  affected by  climatic events, including monsoon rains and droughts. Action at the local level can help deal with the short-term effects of climate change.

Local Adaptation Plan of Action

A Local Adaptation Plan of Action (LAPA) is the community planning and action tool which aims to look at implementation of practical solutions to specific climate-related impacts affecting the communities for whom they are developed. LEAD Pakistan, in partnership with LEAD International and 45 partner organisations across the provinces of Sindh and Punjab in Pakistan, are pioneering the use of this social yet scientific approach in 12 districts to develop LAPAs, most recently for Shaheed Benazirabad district in Sindh during a workshop in Karachi.

30 participants (10 women, 20 men) worked through 8 tools designed by LEAD Pakistan to arrive at a practical  solution with impact to a relevant climate change problem in their local area around the town of Nawabshah. Before arriving at the workshop, local organisations had conducted a vulnerability assessment of the area and focused group discussions with residents to ascertain the most pressing issues. For example, there has been concern about the spread of waterborne cattle diseases increasing with flooding. These issues were analysed through the first sessions of the workshop in terms of their priority, intensity, support and reasoning to arrive at the one most appropriate for local action. In this case the irregular pattern of monsoon rains causing disruption to production of rice and cotton, either by flooding the fields or by heavy uneven rains, was identified as the top priority.

After the discussion on this issue, 3 potential solutions were proposed: 1) alternative crops; 2) better field drainage; or 3) early warning weather forecasting system. These were then analysed using similar techniques to the issues according to their positive and negative aspects, available resources, risks, and socio-economic benefits. The most effective solution identified after this process was to introduce alternative crops replacing rice and cotton in the local farming system.

Finally, the participants evolved a project plan for this purpose involving the selection and training of beneficiaries and also consulting with other stakeholders like local government. This  plan was then presented to the local government officials. Encouragingly, after a slow start, the officials became animatedly involved. They were convinced of the benefits of such a project and proposed which type of alternative crops would be best suited to the local situation (an area where the LAPA development group were unsure).

Micro-project

LAPAs, therefore form the basis for relatively low cost projects with high impacts at local level. With government buy-in, the success of such a project could have a significant impact on the livelihoods of an entire district.

A LAPA developed earlier in the year by Muzaffargarh district in Punjab has now completed the first phase of its implementation with the construction and cleanliness of salinity drains to deal with increased soil salinity. This is a serious issue in the district where unpredictable rainfall, coupled with insufficient drainage, means that the natural salt stays in the soil and affects crop yields. Despite some initial delays due to harvest season and  elections in Pakistan, LEAD Pakistan’s partner organisations have moved forward selecting their beneficiaries and running preliminary awareness sessions. They have even drawn the interest and subsequent involvement of the local forestry department to increase the impact of their work by planting trees near the project sites. They hope that this example of additional and unforeseen benefits will be the good trend with such projects, leading to a more resilient Pakistan.

LEAD International is the world’s largest NGO focusing on leadership for sustainable development with programmes in 12 countries/regions. Together with LEAD International, LEAD Pakistan has delivered this project since 2011, concluding in 2015. This project is funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) as part of the Civil Society Challenge Fund. For more information about the project, please contact Haseeb Kiani or Nosherwan Shahid Sheikh, at LEAD Pakistan ([email protected], [email protected]).

Over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting our development support to Pakistan and how we’re helping to push for change. We’ll be linking up with partners from across the British Pakistani community who are making a huge contribution to Pakistan’s development and promoting the positive voices for progress in country.

To get the latest Pakistan development news straight to your inbox sign up for our quarterly newsletter.

 

Last month, we hit a new digital milestone at DFID: we reached over 100,000 followers on Twitter. Frankly, my first reaction as a digital editor for DFID was a bit, well, “meh”. So what?

But much like Ira Glass said – whose popular This American Life radio podcast reached its own milestone of 500 episodes – it would just feel a bit weird if we didn’t mark it in some way. And with that, we tweeted:

A sprinkling of retweets later and the moment had passed into the internet ether. No one else really cared. The question is – why should anyone care?

It’s true we have worked hard to build our audience on Twitter over the past few years. One hundred thousand followers would have seemed a gargantuan number back when we started the account in 2009.

The number helps to bring home the fact that we’re building up a significant audience that we can talk to directly. This isn’t small fry anymore. We are beginning to reach people on a large scale.

In that sense, it’s important that we marked the milestone to maintain support for what we do and what we can achieve. But talking about Twitter in this way is a traditional approach – akin to column inches, radio airtime or TV viewing figures.

As a team, we’re trying to push that conversation further. Our role in the organisation is to use digital communications to help more people out there in the real world understand what DFID does and why it’s worth doing. The numbers of people we reach is a part of that – but we must also talk about who we’re reaching and how.

What we miss when we focus on numbers is how well we’re actively involving people via Twitter – to help them talk to us and deepen their understanding of our work. We know we need to do more on this, and for all the constraints of being a government department, I think we have made some progress.

I’ve long admired the Foreign Office’s #AskFS Twitter chats that connect people directly with the Foreign Secretary. In a similar vein, we recently held our inaugural Twitter chat with our own Secretary of State, thanks to my colleague Russell.

Going a step further, my boss Marisol used our own Twitter handle to give a voice to two young activists from Tanzania – Frank and Mwajuma – to let people find out what it was like to grow up in a country where hunger is the norm. I can’t think of many better ways to help people in the UK get a real connection to what we do.

But the numbers also divert us from something else: who are we reaching via Twitter? Who do we want to reach? Certainly those who engage most regularly are those who already ‘in the business’ – policy people, development workers, foreign affairs journalists and charity supporters. This is not a bad thing – we need to talk to our stakeholders, and we are encouraging a network of DFID staff to do just that. But we need to find ways to reach a broader constituency.

And if we want to reach more real people, we must also join the conversations they are having and go beyond the usual topics.

In the wake of our 100,000 follower fanfare we marked another digital moment on Facebook with one of our most shared pieces of content ever:

This was not a new bit of policy, announcement of funding or start of a new programme from DFID. But it did join the celebrations of a man who embodies what we’re trying to achieve. And that meant people were happy to share it with their own friends, beyond our traditional base of supporters.

Talking to more people – and a range of people – is good. But it’s just the start. Our ultimate goal is to end extreme poverty. As we reach bigger numbers on Twitter – and all our digital channels – we have an opportunity to translate the support of our followers into action, and to draw on their collective voice to help effect change.

When we talk about Twitter , we end up talking about our whole approach to social media. That’s a pretty big topic – but I’d love to hear your thoughts so far. What do you think we should talk about?

When I think of fragile and conflict affected states such as Afghanistan, Somalia or the Congo, in the development context, I think of humanitarian projects or perhaps peace building initiatives. These are generally short-term programmes aimed at dealing with emergencies rather than focusing on long-term economic growth. Of course these types of programmes are essential, but with 21 out of 28 of DFID’s priority countries classed as “fragile” we need to give some serious thought to how we do economic development work in fragile and conflict affected states, especially as economic development becomes an increasing focus in DFID.

The argument for increased work in the space is there; private sector development can play a key role in fragile and conflict-affected states, reducing poverty, promoting immediate stabilisation and sustained recovery, and, where economic factors contribute to conflict, addressing the causes of conflict.

In the private sector department we’ve been thinking about how DFID runs private sector development programmes in fragile and conflict affected states and what the additional challenges are to operating in such environments. It seems like there’s quite a lot of information out there on working in fragile states and a small, but increasing body of evidence on private sector development. However, there is very little on the specifics of private sector development in fragile states. There is some really good work going on from organisations such as the Donor Committee for Enterprise Development who have a specific webpage on the topic. The Overseas Development Institute have written some interesting papers amongst other organisations. However, there is still very little established best practice in the field and evidence on what works.

