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.

It's the middle of the night when Maina Kiai receives an urgent plea from a human rights advocate in Russia. A recent draft law threatens to block civil society organizations from accessing foreign funding, cutting off their financial lifeline and exposing them to close monitoring by the state. Their work reporting on the government's moves to choke public dissent and suppress free speech is in jeopardy if this law is passed by the Russian legislature.

As the special rapporteur on the rights of peaceful assembly and association for the United Nations, Kiai's job is to collect first-hand information on human rights abuses and bring it to the attention of the international community.

Kiai is one of about 50 lawyers, experts and advocates around the world who volunteer their time as special rapporteurs for the U.N. Human Rights Council. With mounting case loads, a limited staff and shrinking budgets, special rapporteurs are left with little support to fight injustice and aid victims of some of the gravest human rights abuses.

In search of new tools to empower their work, the rapporteurs are now tapping the academic and innovative resources at Stanford to help them do their jobs better.

Harnessing the power of technology

Professor Jeremy Weinstein led the August workshop on new technologies and human rights monitoring. Photo credit: Sarina Beges

Recognizing that technology can increase productivity and efficiency, Stanford’s Jeremy M. Weinstein organized a workshop to bring technologists together with the rapporteurs and other experts to explore how new technologies can help them magnify their impact.

Weinstein, an associate professor of political science and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford, pushed for the use of new technologies as tools for promoting human rights and democracy when he served as the director of democracy and development on the National Security Staff of the White House.

“Special Rapporteurs occupy a unique position, with the legitimacy and mandate of the United Nations behind them as they track human rights abuses around the world," Weinstein said. "New technologies have the potential to amplify their voices, extend their reach, and ensure that citizens around the world have access to this valuable mechanism.”

Weinstein says the rapporteurs can use simple technologies such as database management systems and mobile phone applications to manage the volume of inquiries they receive, increase their response time to victims’ needs and build political support for their recommendations.

Juan Méndez, the rapporteur responsible for tracking torture and other abuses, receives upwards of 50 complaints a day from citizens and NGOs around the world. He wants a way to better organize, process and prioritize inquiries that would allow him to respond to victims in a more strategic, timely and systematic way.

"We have been self conscious of the need to apply new technologies and we are always looking for better ways of applying technology," Méndez said. "In my case, there is quite a learning curve to understand what the new technologies are and how they might work."

One of the most powerful tools for a special rapporteur is the country visit where they spend two to three weeks in a country of concern, visiting local nongovernmental organizations, meeting with government officials, holding press conferences and arranging visits with victims. Special rapporteurs must be invited by the host government to visit and countries with some of the most egregious human rights abuses on record - such as Iran and Zimbabwe - deny them access.

Due to the sensitivity of their findings, special rapporteurs are granted independence and impartiality in their jobs as they often have to say things that make governments uncomfortable. Sharing their findings is a challenge. Other than media coverage, the rapporteurs don’t have easy access to a large audience or the resources to disseminate their findings and recommendations widely in local languages.

But social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter could help heighten their profiles and improve communication with the public. During country missions, for instance, tweets and Facebook posts could easily advertise their visits to attract media and share their findings.

Tapping Stanford's technical edge

Since returning to Stanford where he is a resident faculty member at FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), Weinstein has been using the university's technical edge to benefit those working to advance democratic practices.

Technologists and human rights leaders gathered at Stanford’s d.school to innovate and create new technologies for U.N. special rapporteurs. Photo credit: Sarina Beges

Teaming up with the Brookings Institution and Google, CDDRL hosted an August workshop to bring together four special rapporteurs, civil society activists, technologists, and government donors to brainstorm how to best pair human rights monitors with the technology they need to be more effective in their work.

"What we’ve done is bring together a group of people who normally don’t talk to each other and got them to think about the subject from various users' points of view - the human rights victim, the civil society activist, the governments, and the special rapporteurs themselves,” said Ted Piccone, a senior fellow and deputy director for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and author of a new book, Catalysts for Change: How the UN’s Independent Experts Promote Human Rights . “But we also have experts from technology, from human rights organizers, from think tanks and research organizations, so the combination of smarts and ideas in that mix is fantastic."

The second day of the workshop was held at Stanford's d. school – the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design – where participants put the needs of the user at the center of the design process. Armed with an endless supply of markers, sticky notes and whiteboards, participants divided into groups to brainstorm how technology can assist the special rapporteurs with their mounting caseloads.

The ideas laboratory

Bringing the human rights and technology communities together underscored the gap that exists between the two worlds. Few of the special rapporteurs were using or familiar with technology tools ranging from social media, database management and encryption software.

While the digital divide may be large for some, it was evident from the technologists in the room that there are an abundance of innovative technologies to validate, manage and interpret data for special rapporteurs’ use.

"I would really love a streaming analysis, so public information out there is streamed to me live," said Kiai, the special rapporteur who focuses on assembly and association rights. "I would also like to have a website that can be accessed by activists around the world as a way to communicate and send updates to me."

Sanjana Hattotuwa demonstrates a mock-up of the Web-based dashboard designed for the special rapporteurs. Photo credit: Sarina Beges

One of the ideas presented by Sanjana Hattotuwa, a special advisor to the ICT4Peace Foundation based in Geneva, is a mobile application that would allow anyone anywhere in the world to utilize audio, video, or text to submit a report of a human rights abuse.

"They could track it with a confirmation number, and it's a very easy way of submitting information to the special rapporteurs," said Hattotuwa. This could be a very promising innovation for victims to submit reports from the ease of a mobile device, and to bring them to the attention of the special rapporteurs in real time.

