Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Carol Wanjiku is the CEO of Daproim . She’s an incredible social entrepreneur I just visited with in Nairobi, Kenya. She runs a for-profit social enterprise named Daproim that provides data entry services using disadvantaged students as their primary workforce. We go way back with her firm. In 2008, we were the first customer of Samasource as they were getting started. Samasource connected us with Daproim in Nairobi to proofread books for our Bookshare project. Bookshare is our large digital library for students with disabilities such as blindness or dyslexia. We use digital ebooks at Bookshare’s core, which can easily be turned into braille, large print or digital audio (using synthetic speech technology). We had just won a large contract to deliver high-quality accessible textbooks to students with disabilities in the U.S., and we needed more help. Samasource connected us with a winning team, and we’ve been using Daproim ever since. I visited Daproim four years ago, and wrot...

As I noted in my first blog on my African trip, I was delighted with the entrepreneurial culture in Nairobi, Kenya. A social entrepreneur who very much exemplified this was Stephen Muthee, founder of Daproim, a data entry social enterprise based in Nairobi. We were introduced to Steve and Daproim through the great offices of Leila Janah and Samasource, the "Give Work" people. Leila's dream has been to connect the people of East Africa with dignified digital work, and connecting Steve to our Bookshare team has been highly successful for Daproim, Samasource and Bookshare! It's part of what we call our social enterprise supply chain. It's so cool to come into an office in Nairobi's Central Business District and see a couple of dozen people working on transcribing textbooks for Bookshare's users with print disabilities. Steve wanted me to work my way around the office shaking everybody's hand! I was happy to thank everybody for their work on behalf ...

I've just ended an exciting three week long Africa trip to Kenya, Tanzania and Ghana. There are so many exciting people and organizations to talk about! One of my very first meetings in Nairobi, Kenya, was with John Kipchumbah (Kipp) and Philip Thigo of the Innovation Program of the Social Development Network. I dropped in on them because Kipp had been trained on our Martus human rights software years ago and had been helping human rights groups in the region with using Martus. However, I was thrilled with the incredible range of activities I heard about during our dinner together. Kipp explained that they wanted to take a broad approach to improving human rights, and so had expanded into other areas in the social sector. They felt these new initiatives would all contribute to a better human rights environment in the region. One of the first areas was a budget tracking tools for Kenya, to make it easier for people to learn about budgeted amounts for their areas. Huduma mak...

Bookshare is doing great. Launching the new version of the website has been exciting, and I was happy to see a great blog post on the new capabilities from the National Braille Press' blog . We're also on a roll on many other fronts. We recently obtained the ability to directly download books from the national accessible textbook repository for those states who appoint us to do that for the disabled students of their state. Our staff are all over the country and the world spreading the word. While I was at the ATIA conference in Florida, our Director of Marketing was in Washington DC at another conference. Betsy Burgess got to run into Senator Harkin, who exclaimed "I love Bookshare!" For someone working in the disability field, hearing that (even secondhand!) from the number one disability advocate in the Senate was a thrill! But, it's not just in Washington DC. We have social enterprises all over the world doing book proofreading for Bookshare. One of o...

Technology really is becoming an incredible tool for empowering the poor. Whenever I see a great example of this, I get excited. Vital Wave Consulting covers the opportunities in serving developing markets and one of their blog posts really grabbed me. In M-Pesa is our hippo! we get to hear the story of a cell phone banking service that gives the poor effective banking services in Kenya when the country's banks have declined to serve them. Other great comments from users of M-Pesa directed at traditional banks: You closed our accounts and chased us like dogs. Don’t bark at us. The sly person is in trouble when the fool gets smart. And, Kenya is not the only country to discover this opportunity. The Philippines has had cell phone banking for years. The common thread is prepaid cell service. You load up your phone with minutes with money. Why not trade your minutes for money back (for a small fee) or trade minutes with other people as payment for goods and services? These ne...