Questions such as “at what stage should you start an economic development programme?” or “how can you manage a programme when you can’t access the beneficiaries due to security reasons?” do not have simple answers, but through talking to advisors in country I am beginning to get a feel for the innovative ways DFID is operating in these difficult contexts.

One of the examples of this is the Sustainable Employment and Economic Development (SEED) programme in Somalia.

SEED is a 4 year programme with 2 components – one on market development and the second on developing the investment climate targeting markets including agriculture, fisheries and livelihoods.

The market development activities involve targeted skills training and increasing the supply of contested resources (e.g. fertile land and water). The aim is to fix market failures and engage the poor; thus offering immediate and tangible benefits by reducing the pressure on contested resources and providing other stability dividends for the youth and women beneficiaries. The investment climate activities underpin stability at a macroeconomic level and lay the groundwork for investment and broad based economic growth.

There is an excellent case study on one of the beneficiaries from the programme who underwent training and is now making a living from by-products from the meat industry: camel bones. As a long-term veggie my first thought was “that’s a bit grisly!”, but very quickly I realised this was an incredibly innovative way of generating sustainable employment through making use of by-products that would have normally gone to waste.

What the case study doesn’t reveal is the challenges of operating in a country post conflict in the North but still in conflict in the South Central region. Visits are limited due to security concerns, there is no effective government and weak infrastructure severely limits trading potential. Such programmes require careful planning, a conflict sensitive approach (to ensure that the programme isn’t inadvertently negatively contributing to the conflict), and choosing the right partners to be your eyes and ears and the ground.

Now in phase two the SEED programme has already seen great results; SEED has generated 154,127 jobs, of which 56,904 are long term, in the regions of Somaliland, Puntland and South Central Somalia.

5,700 beneficiaries have received demand-driven technical training; 70% are employed or self-employed; Hargeisa livestock and Boroma (Somaliland) meat and Garowe (Puntland) fish markets have been constructed and are managed under public-private partnership, all attributable to the SEED programme. The SEED programme has demonstrated that it is possible to run private sector development programmes in fragile states. Hopefully SEED, along with events and initiatives such as the Somalia Conference, will encourage other donors and private sector actors to invest in the country as well as in private sector development programmes in fragile states as a whole.

If you’re interested in finding out more about DFID’s work on private sector development check out our Economic Development policy pages and follow us on twitter @DFID_PSD.

Returning from a couple of wet and windy June weeks on holiday in the UK was actually quite a relief from the heat of Dar Es Salaam, but now Tanzania in mid winter is unusually a degree or two colder than the current British heatwave. It’s the best time to travel being both cooler and drier, I took my children to Ruaha National Park, down the never ending 100km dirt road and was totally taken aback by the sheer size and beauty of Africa. Ruaha is relatively quiet and certainly unspoilt, we managed a great couple of days spotting lions in the long grass and elephants cooling in pools along the sandy river bed.

Driving back, a distance equivalent of Edinburgh to London, one realises the sheer challenges Tanzania is facing to provide services to it’s rapidly growing population. In the early morning children as young as 5 trudge along the side of roads in the loneliest locations. James Stone (Plan International) graphically illustrates the challenges faced by one little girl who walks over an hour and a half a day to get an education, braving traffic and predators, both human and wild.

Returning to Dar I thought it important that my children understand more about the vast interior of Tanzania and the people who often live in such difficult circumstances.  The Village Voices documentary films made by Laurance Price make ideal, if at times uncomfortable, viewing. They chronicle over 5 years the lives of remote villagers from the Lindi coast to the Northern plains and give a detailed insight into the cycles of grinding poverty and simple wishes for just a slightly better life. Teenagers lament their lost opportunities to go to secondary school for the want of $50 school fees due to a lost harvest.

Thankfully since these films were made in the middle of the 2000s, secondary enrollment has tripled and now over a million extra teenagers attend Forms I-IV, partly due to budget support funding pumped in from UKAID and other donor partners. However the majority still drop out young and as I’ve chronicled recently a crisis of demotivated teachers and inadequate schools means that for many, secondary school is a frustrating, unrewarding experience.

Supporting education in Tanzania involved some difficult choices in the coming years, how to improve quality and make complex systemic reforms whilst extending the school network for both remote villagers and the marginalised in more prosperous areas?

Some of the most rewarding work I ever did over a decade ago in Ethiopia was to make maps of the mountainous North, that were used to select sites and reduce walk time to new school locations. The Tanzanian government’s Big Results Now! Initiative has also established a geographic interface to show district exam pass rate changes graphically. This is being extended with individual school locations and data to drive transparency and accountability, with improving schools being rewarded with additional grants and funding. Whilst the technology has moved on and the internet has come of age, Tanzania is poised to benefit from this approach to improve its network and reduce journey times for young learners. I hope meaningful learning opportunities will reward those who conquer the long and dusty roads.

I have been working in and on Pakistan for many years, starting there as an economist in the 1980s. It is perhaps the most exciting and challenging partner country for anyone interested in development. It has it all – conflict and insecurity, difficult governance, poor social indicators but also enormous promise with a young population, a dynamic private sector and potentially huge regional economic opportunities.

The recent election has unleashed a fresh wave of optimism. Why? Because it was the most credible election in Pakistan’s history. Because it was the first time one democratic government has handed over to another. But also because politicians were finally forced to talk about how they would deal with Pakistan’s problems, electricity shortages, inflation and insecurity.

 

But almost 3 months on from the election, governments in Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar, Karachi, Quetta and Gilgit are only just beginning to get to grips with the challenges they face. Only they – not donors, not NGOs – have the resources, scale and reach to make and sustain the transformational change that Pakistan needs. But policy capacity is thin, implementation is weak, public finances are extremely stretched, and public accountability mechanisms are inadequate.

That is where DFID can help, providing carefully targeted support to help create the circumstances for growth, stability and prosperity. Over the last 3 years, we have scaled up our presence in Pakistan dramatically – more than doubling our staff and our programme budget, designating representatives to Lahore and Peshawar, and setting out our ambitions in a clear plan. The expertise of our staff, our ability to provide grant assistance, and our strong international networks means DFID support is in high demand.

Our programmes focus on building peace and stability; making democracy work; promoting macroeconomic stability, growth and jobs; and getting the state to deliver services to its citizens. Support for education reform is the single largest component of this, and also DFID’s largest bilateral education programme worldwide.

In addition we support a national cash transfer programme, encourage innovation and improvements to access in microfinance, better provision of new-born and maternal health care services and provide humanitarian assistance to displaced people and those affected by floods.

By 2015 DFID’s work alone will benefit 4 million children in primary education, help 1.23 million poor people (more than half women) access microfinance loans and prevent half a million children from becoming undernourished. While some of our programmes operate on a national level, the bulk of them operate in the provinces of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This ensures we do not take on more than we can manage.

Alongside our programmes, we are heavily engaged in policy debates in the sectors in which we work but also on broader economic policy. Without better economic management and structural reform, Pakistan cannot hope to achieve the high growth it needs to raise living standards for its rapidly growing population. That is why we are working closely with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Asian Development Bank (ADB) and others to try and support the new government’s efforts on tax, energy, state owned enterprise reform and other issues.

