Bolivianen eisen nieuwe grondwet

Ogen uitgekeken bij de enorme hoeveelheid demonstranten die hier op de been zijn om hun eis voor een nieuwe grondwet kracht bij te zetten.

Om negen uur hadden we een afspraak in El Alto, een snel groeiende voorstad van La Paz, en thuisbasis van veel aanhangers van president Evo Morales. We belandden middenin de menigte. Waar je ook keek: vlaggen, vuurwerk, trommels, en vrouwen, vooral veel vrouwen. Beladen met koopwaar, kinderen, of allebei, liepen ze in stevig tempo richting stadscentrum.

Een historisch moment, zo viel hier overal te beluisteren, waarop indigena’s die zich al eeuwen onderdrukt weten hun rechten verankerd gaan zien in de grondwet.

Niet iedereen is even gelukkig met deze vorm van druk uitoefenen. Want zo’n menigte is leuk zolang ze goedgehumeurd is, maar wat als ze teleurgesteld raakt?
Met tienduizenden Bolivianen op straat koos het congres eieren voor haar geld, en besloot begin volgend jaar een referendum te houden over de aangepaste grondwet. En toen was het tijd voor een feestje.


Jonathan, Jeroen en Wolt

Implementing the ProCoDe process - a process review

The process review of ProCoDe was presented to members of the ICCO Alliance in Utrecht on October 24, 2008. The interest in this review was reflected by the high turn up of approximately fifty people and the seemingly inexhaustible questions raised by the end of the presentation.

The R&D department opened by emphasising their continuing interest in monitoring the ProCode process, under the leadership of Irene Guijt. The evaluation team is comprised of Irene Guijt, Kate Hamilton, Celine D'Cruz (Asia pilot), Natalia Ortiz (Latin America pilot) and Moussiliou Alidou (Africa pilot).

From Irene's presentation, it became clear that the earlier used term of 'evaluation' insufficiently addresses the process that will characterise the work her team will do. Her team therefore swiftly suggested to label the work a 'process review'. Characteristic to this review is openness to change and flexibility in the approach. The audience questioned the boundaries and limitations of this flexibility.

Irene shared some ideas she currently has on ProCoDe. It comprises three components: the programmatic approach, co-responsibility, and decentralisation. The pinnacle idea of these three seems to be co-responsibility. This expresses the central vision, while the programmatic approach and decentralisation, she suggested, serves this more pinnacle vision of co-responsibility.

ProCoDe is based on several assumptions and the team will do their best to make these assumptions explicit. It furthermore has high-level ambitions, the team will listen to what extent these ambitions become reality. The emerging context specific realities will also be reflected upon.


Irene Guijt briefly presents some aspects of ProCoDe and its value

Click To Play

See more about the ProCoDe in the Programmatic Approach wiki

by Stephanie Zwier

ComPart goes 2 Burkina

This week part of the Compart support team is in Burkina Faso working with the Education programme of ICCO at the Conference on Informal Education and Literacy. Christophe Hien of Burkina Faso and Oudou Bengaly of Mali are providing the local support for the participants. Danny Aerts and Chris Addison have been working with them explaining the integration of the ComPart approach behind the scenes.

The Conference on informal learning and literacy being held here in Burkina Faso by ICCO with partners from Mali, Senegal and Burkina is being supported by the use of online tools to collect, disseminate and exchange information. In introducing how the ComPart approach has been used to support the ICCO programme (of which this conference is a part), we presented to delegates how the systems have helped to arrange, coordinate, record and disseminate findings from the conference. Christophe and Oudou presented briefly how the wiki, Dgroups, blog and delicious have been used to facilitate the conference.
We had the opportunity in the introduction to link up with ICCO and hear from Maarten Boers in Utrecht by video with Skype, you can see what he had to say on the conference blog. This was not without connectivity problems, but gave the message that ICCO colleagues in Utrecht are able to follow aspects of the meeting here.

