This Spring quarter, while our seminar series took a break, Terry Winograd and Joshua Cohen taught a new course at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school): Designing Liberation Technologies.

During this class, small interdisciplinary teams focus on a term-long design project, taking advantage of the design process structures and methods that have been developed in the d.school. This year's course developed as a collaboration between Stanford, the University of Nairobi and Nokia Africa Research Center.  The focus area was finding ICT solutions to the healthcare needs of people living in Kibera slum outside Nairobi.

Under the guidance of Jussi Impiö at Nokia and the Computer Science faculty, 27 students from the University of Nairobi Computer Science department conducted need finding studies at a number of health-related sites, including clinics, hospitals, community health workers, community leaders, and government offices. They read background materials, made observations, and talked with a wide variety of stakeholders. Their reports became the basis of the Stanford teams' initial understanding of users and needs. Communication with the group in Nairobi was also maintained throughout the course, using a Facebook group to facilitate discussions, as well as several teleconference sessions.

Working in small teams, 20 Stanford students from a wide range of disciplines worked over 10 weeks to develop initial design concepts to respond to some of the needs that had been identified. Click on the title of each project to view their final presentations:

• mNote: an online archive for community health worker notes. This application empowers community health workers by preserving the flexibility and control they appreciate in their current paper notebooks, but adding digital knowledge management capabilities.
• M-MAJI ("mobile water"): an electronic information system that allows people to use their mobile phones to identify clean water sources in their community. The application seeks to decrease the time and money spent searching for water, improve water quality, and foster vendor accountability by providing a mechanism for user feedback.
• Babybank: a dedicated savings plan designed specifically for pregnant women in the slums of Nairobi. By leveraging a popular cell phone payment system, M-Pesa, the application aims to make savings easier, so that expecting mothers can afford the services that will keep themselves and their babies healthy.
• Mazanick: an application to provide support and advice to pregnant women via SMS, with the aim of helping motivate them to attend prenatal appointments.
• PillCheck (Kifaa cha Tenbe): a mobile application to help people in Kibera find information on the availability and pricing of malaria drugs quickly.
• PatientMap :a system to make the waiting process in clinics more transparent, and to increase patient trust in the medical system.

This summer, two follow up trips are planned, with Nairobi students due to spend several weeks at Stanford, while a number of students from the Stanford group will visit Nairobi to explore possibilities for developing their projects further. Building on the success and lessons learnt so far, the Designing Liberation Technologies course will be open to a new set of students next academic year. 

In mid April, FSI convened a special conference on Technology, Governance, and Global Development, to examine how technical innovation solves, or fails to solve, the problems of chronic global underdevelopment.  Experts from business, medicine, philanthropy, academia, government and non-governmental organizations, along with young Stanford alumni, addressed technology's ability to help secure gains in health, economic development, agricultural innovation, food security, and human development.

With a wealth of expertise and on-the-ground experience, panelists tackled central issues and engaged in spirited debate, animated by moderator Philip Taubman.  "The Promise of Information and Communications Technology" examined whether technology can transform lives of individuals, even in poorly governed countries, finding encouraging evidence in technology-based medical and health services and novel approaches to economic development, including sharing vital information and banking via mobile phones. 

A panel of young Stanford alumni discussed their entrepreneurial efforts that led to the development of a low-cost, lifesaving incubator for low birth weight babies, the FACE AIDS program begun at Stanford that now has 20 chapters and has contributed some $2 million for treatment of people with AIDS in Africa, a new Global Health Corps to train health care workers, and other innovations to save lives in underserved areas.

Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, gave the lunchtime keynote with a focus on why democracies are more effective and ultimately more efficient in delivering economic development. Democracies are better at protection of rule of law and property rights, she noted. Democracies are less corrupt, more in touch with their people, more stable, and better able to deliver the benefits of human capital development, health, and education to their population as a whole.

A third panel on "Governance, Innovation, and Service Delivery" addressed how innovative institutions and technologies could overcome poor governance and deliver needed services in underdeveloped regions. "Despite extraordinary growth in our technical capacity to prevent and treat child illness and death, we are seeing stagnation or a rise in mortality rates of children under five in some areas," said pediatrician Paul Wise. "This reflects gross failures in delivering highly efficacious health interventions." Some 9 million children still die each year, and 65 percent of child deaths in unstable areas are preventable, he noted. Wise has launched a new program to improve child health in areas of unstable governance through new integrated technical and political strategies.

