Making Digital Development Projects Work

In the last decade, countless development projects have piloted new tools to reach more beneficiaries or to make current systems more efficient. While the intentions of such initiatives are good, often the results are not stellar.

This is because digital development projects often favor one-off activities, like hackathons. The best solutions are focused on identifying an immediate solution for a particular sector and location. As such, products are developed in silos and many never go beyond the pilot phases.

A good example of this disaster is what happened in Uganda with mHealth initiatives. In 2008 and 2009, Uganda had 23 similar mHealth projects led by different development organizations that failed to scale up and ended shortly after the initial funding. The problem got so bad that Uganda’s Ministry of Health declared a moratorium on pilot mHealth initiatives.

To prevent such failures, leading global development practitioners, including the Gates Foundation and UNDP, have endorsed the Principles for Digital Development. What exactly are the Principles? They’re a community-developed set of guidelines to help the development community integrate best practices into technology or digital-based projects.

As Ann Mei Chang, the Executive Director at USAID’s U.S. Global Development Lab, noted at a recent Principles event, for over a decade the development community has faced challenges using modern tools like mobile phones to make their work more effective or meaningful.

Chang, who came from Google and Apple before she joined the public sector, candidly pointed out that, unlike products developed in Silicon Valley, tech-based development projects are failing because of their structure: they are often uncoordinated, unscalable, geographically narrow-focused, and inflexible.

Fixing this status quo requires institutions to commit to change – and that’s how the Principles for Digital Development came about. It was developed after consultation with over 500 individuals from 100 organizations and it includes nine principles:

1. Design with the user.
2. Understand the existing ecosystem.
3. Design for scale.
4. Build for sustainability.
5. Be data driven.
6. Use open standards, open data, open source and open innovation.
7. Reuse and improve.
8. Address privacy and security.
9. Be collaborative.

Endorsing these principles, however, is only the beginning. To really commit to making impactful digital programs, development practitioners must adopt the principles into their organizational strategies, integrate best practices into business processes or procurement, and self-evaluate their progress. And USAID recently published a guide on how to apply the principles in practice.

I look forward to when CIPE joins this exciting community by endorsing the principles and learning to implement them. Stay tuned for how we progress – we’ll update on our journey to make our digital programs more inclusive, sustainable, and successful for all stakeholders involved.

Maiko Nakagaki is Program Officer for Global Programs at CIPE.