Nuhu Ribadu is a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development. His work at the Center, which began in April 2009, is to draw lessons from his experience for combating corruption worldwide and to provide fresh thinking on the role of international institutions in this fight. Before joining CGD, Nuhu was head of Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) from 2003 to 2007. He served on several economic and anti-corruption commissions and was a key member of Nigeria's economic management team that drove wide-ranging public sector reforms. Nuhu was awarded with the World Bank's Jit Gill Memorial Award for Outstanding Public Service in recognition of his efforts. Prior to leading the EFCC, Nuhu spent 18 years in the Nigerian police force. A lawyer by training, he received his Bachelors and Masters in Law from Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. Nuhu is also a Senior Fellow at St. Anthony's College at Oxford University in the UK.

Carolina for Kibera (CFK) inspires and nurtures youth leaders in the slum of Kibera, Kenya through a unique model of participatory development.  CFK recognizes the youth of Kibera as resilient, wise, innovative, and eager to lift their community above the poverty and violence that plagues it.  CFK's long-term initiatives provide youth opportunities to learn and serve while addressing a wide range of community needs including healthcare, education, waste recycling and reduction, HIV/AIDS testing and counseling, and girls' empowerment.  CFK's model of participatory to fight abject poverty, and prevent ethnic, gender and religious violence has been internationally recognized, earning awards as a Time Magazine and Gates Foundation "Hero of Global Health" and the 2008 Oklahoma City National Memorial Foundation's Reflections of Hope Award.  CFK is a major affiliated entity of UNC based at the Center for Global Initiatives.

Salim Mohamed Salim Mohamed co-founded and served as the Executive Director of Carolina for Kibera for eight years. At the age of 16, he was involved in the development of MYSA - the largest youth sports program in Africa based in the Mathare slum of Nairobi.  Salim has helped launch community based sports and development programs in Ghana, Gambia, and Nigeria and presented at the International AIDS Conference. He serves as a director for Shoe 4 Africa, an advisor to Global Education Fund and a YES! facilitator.  A TED Africa Fellow, he is currently pursuing a master's degree at the University of Manchester.

Rye Barcott  While an undergraduate on an NROTC scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2001, Barcott founded CFK with the late nurse Tabitha Atieno Festo and community organizer Salim Mohamed. Barcott served five years in the Marine Corps before earning a combined MBA and MPA at Harvard as a Reynolds Social Entrepreneurship Fellow and a member of the Harvard Endowment's Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility.  In 2006, he was named an ABC World News Person of the Year.  A TED Fellow and member of the UNC Chancellor's Innovation Circle, Barcott is writing a book that juxtaposes community organizing and counter-insurgency (under contract, Bloomsbury Publishing).

Abstract
Since 2004, Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm of eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar, has been investing in market-based efforts with the potential for large-scale, catalytic social impact. Technology is a significant focus of its work, as it can greatly improve the quality of life, reaching millions of people efficiently and easily. Matt Halprin, partner, and Stephen King, director, Investments, will discuss the organization's pioneering approach to philanthropy, the developing world context for technology, and innovative examples of liberation technology from the field.

Matt Halprin, Partner
Matt leads Omidyar Network's Media, Markets & Transparency initiative, supporting technologies that promote transparency, accountability, and trust across media, markets, and government. Within this initiative, his team pursues investments in Social Media, Marketplaces, and Government Transparency. In his role as Partner, Matt builds Omidyar Network’s team of talented investment professionals and works with portfolio organizations to help them succeed.

Matt has more than 20 years of business experience, including six at eBay. As Vice President, Global Trust and Safety at eBay, he led a team of 90 statisticians, policy managers, and product managers. He also helped coordinate the efforts of 2,000 customer support personnel to increase revenue while minimizing fraud and other trust-reducing behavior. Prior to eBay, Matt served as a Partner and Vice President at the Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with technology clients on issues of corporate strategy and corporate development. Previously, Matt was Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Quadlux, a VC-backed developer of technology-based ovens that was later sold to GE and Hobart.

Matt is on the Boards of Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia), Sunlight Foundation, DonorsChoose.org, Goodmail Systems and Management Leadership for Tomorrow, which supports the next generation of minority leaders in the United States.  He graduated with High Distinction as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School and holds a BS in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.

Stephen King, Director, Investments
Stephen brings Omidyar Network exceptional experience in applying media and technology to create positive social impact. Based in London, Stephen focuses on expanding our efforts outside the U.S. in the Social Media and Government Transparency investment areas. He also makes investments across all areas within the Media, Markets & Transparency initiative.

Prior to Omidyar Network, Stephen served as the Chief Executive of the BBC World Service Trust, where he led a period of sustained growth that included building programs in more than 40 countries in the developing world. Stephen helped establish the Trust’s international reputation as one of the largest and most successful organizations using media and communications to improve the lives of the world’s poor and promote better governance and transparency worldwide. Prior to the BBC, Stephen was the Executive Director of the International Council on Social Welfare, an international organization working to promote social development. Stephen has also held positions with nonprofit organizations HelpAge International, Help the Aged, and Voluntary Service Overseas.