Hattotuwa said data obtained through this app could be fed into a Web-based dashboard system that would feature a world map highlighting where the reports are coming from, allowing the special rapporteur to process and visualize information. The dashboard would also feature a curated news feed.

While the special rapporteurs left the workshop more informed of these new tools and with some tangible ideas of how to enhance their work, many questions remained about the costs and training required for the users, as well as how to build political support for a future with more visible and accessible special rapporteurs.

"I think that there will always be institutional constraints - political constraints - things that we need to work through," said Méndez, the rapporteur who tracks torture cases. "But the four rapporteurs that are here these two days can actually carry the message of technology's use to the U.N. and try to resolve them."

Bringing the two worlds together for this workshop helped close the digital gap and introduce the potential that technology represents to the human rights community and beyond.

"What struck me most is how much there is out there, and how hard it is for us without context, to understand the tech world and how useful it can be," said Kiai. "So that of itself was a revelation."

Philanthropist and software giant Bill Gates spoke to a Stanford audience last week about the importance of foreign aid and product innovation in the fight against chronic hunger, poverty and disease in the developing world.

His message goes hand-in-hand with the ongoing work of researchers at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Much of that work is supported by FSI’s Global Underdevelopment Action Fund, which provides seed grants to help faculty members design research experiments and conduct fieldwork in some of the world’s poorest places.

Four FSI senior fellows – Larry Diamond, Jeremy Weinstein, Paul Wise and Walter Falcon – respond to some of the points made by Gates and share insight into their own research and ideas about how to advance and secure the most fragile nations.

Without first improving people’s health, Gates says it’s harder to build good governance and reliable infrastructure in a developing country. Is that the best way to prioritize when thinking about foreign aid?

Larry Diamond: I have immense admiration for what Bill Gates is doing to reduce childhood and maternal fatality and improve the quality of life in poor countries.  He is literally saving millions of lives.  But in two respects (at least), it's misguided to think that public health should come "before" improvements in governance.  

First, there is no reason why we need to choose, or why the two types of interventions should be in conflict.  People need vaccines against endemic and preventable diseases – and they need institutional reforms to strengthen societal resistance to corruption, a sociopolitical disease that drains society of the energy and resources to fight poverty, ignorance, and disease.  

Second, good governance is a vital facilitator of improved public health.  When corruption is controlled, public resources are used efficiently and justly to build modern sanitation and transportation systems, and to train and operate modern health care systems.  With good, accountable governance, public health and life expectancy improve much more dramatically.  When corruption is endemic, life-saving vaccines, drugs, and treatments too often fall beyond the reach of poor people who cannot make under-the-table payments. 

Foreign aid has come under criticism for not being effective, and most countries have very small foreign aid budgets. How do you make the case that foreign aid is a worthy investment?

Jeremy M. Weinstein: While foreign aid may be a small part of most countries’ national budgets, global development assistance has increased markedly in the past 50 years. Between 2000 and 2010, global aid increased from $78 billion to nearly $130 billion – and the U.S. continues to be the world’s leading donor.

The challenge in the next decade will be to sustain high aid volumes given the economic challenges that now confront developed countries. I am confident that we can and will sustain these volumes for three reasons.

First, a strong core of leading voices in both parties recognizes that promoting development serves our national interest. In this interconnected world, our security and prosperity depend in important ways on the security and prosperity of those who live beyond our borders.

Second, providing assistance is a reflection of our values – it is these humanitarian motives that drove the unprecedented U.S. commitment to fighting HIV/AIDS during the Bush Administration.

Perhaps most importantly, especially in tight budget times, development agencies are learning a great deal about what works in foreign assistance, and are putting taxpayers’ dollars to better use to reduce poverty, fight disease, increase productivity, and strengthen governance – with increasing evidence to show for it.

Some of the most dire situations in the developing world are found in conflict zones. How can philanthropists and nongovernmental organizations best work in places with unstable governments and public health crises? Is there a role for larger groups like the Gates Foundation to play in war-torn areas?

Paul H. Wise: As a pediatrician, the central challenge is this: The majority of preventable child deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa and in much of the world occur in areas of political instability and poor governance. 

This means that if we are to make real progress in improving child health we must be able to enhance the provision of critical, highly efficacious health interventions in areas that are characterized by complex political environments – often where corruption, civil conflict, and poor public management are the rule. 

Currently, most of the major global health funders tend to avoid working in such areas, as they would rather invest their efforts and resources in supportive, well-functioning locations.  This is understandable. However, given where the preventable deaths are occurring, it is not acceptable. 

Our efforts are directed at creating new strategies capable of bringing essential services to unstable regions of the world.  This will require new collaborations between health professionals, global security experts, political scientists, and management specialists in order to craft integrated child health strategies that respect both the technical requirements of critical health services and the political and management innovations that will ensure that these life-saving interventions reach all children in need.

Gates says innovation is essential to improving agricultural production for small farmers in the poorest places. What is the most-needed invention or idea that needs to be put into place to fight global hunger?

Walter P. Falcon: No single innovation will end hunger, but widespread use of cell phone technology could help.

Most poor agricultural communities receive few benefits from agricultural extension services, many of which were decimated during earlier periods of structural reform. But small farmers often have cell phones or live in villages where phones are present.

My priority innovation is for a  $10 smart phone, to be complemented with a series of very specific applications designed for transferring knowledge about new agricultural technologies to particular regions.  Using the wiki-like potential of these applications, it would also be possible for farmers from different villages to teach each other, share critical local knowledge, and also interact with crop and livestock specialists.

Language and visual qualities of the applications would be key, and literacy problems would be constraining.  But the potential payoff seems enormous.