M-Paisa: Ending Afghan Corruption, one Text at a Time
Monty Munford Oct 17, 2010
Afghanistan supplies 92% of the world’s opiates. According to the latest available figures, the country produced 8,200 tons of heroin in 2008, more than double the the amount three years earlier.
But even being the heroin capital of the world, bringing in more money than most Afghans can dream of, the on-going war and rampant corruption means the money goes to the wrong people and the country has no infrastructure. There are no decent roads, no railways… But they do have mobile phones.
Four months ago, the Afghan National Police began to pay salaries through mobiles (using a text and Interactive Voice Response system), rather than in cash. The platform used was based on the M-Pesa service that has become highly successful in Kenya. Branded M-Paisa in Afghanistan, it was introduced by the operator Roshan in partnership with the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) and had an immediate effect.
Votetocracy is a place where every citizen can see every bill currently in congress, vote on those bills and send those votes to thier representatives. The site has been created by three regular citizens that felt it was time to get engaged with American politics. During our efforts to become more educated about our government we discovered that it was not all that easy. We found plenty of information. But it is written in difficult to understand political speak. We also found that it was not particularly easy to act on this information. When we found bills on government websites we had no measurable way to act on it. Sure, you could write a letter or contact our representatives, but had no real way of knowing that it would actually accomplish anything. These things felt like barriers. It was then that we dicided that there had to be a better way and Votetocracy is the the result of our efforts.
The site has the features neccesary for any citizen to find out what congress is working on. More importantly however is the ability to act on that information. We have created the site so that citizens can vote on the same bills as congress, send their vote to thier representatives with the click of the button.
We felt that there are three major areas that we could help citizens.
Access to information
Education about that information
And to provide the ability to act on that information and measure the results
Today, we know more about the universe than about our society. It's time to use the power of information to explore social and economic life on Earth and discover options for a sustainable future. Together, we can manage the challenges of the 21st century, combining the best of all knowledge.
The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator is a previously unseen multidisciplinary international scientific endeavour with focus on techno-socio-economic-environmental systems. The three main achievements of the FuturICT flagship will be the establishment of
a Living Earth Simulator (global-scale simulation of techno-socio-economic systems),
Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, scarcity of resources, emerging risks and conflicts, epidemics, etc.), and
an Innovation Accelerator (identifying innovations early on, evaluating them across disciplines and supporting co-creation projects between different scientific disciplines, business, and governance).
Comment: This is not a new idea but has expanded to a great extent. The 2004/2005 proposal “Re-configuring the Global Organisms' Operating System Through Mobile Democracy” mentions a whole earth simulation of knowledge layers + mobile connectivity to access & add to systems so that more people are involved in the shaping of our world. The Earth Intelligence Network in connection with Medard Gabel has been advocating an EarthGame + a strategic analytic model to jump-start a prosperous world @peace.
Below was posted at the Games for Change forum on the subject:
This is something I posted in the “state of the world” conversation with Bruce Sterling on the WELL…
I give talks on the history and future of media, and on the history, evolution, and history of the Internet. I gave the talk this week to a small group gathered for lunch in a coworking space here in Austin, and after hearing the talk a technologist I know, Gray Abbott, suggested that I say more about the coming balkanization of the network as the most likely scenario. The Internet is a network of networks that depends on cooperative peering agreements – I carry your traffic and you carry mine. The high speed Internet is increasingly dependent on the networks of big providers, the telcos or cable companies like AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Time Warner, and Comcast. They all see the substantial value supported by their networks and want to extract more of it for themselves. They talk about the high cost of bandwidth as a rationale for charging more for services – or metering services – but I think the real issue is value. When you see Google and Facebook and Netflix making bundles of money using your pipes, you want a cut. And if you’ve also tried to get into the business of providing content, it’s bothersome to see your network carrying other competing content services, including guerilla media distribution via BitTorrent.
On Need to Know, we do a lot of reporting about the world’s problems. But we’re premiering a new series about people coming up with creative solutions — it’s called “Agents of Change.”
Social entrepreneur challenging conventional wisdom
Samasource–microwork (small digital tasks that can be done on an inexpensive computers).
Building 21st Century assembly line that can break down massive tasks (e.g. updating addresses for Google maps, or translating emergency messages from Creole to English). Won contracts with Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft.
15% premium for socially-conscious companies, AND competitive on cost, quality, and turnaround time.
Small scale digital tasks did not exist before.
Transforming lives, especially women, young men, and refugees. $5 a day is very much better than local norms, and buys an active English-speaking brain with hands able to do quality work.
IMPORTANT: Developing world is out-pacing USA and West generally in extending Internet infrastructure to the poor–centers created, humans come in, also doing viewing (Gorgon Stare, take note!), creating logs of store videos on shopper buying habits, anything that can be noticed and logged by a human–$5 a day.