DFID’s programme in Pakistan is a priority for the UK government and for the International Development Secretary, Justine Greening. She has visited twice in the last 6 months. I accompanied her both times. The first took place in January, just as Tahir-ul Qadri’s Long March in Islamabad came to an end, and the second was at the start of July.

In July, Justine Greening met with Chief Minister, Shahbaz Sharif and his senior team where she reaffirmed DFID’s strong partnership with Punjab and jointly announced the expansion of the DFID supported Punjab Skills Development Programme. This will mean that by 2015, 135,000 men and women in Punjab will benefit from job skills training.

She also met with Finance Minister Ishaq Dar and welcomed the new government’s commitment to increase the tax to GDP ratio. She extended the UK’s offer to provide expert assistance through HMRC to Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue to help achieve this. And she agreed with Chief Minister Khattak that DFID and the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa should develop a new strategic partnership to deepen our collaboration. So overall, the visit was a success. All the more so that all this and much else was done in 24 hours!

Following this historic election, the new governments at federal and provincial level are under pressure to deliver as never before. The next few years are critical for the future of Pakistan and the region. It is no exaggeration to say that the future of democracy in Pakistan hangs on how this set of governments performs. Our responsibility is to help in whatever modest way we can to try and ensure that 180 million people have a brighter future.

—————————————————————————–

Over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting our development support to Pakistan and how we’re helping to push for change. We’ll be linking up with partners from across the British Pakistani community who are making a huge contribution to Pakistan’s development and promoting the positive voices for progress in country. To get the latest Pakistan development news straight to your inbox sign up for our quarterly newsletter.

If you’ve ever watched the seminal British comedy Yes, Minister, you’ll know that “technical” and “bureaucratic” are 2 words often associated with civil servants. They are also 2 words often associated with international organisations, though I won’t name any names… Most of the time, I disagree with these stereotypes, as I know so many dynamic and effective civil servants and international staff. I have also been trying to work to ensure that the organisation that I work on, the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, isn’t bureaucratic or technical, especially since one of its predecessors, the “Working Party on Aid Effectiveness” was often accused of being overly technical. In particular, 1 of the major shifts the Global Partnership is meant to deliver is to bring something called the “monitoring framework” to life and out of a technical silo.

The monitoring framework is made up of 10 indicators that are designed to help the international community keep track of the progress that countries and other non-governmental development actors are making to ensure development is more effective.

But for many people the monitoring framework can sound very technical.

For example, 1 of the 10 indicators is called “the enabling environment for civil society”. To a lay person (including me until a few weeks ago) the indicator sounds very technical. It doesn’t give a very clear idea of what it might mean in the real world, and how things should change as a result.

But once you delve into it and talk to civil society organisations, its political implications and the impact on people’s lives soon become clear.

Civil society organisations can be defined as organisations that represent the space between individuals or families, and the market and government. They include trade unions, charities, foundations, journalists, and many more. Every year, an umbrella organisation of civil society organisations worldwide called CIVICUS, publishes a report called The State of Civil Society. This year’s report, released last month, carefully details how the space for civil society organisations to work has been reduced considerably in many places. Protests by citizens’ groups have been met with aggression from governments, journalists arrested, and many non-governmental organisations are facing funding reductions in part because of their campaigning and advocacy work. Many are having difficulties registering. In my view this is all bad news for development. If people cannot express their demands of governments or employers, it makes development more difficult to take place and have a lasting impact.

At the same time, there are many other trends outside of these formal structures that are enabling people to express their demands and influence change – often enabled by the internet. For example, the campaigning organisation Avaaz  has amassed 23 million members from 194 countries, and now regularly sets up petitions that consistently get over 1 million signatures. Some types of funding from individuals is growing, through sites such as indiegogo  and Kickstarter based in the US, and Demohour and SeedAsia based in China. Close to home here in the UK in 2012 there were boycotts of firms such as Starbucks and Amazon. It’s not for me to say whether these are “good causes” or not, but they do illustrate that citizens are coming together in different ways, expressing their views and power as consumers, to impact state and market choices.

Although the “enabling environment for civil society” indicator sounds technical, by helping keep track of these hot political issues it can actually help us understand the potential for effective development. Many of the other indicators in the Partnership’s monitoring framework have these exact ingredients. They can sound rather dry but they are actually determined by and can determine major political shifts.

As the former South African Minister for Communications Jay Naidoo said in a recent blog post – it’s all about the politics… The Global Partnership has a major opportunity to turn technical information on development effectiveness into real and political information. That will be its key to making a real difference.

Part of my job as the picture editor for DFID is to always be looking out for creative ways to tell our story in images. From reports and publications to humanitarian emergencies and ministerial visits overseas, I think DFID has amazing stories to tell, and, increasingly, sharing our photography online is a big part of that. To this end, I set up DFID on the photo-sharing website Flickr back in 2008. Since then we’ve created an archive of nearly 3,000 photographs about development issues and some of the many people whose lives have been changed by British development aid.

My colleague Marisol has written more about Flickr and how we use it in another blog for this series. I continue to love it. But it was conceived and designed in the early days of what used to be called Web 2.0 – sometime around 2005/6, roughly when Facebook and YouTube also came into existence. People were just starting to talk about creative commons, open source, APIs and, yes, social media.

Then, in 2007, the iPhone came along, and everything changed. The internet became mobile, mobile phones became smart and the age of the app was born. Suddenly you could own a mobile phone that included a pretty good digital camera that was always connected to the internet. People started sharing photos taken on their phones in extraordinary numbers.

Fast-forward to 2011 and an app called Instagram was launched for the iPhone. A piece of software that would apply a retro-style filter to your digital photos (basically making them look like a 1970s-era polaroid photo) and upload them to the web directly from your phone.

People went crazy for Instagram in a way arguably not seen in photography since Kodak launched the Brownie camera at the start of the 20th century. In little more than 2 years, Instagram has amassed more than 130 million users worldwide, who between them are uploading some 40 million images every single day.

And now DFID is one of those 130 million Instagram users – take a look at http://instagram.com/dfid_uk. Why? Well, for us, telling our story has always been about going to where people are spending their time online and putting our stories there. We’re doing it with Facebook, with Twitter and YouTube, and now we’re going to try doing it with Instagram too. We just felt that Instagram has reached a tipping point in the last few months.

For me this realisation came during a visit to Lagos last October, when I met and tried to photograph some of Nigeria’s tech entrepreneurs. After a day or so of trying – and failing! – to make interesting images via my digital SLR, I realised all of the people I was trying to photograph were comfortable taking pictures of themselves and each other on their mobile phones. So I decided to do the same, and posted them to Instagram. You can see the results here.

It isn’t just about numbers though – it’s about the tool, the way people are using it, and the potential for how it might help show where UK taxpayers’ money is going. Many of our staff are based around the world in the countries that we work in. Many of them have smart phones, and many of them take pictures on them of the people and places that the UK is helping when they’re out and about monitoring and evaluating the work that we do.

So I’m interested to see if we can harness some of those photos, as instantly as possible. Can we get some of our staff to upload what they’re seeing directly from the field? And as those smart phones and mobile internet access become more widely available to the people in the countries we work in, can we use Instagram as a way to see what they see, from their perspective?

‘No nation can rise to the height of glory unless your women are side by side with you’, said Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan. Unfortunately for the majority of Pakistani women, the notion of equality remains a dream, even now. But how can we ensure women play a part in decision making? And how can we break down the barriers that prevent women from becoming leaders? These are the questions that brought together Oxfam Great Britain and its partner The Aurat Foundation (AF) for the DFID funded Raising Her Voice (RHV) programme in Pakistan. DFID supports Oxfam’s RHV programme in 17 countries through its Governance and Transparency Fund.

