Collaboration not competition: could this be the future of development?

What’s the best way to get fresh new ideas for development problems? If the collaboration between the UK government and a Californian tech company has got it right, we need to be encouraging different sectors to work together, rather than against each other.

“DfID has traditionally used competition as a driver for innovation,” says Jonathan Wong, who is taking the lead on the project at the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID). “Now the intention is to form interesting collaborations.” He believes that innovation happens when different people with different perspectives work together. The aim is that this project will bring development professionals together with the private sector, tech startups, local experts and anyone else who has an idea and interest in solving the challenges.

Amplify will look at 10 global development challenges over five years. Anyone can contribute ideas to solve these problems on an open-platform website. The ideas are then refined through a series of stages where experts and opinionated amateurs give their feedback, before the best few are awarded DfID funding. It’s crowdsourcing development: but will it work?

The results of the first two challenges, focused around empowering women and girls and the health of children under five have been promising. For one project, design students in New York worked with a women’s NGO in Nepal to develop a safety programme. “These two design students would never have got any funding from DfID,” says Wong. “They didn’t have a company. They didn’t have any finance systems to handle the money, but it allowed them to build on an idea from a local organisation.”

The New York design students’ idea was eventually refined into a community concierge programme in a slum in Kathmandu which trains female leaders to provide guidance to other women in the community to improve safety. For example, young women who have just moved to the city from the countryside (prime targets for sex work) are given advice on where to look for jobs. And a young woman who has to get the 6am bus to work everyday is connected to other women travelling the same route so that they can feel safer.

But ensuring that the NGO working with women in Nepal, and their equivalents in remote communities around the world, know about Amplify is a challenge. “We have had to add outreach,” says Jocelyn Wyatt, executive director of IDEO.org, the design consultancy which developed the programme for DfID. “We’ve had to intentionally curate the community for each of the challenges, so that we could ensure that the organisations coming up with solutions are based in those countries.”

Wyatt says working with local organisations is an essential part of the approach. She worked on development projects in Kenya and India before she joined IDEO. “I felt like top-down approaches that I was seeing around me were not ultimately making the changes in the world that we all wanted to see,” she says. “The strategy is crafted in rooms in Washington or London, without connecting with local communities.” The central precept of IDEO is “human-centred design”, the idea that solutions should be created with the needs, wants and limitations of the end user in mind.

As well as putting local needs at the centre of the process, Wyatt says another strength of human-centred design is that it starts with prototyping. One of the ideas from the first challenge that Wyatt is most excited about is one from an NGO in Nairobi, Shining Hope for Communities (Shofco) that allows men to anonymously report instances of gender-based violence using a “step-up box”. This was initially prototyped with just a couple of boxes placed in public toilets (an accessible place where men are alone). “There were nine incidences reported,” says Wyatt. “And six of them proved to be real cases when they were followed up by counsellors. If we hadn’t had initial success we would have moved on to a different idea, rather than investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in an idea that ultimately wasn’t going to work.”

Lack of flexibility in funding is often a problem in development, Wyatt says: “I think that the structure of funding needs to change to allow more unrestricted funding, more experimentation. Otherwise they may be able to come up with great ideas but they’re not then able to support that implementation.”

Part of Amplify’s remit is to move away from traditional models and the “usual suspects” international NGOs. “We wanted to show that there is a different way of doing aid that isn’t so reliant on working with the largest NGOs or contractors,” says Wyatt. “But instead encourage a real collaborative approach.”

But there’s still hope for the usual suspects. IDEO.org are working with international NGOs Marie Stopes International and Mercy Corps. “Innovation doesn’t only have to be done with the grassroots,” she says. “It can also be done by more traditional players if they can learn to apply human-centred design.”

Amplify is still in its early days. There are four more years and eight more challenges to go and the impact of the successful projects has yet to be evaluated. But this format offers a solution to common complaints that the aid industry is too top-down and inflexible.

Perhaps surprisingly, some of the best feedback for Amplify so far has been from groups that haven’t won any funding with their ideas. Wyatt says: “They’ve come back to us and said ‘my idea didn’t win but I really feel like I learned so much that I’ve improved my idea’. The participation itself has great benefits.”

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