Phi Beta Iota: We could not, in a million years, have found a better “off-set” to the USAF Gorgon Stare program. This micro-tasking, combining human brains and hands with Internet access, is one of the most profoundly intelligent and socio-economically useful ideas we have seen in our lifetimes (there are 800 of us here). BRAVO.
Decision-support (intelligence) is the ultimate objective of information processes. One must carefully distinguish between data which is raw text, signal, or image; information which is collated data of generic interest; and intelligence which is information tailored to support a specific decision…
As noted in an earlier Journal entry (Assessment of the Position of Director of National Intelligence December 27 2010), the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is an unclaimed orphan among the senior U.S. intelligence managers while the Office of DNI (ODNI) is an unwelcome member of the so-called Intelligence Community (IC). The current DNI, General James Clapper (USAF ret.) is a good man in a bad job. He conspicuously does not have the ear of his most important constituent, the President of the U.S. (POTUS) or the support of the President’s most important intelligence advisor John Brennan. So how can the DNI carve out a niche for himself and his office that will enable him to build a Washington D.C. based constituency that may even include the POTUS ?
Even a cursory examination of the principal agencies of the IC, will reveal that none of them are producing strategic intelligence. CIA maintains that its intelligence analysts (most less than five years in service) are too pressed by the need to develop current intelligence to engage in the in depth analysis and research required to produce strategic intelligence. State INR the only other intelligence center really capable of producing strategic intelligence tells much the same story. The once widely influential National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), primary vehicles for strategic intelligence, are no longer highly regarded guides to policy formulation.
Yet according to one of the most important thinkers on intelligence analysis, Sherman Kent, strategic intelligence provides, “the knowledge which our highly placed civilians and military men must have to guard the national welfare” (emphasis added). Put another way, strategic intelligence can be described as accurate and comprehensive information that is needed by decision makers to formulate policies or take actions to protect our national interests.
PART I: The Only Way to Fix the Deficit–Multiply Jobs (William Drayton)
PART II: Nice Ideas But So Is Icing Cover Feces (Robert Steele)
PART III: Create Jobs? As an End In Themselves? To Do What? Why? (Alexander Carpenter)
PART IV: Related Recommended Reading (Robert Steele)
The core take-away (from PART III)
Beyond its inherent merit and explicit substance,William Drayton: The Only Way to Fix the Deficit: Multiply Jobs is a great example of unconscious status-seeking righteousness – well-meaning ineptitude and irrelevance, trapped in the old paradigm of debt-money, growth, and social conditioning. This kind of thinking is exemplary of people who are focused on the superficial “economic crisis,” not going deeper to see that we have a political (and even a social) crisis with, of course, an economic manifestation. This represents the success of the pseudo-science of “economics,” originally created with the intention to get most people to believe that objective “natural” forces are running their lives, not other people, classes, and institutions (Thurmond Arnold, 1937). Good problem-solvers always begin with as much accurate information about the overall problem as possible. It's incompetent – or unconscious self-deception – to assume human nature isn't the core and essence of the problem, and Bill Drayton isn't necessarily incompetent…
“By providing the funding and the policy framework to many concerned and dedicated people working within the non-profit sector, the ruling class is able to co-opt leadership from grassroots communities, … and is able to make the funding, accounting, and evaluation components of the work so time consuming and onerous that social justice work is virtually impossible under these conditions” (Paul Kivel, You Call this Democracy, Who Benefits, Who Pays and Who Really Decides, 2004, p. 122 )
Phi Beta Iota: In Advanced Information Operations (IO) terms, we cannot fix the military until we fix government, we cannot fix government until we fix Wall Street and Main Street, we cannot fix the economy until we fix the society, and all of that requires a firm focus on human nature and the relations among humans. We live is a “whole system” and are mis-managing it by being ignorant and delusional about root causes and actual relationships. Until we get the truth on the table, we cannot deal with it. Good news: all it takes is ONE node able to blend intelligence & integrity, that “spike” will proliferate. The bottom line is that DEMAND creates jobs, and EDUCATION creates the demand for the RIGHT jobs. Taking one example, the US Army, it could apply Advanced Information Operations to create a 180 degree maturation of the mind-set of its personnel, and use that to “eat the old” and create the new. The US Army is going to suffer a nose dive in financial resources (as will the other services); the US Army is the ONLY service that must might be capable of “beating the dive” by re-inventing itself from inside out–starting with Advanced IO being about minds, not technology. Similarly, a single multinational could “get a grip” and re-invent itself overnight–the example will proliferate.
M-Paisa: Ending Afghan Corruption, one Text at a Time
Working for change: Samasource redefines international aid 