Over the past 5 years, the RHV programme supported 1,500 women activists, living and working in their communities, in organizing themselves into 50 ‘Women Leaders Groups’ (WLGs) in 30 districts across Pakistan. Each WLG brings together women from a cross section of Pakistani society, to form a joint platform based on mutual trust, to strengthen the collective voice of local women.

As Razia Sultana, WLG member from Rawalpindi puts it: ‘I believe that men and women are created equal and therefore should be treated equally…The time is past when women couldn’t raise their voice against violence…I want to help local women influence local decision makers. Being a woman leader has helped me accomplish my goals and I will continue the struggle’

Through this programme 116,000 women received Computerised National Identity Cards giving them the ability to vote, travel and access loans. Ninety WLG members ran for political office in the recent elections, 5 of these women won provincial assembly seats and 1 took a National Assembly seat, a fantastic achievement.

The biggest achievements of the programme however, have been the dramatic changes that these women have brought about in their lives and the lives of the women around them. All 1,500 women we worked with had stories to tell.

For example, the WLG Secretary General of Abbottabad said “Initially I would be accompanied by my brother when I went to government offices, but now I have the confidence to interact with government officers alone”. On the voter registration day at Khamberanwala village in Punjab, few women turned out to vote. Women leaders went door to door encouraging women to vote. Through their efforts, 506 women registered.

There are also tales of women struggling collectively for their rights. For example a woman college teacher who had been harassed by a senior colleague, shared the matter with the WLG in Haripur. The WLG took the case to the college management, referring to the Harassment Act and the accused colleague was removed from his post.

The energy and commitment these women exhibit, despite the challenges that they face in their personal lives, is very humbling for me. Meeting them and hearing their stories of change has always been an energizing experience. In fact in one of their meetings that I attended, I couldn’t stop myself from remarking that “I wish I was a woman too, so I could join them!”

Despite all these achievements, the scale and complexity of challenges are immense and we have a long way to go, in achieving equity and equality for all the women and girls of Pakistan. The 1,500 women leaders of the RHV programme are however, enthusiastic and committed.  With support from DFID, Oxfam GB and Aurat Foundation, are now working on the next stage, which may include expanding the RHV programme to the rest of the country.

Oxfam GB has been working in Pakistan since 1973. Oxfam is currently supporting women and men in raising their incomes and achieving food security, supporting women’s groups in raising their voices and position, facilitating access to education especially for girls, supporting local communities in mitigating the effects of disasters and in the aftermath of a disaster, providing relief and recovery support to the affected communities.

In the year 2012-13, Oxfam GB supported 650,000 persons (mostly women) directly and more than 1.5 million people indirectly through our advocacy programmes. Oxfam also supports the government and civil society organizations in developing and implementing pro-poor policies and legal frameworks.

Visit our website for further information about Oxfam GB and the RHV programme around the world.

—————————————————————————

Please note, this is a guest blog. Views expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of DFID or have the support of the British government.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting our development support to Pakistan and how we’re helping to push for change. We’ll be linking up with partners from across the British Pakistani community who are making a huge contribution to Pakistan’s development and promoting the positive voices for progress in country. To get the latest Pakistan development news straight to your inbox sign up for our quarterly newsletter.

When people think of Sudan, they will often think of the conflict in Darfur and people living in IDP camps, without really understanding what life in an IDP camp is like. Since moving to Sudan almost 2 years ago, I’ve visited several IDP camps in North and South Darfur. I can still remember my first visit, the massive scale of the camp both in terms of area and number of people, the awful stories of people being forced from their homes, the children growing up with no clear future and the incredible individuals in the international community who were trying to support the residents. I was trying to explain this to a friend when I was at Glastonbury Festival, back to the UK on leave. There is obviously no real comparison between the camps I’ve visited in Darfur and Glastonbury, however I realised that for my friend being able to relate it to where we were might help them to understand the issues. I’ve used this blog to explain in more depth where the comparison works and where it doesn’t.

In some areas the comparison works quite well…

Number of people – Last September I visited Zam Zam camp in North Darfur, which is the largest IDP camp (pdf 1.45mb) in Sudan with 160,000 residents. Glastonbury sells 135,000 tickets and there are about 38,000 staff passes which means about 173,000 people on site. This means that there are 13,000 people more at Glastonbury than at Zam Zam. However there are a total of 1.4 million IDP’s across Darfur this is about 8 times the number of people at Glastonbury, and about half the population of Wales.

Water – Glastonbury has built two on-site, underground reservoirs to provide the festival with 11 million litres of water over the 5 days of the festival. This is about 13 litres of water per person per day, which is the same as the people in Kalma get. However the average person in the UK uses 150 litres of water per day and the humanitarian guidelines are at least 15 litres per person per day for drinking, cooking and personal hygiene. Oxfam America also works on access to water in the camps, when I visited there were large problems with the water supply because of the fuel shortages, meaning that the water pumps, which normally ran for a few hours a day were not able to run every day and that there were often large queues for water.

Sanitation (Toilets) – This can be a favourite subject of people at Glastonbury, Are there queues? Do they smell? One of the reasons Glastonbury took a year off last year was because there wasn’t enough portable toilets for both the Olympics and Glastonbury. According to the Glastonbury website there were 4800 toilets a mixture of compost toilets, portable toilets and long drops this is about 36 people per toilet. In Kalma camp in Darfur there are 8,000 toilets, which is about 11 people per toilet, although in some areas only about 20% of the toilets are in good condition.

The international community works hard to make sure that people in IDP camps get appropriate support. The humanitarian guidelines are ‘One toilet for a maximum of 20 people should be the target. Where there are no existing toilets, it is possible to start with one for 50 people and lowering the number of users to 20 as soon as possible.’ I visited Oxfam America who provide toilets for a third of the camp, they showed us the work they do with the community deciding where to put toilets and helping to maintain them. DFID is supporting them in this work through the Common Humanitarian Fund.

In other ways there is no real comparison ….

Glastonbury is only for 5 days every year and it takes about every 4th year off to let the land recover. Visiting IDP camps I met people who had been there for 8 or 9 years as well as people who had arrived in the last few days or weeks because of the increase of conflict in Darfur this year. OCHA estimates that 280,000 people have been displaced by this recent conflict. The new arrivals I spoke to had all travelled for several days and sometimes weeks to get to the IDP camps, often on foot. Most hadn’t managed to bring anything with them from their homes and had clearly been through an incomprehensible experience. People arriving at Glastonbury have either driven themselves or arrived on public transport, in the first few days there are people streaming onto the site with all of their belongings for the week, including tents and food, often doing several trips to their cars for more belongings. Having adequate shelter was one of the main concerns of new arrivals at Kalma, the people we met had makeshift shelters built of anything they could find and were worried about how it would hold up during the rainy season.

Things to do – Glastonbury Festival for Contemporary and Performing Arts to give it its full name is renowned for the diversity of their acts. You could watch bestselling bands, dance the night away to DJ sets, participate in political discussions, watch theatre or cabaret, or much more. At Glastonbury there are lots of things for children to do, some of my friend’s volunteered running fun and educational activities in the Kids field. I visited Zam Zam last year with Plan and visited some of the schools and child friendly spaces that they run in Zam Zam. These are makeshift classrooms but where the dedication of the teachers is providing the children in the camp with a valuable education. However once the children finish school there are limited opportunities for them to find jobs in the camp.

