Impact at Scale

In this episode, Michael Waitze and Daniel McFarlane talk to Aung Thura about Myanmar’s rapidly changing mobile media landscape. Aung is the Chief Strategist at Ignite Marketing Communications and, with a team of researchers around the country, he is in an ideal position to provide insight into the rapidly changing media landscape.

The pivotal year was 2013 when the telecommunications market was liberalized. In the past, SIM cards could cost a staggering $2000-$3000 USD, but with the liberalization of the market, SIM card prices dropped and mobile phone ownership rose. In 2014, Ooredoo from Qatar arrived and their sim cards were a mere $1.50. Soon after, Telenor from Norway joined the market and KDDI of Japan signed a joint venture with MPT (Myanmar Posts and Telecommunication), the incumbent local operator.

According to Aung, the new arrivals faced tough competition as MPT had the majority of the towers and an established audience, while Ooredoo and Telenor had to start from scratch. Myanmar now has 54 million sim cards for a population of 52 million people. When it comes to market share, MPT is still the market leader with 22-23 million subscribers and is followed closely by Telenor with around 20 million and then Ooredoo with  9 or 10 million.

Six months ago Mytel arrived on the scene. It is a joint venture between the Myanmar military and Viettel, a telecommunications company owned and operated by the Vietnamese military that has a strong market position in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos and has expanded globally. They claim to already have 2 to 3 million subscribers. Mytel, Aung suggests, is somewhat aggressive, “They are in your face. They stand out.” Their growth is accelerated by offering services the others don’t, such as streaming the English Premier League to the football-mad people of Myanmar.

Aung estimates that 80% of phones in the market are smartphones, primarily Android devices thanks to affordable handsets from Chinese brands. These devices are providing many people with their first experience of the internet and that experience is often dominated by Facebook. “Some people even think that Facebook is the internet,” Aung explains. After Facebook, messaging apps rule with the most popular being Viber, owned by Rakuten.

Even with the rapid developments in infrastructure and mobile adoption, many challenges remain. The geographic makeup of Myanmar consists of numerous mountain ranges, causing considerable network coverage difficulties. Around 135 languages or dialects are spoken around the country and it is taking time to develop enough local language content. Another challenge is the use of fonts.

Michael Waitze and Daniel McFarlane visited FHI 360’s regional Bangkok office to talk with Josh Woodard, who is the organization’s Regional ICT & Digital Finance Advisor. In an insightful discussion covering many issues, Josh highlights the role of technology in creating resilient communities and the value of thoughtful planning.

Josh’s first experience with Thailand came as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Northeast of Thailand. He explains how it gave him “a sense of the world of international development” and insight into how technology can transform people’s lives. His experience in the Northeast led to a career focus on digital development which he explains as “using digital technology in ways that are appropriate and can effectively help us to achieve development objectives.”

In recent years, Josh has led a grant focused on Technologies for Resilience in Asia-Pacific funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Resilience, according to Josh, is a framing of development that focuses on the “capacity of individual, communities, and systems to survive, adapt and grow in the face of stress and shocks and even transform when conditions require it.”  Technology for resilience, he explains, is about how we can utilize technology to “make individuals, communities, countries, and the whole world stronger.”

In deploying technologies for resilience, Josh stresses the importance of alignment with the needs of actual users and their capacity. He also emphasizes how organizations need to ensure resilience is designed into the technologies they develop and deploy. Josh asks, “if the technology that we are using to try and help people to be more resilient is not resilient in itself, not sustainable, then how can it help with long-term resilience?” Josh encourages organizations that are developing technological solutions to anticipate the future, especially regarding how the technology will be sustained into the future.

To support organizations that develop and deploy impactful yet sustainable technologies, Josh developed a Digital Technology for Resilience Planning and Due Diligence Tool, which is an Excel-based tool that helps organizations plan the development of technology and provides a framework for identifying potential development partners.

The conversation concludes with Josh giving his personal perspective on the need for more thoughtfulness in the commercial tech world. “There are unintended consequences we are already aware of that are still not being addressed.” Then, there are a lot of things that “we can realistically anticipate that it's gonna be an issue”, which require a lot more consideration and dialogue between the tech sector and the public.

Technology developed for the good of people can often be used for evil and harm, intentionally and unintentionally. So, rather than dealing with the consequences after the fact, he hopes that it becomes the responsibility of tech developers to anticipate the harmful uses of their technology. While we can not protect against everything, “we need to at least be vigilant” and anticipate what can happen.

Correction: During the podcast, the Pulse Lab’s Haze Gazer innovation is discussed. It was described as a response to forest fires when in fact it primarily deals with peatland fires.

