Exploring the future of frontier technologies for development in India
What are the frontier technologies showing the most promise in international development?
How might technology affect our work, and what should I be doing about it?
What are the potential impacts — positive and negative, intended and unintended — of future tech and how can we leave no-one behind even as we make progress at pace?
Frontier Tech Futures is an immersive experience designed to enable DFID country offices and departments to answer questions like these. In December, the Futures programme went to India and through a week-long programme in-country, DFID India teams, partners and stakeholders had the opportunity to connect with what’s next in technology. We met and heard from local technologists on tech as diverse as: IoT, Big Data, drones, AI & ML, blockchain, and learned about the implications of using frontier tech in programme management. We also collaborated on core programmatic areas of work (i.e. Urban, Climate Resilience, Enterprise & Finance), exploring the frontier technologies showing the highest impact potential and challenges faced when scaling solutions.
During our time together, key questions emerged like:
How can India close its digital divide and make tech more accessible?
India is going through a major digital transformation, underpinned by the India Stack government project. The vision is to provide the right digital infrastructure and open APIs to be leveraged by developers and tech start-ups to build inclusive digital services. This is easier said than done — as well many successes, early projects have had their share of failures, and despite all the recent developments and efforts, the large low-and-middle income (LMI) segment still remains underserved.
Digital inclusion by design is still uncommon, therefore many initiatives end up being retrofitted to serve the LMI segment with very limited scale. However, there is a strong drive to address this issue in India, particularly at a grassroots level. During Futures Week India we heard from key players in the tech ecosystem about promising initiatives like the Financial Inclusion Lab that supports start-ups with a specific focus on LMIs, and Outline India’s approach to scaling digital inclusion initiatives by enabling the local enablers. Ultimately context is everything — what works in one place may not in another, which is why experimentation and trial and error is key to unlocking this segment.
How can DFID India accelerate getting promising innovations to scale?
“The bane of urban development are pilots that don’t make it to scale”
This was just one of the catchphrases of the week that stayed with us. Too often, development solutions struggle to scale. Throughout the week we’ve heard about the difficulty of solving India’s key challenges without addressing the system that creates the problem in the first place — tech can be a catalyst, but it may not succeed on its own. How might the journey from short-term improvements to fixing a broken system to enable scale look like? Any answer is somewhat subjective, but what was clear from the Futures sessions is that India’s most complex challenges (such as urban development) require a bold vision, with humble actions to test and learn along the way, and a mix of point-solutions AND system innovations. Big problems can’t be solved by one organisation or sector alone. A networked approach of connecting at a grassroots level is needed, as well as establishing partnerships with private sector players and framing mutual benefits to bring them onboard. Through the Million Neighbourhoods project, we also learnt about the importance of mapping the scale of problems, which is essential to bring players on the same page and effect the required exponential change.
We need tech to be ethical and environmentally sustainable. What’s DFID’s role to support India with these challenges?
With the abundance of tech talent and innovations coming from India, the question of ethics and unintended consequences of technology is one still to be addressed. Innovation usually starts before regulation, as we’re seeing in many cases including in the ‘future of mobility’ space. To combat pollution (India is battling with air pollution that is amongst the most severe in the world), the government has decreed that all vehicles sales be electric by 2030, and is starting to establish supporting guidelines and regulations for EVs. However, other emerging ‘future mobility’ initiatives, such as shared mobility/carpooling, that are mainly driven by start-ups (see sRide) have received less attention, but need ethics frameworks to enable safe services and uptake. There is an opportunity to close the gap around the policy narrative on ethics to future-proof innovation in India. Tools and organisations already exist to guide this conversation — such as The ODI’s Data Ethics Canvas and the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, which provides recommendations to the UK Government, that is required to respond to within a set number of weeks. Would an independent body for technology ethics in India help deepen accountability and transparency?
How can we ensure we design the right thing, then design the thing right?
The quality and impact of our solutions depends on the correct framing of the problem. Throughout the week we heard reminders to always start with understanding what the end user truly needs, before asking how technology might help. Ultimately, technology is just one of the components of a solution. One of the main goals of the Frontier Technology Futures Weeks is to demystify technologies, but we also introduced innovation tools (such as the Service Blueprint) through short ‘Daily Innovation Workout’ sessions to enable service designers to have a more user-led approach to innovation. We’ve decided to frame the relationship between innovation & technology (too often used interchangeably) even more in our following Futures Weeks and bake this in all key sessions.
Our next stop: Futures Week Rwanda — so watch this space!
