From May 15-18, the ninth annual ICT4D Conference will be held in Hyderabad, India. This annual conference brings together more than 1,000 attendees from public, private and civil society organizations from across the humanitarian and international development community to discuss how they’ve used innovations in technology to increase the impact of their work.
This year, the conference will focus on ways to harness the power of data to accelerate progress toward the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and increase the impact of ICT4D programs. One of the key means of achieving the SDGs, including all 17 targets and 169 indicators, is through the collection, analysis and effective utilization of data. For this year’s conference, DIAL has organized a track dedicated to data-driven adaptation and strategy. Throughout ICT4D, participants will explore actionable ways the international development community can use data to influence their decision making, programmatic strategies and more. Additional speaker themes include the impact of digital transformation on development; innovations in data visualization and analytics; enablers and barriers to open data sharing; and frontier solutions and their contribution to meeting the Sustainable Development Goals.
DIAL will participate in several sessions throughout ICT4D. To kick-off the conference on Monday, May 15, DIAL’s CEO Kate Wilson and Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary of the Industries & Commerce and Information Technology Departments for the Telangana government, will participate in a discussion around India’s eGovernment Transformation. Wilson and Ranjan will explore India’s application of digital technology in government and the lessons it provides to others across the public and private sectors in our collective efforts to advance ICT4D innovation to achieve the SDGs. Key questions will focus on what takeaways countries can learn from India’s experience in eGovernment transformation, what has worked well and what others should do differently based on the India and Telengana cases. Other discussion topics will focus on how the IT Ministry in Telengana sees their efforts tying to the SDGs and what additional support from other digital development actors is needed to support efforts to reach the SDGs.
Melissa Johns, Senior Director, Insights and Impact, and Wameek Noor, Director of Insights, will participate in a session that shares key learnings from practitioners who have played key roles in scaling digital solutions, especially past the four to five year mark of a service. Challenges to scaling deployments may be a funding cliff, a leadership change, an expansion to a new market or location, new competition, or the entry of government into program ownership. Deployments face common questions as they navigate transitions, with respect to their program strategy, business models, solution design, human capacity and regulatory policy.
Noor will also hold a user testing session around a new DIAL project that will create a resource to enable digital service providers to move beyond pilot projects and start-up phases to reach sustainable scale and achieve greater impact. DIAL can source best practices directly from organizations that are managing these transitions around the globe in diverse sectors and provide pragmatic how-to guidance that maturing projects can use for their own models.
Syed Raza, Senior Director, Data, will participate on a panel exploring the potential impacts and benefits of data sharing for private sector entities and the barriers to realizing them in the development context. The focus of the discussion will question the often unexamined premises in the current data sharing debate and explore the incentives, processes, resources and platforms needed to make increased private sector data sharing a reality.
Carolyn Florey, Director, Collective Impact, will hold two sessions on the Principles for Digital Development (PDD), showcasing the toolkit and hosting a workshop to discuss feedback. The Principles for Digital Development are “living” guidelines that can help development practitioners integrate established best practices into technology-enabled programs. They are written by and for international development donors, multilateral organizations, and implementing partners, and they are freely available for use by all. The Principles are intended to serve as guidance rather than edict, and to be updated and refined over time. In 2016, DIAL was asked to take over stewardship and operationalization of the PDDs.
Florey is also hosting a session on the Broadband Commission Working Group on Digital Health. The Working Group, co-chaired by the Novartis Foundation and Nokia, commissioned Vital Wave to conduct research and to interview digital health leaders from twenty countries to explore the role governments play in developing and implementing digital health. This session will share the results of the exploration and provide practical guidance on leadership, governance and intragovernmental cooperation to leaders in health and ICT who will to adopt a digital health strategy.
DIAL will also be co-hosting a session with World Vision International that will bring together practitioners have been working on issues of data protection, privacy and security to discuss existing and potential standards, policies, frameworks, approaches and tools. World Vision International will share an overview of its recent white paper on data protection, privacy and security. Participants will then discuss key resources, recommended approaches to existing standards and delineation of a collaborative effort to build a suite of resources that all organizations implementing ICT4D can benefit from.
For a full schedule, visit https://2017ict4dconference.sched.com/