A fourth session on "Creative Markets for Technical Innovation" honed in on the institutions, innovations, and incentives needed to stimulate development of products and services that address the needs of the poor. Panelists focused on pharmaceuticals, agricultural innovation, use of mobile technologies to share information on best practices, improved food security through innovative technology - such as solar-powered irrigation to expand growing seasons, crops, and incomes, and the development of human capital in China through rigorous evaluation, field trials, and nutritional intervention.

Among the experts addressing these vital issues were Google.org's Megan Smith, BP Solar's Reyad Fezzani, Center for Global Development President Nancy Birdsall, Gates Foundation Director of Agricultural Development Sam Dryden, Gilead Science's Clifford Samuel, dynamic Stanford alumni Nava Ashraf ‘97, Jared Cohen ‘04, Jane Chen ‘08, and Jonny Dorsey ‘07, and FSI's Coit D. Blacker, Joshua Cohen, Stephen D. Krasner, Paul H. Wise, Rosamond L. Naylor, and Scott Rozelle.

FSI Payne Lecturer Bill Gates, Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Chairman, Microsoft, gave an address on "Giving Back: Finding the Best Way to Make a Difference."  He urged students to become involved in the central issues of global health—including the need to reduce child mortality through more vaccines and better delivery systems—and education, saying we need to find out "what works" and use the Internet to share lessons learned globally.

"We need to shift talent toward bigger needs," Gates said, urging students to provide the passion and ideas to drive us forward in health, education, and energy.  To make a difference, Gates advised, "Get your hands dirty, do the hard work in the actual environment, early in your career."  Telling students that he is looking for "great ideas," he challenged them to post answers on the Gates Foundation Facebook wall to three questions: What problems are you working on? What draws you in? How will you draw other people in to work on solutions to the world's great challenges.

On March 30, 2010, Prof. Samer Shehata from Georgetown University gave a research seminar for the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at CDDRL titled The Regional Dimensions of Authoritarianism in the Arab World.  Prof. Shehata’s talk was in response to the research puzzle, as he called it, of the persistence of authoritarian politics at the regional level in the Arab world. He argued that the subject that has received most attention in political science is the question of authoritarianism and absence of democracy. The question of why there are no democracies has offered a number of possible reasons including: the qualities and consequences of oil and rentier politics; absent or weak civil societies in the Arab world; social class-based explanations; the issue of political liberalization instead of democratization; external factors such as US support for authoritarian regimes, which he argued has not decreased since the end of the Cold War; regional conflicts like Palestine/Israel and the Gulf wars; institutions of authoritarianism including how elections, parliaments and single parties work; Islamist politics creating deep divisions among opposition groups; and patronage, clientelism and the (absence of) social contract.

Prof. Shehata then proceeded to say that there has been some positive development in the approach to democracy in the Arab world, but that there remains insufficient attention to the regional dimensions of authoritarianism. He argued that the Arab world is authoritarian not just on the state level, but also on the regional level. As International Relations specialists have spoken about the existence of an Arab regional system, the institutional dimension of this system, such as the Arab League, needs to be studied.

He stated that there are three mechanisms of the reproduction of authoritarianism on the regional level: authoritarian learning, authoritarian cooperation, and regional organizations. Cases of authoritarian learning take both direct and indirect forms where certain regimes “learn” from one another. He gave the example of constitutional amendments that allow elections but that give the illusion of competition, where electoral outcomes are similar. In Tunisia, for example, Ben Ali “learned” from the Algerian experience by not allowing Islamists an electoral opening.

Authoritarian cooperation, he went to argue, occurs mainly regarding security matters. He gave the example of certain activists not being to allowed certain countries in the Arab world (like the Tunisian Moncif Marzouki, who was not allowed into Lebanon). Such “cooperation” widens the scope of authoritarianism beyond the borders of individual states.

Prof. Shehata’s ended with a discussion of the third mechanism, regional organizations. He talked about institutionalized cooperation within the Arab League and the GCC, calling the Arab League a “club for authoritarian regimes” that is not committed to democracy. An example of this in action is the Arab League accords on security and anti-terrorism which have ended up extending authoritarian rules across the Arab world. Another example is the Arab media charter that was put in place in February 2008, and which limits internet and media freedom. Prof. Shehata acknowledged that further research needs to be done on those three mechanisms and the floor was then opened to questions from the audience.

"Not a single one of the 23 countries that derive most of their export earnings from oil and gas is a democracy today," wrote CDDRL Director Larry Diamond in an an article for the Journal of Democracy, Why Are There No Arab Democracies? In these countries, the state is "large, centralized, and repressive," he notes. Diamond comments in Newsweek about Iraq's prospects for escaping the oil curse.