The exercise with the wiki used the questions raised in the first part of the conference. Questions raised for each country, Senegal, Mali and Burkina were placed on three pages. These linked to separate page for each answer. Within one hour many of the pages were completed giving answers to the questions in a fraction of the time it would be possible to collate in any other system. Several threats were needed to get people to go for lunch. For the blog exercise we have encouraged people to take notes for a story from the field visit tomorrow and they will be able to include photos.

Blips and videos: The format of taking short videos to record opinions and feedback from participants has worked well. You can see a selection on http://compartuser.blip.tv/. On the same channel we have also captured some of the sessions with minimal editing. The videos have been optimised for displaying within the wiki and supporting lower speed connections.

Presentations: We have taken the opportunity to try out a new site for the presentations which has a French interface and just French language content, see http://www.slideo.com/espace/?compartuser.

Local copies: Videos will also be available on the USB-stick used to store the outputs of the wiki and blog. Creating local copies of the blog and wiki is complicated by the passwording and local copies created when logged into the respective systems. We hope both systems will be public at the end of the conference. Key documents have also been loaded onto the USB.

Support materials in French: A range of French language materials were prepared for the conference and to continue ComPart support in Francophone countries. The web2partager site now provides introductions to web2 material in French and here you can find a nice introduction to RSS. A French compart toolbar has been created (click the plus on the far left hand on your toolbar). We also prepared a tutorial printout that explains the basics of using a ComPart wiki.

Compatibility We have used participants' own machines in the conference for demonstrating the ComPart tools, and as a result have found some of the compatibility issues in using for example the wiki. We have identified some minor problems with the display of the menu in Internet Explorer 6 (This can be remedied by reloading the page.) The scroll bar disappears occassionally in full screen with Explorer 6, by reducing the window it reappears.

Connectivity has generally been superb from the conference venue, with speeds up to 150Kb/s allowing viewing of videos from blip.tv and easy upload to blip.tv and flickr.

From the conference we already have new wiki pages, several blips, some new documents and plenty of photos online. You can find the blog, wiki and videos from the ComPart toolbar, click on the 'plus' sign at the far left and choose 'ComPart FR'.




by Chris Addison and Danny Aerts

Op weg naar FAM workshops in Peru en Bolivia

Zondag 12 Oktober. Het vliegveld van Schiphol is al vroeg in de ochtend druk bezaaid met reizigers. Sylvia en Jeroen reizen vandaag naar Peru. Partnerbezoeken en een workshop voor ICCO en Kerkinactie partners staan op het programma. Collega Wolt is al in Lima om e.e.a. voor te bereiden.

Na een vlucht van ca 12 uur komen we moe maar toch redelijk opgewekt uit het vliegtuig gestapt. Wolt verwelkomt ons in Lima op het vliegveld. De taxirit naar Hotel Aleman is de eerste kennismaking met deze miljoenenstad.
Veel tijd om dingen te bespreken en of te bezoeken is er niet. De volgende ochtend vliegen Jeroen en Wolt alweer door naar Cusco. Sylvia gaat partners bezoeken in Lima.

In Cusco wordt Cenfopar bezocht. Eigenlijk ligt Cenfopar in Urubamba een uur van Cusco. Het is een organisatie die kinderen en jong adolocenten opleidt in o.a. landbouwprojecten, handel , horeca en microkredieten verstrekt.
de heenreis bij daglicht was al een hele bevalling... slingerend over nauwe bergweggetjes met een chauffeur die net iets te hard rijdt, te laat remt voor de bocht en inhaalt waar het eigenlijk niet kan. Gelukkig op de terugweg konden we een lift krijgen van een echte "padre" Een 70 jaar oude fransman die een kleine auto bezit. Je zou denken dat dit een verademing moest zijn, helaas was niets minder waar. De beste man reed zoniet NOG harder, NOG gevaarlijker en haalde in in bochten zonder te weten of er tegenliggers aankwamen. Met de bekende 7 kleuren in de broek kwamen we heelhuids in Cusco aan. "Thank God!"
De volgende dag was het tijd voor Wolt om nog wat partnerbezoeken af te leggen. Ondertussen in Lima ging Sylvia als een trein naar verschillende partners. Jeroen ging met de trein naar Machu Picchu.

