NAIROBI, Kenya – Single-room shacks with mud walls, metal roofs and dirt floors sleep families of eight here. Plastic bags filled with human waste are thrown into unpaved streets, earning the nickname “flying toilets." Trash piles up in front of homes and storefronts. The flies are everywhere. People struggle to survive but the appetite for change is strong.

This is Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum home to hundreds of thousands packed onto one square mile of land. Kibera's population is a matter of debate – and politics – with unofficial estimates ranging from 250,000 to 1 million.

And it is next door to some of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods. On its edge lies a golf course serving the elite, the lush green grass a stark contrast to the rusted metal roofs that clutter Kibera's skyline.

More than half of Nairobi's residents live in human settlements like Kibera. Photo Credit: Sarina Beges

The government says those who live here are illegal squatters, and officials withhold basic public services like electricity, sewage and waste collection. Health care and education are expensive and out of reach for those struggling to find steady employment amid the rising price of food and fuel. Water is scarce here – a resource turned on and off by the government and a commodity overpriced by a handful of private dealers.

But mobile phones are so cheap and easy to access that more than 70 percent of people living in Kibera have one. Harnessing the potential of technology for development, an innovative course at Stanford is designing mobile phone applications to improve living conditions in Kenya's slums.

Incubating ideas

Stanford professors Joshua Cohen and Terry Winograd created Stanford's Designing Liberation Technologies course, which is taught at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) each spring. Grounded in the principle that an effective product cannot be designed without participation from the local community, the course pairs student teams with NGOs to co-create technology platforms.

"We started with the belief that by combining emerging mobile technologies with human-centered design, our students could find new opportunities to change people's lives for the better," says Winograd, a computer scientist. "We were fortunate to develop connections with strong local organizations that could guide our understanding of the needs and provide a vehicle for turning our students' ideas into real programs."

The course is part of the Program on Liberation Technology at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute. Cohen and Winograd helped launch the program in 2009 with CDDRL Director Larry Diamond to explore how technology is being used to advance change in the developing world.

Originally funded with support by Nokia Research Center in Africa, the course is now supported by the Silicon Valley-based Omidyar Network.

One of the first ideas to come out of the class is M-Maji, which means “mobile water” in Swahili. M-Maji is a mobile application that uses a two-way SMS system to provide users with accurate and up-to-date information on the location, price and quality of one of Kibera's most precious resources – water.

Water economics

Water is scarce, expensive and can often be contaminated in Kibera. The government supplies water to Kibera just two or three days a week. When the water flows, vendors fill large hundred-gallon plastic storage tanks that tower imposingly from the rooftops.

A water tank sits atop a water vending station. Photo Credit: Sarina Beges

Water is collected from kiosks housed in storefronts along dusty streets and open gutters. Young girls pour water from rusty faucets into large jerrycans and struggle to carry the containers through Kibera's pock-marked streets. They spend about two hours a day collecting water for drinking, cooking, cleaning and bathing.

"On a good day they can go to their normal spot to find water, but on a bad day they have to keep walking around until they find a source," says M-Maji co-founder Sangick Jeon, a Stanford PhD student.

Jeon explains that water has turned into a big business in Kibera and large cartels deemed "the big five" control the price and availability of water, shutting out the smaller vendors from the marketplace. That means Kibera's residents pay more than double the cost for water than their rich neighbors on the other side of the golf course.

Water quality is always a concern.

"Most water is contaminated because steel pipes are stolen and they use above ground plastic pipes that break off and flying toilets can seep into the pipes," Jeon says.

Jeon is researching conflict and cooperation in Africa. He took the course taught by Cohen and Winograd two years ago and has stayed invested in M-Maji. He says Kibera is a fascinating place for a political scientist to work, but also points to the strong partnerships that have allowed the project to take root.

When asked about how the M-Maji technology works, Jeon laughs.

"I am just a political scientist," he says. "The guys at Umande Trust are doing it all."

Dialing for water

Kelvin Lugaka is a young Kenyan water specialist at Umande Trust who leads the M-Maji project. He implements the technology and gets people to use it. Lugaka grew up in Kibera and is proud of his childhood home that he calls a human settlement, not a slum. His parents and siblings still live here, and he knows all the water vendors in the five villages where the technology is being piloted.

Walking through Kibera, Lugaka shows how M-Maji works on a very basic Nokia mobile phone – the kind that costs the equivalent of $15 on the second-hand market. The technology was developed by a local team of Kenyans working for Wezatele, a Nairobi-based startup located at the iHub technology incubator.

Lugaka dials *778# onto the phone's large buttons. A few seconds later, a SMS message pops up on the phone's small screen prompting him to press "1" for water, "2" to sell water or "3" to file a complaint. He presses "1" and a list of villages appear that have water available that day. Next to each landmark is the cost of water that day.