Food – There are over 250 food facilities on site at Glastonbury, with a wide array of excellent foods to enjoy, with most meals costing about £5 – £8. Some camps run a food ration scheme, where each household is given a set amount of food each month with no choice over what they receive. In Ottash Camp in South Darfur, they have moved to a voucher scheme. This means IDPs are given 30SDG per month, about £4, which can be exchanged for 20 different commodities. The World Food Programmewho run the scheme has worked with traders to establish markets in camps. The people we met were pleased with the ability to have choice but also concerned at the value of the voucher is less than the value of a full food ration. When you would struggle to buy a full meal at Glastonbury for the amount of money people in IDP camps have for food for a month it puts our food choices in perspective.

Medical Facilities – There was news at Glastonbury this year when a couple gave birth to a baby girl during the festival and there is a high level of medical facilities offered including x-ray, physiotherapy and emergency dental services. Whilst a birth at Glastonbury is considered News, babies are born every day in IDP camps. Visiting the Merlin health clinic in Kalma camp we met a woman who had given birth earlier that day, supported by the excellent Merlin midwives. However the conditions that she gave birth in were different from those in the UK or even the facilities at Glastonbury. Merlin also offers health clinics, feeding programmes for malnourished children and ante-natal clinics. The work that Merlin delivers is well needed but isn’t enough to support everyone in the camp and for complex cases they have to send people to Nyala town.

Glastonbury 2013 was an amazing experience, and I’m already making plans to go again next year. By the end I was ready to go home, 6 days of not showering, not using a flushing toilet, being outside every day at the mercy of the weather and being constantly surrounded by people with no space of my own had taken their toll. I was pleased to get back to my parents’ house for a shower, flushing toilet and food not on a paper plate. The work the international community does, in Darfur supporting those who live in camps, is saving people’s lives and improving people’s quality of life. However without an end to conflict in Darfur the people I met will continue to struggle to rebuild their lives. Writing this in Khartoum, I can’t imagine having stayed at Glastonbury for the three weeks since Glastonbury ended. For the people of Darfur some of whom have been in camps since before my first Glastonbury in 2006 and who will be probably still be there next year, life with limited water, shelter, food, and medical facilities is their lives for the foreseeable future.

 

Pakistan has the highest out of school population in the world. Learning levels are low. Successive governments have not allocated sufficient resources in the right places and have struggled to take many of the tough political decisions required to tackle a range of barriers to reform.

Even in Punjab where indicators are more positive than other parts of Pakistan, there are significant variations between districts, with children, especially girls, in southern districts much more likely to suffer educational deprivation than elsewhere in the province.

Yet there are also some hopeful signs. Across Pakistan, and in Punjab in particular, the low cost private sector is burgeoning, stimulated by demand for better quality education. Education activists are finding innovative ways to reach children in rural areas. The Government of Punjab has demonstrated a long term commitment to reform, working consistently with DFID, the World Bank and Canadian Internation Development Agency (CIDA) to strengthen institutions and address issues such as the way teachers are recruited. For all these reasons DFID has committed up to £350 million between 2013 and 2018 to support the transformation of education in Punjab.

Education Reform Roadmap

The Chief Minister’s Education Reform Roadmap, launched in 2011, is an important element of DFID’s work alongside direct financial aid to government in partnership with the World Bank, and substantial investment in the low cost private sector with an emphasis on reaching the poorest and most marginalised children.

The Roadmap is based on monthly data for core indicators such as teacher presence and student attendance, collected through the Programme Management & Implementation Unit, an institution built with the World Bank, DFID and other donor support over the past decade.

The strength of the Roadmap lies in securing political leadership at the most senior levels for delivering free, quality education to all children in Punjab, in line with the 2010 18th Amendment of the Constitution of Pakistan. The Chief Minister has met with us and our partners every 2 months for the last 2 years to review progress and set direction, and education has moved up the political agenda in the province. Early signs following this year’s election are that this commitment will not only continue, but that the new government is prepared to take the tough political decisions required to transform Punjab’s schools.

While top down commitment to identifying and tackling binding constraints to reform is crucial, it is essential that this approach is complemented not only by technical assistance and support to implement reform, but also by developing bottom up demand for change. This is why the next phase of the Roadmap work will include new indicators on learning outcomes with the aim not only of tracking improvements in the quality of education offered in Punjab’s schools, but also of equipping parents with information to make informed decisions about their children’s education.

Improving student participation and enrolment

In its first 2 years, the Roadmap has focused strongly on improving student participation and enrolment. The Programme Management & Implementation Unit has produced monthly data by district for the Roadmap which indicates that participation has increased from a baseline of 82.8% to 92.1% in December 2012.

On enrolment, newly released Pakistan Social & Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) data indicates that while net enrolment at primary level remained static between 2007 and 2011, there was a 4% point increase between 2010 and 2011. It is difficult to make firm statements about attribution for the increase, although more enrolments in the private sector are likely to be a major factor, as well as the government’s own reform programme, including the Roadmap.

PSLM is conducted annually and currently the government is not able to release data at pace. For this reason, DFID has commissioned a bi-annual household survey to track enrolment on a more regular basis and produce information more quickly. It is important to note that this survey does not measure net enrolment but does provide regular snapshots on how many more children are attending school and pre-school. It therefore reports how many children are in school, regardless of grade (around 86% of 6-10 year olds) as opposed to the net enrolment rate (NER), which excludes children in preschool and is around 74%. Estimates indicate that gross enrolment in Punjab has increased by between 1,000,000 and 1,500,000 children since the survey began in December 2011.

While this increase, for which attribution is also complex, does not translate directly to progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goal which is measured using NER, it does indicate that many more children are enrolled in school than before. The challenge now for the government will be to help those children enrolling late to catch up with their peers, and to ensure that preschool, where all are required to enrol when starting school for the first time, provides an excellent foundation for future learning.

Push for progress

At the same time, the Roadmap has helped secure real progress in some important areas. For example, teacher absenteeism in Punjab has declined from a baseline of 19.3% to less than 9% in December 2012. Unauthorised leave has been squeezed to less than 1%, while the difficulties some districts are facing in ensuring teachers are in the classroom every day has opened up a policy discussion with government on the complex and political issue of teacher pay and incentives.

Progress in providing toilets, drinking water, electricity and boundary walls to schools accelerated greatly, with the proportion of these facilities available and functioning increasing from 69% to 88% during the first year of the Roadmap. The Roadmap has also made significant progress in improving some of the inputs to learning, particularly textbooks and teacher guides, though as yet there has been no measured impact on learning itself.

DFID is deeply committed to the transformation of education in Punjab. Our range of interventions including the Roadmap is designed to progress this. Our close collaboration with the World Bank and other partners is crucial to achieving our ambitions for the province’s children, teachers and schools. And we remain keen to work closely with our international colleagues to make effective use of the political opportunities that the Roadmap offers to deliver better education for current and future students across Punjab.

Moazzam Malik is Director, West Asia and Stabilisation Division at the Department for International Development and Sir Michael Barber is DFID’s Special Representative for Education in Pakistan. This is a joint blog on education reform in the province of Punjab, where DFID, the World Bank and Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) work together to support the Government of Punjab.

———————————————————————————-

Over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting our development support to Pakistan and how we’re helping to push for change. We’ll be linking up with partners from across the British Pakistani community who are making a huge contribution to Pakistan’s development and promoting the positive voices for progress in country.

To get the latest Pakistan development news straight to your inbox sign up for our quarterly newsletter.