Op woensdag verzamelden iedereen zich weer in Hotel Aleman. Vandaag zouden we de partners ontvangen die aan de workshops meedoen. Het bleken er achteraf zo'n 80 in totaal. Een fantastische opkomst!
De workshop dagen op donderdag en vrijdag in Chaclancayo zaten goed in elkaar en werden door iedereen goed ontvangen. Er werden uiteraard zeer veel contacten gelegd en de organisaties onderling begonnen al met kennisdelen. Echt een groot succes.
De dagen werden afgesloten met verschillende pisco sours en muziek.
Een memorabele bijeenkomst.

Terug in Lima werden de eerste voorbereidingen voor de reis naar Bolivia getroffen. Collega Jonathan was inmiddels aangekomen in Lima om met ons drieën door te reizen naar La Paz ( volgende blog )
Op een memorabele zaterdagavond waarop Wolt zijn verjaardag vierde, zaten wij met zijn vieren moe maar zeer voldaan te staren over de grote oceaan................... Op naar Bolivia.

Jonathan, Jeroen en Sylvia

Programme Operations, Information, Learning... and Mobiles

After the MobileActive08 conference in Jo'burg last week it's interesting to reflect on how things are changing in our work because of and around the spread of mobiles. Four or five clusters of applications have emerged during the last five or six years that are making their way into the development mainstream.

Mobile-based survey and data collection tools: There are several mature toolsets that can be used for all kinds of one-off or regular surveys. Episurveyor, for example / or the Nokia supported mobileresearcher. There is a lot of activity in health programmes. IDRC continues to experiment with using PDAs with nurses and midwives. Cell Life in South Africa has a range of applications, including surveying and supporting people living with HIV/Aids. In all these cases the data is sent back from the field using standard mobile signals. An interesting example from the agriculture sector in Mexico has coffee farmers belonging to one collective being trained to use their phones in their self-managed organic quality certification processes.

Bulk SMS for advocacy and information campaigns: there are a number of both Open Source and proprietary SMS bulk products available, for all budgets and contexts, including the new Dutch start-up, texttochange. Two of the most impressive come from commercial marketing companies who are making available products and services that have been tested and tried in advertising campaigns. Ad.iq, for example, is widely used by larger Northern NGOS -such as GreenPeace, Oxfam GB and Action Aid. The Praekelt foundation from South Africa is experimenting with using the advertising space on call-me messages. (Call-me messages are an interesting case in themselves. Research by TelCos active in Africa into the unusually high level of miscalls showed that people were using them to communicate, often via pre-arranged codes - as anyone with a teenager probably knows. The operators introduced a special number that generates a 'Please Call Me' message, onto which advertising messages could be added. Such calls are free to users in South Africa. The same facility is also being used for HIV/Aids messaging, generating a high level of response)

SMS used for more specific purposes such as:

• SMS marts - where SMS messages can be used to communicate jobs wanted/available (Souktel - and the phenomenally successfull Kenyan service, kazi560, based in Kibera)
• Regular messaging to support treatment adherence programmes for people living with HIV/Aids, as with the Cell-Life example above
• Education - Worlded is experimenting with using mobile phones to assist literacy (and has done a lot of interesting work using phones to link students and schools: parents can sms in to hear about homework, exam timetables etc.)
  

Managing and maintaining communications with stakeholders and colleagues using SMS: this is probably the most ordinary and widespread use of mobiles for communications. Survey data confirms that most subscribers in Africa use pay-as-you go schemes, as opposed to the contract schemes that are most popular in the OECD countries. SMS pings were the constant background to conversations in the conference, in the offices I have visited and the project visit I made to a youth project in a Township. Mobile coverage is now so widespread that SMS is a reliable, as well as cheap, way to maintain the daily round of conversations - professional and personal.