Because there are no street signs in Kibera, the M-Maji team had to use popular landmarks – schools, health clinics and churches – to identify water vendors locations.

"M-Maji is going to have the coordinates for water vendors, which will allow people to find out information about water and the cost of water today, so people can move to a different water vendor (if the price is too high)," says Lugaka.

Each morning the registered water vendors are responsible for entering the price of water at their kiosks into the M-Maji system. Lagaka currently has 45 water vendors registered in the system but would like that number to grow to 100.

A unique partnership

Josiah Omotto is one of Umande Trust's original founders. Raised in Kibera, Omotto has devoted his work to improving water and sanitation conditions in the community.

He has a booming voice and commanding presence. When he speaks, everyone in the room listens.

"Umande Trust implies that you wake up in the morning with a new perspective on the world," Omotto says. "We work on projects that do not recycle the ideas or biases of yesterday."

The power of technology to advance change has always been part of Omotto's vision for development in Kibera and before working with Stanford he claims there were no other mobile phone-based projects here.

"Access to information is power and technology represents the future potential to transfer and share information," he says.

Over a lunch of rice, vegetables and bits of meat, Omotto talks about the unique partnership with Stanford. It’s unusual to see student researchers in the field translating knowledge into practice and impact, he says. Other researchers have showed up at Umande Trust to collect data for their surveys. But they rarely stay long enough for lunch or a walk through Kibera.

Before the course starts, students spend over a week in Kenya meeting with local NGO partners, conducting needs assessments with the community and developing the ideas that will turn into their design projects.

Some of the prototypes created have used mobile phones for reproductive health counseling, to coordinate a system of community foot patrols, provide legal advice, report violent crime, and incentivize savings, among others. With the ease of a mobile device, they attempt to break the information divide that exists in Nairobi's poorest communities to connect users directly to medical, health and legal professionals.

Not all the projects succeed. But M-Maji seems to be defying the odds.

Leveling the playing field

A female water vendor hopes the M-Maji service will increase business at her kiosk. Photo Credit: Sarina Beges

Standing outside in the hot afternoon sun as water trickled from the tap into the muddy street, one of Kibera's few female water vendors enthusiastically endorsed the M-Maji service. She’s optimistic that the service would drive more customers to her smaller kiosk that struggles to compete with the larger vendors in Kibera.

At her station, a teenage girl rinses her clothes in bright red plastic basins of soapy water as young children run through the narrow streets filling small tin cups. As they drink, dogs fight over scraps of garbage.

"M-Maji allows the poorer water vendor to enter the marketplace," Omotto says. "The larger water vendors are well known, they control the water supply and are connected to big political players and the government. The moment you make this information open you liberalize the system."

M-Maji's co-founder agrees.

"The system will put downward pressure on the water prices so if you are selling water for five shillings when it is only worth two shillings, then someone else will sell it for four and people will go there," Jeon says.

In discussing the politics of water, Omotto says water is one of the few areas the Kenyan government has been making an effort to improve in Kibera.

"The government does not invest in informal settlements," he says. "Resources are typically channeled outside the city into rural areas or spent on defense and the police."

Omotto shrugs his shoulders when asked why water policy has improved in Kibera and suggests that the new Kenyan constitution – which contains provisions for water rights – might be the answer. Or he just chalks it up to politics, suggesting that it may have to do with the political ambitions of the current water minister. Not surprising in a country where resource allocation and politics go hand-in-hand.

Scaling the service

As the project grows, water quality testing is going to be an important component. M-Maji is planning to do periodic tests on the water quality and would eventually like to employ infographics technology to visually plot the sources of contaminated water for residents. Jeon is hoping to work with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's office in Kibera on water quality testing.

While M-Maji is gearing up for a full launch of the service this year, they expressed concern about the sustainability of the project. For the pilot they received small grants through the Freeman Spogli Institute's Global Underdevelopment Action Fund and the Center for Innovation in Global Health. But it is uncertain where the funding will come from going forward.

M-Maji does not charge people to use the service, which is equivalent to the cost of sending a text message, but will be unable to subsidize the service indefinitely.

"The cost of sending a message through M-Maji is the cost of one vegetable or liter of water," Omotto says, underscoring the trade-offs that will force the M-Maji team to work hard to prove the utility of the service to the community and vendors.

Umande Trust has already received 400 calls from community members interested in the service and believes M-Maji will have traction on the ground once it is fully launched. Lugaka has been busy working with the local radio station in Kibera to develop advertisements for M-Maji as part of a larger community outreach strategy.

The problem of water availability and quality are not unique to Kibera. If the project takes off it has the potential to scale to other human settlements across Africa and the world.

"If the technology works perfectly then Kibera is just the start,” Jeon says.

