Water is scarce, costly, and contaminated in Kibera, Nairobi -- one of Africa's largest urban slums. On good days, the women and children spend just under an hour finding clean water in their community. On bad days, the price of water increases tenfold and the search takes all day. Often, people ask jokingly whether it is water or cholera they are buying.

Many slums like Kibera lack access to clean drinking water, but they don't lack access to mobile phones. This is the insight behind M-Maji, a start-up non-profit project that uses mobile phones to empower communities with better information about water availability, price, and quality. This seminar will introduce the M-Maji system, and describe some of the challenges to designing for such a complex social environment.Background: M-Maji emerged from the Designing Liberation Technologies course in the Stanford d.school, which focused on using mobile phone technology for health improvement in Kibera. M-Maji has since received funding to run a pilot from the Program on Liberation Technologies and the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford

Sunny Jeon is the principal investigator to M-Maji research, and is currently making frequent trips to Kenya to prepare for a randomized impact evaluation of their water program. He is also a Ph.D. Candidate in the Stanford Department of Political Science, where he is working on a dissertation project that studies the economic and political returns to ethnic diversity.

Katherine Hoffman is a co-terminal student completing a B.A. in International Relations and Economics and an M.A. in International Policy Studies with a focus on Global Health. She has been involved with M-Maji since it began in Spring quarter, and has just returned from a trip to Kenya in December to begin laying the groundwork for the project implementation. 
Her primary interests include economic development and health improvement in low-resource settings. Past experience includes internships at the Bonn International Center for Conversion in Bonn, Germany and at the Institute for Financial Management in Chennai, India; she has also volunteered at the Center for the Working Girl in Quito, Ecuador and studied abroad for a quarter in Moscow.

Abstract
Consider three different worlds of poor network connectivity:

• Scenario 1: A user in Africa uses a cheap mobile device with voice and SMS as the only data connectivity channel (140 bytes per message and each SMS costs money).
• Scenario 2: A university in India has good connectivity which is shared simultaneously by 400 users. (Per user share = 2 Kbps)
• Scenario 3: A school in Kenya has a computer but no Internet.

In this talk, I will describe a range of techniques we have developed to enhance information access in these three scenarios of poor connectivity. In Scenario 1, we have built an entire SMS-based protocol stack for mobile applications being used in India, Mexico and Ghana as well as a live SMS search engine in Kenya. We are also rolling out a data-over-GSM voice stack to support data connectivity over cellular voice.

In Scenario 2, I will describe why some of the fundamentals of network protocols break down in these regimes and why we need a completely new Web architecture for these types of networks. We have deployed early versions of our system in a few schools and universities in India, Kenya.

In Scenario 3, I will describe how we can use vertical search engines to deliver a vertical slice of the Web in a hard-disk and provide an offline searchable and browse-able Internet. This system has been used in schools in India and Kenya as an educational tool for students and teachers.

This is joint work with several others with Jay Chen being a primary leader for many of these projects.

Lakshminarayanan Subramanian is an Assistant Professor in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU.

His research interests are in the areas of networks, distributed systems and computing for development. He co-leads the Networks and Wide-Area Systems(NeWS) group (which investigates software solutions for distributed systems, wireline and wireless networking, operating system, security and privacy, technologies and applications for the developing world) and the CATER Lab at NYU ( which focuses on developing and deploying low-cost, innovative technology solutions to some of the problems in developing regions in terms of communication, healthcare and microfinance).

Recently, he has co-established a new Center for Technology and Economic Development (CTED) at NYU Abu Dhabi which brings together students from several disciplines (CS, economics, healthcare, education, policy). He is the recipient of several awards including the  NSF CAREER Award (2009), IBM Faculty Award (2009, 2010) and C.V. Ramamoorthy Award. He has been at the forefront of several technological innovations for development that have been used in several countries around the world.

Why are some governments better able to reform public service delivery than others? The increased availability of information and communication technologies marks an important opportunity for politicians to improve the quality of public services. However, state-level experiences with eGovernment in India display significant variations in the ability of governments to successfully adopt these technologies to provide benefits to citizens. Based on her studies of one-stop, computerized public service centers in sixteen Indian states, Jennifer will discuss the characteristics of states associated with differences in policy outcomes and present original survey evidence on the effects of technology-based reforms on the quality of public services.

Jennifer Bussell is an Assistant Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research concerns the political economy of development and governance with an emphasis on the role of formal and informal institutions--such as federalism, coalition politics, and corruption--in shaping policy outcomes. She is particularly concerned with the politics of government technology adoption for the benefit of poor citizens in developing countries, with an emphasis on India.

Susan Hyde is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Yale University, where she is affiliated with the MacMillian Center and the Institute for Social and Policy Studies. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2006, and has held fellowships at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and Princeton University's Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. Her research interests include international influences on domestic politics, elections in developing countries, international norm creation, election manipulation, and the use of natural and field experimental research methods. Her current research explores the effects of international democracy promotion efforts, and her research has been published in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, the Journal of Politics. She has recently completed a book entitled The Pseudo-Democrat's Dilemma: Why Election Monitoring Became an International Norm.  She has served as an international observer with several organizations for elections in Albania, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Pakistan and Venezuela, and has worked for the Democracy Program at The Carter Center. She teaches courses on international organizations, democracy promotion, the global spread of elections, and the role of non-state actors in world politics.

CO-SPONSORED BY COMPARATIVE POLITICS

Symposium Outline

Ten years after President Bush attempted to reduce U.S. involvement in statebuilding, America and its allies are more heavily involved in it than ever before.  There simply are no viable alternatives to stabilizing fragile states. And yet the tremendous sacrifices we make to rebuild states too often produce regimes where corruption and other abuses of power prevail. In turn these undermine the legitimacy of the regimes and render stability ever more elusive.

The international community may share responsibility for creating this accountability gap. In Afghanistan, the rush to build up the power of the government and to respect its sovereignty have weakened constraints that would subject that power to the will of the Afghan people.

Amid struggles over flawed elections and corruption these past two years, practitioners on the ground have experimented with new approaches to close the accountability gap in Afghanistan. NATO military approaches to governance-led operations have been matched by parallel civilian efforts to work from the bottom-up in engaging Afghan communities and helping them seek solutions through the nascent institutions of the Afghan government. 

These efforts face an uphill challenge, but represent the best hope for closing an accountability gap that threatens all statebuilding efforts. This symposium at Stanford University will bring together practitioners and experts to share experiences and explore options to improve the contemporary practice of statebuilding.

Organizers

The symposium will be hosted by Larry Diamond, Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Founded in 2002, CDDRL engages in research, training, and teaching, organizing policy dialogues aimed at increasing public understanding of governance and political development. In addition, CDDRL collaborates with scholars, policymakers, and practitioners around the world to advance collective knowledge about the linkages between democracy, sustainable economic development, human rights, and the rule of law.

The research team supporting the symposium is led by Ben Rowswell, a Visiting Scholar who is in residence at CDDRL during the 2010-2011 academic year to carry out the project entitled, Promoting Popular Sovereignty in Statebuilding. Rowswell is a Canadian diplomat on leave, who has recently served both as Director of the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction Team and as Deputy Head of Mission for the Canadian Embassy in Kabul.  Promoting Popular Sovereignty in Statebuilding and the associated symposium have been made possible by a generous contribution from the Global Peace and Security Fund of Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.