In this episode, Michael Waitze talks with Allison Sanders, the Director of Strategy and Partnerships at Baan Dek Foundation (BDF) about the Foundation’s work supporting the lives of vulnerable migrant children growing up in construction workers' campsites in Thailand.

The Baan Dek Foundation (BDF) was established in 2002 in Chiang Mai by Nicola Crosta, Magali du Parc, and Acha Sripaurya. After surveying vulnerable communities around Chiang Mai, they realized many of the most vulnerable in Chiang Mai were the children of migrant workers living at construction campsites around the city. They are at risk of neglect, abuse, exploitation, and missing out on basic childhood development needs.

In response, they developed a multilingual team that engages in a social work-based approach to supporting children from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos living at these campsites. A core part of their support is building a bridge between migrant communities and existing education and health and safety services available to migrants and where there is a gap BDF tries to find a solution to ensure the needs of children are met.

BDF has been supporting more than 1,000 children per year in Chiang Mai, but the challenge is large and can not be handled by the BDF team in Chiang Mai alone. They estimate there are 60,000 children living at construction worker campsites around the country, particularly in Bangkok where migrants provide the bulk of labor for the booming construction industry. As a result, BDF has recently expanded to Bangkok and has been developing sustainable and scalable solutions to meet the challenge.

Among many of the programs BDF engages in, Allison points out, there Migrant Empowerment Project has been one of the most impactful. It trains migrants in each community with the skills to access health, education, and safety services and become peer educators who can take over the role of Baan Dek’s staff.

BDF also recognizes the importance of scalability. For example, they took their successful Superheroes Academy program which has been teaching about 500 migrant children a year in life skills, and turned it into an application that enables children to digitally access the academy activities through tablets and low-cost smartphones. In recognition of their innovation, BDF won the MIT Solve Award.

Beyond making a direct impact, the Baan Dek Foundation’s strategy is to drive systemic change and “improve the dynamics of the entire construction industry” by working with institutional and corporate partners. A key partner is Sansiri, one of the leading property developers in the country. It works with UNICEF and Baan Dek to improve conditions in construction worker campsites and provide safe spaces and education for children.

To drive more systemic change, BDF worked with UNICEF to produce the Building Futures in Thailand report on support for children living in construction worker campsites and how private sector companies can more appropriately support the children of construction workers.

Learn more about the Baan Dek Foundation here.

What can a picture of eggs reveal about Indonesian beauty? What can an image of megaphone diplomacy tell you about family relationships?

In this episode, Michael Waitze and Daniel McFarlane talk with Neil Gains, who is the owner of TapestryWorks and helps clients decode people and culture to help them better connect with the emotions that drive behavior. He brings a breadth and depth of experience to the conversation after decades of work in research across the world including almost 20 years in Asia. He makes a valuable contribution to the podcast by providing an innovative visual approach to understanding people and the emotional drivers of social and behavioral change.

In a playful conversation, Neil gets Michael to reveal his own motivations and character using pictures. Neil explains how visual approaches help reveal unconscious motivations by tapping into our brain’s powerful visual memory. They discuss how familiarity and recognition give a simpler and more intuitive way to understand people than asking direct questions and relying on memory recall.

The discussion covers the role of cultural values and self-identity and why people are often unaware of what drives their behavior. Visual approaches help hack our rational brain to reveal hidden feelings. These feelings may also be difficult to articulate because they are socially unacceptable or difficult to translate into the local language when a large part of communication is contextual.

Although visual approaches can appear very subjective, in the digital age they can also be used to quantify motivations and emotions across large samples of people. This can allow a detailed comparison of cultural drivers across countries and cultures and life stages. Humanizing research in this way can help you understand beneficiaries, stakeholders, customers, employees, innovators, leaders, and entrepreneurs.

Neil's intuitive visual approach captures honest and authentic responses to difficult questions, providing a roadmap of personal and cultural values that drive how people see themselves as individuals and how they relate to their communities.

'Inspirational' is a good way to describe Rithy Thul, but it also captures what he wants Koompi to be for young Cambodians. Koompi is Cambodia's first locally designed laptop and Rithy Thul's latest venture. He discusses it, his company SmallWorld Cambodia and his dream for education in Cambodia with Michael Waitze on our first podcast on innovation in Cambodia.

An important part of Rithy's journey towards launching Koompi has been Bitcoin. He explains how it kept coming back to him, leading him to try to understand more about it by investing in Fortunately, he got in early and was able to experience years of growth, which funded his recent ventures over the past couple of years.

One of Rithy's ongoing ventures is Smallworld Cambodia. It started as a coworking space but soon became a platform for start-up ventures in Cambodia by providing office space, mentorship, and in some cases, capital to support new and interesting Cambodian businesses. Smallworld Cambodia also engages in internal projects and for these Rithy follows a simple principle. If it is meaningful but people think is it too difficult, then Smallworld should do it.