Stephen is a board member of CARE International in the U.K. He holds an MA in Oriental and African Studies from the University of London.

Summary of the Seminar
Matt Halprin is a Partner leading Omidyar Network's Media and Stephen King is the Director of Investments and is based in London. They introduced us to the work of Omidyar Network which invests in market-based efforts to give people the technology tools they need to improve their lives.

The network was set up in 2004 by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, and his wife Pam.  It comprises both a venture capital fund and a grant-making foundation.  The network has a strong focus on individual empowerment and is committed to market-based solutions, believing that business is one of the best mechanisms for achieving sustainable social impact. Omidyar looks to invest in projects that have potential to impact large numbers of people and that show signs of real innovation - for example, new business models or new markets.

So far $307 million has been committed, with $138 million going to for-profit investments and $169 million to non-profit grants. There are two broad areas of focus:

• Access to capital: This encompasses projects around microfinance, entrepreneurship and property rights.
• Media, markets and transparence: This encompasses projects around social media, marketplaces and government transparency. Omidyar are particularly interested in the role of journalism in ensuring accountability of governments.

Projects in the Unities States include:

• The Sunlight Foundation - works to make information about Congress and Federal government more accessible and meaningful to citizens; created the first searchable site for all federal government contracts to monitor where money is going.
• Global Integrity - uses quantitative and qualitative analysis to provide a scorecard tracking governance and corruption in different countries.

In the developing world, Omidyar looks to supports access to greater information and government transparency, which it views as key drivers of prosperity. The network is supporting global organizations, national partners in three African countries (Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya) and is establishing a pan-African mechanism for smaller grants. Current global projects include:

• Ushahidi - an open source platform to report and share data in the aftermath of a crisis. Omidyar will be working to help Ushahidi to build traffic to the site and to tackle the challenge of verifying reports.
• Infonet - a web portal that acts as an information hub for all national and devolved budgets in Kenya; currently used by NGOs, citizen groups and the media.
• Mzalendo - a one stop shop for citizens to track the activities of parliamentarians in Kenya.
• FrontlineSMS - a two way communication tool using laptops and mobile phones for organizations without internet access.

Abstract
Despite the promise, the majority of mobile technology solutions are only meeting the needs of a small percentage of organisations who could benefit from them. In his talk, Ken Banks will discuss how he empowers grassroots NGOs, provide the history and background to FrontlineSMS, and highlight some of the challenges in developing mobile tools which work in resource-constrained environments

Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net, devotes himself to the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world, and has spent the last 16 years working on projects in Africa. Recently, his research resulted in the development of FrontlineSMS, an award-winning text messaging-based field communication system designed to empower grassroots non-profit organisations. Ken graduated from Sussex University with honours in Social Anthropology with Development Studies, and was awarded a Stanford University Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship in 2006, and named a Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow in 2008. In 2009 he was named a Laureate of the Tech Awards, an international awards program which honours innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity. Ken's work has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation and Open Society Institute, and he is the current recipient of a grant from the Hewlett Foundation

Summary of the Seminar
Ken Banks, the founder of kiwanja.net, spoke about the importance of technology solutions that meet the needs of those working in the developing world and his own work in this area through FrontlineSMS.

While current excitement in the technology world may be focused on increasing centralization through cloud computing, this means little to people working in the developing world where internet connectivity is unavailable or unreliable.  Too little investment is going into building tools that will genuinely assist the work many non-profits are doing now.

Ken developed FrontlineSMS to tap into the potential of mobile phones, which are now widely available and used in the developing world. This is a two way communication system that can be used anywhere where there is a mobile phone signal.  FrontlineSMS is available as a free download and Ken's approach has been not to dictate implementation but rather to allow people to use this very general tool in whatever ways meet their particular needs. This has resulted in diverse applications, for example:

• Monitoring election practices in Nigeria in 2007
• Sending security alerts to humanitarian workers in conflict areas of Afghanistan
• Encouraging young people to take part in elections in Azerbaijan
• Updating local people on the location of speeches during President Obama's visit to Ghana

There is also great potential to combine FrontlineSMS with traditional media, such as radio, that is already widespread throughout Africa, to make this much more interactive.

Ken offered a number of points of guidance for those thinking about designing technology with social applications:

• Work with the equipment that people already have at their disposal
• Make equipment easy to assemble and intuitive
• Price it at a level people can afford
• Think about how use can be replicated - how will other NGOs find out about it?
• Assume a situation of no internet connectivity
• Where possible, give users an ability to connect with others - for example through a forum (this has been particularly successful at FrontlineSMS, with a third of those who download the software joining the online community)
• Don't let a social science approach dominate - it is much better to think in a multi-disciplinary way
• Use technology that is appropriate to the context - don't bring in tools that require knowledge and equipment not already held in the community
• Collaborate, don't compete. Sometimes NGOs can rush to do the same things; examples of genuine cooperation are hard to find

Looking ahead, Ken will be developing functionality for FrontlineSMS that makes use of internet connectivity where this is available. He is also working on finding additional funding to help organizations pay for text messages.