Camfed is a NGO that provides scholarships to keep girls in school.  Camfed was founded in 1991 when their founder, Ann Cotton visited Zimbabwe to investigate why girls’ school enrolment in rural areas was so low. Contrary to the common assumption that families weren’t sending girls to school for cultural reasons, Ann discovered poverty was the main roadblock. Families couldn’t afford to buy books or pay school fees for all their children, so they had to choose who would receive an education. Girls were rarely chosen. The reason was simple: boys had a better chance of getting a paid job after graduation. When Ann returned to Cambridge, UK, she became determined to find a way to help girls go to school in Zimbabwe. She recruited friends and family and sold baked goods to raise money and awareness about the lack of education for girls in Africa. At the end of her grassroots campaign, she supported 32 girls through school. In 1993, Ann formally launched Camfed, the Campaign for Female Education. Camfed’s model has been so successful that it has been replicated in more than 2,000 communities in Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

DFID Ghana is supporting Camfed to disburse 20,000 scholarships (see my October 2012 post).  I recently met with Dolores Dickson, Camfed Ghana’s country director to understand their approach in more detail.

What are some of the changes you have seen since you joined Camfed Ghana?

Since joining Camfed in 2007, I have seen the tremendous impact we have made on the lives of young women and communities in Ghana, particularly in the Northern part of Ghana. The Northern region has one of the lowest female literacy rates in the country, many of the girls we support come from families where their mothers have never been to school. They are the first generation of girls from their families to go to school. Getting girls from these backgrounds to go to school and to complete is a huge achievement for the girls, their families and communities. I have also seen communities come together, give their time, knowledge and resources (motor bikes, crops and land) to support girls overcome the obstacles that prevented from going to school, such as early marriages, teenage pregnancies and poverty. Chiefs and community elders come together to enact by-laws that aim to prevent early pregnancy; community members come together to support schools with feeding programmes that will keep children in school throughout the school day and community and religious leaders have come together to advocate against child marriage. I have seen change come in individual families because their children have completed school and now have an income to support their parents and other siblings.

What have been some of your challenges?

One of our challenges is the increasing demand for Camfed’s programmes across the country.  Camfed’s opportunity to start engagement with communities begins with our bursaries, and we need to find ways to reach these girls. The other challenge is the growing demand for higher education from the graduating girls we support through secondary school.

How do communities, parents and girls feel when they complete secondary school?

There is a sense of excitement, a sense of ‘we have done it’ and pride for parents and community members. For the girls there is a sense of achievement and sometimes a sense of apprehension of ‘what next?’ To this I think most of them feel and see their security in ‘Cama’ (our alumni network) particularly when they get to meet with other Cama members, they begin to gain a ‘can do’ attitude and the hope that we are on course but not there yet and we need to keep doing our best. One young woman remarked after completing school, ‘I am going all out now because I know there are people behind me supporting and cheering me on.’

What is Cama and what are some of the Cama members doing now? Cama is the network of young women who have been supported through school by Camfed. It is a democratic network with strong values such as ‘giving back’, ethical leadership and promotes volunteerism. As a result most of their members are working in ways that bring about change and social impact to their rural communities. For instance, some Cama members have started a radio show that educates their own communities on healthy practices and advice on financial literacy. Cama Ghana members support on average 3 children who are not directly related to them.

What are your hopes for Camfed Ghana?

Under a new partnership with the MasterCard Foundation, we will be able to support academically gifted young women from the Cama network to access tertiary education in some of the best universities in Ghana, growing a cohort of ethical leaders for Africa. Our partnership with Google also offers the opportunity to bridge the digital divide in rural communities by setting up ICT centres which are run and managed by Cama members. These centres provide employment to young women and create opportunities for the rural communities to access market opportunities and gain information on health and education.

 

Why do you think Camfed Ghana has been so successful in working with communities?

I think Camfed Ghana has been successful working with communities because we invest in our relationships with communities and governments. We also listen and learn.

What do you hope for from the DFID-Camfed partnership?

The DFID-Camfed partnership is supporting 20,000 girls to complete secondary education; this is an unprecedented opportunity and investment in a generation of girls in Ghana. This will bring about significant improvements to lives of many families and communities all over the country. Africa is a growing and youthful continent and this investment could not have come at a better time, the results and impact will be seen in the near future.

I’ve worked for DFID for 6 years managing our website and intranet team. I’m based in our East Kilbride office and work closely with digital communications colleagues in London (both in DFID and across the UK government) and with our aid transparency and intranet teams here in Scotland. Now the focus of my work is on putting our new digital strategy into practice.

We recently moved our website on to the single UK government website, which has provided both opportunities and challenges. GOV.UK is managed by the Government Digital Service (GDS) and recently won an award for Design of the Year. The opportunities are to make DFID’s policies, spending and results really clear and to place our work in the context of what the UK government as a whole is achieving worldwide.Feedback has been largely positive about the bringing together departmental websites and the clarity and presentation of the information. The challenges are to structure and link DFID’s content clearly and to ensure people can find the level of detail they need.

One of the areas of my work I’ve always found particularly interesting is web usability testing. The GDS regularly tests the GOV.UK website with real live web users in lab conditions to see whether it is meeting their needs.  I recently observed the testing of the ‘worldwide’ section of the site. It enabled us to watch and learn how people search and navigate, what they click on and why, and how easy or hard it is to find what they need (as they give a running commentary). It never ceases to amaze me to see the different techniques people have for searching and browsing websites! It’s also illuminating and rewarding to see how familiar some of our audiences are with in-depth content that we publish.

In our digital strategy, we’ve set a target of improving how people find and apply for funds and grants from DFID. We offer around 55 different grants that a wide variety of organisations can apply for to meet specific development goals. This is one of the most visited sections of our website, year in and year out, but there’s work to do to make the process of identifying the right fund and applying for it simpler, clearer and faster. I’m working with colleagues from other government departments and I will keep you updated on progress on this blog.

Meanwhile, if anyone would like to give us feedback on our new website, or details of anything you can’t find, we’ll listen carefully and see how we can act on your suggestions. You can either post your comments below, or email us details at [email protected].

With news of Yahoo’s Yahoo’s $1.1bn purchase of Tumblr still rumbling, I thought I’d seen the big social media story of the week. Then late that same night, surprise news of Flickr’s revamp began to emerge. A radical, Pinterest-influenced new layout. One free terabyte of storage for every user.

A torrent of emotion ensued on feedback forums. “I HATE IT! CHANGE IT BACK!” is the defining comment from Flickr’s loyal base of members. Nearly 16,000 comments later, and pockets of positivity are starting to temper the wrath. The debate will rage on. As ever, a major new vs. old bun fight is developing. Digital media commentators could rival the Paris Left Bank in fashion week for backstabbing and vitriol.

As the digital team lead for DFID, I must admit the new format came as a shock. There was no warning. The page looks and feels very different. Gone is the lightbox-style of viewing each picture individually, with a civilised amount of air, space and text around it.

The new, masonry-style picture stream completely fills the screen, refilling as you scroll down into what feels like infinity. The images somehow feel less meaningful when viewed packed alongside hundreds of others, I thought. How will we get used to this? Is it better?

Captions are completely sidelined. While they are still there, the redesign makes it harder to find them and we will need to rethink our approach to the text we publish alongside. Wired calls these captions and picture info “icky white space and meta-data that only your photographer cousin cares about.” It’s true we need to know a whole lot more about what people want or need out of both.

DFID has been posting on Flickr for almost six years, so we could be forgiven for getting used to the format. Our 2,000 or so photographs have been viewed more than 2 million times, so it’s a vital tool to communicate the important work British taxpayers are funding in developing countries.