For Mariah Halperin, it was an extraordinary moment.

The Stanford senior – who is writing a thesis on the development of democracy in Turkey – sat across a table from Kemal Dervis, a former Turkish minister of economic affairs and treasury. Halperin was among several students in the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law honors program spending the better part of an hour listening to Dervis speak on the global economy and other topics.

“It was an amazing opportunity,” said Halperin, who was able to ask Dervis about his reform efforts as minister.

The meeting was one of more than a dozen similar sessions the students participated in over five days during a visit to Washington, D.C. The mid-September trip to the nation’s capital was a highlight of CDDRL’s honors college program, which was recently endowed with a gift from philanthropists Sakurako and William Fisher. 

Led by CDDRL Director Larry Diamond and Francis Fukuyama, this year’s honors program director and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the students saw the inside workings of government and development organizations and had lively question-and-answer sessions with a host of prominent figures.

They went to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Millennium Challenge Corp.  They met with Stephen Hadley, who served as President George W. Bush’s national security advisor, and Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy. And they spoke with Inter-American Dialogue President Michael Shifter.

“Expectations were high; the trip lived up to them,” said Imani Franklin. The international relations major joins Halperin and seven others in this year’s honors class.

“Just mind-blowing to me, that you’re meeting just all these incredibly famous people in such a small setting,” Kabir Sawhney, a management science and engineering major, said after meeting with Dervis at The Brookings Institution, where he is a vice president and director of global economy and development.

The program, whose formal name will be the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Undergraduate Honors Program at CDDRL, was created by a group headed by FSI senior fellows Kathryn Stoner and Michael A. McFaul, who is now Washington’s ambassador to Moscow.

The program allows seniors to graduate with honors in democracy, development and rule of law. Its roots go back seven years, when Stoner-Weiss was teaching a single class to 20 students. 

"Our goal had always been to truly create...an interdisciplinary program,'' Stoner-Weiss said. "It's become, I think, a lot more than we thought it might be.”

Initially the program was for students studying international relations or political science. That changed last year, when the university made CDDRL honors an interdisciplinary program. Diamond said at that point the program crossed a critical threshold, that now it can engage a wider range of students and has become more competitive and more selective.

“It wasn’t as rich and diverse a mix,” said Diamond, who also believes opening the program to students across campus has benefited those who are accepted.

“I think, in a way, it’s more fun for them because they have a more diverse group,” he said.

This year’s group does include two international relations and one political science major. But Halperin is majoring in history and others are studying human biology, public policy, earth systems and economics.

“I wanted to do it because I wanted a challenge, and I wanted to work intensely in a discipline in which I had no experiences,” said Holly Fetter, who is pursuing a bachelor’s in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and a master’s in sociology. “I knew I wanted an international perspective that I had not sought out yet as an undergraduate.”

Sawhney said the honors program allows him to pursue a thesis outside his engineering major and gain a measure of depth in something other than his major before he graduates.

“This is something I can do that’s going to be a very unique experience,” said Sawhney, whose thesis will be a study of the effect of regime type on a country’s propensity to default on its sovereign debt obligations.

Thomas Alan Hendee – who was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and whose thesis will be a study of the social determinants of health in Brazilian slums and how they affect child health – said he wanted to be a part of the honors program since freshman year.

“This is the second year when they’ve allowed people from all over the university to come in, and I’m really thankful for that opportunity,” he said.

Explaining the decision to endow the program, Sakurako Fisher said she and her husband are making a yearly investment in a group of students “who are going to go out and make the world a better place,’’ and that some CDDRL honors students may in their careers have an impact that brings more than a ripple of benefit to people in distant lands.

“It could be a tidal wave. It could be a tidal wave on another shore,’’ she said. “We may not know that for 30 years.’’

Fisher said whether or not an honors student ultimately works in one of the fields the program focuses on, the experience of going through the program will affect how each lives his or her life.

“Maybe they don’t stay in this area, but it always influences their decisions for the rest of their lives,’’ she said.

Julie Veroff, who was a member of the first CDDRL honors program class, said the experience has served her well since she graduated from Stanford in 2007.

Veroff went on to receive a master's in international development from Oxford and spent three years as executive director of Face AIDS, the San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that was created by Stanford students to engage high school and college students in the fight to eradicate AIDS. Veroff is now in her first year at Yale Law School. 

"First and foremost, it gave me a lot of confidence as an intellectual person,'' said Veroff, who explained that the program led her to thoroughly explore and think critically about issues and ideas, to not just accept something at face value.

She also said the program taught her how to both accept and ask for feedback and how to be more aggressive in speaking to professors and mentors about her goals. It also left her with lasting connections with peers and professors she can turn to for help - or for a simple friendly conversation. 