It's this principle that led him and his team to develop Koompi and their pursuit of changing how laptops are designed. Rather than hardware being designed for the latest software and dropping off in performance as the software is updated, Rithy believes software should be designed to work for the hardware and get faster over time. So, Rithy and his team designed an operating system they call KramaOS based on Linux. After just launching in just November, they are on track to sell 1,000 units by the end of the year. But they won’t stop with just designing the laptop and operating system. Next year they plan to start manufacturing motherboards in Cambodia.

Koompi is not just an affordable and practical laptop. Rithy wants young Cambodian's to see Koompi and what his team is doing and "look up to the sky". Young people in Cambodia are brave. If you lead them and give them the right tools they have so much potential, Rithy believes.

Rithy's bigger dream is to change education and the opportunities available to young Cambodians. He points out that Mark Zuckerberg was using a computer by the age of six, and Rithy wants to close the gap by giving more young Cambodians the chance to use computers and learn to code at a young age. He has a vision of bringing Koompi computers to every high school in Cambodia and training university graduates to go back to their hometowns for one year to give computer training to the next generation of young Cambodians.

If it seems too difficult, Rithy and his team will give it a go. In Rithy's Cambodia, the only boundary is the sky.

Just before Pinnapa Satitpatanapan headed to Manila to take up a position at the Asia Development Bank, Michael Waitze caught up with her to discuss her experience studying at Yale, her passion for impact investing, and how to support the growth of impact investing in Thailand.

Pinnapa did a Bachelor of Business Administration at Thammasat Univesity before gaining experience in the investment banking unit of Bangkok Bank and as a Thai real estate developer. She then headed to the US for an MBA at the Yale School of Management.

While her BBA at Thammasat prepared her well, Yale posed new challenges, particularly the dynamic classroom discussions and the mountains of readings for each class. The most valuable lesson she gained at Yale, she says, was how to prioritize and manage time effectively.

A pivotal experience during her MBA was taking the School of Management's Global Social Entrepreneurship course, which has students team up with mission-driven social enterprises in India. She found herself supporting an enterprise called Onergy which delivers solar energy solutions to farmers, helping them engage in organic farming practices and linking them to buyers through an e-commerce platform. Inspired by the passion, hard work, and can-do attitude of the people at Onergy in India, Pinnapa asked herself how she could use her skills to make a difference in the world. She turned to social impact investing, which was unfamiliar to her before arriving at Yale.

After graduating from Yale, she landed an internship and then a full-time position at Calvert Impact Capital. Then, on returning to Thailand she discovered a dearth of knowledge on impact investing. While impact investing has gone mainstream in the USA, very few people in Thailand are aware of it as an investment option.

But awareness is not the only challenge the sector faces, Pinnapa points out. In the US, impact investors utilize standardized metrics to report on the impact of investments and funds. At Calvert Impact Capital they use IRIS metrics managed by the Global Impact Investing Network.  However, social enterprises in Thailand have been reluctant to adopt measurement practices due to a number of reasons. They are either too focused on getting up and running or lack the resources and capabilities to measure their impact. So, Pinnapa recommends that supporting institutions like the UNDP and universities should be focusing on improving the capacity of SEs to use existing metrics and frameworks to measure impact. After all, investors need to see impact goals and measurements that track progress to those goals.

Pinnapa is now settling into life in Manila at the Asian Development Bank where she is excited to learn how infrastructure projects impact people's lives on a large scale. We look forward to connecting to Pinnapa again and hearing more about her work at the ADB.

In this episode, Michael Waitze and Daniel McFarlane, are fortunate to converse with Stéphane Rousseau, who is the Director of International Field Immersion Courses at the School of Global Studies at Thammasat University. He brings an enormous wealth of experience to the conversation after decades of humanitarian, human rights, and civil society work across Asia and the Pacific.

Over the years, his work has presented many ethical and moral challenges. It is not the uplifting work many people think it is, Stephane suggests. The people you could not help or the people left behind are the ones that stay in your memory.

Without referencing social innovation specifically, Stephane provides multiple examples of how people and organizations have subverted structures of power and created innovative approaches to address pressing social problems. Listening to Stephane, it is evident social innovation is nothing new. It just has a new label and a fresh look.

Stephane discusses how in the early 1970s, French doctors, frustrated by the political and religious boundaries that were impeding their capacity to support the welfare victims of war set up Médecins Sans Frontières.  They continue today as an organization of impartiality, independence, and neutrality.

In his work for The Global Fund in Geneva, he has observed the power of involving those who are afflicted by HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria, in programs to end these epidemics and revitalize the communities impacted by them. They work harder than anyone to stop these epidemics and relieve the people's impact on them. Stephane points out it often requires a power shift and cultural change to give voice and power to the people that are best positioned to enact change.