The archive covers everything from flood and earthquake relief efforts to maternal health and mine clearing initiatives. Many of our photographs are taken by staff in the field and by members of this team, sometimes with extraordinary reach, such as this series of spider web trees following the Pakistan floods by our picture editor Russell Watkins.

Our Flickr pics have been well received so far. Having high quality images online in one place makes them easy to share too. Whenever possible, we allow the images to be reused free of charge, providing they are credited to the source (known as creative commons licencing, but also the Open Government licence).

Now we’ve worked with the new format, I’m reassured. Our latest batch of photos from a cement factory in Ethiopia by colleagues Simon Davis and Gavin Houtheusen looks fantastic:

The detail of the factory and the people working there stand out in a way they didn’t before. There is a sense of purpose and direction in the pictures which reflect that country’s growing economy. Indeed, different perspectives on African countries – such as the BBC’s recent Africa Rising series – are beginning to change how the world thinks about the continent.

So, now the stream looks rich and varied. The question is what will users think? Will they miss the prominent, information-rich captions, or will they be happy simply browsing pictures?

Suffice to say we care deeply about photography at DFID. It’s a topic I hope we can explore in these blogposts as part of the Digital for Development blogging group, along with thoughts on the rest of our social media, meeting needs of the citizen on GOV.UK and collaboration with the other digital teams within the organisation. So please stay tuned.

The Flickr changes make two things clear to me more than ever about digital communication. Firstly, never get too comfortable – the oft-quoted “change or die” mantra. The times shift relentlessly and half the job is keeping up. Secondly, the visual web is more important than ever, and central to this is photography.

Unlike traditional communications work, digital comms people need to be ready to adapt to the market forces that determine the direction of big web endeavours. While it can be tiring, it can also be really rewarding and exciting.

Lastly, we would love to hear from you about any aspect of digital communication, DFID’s or otherwise, so do get in touch via this blog.

Hello and welcome again to the new Digital for Development blogging group. I am the head of the digital team here in DFID’s communications division in London. I work with a team of talented editors to produce and promote the online words, pictures, video, audio and graphics for the department. We also lead on DFID’s digital engagement which has grown from a germ of an idea many years ago, to a business as usual, day to day activity.

It’s an exciting time to be writing. With the advent of the UK government’s Digital by Default strategy, things are changing fast and changing for the better. As a former print and online journalist, I have lately been astonished by how willing the civil service is to adapt and grow with the changing times. There are many dedicated and switched on digital people across the UK government who are contributing daily to improving services for citizens.

At DFID, much of our digital communication is focused on demonstrating the impact of British support in developing countries. We work in 27 countries so there is a lot to show.

It will also be fascinating to read posts from the other digital teams in DFID, whose work on aid transparency and technology for development are breaking new ground in the global effort to eradicate poverty. I would also love to hear readers’ thoughts on what we could improve and what works well.

In this blog, I will write about social media initiatives, interesting articles, meeting citizen needs on the award-winning GOV.UK, digital trends and more. I will introduce colleagues who will – no doubt – write with zeal about what has worked and what hasn’t. While we are very established now on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, SoundCloud, not to mention this blogging platform, we are always exploring what else we can do, and what should be dropped.

My next post discusses the recent changes to Flickr. Let’s get the conversation started.

Tanzania’s founding father Mwalimu (Swahili teacher) Julius Nyerere was certainly both erudite and multi-lingual; as he guided his country to independence in the 1960s he translated Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar into Swahili in his spare time. He was also a passionate believer that all Tanzanians should speak and be literate in Swahili, it has been suggested that the ability to adequately express such rich works as Shakespeare in Swahili, gave him the strength to resist pressure to adopt English as the national language.

Swahili since then has been used as the language of instruction through pre-school and seven years of primary education, leaving students with a difficult transition to English medium instruction as they enter Form I of secondary school around the age of 14. As I’ve recently posted the rapid expansion of secondary schooling in Tanzania (enrolment tripled in the past 7 years) has exacerbated this problem with many new secondary schools, teachers and students unable to cope.

The large drop in secondary Form IV examination results for 2012 led to the Prime Minister establishing a special probe (commission) into the reasons why; the nation awaits with interest the findings. The standard of English in teaching is a factor likely to be cited in the report, together with complaints about a dysfunctional system that has over-expanded and has under qualified, demotivated teachers. Tanzanians were surprised however that prior to the probe reporting fully, the first concrete action taken by government on the matter was to annul all Form IV candidates’ results and demand that the exam board NECTA re-grade them according to the system used previously, which puts greater emphasis on continuous assessment marks that many believe are inflated.

This topic is likely to remain hot for some time, but meanwhile it was pleasing last week to join Tanzanian Minister of Education, Dr. Shukuru Kawambwa at the launch of a new English Language Training programme that DFID is funding. Being implemented by two of our most trusted partners: the British Council and VSO, we hope this can have a lasting impact on improving English language competencies and  the ability of secondary school students in Tanzania to effectively learn. Expert tutors and volunteers will directly work with all of the 34 Tanzanian public teacher colleges to improve tutors and trainee teachers’ pedagogic skills and ensure that each year all 400,000+ new Form 1 students starting secondary school receive a foundation English language readiness course – Baseline.

Switching to use of a second language is daunting, I managed to fumble my way through a self-introduction in Swahili at the launch, but nobody expects me to use it fluently in my regular work, as many Tanzanians must try to. Minister Kawambwa was pleased to meet student teachers from nearby Vikindu College at the launch, they were already eager to showcase their confidence in English as they described their hopes and ambitions for the future.

As language skills improve, Shakespeare’s classic insult of Gratianio in the Merchant of Venice, “You speak an infinite deal of nothing”, will hopefully never be a relevant description of the classrooms of Tanzania!

Despite the rise in school attendance in Ghana, around 440,000 kids are still out-of-school (61 million globally). The United Nations estimates it would cost $16 billion a year to get these out-of-school kids into class by 2015 to reach the Millennium Development Goal 2. Here in Ghana, while the government is expanding access, some parents are opting to pay for their children’s education. In fact, it is estimated that private schools make up a third of total schools. DFID Ghana is looking to understand more about the private sector, and we are financing the World Bank (Harry Patrinos) to carry out “Education Markets” analysis of low fee private schools.Whatever one’s ideological stance is on the role of private schools (read the BBC article which sees Sir Michael Barber go head to head with Professor Keith Lewin debating this very issue), we can’t ignore the fact that poor families are opting out of the government system. I went to visit Ghana’s Omega Schools, a chain of low fee private schools which last year received financing from Pearson’s Affordable Learning Fund. Pearson’s Affordable Learning Fund is chaired by Sir Michael Barber who was once head of Tony Blair’s Service Delivery Unit.

I just met with Sir Michael on a recent trip he made to Ghana checking up on his investment. He seemed pleased with the progress that the Omega Schools are making and would like to explore vouchers – where parents are given vouchers to spend on education. He is actually working with DFID Pakistan in Punjab on a programme that provides vouchers for poor families whose children attend private schools, providing free education to 1.1 million children in 2,233 schools.

The Omega Schools are located in Kasoa, on the outskirts of Accra – a lively and hectic place, home to migrants from Ghana’s poorest regions, working-class Ghanaians and anyone trying to eek out a living in Ghana’s capital. Kayayei girls sell goods on their heads, from plantain chips to lobsters line up at car windows, while bus drivers gather up passengers to brave the traffic into the centre and young boys hustling their car-washing skills at the traffic lights.

I met with Omega’s CEO, Ken Donkoh in their Kasoa HQ who told me about their plans, and took me around 3 of the low fee private schools.