For Democracy and Peace issues this connectivity can be crucial. Reporting from polling stations in Zimbabwe, for example, enabled NGOs to publish stories and some results ahead of Government services. An SMS help line was set up by a consortium of NGOs in Kenya earlier this year following the post-election troubles. The new collaboration platform ushahidi was active in both those situations and, like increasing numbers of sites that aim to connect with users in Africa, is SMS enabled: people can SMS in, or receive SMS feeds.

Finally, the introduction of mobile money to Kenya - mpesa - in 2007 has been transformative, and it was only introduced in 2007. Mobile money is fast spreading to other parts of Africa

For the professionals in NGOs, like ICCO partners, the mobile then becomes one of the standard tools for a multi-channel life - used as a phone or for SMS where there is no connectivity, used on WiFi where that is available, used to transport data or capture images and sounds - to be transferred to a PC. All of this brings us back full circle - how mobile phones can be integrated into information management and the everyday activities that support Learning and Knowledge Sharing. Here is Jan Moolman of sangonet, who will be leading their work on the ComPart programme:

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For information on any of these applications please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Pete Cranston, pcATeuforic.org

Rising food prices: An opportunity for change?

The Brussels Development Briefings is a bimonthly series of meetings on key issues and challenges for rural development held in Brussels at the European Commission.

Yesterday’s briefing held at the World Food day on 16 October 2008 addressed the challenge of dealing with rising food prices. In two panel discussions, twelve knowledgeable speakers addressed the rising food prices and best policy options to ensure long term food security, especially for vulnerable households.

Key findings, background documents, blips and blogs are available online. This posting reflects on the contributions made by Stineke Oenema (ICCO) on behalf of the European Food Security Group (EFSG) of CONCORD.

Dr. Lluis Riera Figueras from the European Commission's DG Development introduced the question of rising food prices and the slow response of farmers to increase the supply of food. Solutions for high food prices and the higher food demand vary. Among them, are a need for: funds to be made available that are well monitored to ensure they reach the farmer, technological developments, resilience to be built by countries through increased stocks of grains,and the active involvement of farmer organizations. The different speakers emphasized the need to act now, especially in the Sub-Sahara African region.

A time of crisis allows people to stop and rethink what they are doing. It can therefore also be an opportunity for change. Stineke Oenema, the only female speaker, diplomatically emphasized the need for a new food system in which the right to food is central.

Unlike most of the other speakers, her message explicitly propagated a need to protect smallholder farmers. Their production processes need to be strengthened before they can equally compete in the free market. She described the case of a school feeding programme in Bolivia where small scale farmers provide food to the schools. Their preferred position gives them a secure demand with stable prices. With relatively small financial inputs, the complete chain from producer to consumer is strengthened.

However through regional free trade negotiations, this preferential position of small farmers risks being liberalized. When this happens, farmers will loose their preferred situation and will have to compete in the world market. Then they would no longer benefit from this programme.

Luca Alinovi, senior economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization, concludes that it is urgent to set our objectives straight and that we should start by bridging the dichotomy between protectionism and free market thinking. The reality is that most successful measures to tackle the food crises can be achieved by workable and correct policy mixes. These policy mixes should include support for smallfarmer production and market regulation and it should remain focused on the most vulnerable rural households.

On Saturday 18 October (22:45), Stineke Oenema joined a thematic evening on the Food Crisis on national Dutch television. View the video.

Project Knowledge Sharing & Mobiles

Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) is an NGO using ICTs to support information and knowledge sharing among women living in rural East Uganda (Apac). WOUGNET focuses on appropriate technology. They began, for example, with simple tape recorders which they used to those gather questions from the women. After translating the questions WOUGNET gathered responses, re-translated and redistributed the material. They have gone on to integrate the use of Community Radio and some Internet services into their work. They are now experimenting with Mobile Phones, especially SMS, using mass distribution tools - Frontline SMS and BulkSMS.

