In the past few years, I have been a part of many different types of online discussions. More recently there has been an upswing of Tweetchats. Today, any well organized meeting, conference, or discussion is complimented by some kind of common hashtag, Twitter, or Facebook presence. It helps the event gain exposure and fuels conversation with people who may not be able to attend in person.  

On Thursday, May 16  the Guardian’s Global Development Professionals Network hosted the online discussion/debate, How can social media change how development is done?  People were able to participate through comments on the actual post or using #GlobalDevLive participants were able to post questions and make comments via Twitter.

Social Media as a Global Community

Peer-to-peer versus dissemination. Graphic facilitation by The Value Web.

Though the conversation only lasted about an hour, took in nearly 200 comments on the discussion forum page and over 450 tweets. There were nine panelists including myself that were from all over the world and with many different development backgrounds.  So much was shared through the forum and through Twitter, it was overwhelming how important social media has become to the development community.

One participant wrote, “In terms of development, social media has an unrivaled capacity to empower the individual. Nothing promotes freedom of speech like social media.”

Powerful thoughts and words were littered throughout the page about how social media will give a voice to those without a voice.  One panelist, David Girling agreed with a participant and stated that social media has the ability to change development, “It has, can, will and it should.”

Hot on the heels of a partnership agreement to reduce the price of the long-acting, contraceptive implant Jadelle by half (see my blog of February 22), comes  an announcement by Merck (MSD) and partners to reduce the cost of IMPLANON® and its next generation IMPLANON NXT® by 50% for the next six years in 70 of the poorest countries around the world.Implanon® is the only single-rod, long-acting reversible contraceptive implant (Jadelle has two rods). It offers three years of pregnancy protection through a one-time single insertion by a trained health care worker. “Notably, IMPLANON and its next generation IMPLANON NXT® are pre-packaged and fully sterilized, making them easy and convenient to insert, including in settings with limited health care infrastructure,” according to the announcement. (Learn more about Implanon and two other hormonal implants, Jadelle and Sino-implant (II), at K4Health’s Implants Toolkit.)

 

A family planning client in Kampong Thom, Cambodia, displays her contraceptive implant insertion site.

© 2012 Marcel Reyners, Courtesy of Photoshare

MSD and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are direct parties to the agreement. Other facilitating parties include the Clinton Health Access Initiative, the governments of Norway, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Sweden, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

According to a USAID press release about the earlier Jadelle price reductions, about 600 million women in the developing world use some form of contraception, but only 1% to 2% of them are using long-acting, contraceptive implants. Surveys show that as many as 20% would prefer them, if they were available.  An article published in the Global Health: Science and Practice Journal (co-published by USAID and the K4Health Project) explains that if 1 of 5 women in sub-Saharan Africa who were currently using pills or injectables switched to the more effective contraceptive implants, more than 1.8 million unintended pregnancies would be averted in 5 years, resulting in 10,000 fewer maternal deaths and almost 600,000 fewer abortions.

Now with the cost of all three implants on par at about US$8 per set, there is a tremendous opportunity to provide modern contraceptives at low cost to the 222 million women—73% of whom live in developing countries—who want, but don’t have access to, them.

Imagine an urban slum in Kenya where trash is so abundant that children are prevented from playing. This is where Diana Mong’are, the 2012 Anzisha Prize winner, grew up – a community where the norm was to throw your trash wherever you saw fit. Upon graduating from high school, she saw this as a large problem and came up with a solution.  At 18 years old, Mong’are started small with her own community and 10,000 Kenya Shillings (≈$120 USD) raised from her family and friends. Her solution, Planet Green, was threefold:

 

A small boy rummages through trash in Kibera, Africa's largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya, where most people live below one dollar per day. Youths depend on collecting debris from the Nairobi River (a flowing sewer in this slum area), such as bottles and bags, which they then hope to sell. Most of the homes are shacks, and schools are built on the flowing, murky river. Residents have no access to clean water and hence depend on the polluted river for survival.

 

© 2005 Felix Masi, Courtesy of Photoshare

 

1. Provide bags for garbage sorting and a pickup service for the trash and recycling.
2. Purchase waste from carpenters (wood chips) and sell to the chicken farmers to be used as coop flooring to be made into manure to then be used or sold.
3. Create environmental clubs through primary school in the community to increase demand for positive environmental awareness.

On May 1, 2013, the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Africa Program hosted a program on African Women and Youth as Agents of Change Through Technology and Innovation. Diana Mong’are was part of the first panel focused on problem solving through innovative solutions for sustainable development. What struck me about Mong’are’s project was that while extremely innovative, it did not utilize any form of technology as we are used to seeing with innovation. In the age of technology that we all live in, I think innovation without technology is still extremely valuable and often not recognized. Mong’are’s presentation was inspiring and truly showed the ability for one individual to impact social problems. Since the start of her small project she has expanded from 20 families to 80 and continues to expand with more employees and into more areas of Kenya.