"I can't remember anything from statistics, but certainly that peer community is long lasting. And for that I'm grateful,'' she said. 

Honors program students must have at least a 3.5 grade point average, and they apply to the program in the winter quarter of their junior year. Those accepted begin their studies with a three-unit research seminar in the spring quarter of their junior year. 

The students are also encouraged to do field work or other research over the summer before senior year, and several members of this year’s group ranged far and wide over the globe. Keith Calix, whose thesis will examine the relationship of post-apartheid education reform and the rise of organized crime in Cape Town, spent the spring and much of the summer in South Africa.

Fetter, whose focus is the influence of U.S. funding on the development of China’s civil society, did research in Beijing. Halperin spent the summer in Turkey. And Franklin, who will assess whether exposure to Western beauty standards impacts the self-image of women in the developing world, studied Arabic in Jordan. 

Lina Hidalgo is studying the social and political impacts of media in Egypt and China and spent time in both countries. Anna Schickele spent two weeks in Peru to explore the determinants of farmer participation in agricultural development projects in the country. Vincent Chen, who was unable to make the trip to Washington, will study how democratic and autocratic systems affect the formation and efficacy of their environmental policies.

Diamond said the number of students admitted to the program is limited not only by the academic requirements, but also to allow the scholars to be able to develop strong relationships with each other and their instructors.

“I think that having somewhere between about eight to 12 students is a good size. That’s kind of been the size the last few years,” he said.

In D.C., students said bonds were being formed.

“We’re getting more of an idea of what we’re all working on,” said Halperin.  And Hendee said there must be camaraderie in order to face the work ahead.

“It’s a struggle,” he said, “a year-long struggle we’re going to be in together.”

Jenna Nicholas, who was in last year’s honors program, said it was valuable to have her colleagues’ perspectives and opinions as she worked on her thesis that examined the growth of civil society in China. She said her group offered hard analysis of one another’s work, and that the program resulted in her improving her own critical-thinking skills. Nicholas, who is completing her master’s in organizational behavior at Stanford, also advised this year’s group to “keep the commitment level up.”

Then, with a laugh, she said: “And remember what your hypothesis was.”

Diamond said that in terms of teaching, the honors program has become CDDRL’s crown jewel. He said students’ research, which results in theses of 75 to 125 pages, is having an impact.

Otis Reid, who graduated from the program last year, was recognized by the university with the David M. Kennedy Honors Thesis Prize and the Firestone Medal for Excellence - the top prizes for undergraduate social science research - for his thesis on the impact of concentrated ownership on the value of publicly traded firms on the Ghana Stock Exchange.

“They’re generating new knowledge,” Diamond said. “It’s not just an exercise.”

Before heading back to Stanford in late September, the students received an invitation to return to the nation’s capital from David Yang, director of the U.S. AID Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights & Governance in the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance.

“Come back,” Yang said. “We’ll share your papers and debate your findings.”

Michael McAuliffe is a freelance writer based in Greenbelt, Md.

In September, CDDRL's Program on Social Entrepreneurship (PSE) welcomed its second class of Social Entrepreneurs in Residence at Stanford (SEERS) who hail from Malaysia, South Africa and the San Francisco Bay Area. Using the law as a vehicle for social change, this group is collaboratively working to advance the rights of women, minority groups and refugees around the world.

The three SEERS will spend the fall quarter in residence at Stanford connecting to the academic community through a course taught at the Stanford Law School - Law, Social Entrepreneurship and Social Change - by PSE Faculty Director Deborah L. Rhode.

An international figure recognized for her work to help change domestic laws in Malaysia, Zainah Anwar helped launch two ground-breaking civil society organizations working to promote women's rights in Islam. Anwar founded Sisters in Islam in Malaysia and its pioneering work led to the creation of Musawah, a global movement of equality and justice in the Muslim family. 

A social justice activist in South Africa, Mazibuko Jara works to support sustainable rural development for communities residing in the Eastern Cape province. Founder of the Ntinga Ntaba ka Ndoda organization, Jara protects the practice of customary law and the interests of rural African women. As a spokesperson for the Democratic Left Front, Jara also works to bring together anti-corporate social justice movements in South Africa challenging the government and powerful interest groups.   

A lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area, Emily Arnold-Fernández works to defend refugee rights and transform the lives of refugee communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Founder of the organization Asylum Access, Fernández empowers refugees to build a new life in their new homes by providing legal aid, community legal empowerment, policy advocacy and strategic litigation.

The three SEERS will spend the quarter engaging the student population at Stanford, pursuing their own research agenda and taking some time to reflect on their work and next steps. CDDRL will be hosting a public event with the SEERS on Nov. 14 at 5 pm in the Bechtel conference room at Encina Hall to introduce them more formally to the Stanford community.