Digital Development and COVID-19
We have been formally and informally asked by many clients and agencies about how we see the role of digital technologies addressing the immediate issues relating to COVID-19. We thought it was worth capturing a high-level summary of our thinking, based on our experience, in a more public format for others, on the off-chance that it is useful.
1 — Act now on Communications — for immediate deployment, it’s essential to understand how digital platforms can send urgent messages to stay inside, keep hand washing etc. We know digital communications fracture public spheres, creating challenges for public health (and public goods) communication and discussion. Our friends at Public Digital have good advice on how Governments should approach dealing with this. We need to communicate trusted information to challenge fake news spread on social media, and work out how to use social media effectively to provide access to credible advice, for example from the WHO. Turn.io has been doing this via their WhatsApp service in South Africa and beyond. WHO have launched a WhatsApp chatbot for COVID-19 information. Also Every1Mobile has over the past three years scaled a mobile service with Unilever that provides information to thousands of dukas on healthy handwashing, but tied with vouchers and stock management systems.
2 — Soon, act on Remittances — this is the immediate impact digital financial services can have at the consumer level. We’re already seeing responses to this from the DFS community and Governments. As a community, we need to understand, rapidly, whether existing remittance inflows are down, where there are liquidity issues in CICO agent networks, etc. Monitoring remittances in real time is going to give us a good sense of how desperate the situation is getting. We’re lucky we have Caribou Data panels in five countries giving us near live data, and we’re talking to other research firms about how we could pool resources and combine to give us something like a dashboard on what’s happening — BFA already has a great financial household COVID-19 impact survey running.
3 — Now through to longer term, act on Livelihoods and vouchering/rationing, and digital ID. As the impact of COVID-19 develops over time, the hardest part is likely to be the 6–12 months afterwards, or even longer if this is the new normal, where the development community will need to consider how to assist Governments in rationing food and other goods, securing livelihoods in a radically different economic world, and managing a privacy-protective digital ID architecture that can allow access to services and freedom of movement based on need, and mapping results from testing for COVID-19. BFA Global and others already point to the role remittance can play in maintaining livelihoods.
We’re seeing the way China, Singapore and South Korea have taken the lead with ID technology for COVID-19 surveillance, but there are major questions about both immediate and longer term privacy issues. There’s a delicate balance to be struck here between saving lives today and protecting life in the future.
In the near term, we’re thinking a lot about securing livelihoods, particularly for platform workers as this is a current research focus for us. Globally this crisis has brought into sharp relief how precarious many incomes are, particularly for gig workers and low-income working women, and this is accelerating debates about the role of the state and platform owners in providing a safety net for their workers. The situation is even more acute in developing countries, such as many in sub Saharan Africa, where companies lack the deep pockets of their counterparts in the global north to subsidize the lost incomes of workers, and government budgets are already severely strained. We’re currently looking at technologies and regulatory frameworks for state social protection — there’s much to be done to deliver benefits efficiently whilst protecting privacy and data. We also have some thinking on paid training programmes for platform workers furloughed due to COVID-19 that would act as an income bridge and also upskill the workforce. We’re also thinking about how vouchering systems like the one at Every1Mobile, but also commerce platforms like Twiga, Sokowatch and Copia can be used to help maintain access to food and good supply chains in low-income countries.