“Our plan is to scale-up to more than 200 schools in the next 5 years. Currently we have 20 schools in Ghana with 12,000 students and we are adding 20 new schools to the chain this September. We will then add about 35 more schools every year. We want to take the model to other countries in West Africa, and we are now in Sierra Leone and will be looking for opportunities in Nigeria and Liberia.”

According to observers, Omega has been successful because of the all-inclusive (no hidden fee) daily fee model as it fits well within the earning pattern of the parents who are mostly informal workers, and don’t always get a regular salary. Just as “pay-as-you-go” was an instant success for the mobile phone sector, it seems to work for Omega Schools.

Ken calls it “pay-as-you-learn” and emphasizes that:

“It drives us to be the best we can be. We have to be accountable to the parents on a daily basis. If we don’t do a good job today, don’t expect the children to come the next day. I love the discipline this brings to everybody –teachers and the management on their toes.”

Another novel component of the Omega package seems to be the consistent tracking of how well students are doing. Ken explains:

“We track the progress of each student using 7 different tests annually. There are mid-term formative assessments per year which ensures that we are able establish how well the children are receiving our curriculum – then we do remedial teacher training and teaching to fill in the gaps. Three end-of term tests track ‘progress’ and an annual test compares Omega schools with, government and other private schools.”

I became curious to know more about the button sewn onto students’ shirts. Ken explains that this button acts as a tracking device and once swiped can provide access to the students’ academic records. A teacher confirms that they use the data on the button to text a student’s parents how well his/her child is doing in each class.

Although the Omega’s approach does look promising, the evidence base on low fee private schools is still weak, and there are more questions than answers. Professor Keith Lewin does make a valid point that where there has been growth in low-price private school numbers, it is often because of specific circumstances, such as where a high level of migration into cities has not been matched by an expansion in public services, and it is still impossible to tell whether low fee private schools or public schools are better, because the research produces contradictory results.

This is exactly why DFID is supporting the World Bank’s “Education Markets” study to develop a better understanding of the policy and operating environment in which the private education sector currently work, and obtain more data on the role of private schools for the poor.

Ken is proud of the unique model of Omega schools.

“The lesson plans are already developed – and the lessons are also scripted which allows Omega to hire high school graduates as teachers. These high school graduates are young, passionate and energetic – and they want to make a difference.” Critics have pointed out that the fees are so low because they are deliberately exploiting secondary school leavers without jobs who are willing to work below the minimum wage.

So how did Ken become involved in the Omega Schools?

“Maybe I was just lucky, because out of a class of 80 students in junior high school (morning and afternoon shifts) only 5 of us made it to senior high school. While I was studying for my MBA at GIMPA , I encountered James Tooley’s research since I was searching for solutions to help my elder sister who was running a low fee private school. I came to the conclusion that (given the chicken-and-egg dilemma that private schools face) the most effective way to improve quality and drive down fees was to build a chain. I sent James Tooley my business plan – with a provocative note, “if you really believe in your research, can we turn this into a business?” After a number of failed attempts to secure financial backing, we finally said enough is enough, let’s start on our own”. In 2009 we opened our first 2 schools filled to capacity on the first week of opening. One of the schools had as many as 350 students on a waiting list. In 2 years we grew to 10 schools, broke even and caught the attention of Pearson who invested in us.”

DFID is continuing to research the role of private schools. Our senior education advisor in India, Colin Bangay and Michael Latham have been researching private schools in India and looked in-depth at ‘Gyan Shala’, an innovative low cost education programme operating in the slums of Gujarat and Bihar. They argue for a better understanding of the dynamic between the public and private schools. Further, DFID is supporting Results for Development Institute (R4D) to launch the Center for Education Innovations which will be an online platform identifying, analysing, and connecting non-state education innovations.

I would be interested to hear what you think on the role of private schools and whether DFID should be investing in them. Do let me know what you think and add your comments here!

We’re starting a new group blog, Digital for Development, to introduce you to colleagues around DFID who will share how using digital communications and technology can help us achieve better results and value for money in our programmes.

You will hear from colleagues working on a new platform to update, improve and replace the existing projects database. We are improving the way to find out where aid funds are spent and giving people the facility to trace those funds through to the people who benefit from it on the ground. You will hear examples from the team behind @dfid_uk on twitter, DFID on Facebook and other social media channels about how they look continually for different ways to interact with new audiences.

We will share news from colleagues working on ways to transform how we interact with the people and organisations who have contact with us – whether they are applying for a grant, reporting back on programmes they run on our behalf, or finding out how people are benefitting from our work. And last, but definitely not least, from the team who are leading the way in exploring new ways that technology can support development.

All these areas of work came together under the departmental digital strategy published last year following publication of the overarching government digital strategy.

My new role is to have oversight of the many threads and priorities which the strategy covers, and report on progress – which will involve showcasing achievements as well as updates on work which is still to be done. I am looking forward to this work, as it builds on the many different projects I have been involved with as DFID’s digital capacity has developed – from the early days of creating our first ever website in 1995, launching the first intranet in 2000, through the excitement of experimenting with emerging social media channels (which included the creation of this blog platform), to seeing our presence in places like twitter, facebook and others grow.

The strategy identified the priorities for DFID to 2015 and outlined how we plan to improve digital capabilities across the organisation. There will be more from me on that over the next couple of months as we work out current levels of activity and awareness, what people’s needs are and how to meet them. I look forward to working with colleagues from other government departments to share ideas and approaches.

There are some pockets of activity and enthusiasm across the organisation already. We have individuals making excellent use of social media to have conversations with specialists in their field, and we have teams working behind the scenes finding efficient ways to share evidence and improve decision making. One of my biggest challenges is to find these examples, so we can showcase how staff are using digital in their work and encourage others to try things out.

Over the past 5 years we have almost entirely re-engineered the way DFID manages programmes and made some significant improvements. We have introduced, among other things: more rigorous design templates, tougher spending controls, better contract management policies, systematic quality assurance stronger use of evidence and a better focus on results.

But have these changes made DFID more rigorous and effective at delivery? Have we become better able to adapt to the complex and changing environments in which we work?

Development Secretary, Justine Greening, has commissioned an internal review of the programme management cycle to look into these questions. At recent meeting of DFID’s senior managers, we agreed that the review needs to lead to faster programme design and approval; clearer and more streamlined guidance; and, more time spent on delivery and implementation.

In turn, this will help us retain the flexibility and dynamism to deliver multiple objectives; deliver quantifiable results while continuing to invest in changes that will unfreeze longer term processes; build and strengthen our reputation for innovation and agility as one of the world’s leading development agencies.

I am proud (and not a little scared!) to have been asked, with my colleague, Tom Wingfield, to co-lead this review over the next five months.

While this is largely an internal process, we are also interested in external stakeholder perspectives of DFID’s programme management cycle and thought we might be able to elicit views through this blog.

We would welcome comments below or direct contact ([email protected] and/or [email protected]) setting out what you think about how DFID manages programmes and are particularly interested in:

1) Innovation and flexibility.

• How good are we at taking risks, being flexible and innovative?
• Do we share lessons in an open and transparent way?

2) Capabilities:

• Do we have sufficient country knowledge for the contexts in which we work?
• Do we have sufficient implementation management skills and at the right levels?
• Are DFID staff you interact with able to make decisions and judgements themselves?

3) Operational Processes:

• What needs to change in our systems to make them simpler, more agile and more appropriate for working in fragile states?
• Does it feel as though all our processes add value?

Of course, I would be interested in other thoughts on what you think would make DFID a better development partner either direct to me or in the comments section below.