As well as enabling women to mobilise and campaign, they have experimented using SMS as a part of their Knowledge Sharing and Learning processes. As part of a consultation they sent out five questions by SMS, one at a time. 45 to 50 women became engaged in active discussion. WOUGNET then followed up with a workshop and the women came already engaged in the conversation. This was more successfull than many pre-workshop discussions I have expperienced. Here is Nora Odoi, a WOUGNET Project Officer on their plans:

MobileActive 08 in Johannesburg

This - www.mobileactive08.org - is shaping up to be a very special and possibly quite influential event. Jointly organised by SangoNet - the South African organisation that will be one of the early collaborators in CompartSouth) and MobileActive, it is focusing on the uses of mobiles in development and brings together an extraordindary mix of creative applications of mobiles to support activism, health and agricultural programmes, data gathering and corruption monitoring, communications and news. One of 381 delegates, I am here to explore how mobiles can contribute to Knowledge Sharing and support the ComPart South programme.

I have been helping with the preparations, supporting members of SangoNet's Citizen Journalism programme to download and learn mobile applications. There are two teams of documenters - one from a Rhodes University New Media programme and the other from SangoNet. Each has been issued with top-end Nokia (donated of course) with which they will use to gather photos, video interviews and audio recordings of the workshops, meetings and demonstrations.

This, I think, is an immediate and obvious application of mobiles to Knowledge and Learning. Euforic and ICCO know about the value of rich reporting during and from events. Using mobile phones is one way to involve more people in in this process, especially to contribute multi-media content to the post-event documentation. The emphasis of course is on communicating what is going on, enabling others to get connected to such events. It is also a way to capture learning, insights, excitement or ideas. This communication, and the ability to then organise and store the material, is a central part of Learning and Knowledge Sharing.

And since this is 2008, of course the phones will use very smart a software and web services which exploit the convergence of applications onto modern phones. Shozu enables posting of photos and videos instantly (via a WiFi internet connection) to your favourite social media. Look for the tag mobileactive08 on Flickr, YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter. They are also experimenting with live video streaming using Flixwagon.

Approx 9% of South Africans can access the Internet. Around 80% can access a mobile, now more even than Radio. David Barnard, the Executive Director of SangoNet was at the June Compart South learning workshop in Lisbon. He has clear ideas about where how SangoNet wants to integrate mobile phones into their work.

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A future for new media in education programs in developing countries?

Stephanie Zwier recently joined the Euforic team to work on ComPart knowledge sharing and learning activities. We asked her to reflect on her previous work with Plan Netherlands and to introduce herself:

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As part of the Euforic team, I will support learning in the ICCO Alliance. My name is Stephanie Zwier, I am a young consultant working on policy and research in development organisations. I write this posting because a number of people at ICCO asked me to reflect on my learning experience at Plan Netherlands. Last year I worked at Plan where I helped to stimulate learning. I will reflect on learning within Plan's livelihood learning group and on some research I conducted on learning from their pilot School improvement program.

Plan is an international Development organisation that aims for a world in which children can develop their full potential. One theme Plan works on is livelihoods. The livelihoods learning group was facing some start up difficulties, it had no leader for a while and was lagging behind. As soon as a leader was appointed we, as a group, cooperated to develop a learning action plan. With outside support the group developed first a vision, then a mission and, after a while, an entire learning plan that was put into action. Central in this plan was the thought of generating best practices and stimulating learning. The plan involved a decentralisation process, whereby our group set up four learning sites in 'the south'. At these learning sites a different culture was stimulated to share knowledge and generating best practices. This required some behavioural change, but was soon appreciated and ownership grew.