In humanitarian work, Stephane highlights that it is usually soft skills and emotional intelligence that enable someone to make a sustainable impact. In his work as the Director of International Immersion Programs, he is supporting young people to develop the skills and intelligence to make a positive difference in the world. Every summer he welcomes public health students from the University of California to experience life on the Myanmar-Thai border at Mae Sot and examines how health and well-being can be improved in refugee and border communities. It is through these experiences his students gain the emotional skills that will support them for years to come.

Stephane is developing new immersion programs in the region to incorporate students from multiple disciplines so they can experience boundary spanning, which Stephane describes as the power of bringing together the skills and perspectives of different fields. Boundary spanning also sums up his unique skills and expertise developed over 25 years of working across the region.

In this episode of the Social Innovation podcast is an energizing conversation between Courtney Savie Lawrence and Michael Waitze.  Courtney, originally from Nashville, Tennessee, arrived in Asia seven years ago with the perspective "the world is so much bigger than our own bubble.”  After co-founding a social enterprise in the US, she was recruited to develop a Global Studies program at a university in Hiroshima. After a few years in Japan, Courtney followed her now-husband to Bangkok, where she teaches at the School of Global Studies at Thammasat University in Bangkok and facilities workshops and training on design thinking and social innovation. She describes Bangkok as one of her favorite places and "a dynamic city of innovation and change in the region."

For Courtney, social innovation is about "thinking really creatively about in fresh ways that are going to be disruptive in terms of changing the status quo and meeting the global challenges that are unprecedented." To Courtney, it is much more than a step-by-step process. It should be seen as shifting and changing mindsets.

She reminds us that it's easy to surround yourself with people drinking the same kool-aid. In an indication of reflexive turn, Courtney argues that conscious capitalism and bottom-up market-based solutions might be too limiting. Policy-based and political solutions are also crucial to lasting change and addressing some of the most pressing issues such as the growing socioeconomic divides.

Reflecting on the happenings in her home country and the latest mid-term elections, Michael and Courtney discuss the role of anger as a catalyst for change. It's clear that Courtney doesn't have time for cynism. She explains, "I am going to consciously embrace all that is chaotic and crazy, and let it stir me intellectually and feed the fire of what is  possible in a positive way."

It is an approach to life and problem-solving that Courtney brings to her teaching and the facilitation of the workshops. She is "blow away by the agency and creativity" of her students at Thammasat University. In the third iteration of her course on design thinking and social innovation, Courtney has her students acting as consultants for real-world clients and in the process of learning how to manage expectations and maintain motivation through long and arduous projects. One thing she wants them to learn is a failure is okay. More important is what you do with failure and how you learn from it.

Learn more about Courtney’s work or reach out to her through her website here.

In this episode of the Social Innovation Podcast Dipendra KC talks with Michael Waitze about his experience founding and running a youth organization in Nepal, and a new master's degree program of Social Innovation and Sustainability at the School of Global Studies at Thammasat University.

When Dipendra and his friends were seeking our work experience as young college students, they kept being asked if they had any experience. They didn’t have any so they went about building an organization through which they could experience. Its called Yuwa, which simply means youth in Nepali and has the objective of giving young like-minded Nepalese a chance to explore and experiment with their ideas for social change.

It began as an organization of five unpaid young students with no external capital and has become an organization with 10 full-time staff, 100 active members, funding of four to five hundred thousand US dollars per year while reaching out to 5,000 young Nepalese around the county on an annual basis.

As for the impact of Yuwa, Didpendra reflected on the learnings and experience gained by what he calls the “graduates” of Yuwa. But it has done much more. Through Yuwa, Nepalese youth like himself have been able to impact government policy. Dipendra cites the case where members were active in changing the national education curriculum to include topics such as sexual reproduction rights and alternate gender identities.

In his life after Yuwa, Dipendra is embracing his passion for innovations in development and his fascination with big data for his Doctorate degree. He recently published a paper based on a study of around 40,000 NGOs in Nepal, which examined what determines their location and whether they are positioned where they are really needed. In his role as a lecture, he is bringing his first-hand experience of analyzing big data to his student and opening their mind to insights they can gain by using statistical tools to understand economic, social, and political change at national and global levels.

Just as Yuwa was turned into a platform for young Nepalese, Dipendra has a vision that the Masters in Social Innovation and Sustainability will be a springboard for people creating careers as social innovators and sustainability experts. You can learn more about the program by clicking here.

The post EP 48 – ShuFen Lin – An ex-Startup Founder Deeply Interested in AI & Climate Change – It’s Everybody’s Responsibility appeared first on Social Innovation Podcast.