Innovation and communication are key to IICD’s future

Interview with Caroline Figuères

IICD’s brand-new Managing Director, Caroline Figuères, is steering the organisation on its new course towards larger-scale programmes in the coming decade. At the helm since January 2008, Figuères has the perfect background and experience to bring IICD’s work in ICT for Development to a new level. She reflects on some of the changes that are taking place as a result of the new way of working.

After nearly twenty years of working as an engineering consultant for projects dealing with water and the environment, Caroline Figuères recognised that it was more effective for people in developing countries to do the job themselves rather than always having consultants doing it for them. In a switch from consulting to education, she was appointed to head a department at UNESCO-IHE (Institute for Water Education) that focused on drinking water and sanitation. One of the initiatives that she was involved in there – the AKVO initiative: a computer-based ‘mesh-up’ combining a Wikipedia-like, eBay-like and YouTube-like systems – proved to be a real eye-opener for her. “That initiative was what made me realise just how powerful ICT could be in helping to provide real solutions in developing countries. It was also what made me realise that no matter how important things like clean water and sanitation are, those were not the things that make people dream,” Figuères explains. “ICT is such a powerful tool for fostering the development of people,” she adds. “It gets information as close to them as possible, enabling them to make their own choices about what they want to do in their lives.”

And yet, as the new Managing Director is quick to add, it is never simply a matter of applying ICT for the sake of ICT. Figuères is convinced that any new technology needs to be relevant for the people who actually live in a particular social and physical environment. The limiting conditions in a region need to be taken into account. Internet can be very useful, for example, but not until the problem of broadband connectivity in rural areas has been solved. In those circumstances mobile telephones can make a big difference as a way of spreading information. Figuères: “We have projects in Ghana and Uganda where someone in a village collects information on crop prices from the Internet and then passes it on to the farmers. Often that merely involves writing the data on a chalkboard outside the agricultural information centre in the village, but SMS messaging can make it possible to send the most important information by cell phone so that the farmer doesn’t need to travel to the village. The problem is that you can’t send everything at once with a normal cell phone because there is a limit to the amount of data you can forward. For the time being it is better than nothing, but you always have to see what works best for the people.” And as ICT is very often seen as being high-tech, the people need to see and hear how the new applications work in order to able to understand the possibilities and recognise how they can apply them to meet their own needs. After all, people will only be able to ask for what they understand their needs to be.

To gain support for its local demand-based projects, IICD works on encouraging not only national governments and donor agencies but also private companies to make better use of ICT for development within sectors such as agriculture, education, health, environment, etc. For the most part, the private-sector IT companies IICD works with are motivated by a sense of corporate social responsibility but Figuères would like to see some change in their level of involvement. “Most of the companies we have worked with in the past contributed their manpower and expertise to projects more or less randomly,” she says, “now we are trying to make a shift towards a long-term commitment with more of a focus on a specific topic or a specific country. That is not only good for the local beneficiaries and for IICD, but can also be advantageous for the companies involved.” If it borders on research and development, for example, they may be willing to invest in coming up with new applications.”

But the relationships with those private-sector partners are still developing. Figuères: “Sometimes we find that the relevant knowledge or services that the northern companies are willing to provide is actually already present locally in the developing countries of the south; other times what they propose is simply too sophisticated for the local conditions. Our partners do not always have a clear sense of the level of the local demand. Many of them have never actually been in developing countries so they don’t know the situation as it is there and things are developing fast there too. We are working on fine-tuning that match, but that takes time.”

As Figuères sees it, the real power within IICD is its ability to recognise opportunities for using ICT to improve people’s lives. She explains: “That enables us to use our technological background to put ICT into a local social context. And it is that match, that connection between those two fundamentally different things that makes IICD so unique. So on the one hand there is the technical or technology-based side of our work, and on the other hand there is our understanding of what is happening in the developing world, for example that technology will only work there because the people want it to work in a certain way. This is a very strong competency, and I think that IICD is at a point right now that we need to expand from there once again and start exploring new areas. And that expansion could also depend on the demands voiced by donor agencies and NGOs such as Cordaid and Hivos. If we see real possibilities there for the local beneficiaries and if we can identify our added value, we will enter those new areas.”

How will working at the programme level affect IICD’s character as an institution in the future? At this stage, considering the incredible speed at which ICT itself is developing, Figuères envisions IICD more as a knowledge broker than as a centre of expertise. She explains: “We are hardly experts in agriculture or education or health – nor have we ever pretended to be! But to be honest I wouldn’t even say that we are really experts in ICT issues anymore. We may have people who know a lot about web2.0 tools or connectivity or community radios, but we cannot possibly keep up with all the latest developments with the present level of staff we have here. So instead we are now focusing on knowing where we can find those experts for the various different technologies. And in that sense, in terms of the close connection between the ‘true’ experts and our organisation, I guess you could say that we are working towards becoming a centre of expertise, even if we no longer have all the expertise in house.”

For Figuères, facilitating the exchange of knowledge and experience forms the core of IICD’s work. “In that sense I want IICD to become a stronger learning organisation,” she says. “We are sharing our knowledge within our networks and we get others to share their knowledge, so that we and our partners can continue to learn from each other. As we have worked with thematic networks in the countries, we now have local people learning from each other on the country level. And in the meantime we have also created internal thematic learning circles within IICD where our staff can share their knowledge and learn from each other. So communication structures are already in place, and now we just have to make them work. There are basically two different dimensions: that of sharing knowledge and that of learning, as individuals, which in turn involves creating new knowledge to share.”

“Knowledge sharing is all about communication,” Figuères continues, “but innovation is also really important for us. In that connection, we will definitely also be continuing our work in the field, since that is where the real innovation takes place. I would say that innovation and communication are two very important words for the future of IICD. It is important that we have a balance between those two. We need innovation to maintain our unique position, but we also want to be at the forefront of communication.”

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