To stimulate learning on the education program I furthermore conducted a research and wrote the report 'learning for innovation in quality education: A meta-evaluation of Plan's school improvement program'. This program was a holistic pilot program on quality education, implemented in from 2003 until 2006 in Africa, Asia and Latin-America. The pilot SIP was thoroughly evaluated in 2006 and 2007. The evaluation reports were not yet compared or analysed. The learning potential offered by these reports was the reason why I decided to analyse them in a meta-evaluation. This research emphasises the importance of involving children in the learning process. 

My first day at ICCO, I discovered how new media, such as wiki's, blogs and video's is used to stimulate learning. Its use follows a 'bottom- up' approach. It seems to challenge more common hierarchical structures, by involving ICCO staff in all layers of its organisation. New media enables knowledge sharing through social networks. Especially in the area of education I could imagine the vast possibilities for such new media to distribute knowledge in the south and increase children's participation. I therefore would like to trigger some debate by stating that ´the use of new media in education programs is a way forward to increase possibilities for children in developing countries´. What do you think of this statement?

By Stephanie Zwier

ComPart: Upcoming plans

On 1 October, the Euforic team and Maarten Boers met in The Hague to review ComPart plans for the coming period.

Two recent meetings guided our efforts - Lisbon in June and Utrecht in May. The Lisbon discussions were more focussed on possibilities with partners in developing countries; the Utrecht meeting on actions needed to reinforce efforts here in the Netherlands.

The plans include:

• ComPart goes to Burkina Faso: In mid-October, 2008, we will run a series of ComPart sessions as part of the regional education programme conference in West Africa. For the workshop, we are involving expertise from two additional Euforic members: ATOL and IICD.
• Extending the ComPart 'alliance': We will agree cooperation frameworks with some of the organizations joining us in Lisbon, building up a capacity in the South to support information, communication and knowledge-sharing activities with ICCO partners in the South.

• E-surveys of Aliance partners: One of the first collaborations is to survey ICCO alliance partners in different regions to better understand how they engage in information, communication and knowledge-sharing, and their connectivity situations.
  

• ComPart in Brazil, Bolivia and Angola: We are exploring with ICCO colleagues and partners how best to embed ComPart activities in emerging programmes.
  

• ComPart 'surgeries': Following the May discussions in Utrecht, we will start a regular weekly 'surgery' where anyone working with ComPart can drop in, meet the experts and champions, and get advice answers and share tips (starting 4 November every Tuesday afternoon from 14:00 to 16:00 in the ComPart training room - 041 - at the ICCO offices).

• Documenting and sharing the learning: While the amount of ComPart activity is growing, we will reinforce efforts to capture knowledge and learning across the Alliance, making sure that that various tools being used are properly presented, tagged and described to allow easier access. Stephanie Zwier recently joined the Euforic team working on the project; she joins ICCO's Gerrit Visser who is already active on this ComPart Blog and elsewhere.
  

Watch this space for news and updates ...!

Surprising Africa

Last week during Picnic 2008 in Amsterdam SICA organized with Butterfly Works the conference 'Surprising Africa'.

With the theme Storytelling presented about fifteen speakers their innovative ideas on the area of culture, design and media. Among them were the writer and journalist
Binyavanga Wainaina from Kenia, the cartoon expert Marguerite Abouet from Ivorycoast and the Algerian poet Lamis Saidi.

These were the themes: Future of Africa Through Storytelling, African Stories For and From Young People en Story Telling Through Mobile Phones.

A personal account on 'Surprising Africa' is blogged on Smartmobs titled:

- If it works in Africa it will work anywhere
- Citizen journalism in Africa
And there is more about Picnic in 'When we change the way we communicate, we change society'(Clay Shirky)

ComPart South Workshop 16 and 17 June 2008, Lisbon (3)

In June 2008, ICCO held a workshop in Lisbon to think through next steps and plans for the ICCO ComPart 'South' initiative. The workshop was held in Lisbon to coincide with the annual KM4Dev workshop, to enable ICCO sponsored participants to contribute to and learn from this community.

The report of the workshop outlines the origins of that workshop, its activities and findings and agreed next steps.

See related stories with the label 'compartsupport'