When innovation is yet another Connected Community Centre: Connectivity at the margins of innovation
All roads lead to the Connected Community Centre
“Please, do not be another Connected Community Centre,” I thought as I read through the latest submissions to the first Community Connectivity Fund, launched in 2018 by UNHCR’s Innovation Service. The Fund was designed to search and select the most promising and innovative ideas for connecting refugees and the communities that host them, across UNHCR’s operations worldwide.
It turned out that almost half of all the applications to the Connectivity Fund were variations around the same theme, and no matter the country or context, the displacement situation, or the specific connectivity needs, there was a Connected Community Centre for every circumstance. As if that was the one key opening all doors to the world of fulfilled digital promises: online learning and better education, professional development, remote work opportunities, access to relevant content and valuable information, and the ultimate possibility to be and stay connected beyond all physical barriers and constraints. It was a copy and paste from place to place — as if this idea was the only path for a connected future.
The response to our Community Connectivity Fund got me wondering. Was the challenge to connect the under-connected too broad or, on the contrary, pointing towards the same, unequivocal direction? How and why, in our collective imagination, did the vision of Connectivity for Refugees take the form of a Connected Centre? After an initial “What’s wrong?” reaction, the reflection and curiosity shifted towards these centres: Are they all the same? Do they work? What’s their impact? Why is there the assumption that it is the greatest need?
This post is a reflection on some of these questions and a journey to Connected Community Centres, through the Community Connectivity Fund, to discover what happens at the outskirts of innovation and connectivity.
Not all connected centres are born equal
Even when repackaged and reframed, and after some scratching the surface, everywhere I looked in the proposals received, there seemed to a Community Centre in the making. Certainly, the names differed: Algeria had an ICT Lab, Mauritania a Computer Centre, Venezuela the Technology Centre, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo a Community Internet Access Centre. The interventions were also not all the same: some looked at constructing a new centre for urban refugees or in a disconnected and remote settlement, transforming and repurposing an existing building to make a Connected Centre out of it, or improving an existing facility with better tech, stronger internet, and a more sustainable solar power system. Some of these places lacked proper hardware, others needed better management, a few of them needed to be more accessible, and some just needed to be accessed.
To be clear, we are not against Connected Centres, quite the opposite. The Connectivity for Refugees initiative was born out of a need to streamline where there was fragmentation, to support and experiment with ideas and innovations that are born in the field, to use research, data and communication strategies that bring about change so that all refugees, regardless of age, gender or diversity, can access mobile and internet connectivity to build brighter futures for themselves, their families and the world.
Now, if a Community Connected Centre is the way, or one of the ways, to realise this vision then we are all for it. But we also want to make sure that we don’t just drop equipment in a camp and figure out six months down the line that the costs of running a centre on a generator are too high, that the population is digitally illiterate, or that the location is just not convenient and very few people have access to it.
As for everything, but even more when it comes to complex issues such as connectivity, there’s a wide range of factors at stake, there are good practices and, usually, no one-fits-all Connected Centre solution.
The Community Connectivity Fund was designed with these dilemmas in mind and as a means to contribute to the Innovation Service’s learning agenda around a number of areas relevant to the Connectivity for Refugees initiative, and to specifically find out what works and what doesn’t, and if there are good connectivity practices to be drawn across different contexts and scenarios.
And so we decided to invest in hopefully yet, not another, Connected Community Centre.
From the last to the extra mile
Investing in one (or two) Community Centre(s) was also an opportunity to see what it takes for such a centre to be a “good” one, go beyond its simplest expression and provide more than access to technology.
Of course, considering the last-mile contexts in which UNHCR works, setting up a place equipped with tech and internet is already a good thing. But it’s only a start: a Connected Centre needs resources, investments, buy-in from refugees and host communities, and collaboration with partners to function well and to keep running. Let alone have an impact or make a difference. There is, in fact, a critical dead time, between setting up a Connected Centre and the moment when we can see its effects and the community can start benefiting from it. That’s the same interval between access and use, between providing tech and connectivity and ensuring that they serve some kind of purpose, an interval where a lot needs to happen and that can determine whether objectives, expectations, needs, and desires are met.
A Connected Centre comes with expectations, both from host and refugee communities and humanitarian organizations. We all hope that access to technology can lead to a capital A type of Access, that connectivity transforms into connection, that skills and instruments translate into opportunity, that underground fiber optic cables can become pathways towards self-reliance and resilience.
Often, however, enhanced digital literacy, education or job opportunities are not a direct, given or immediate result of a Connected Centre being built, but they can be indirect future outcomes, together with many expected and unexpected others, if the right conditions are in place. The evaluation of UNHCR’s Community Technology Access (CTA) program provides important lessons and recommendations to ensure that CTAs don’t only do what they say, i.e. provide access to technology, and concludes that technology per se is not enough to bridge the digital divide and bring everyone up to the same speed and closer to equal chances. For a CTA to do this, it needs to fit within the local context, understand the needs and demands as well as the larger socio-economic environment, and have the ongoing support of different players.
To add on these best practices, through the funded projects we gathered some ideas and insights on how we can create and encourage the right ecosystem for a connected centre to thrive. Rather than an inclusive list of tips that apply across the board tips, this is more of a snapshot of successful practices in setting up Connected Centres as they emerged throughout the Fund and largely thanks to CTA projects and experiments in Mauritania and Venezuela.
We suggest focusing on these distinct actions related to building connected centres:
- Communicate, collaborate, and co-design: Connected centres are a collective effort and one that needs constant communication with the communities involved or targeted in the project. For both of the Fund’s projects, Mauritania and Venezuela, the idea of connected centres came from refugee communities and everything was done in consultation with them. This allowed UNHCR operations and the local communities to be on the same page regarding goals and expectations, and make adjustments when needed.
- Find a focus (competences, skills, themes): Both projects did not provide a general ICT Training in their centres but they either had a thematic focus or a skill set in mind. They understood in fact that improving refugees’ livelihoods, future opportunities, and wellbeing is not simply achieved by providing basic digital literacy. Training should focus on skills that are in demand in a specific context specific or specific challenges that the community faces. In Caracas, Venezuela, where urban refugees were exposed to particular protection risks and increased vulnerability, the training focused on privacy and how to stay safe online. In Mauritania, the refugees discussed how poor communication and lack of information affected their decision-making and felt that there was a need to change that. Throughout the training, they acquired key competencies and are now creating and testing a digital platform to improve communication in the communities, but also with UNHCR and other partners.
- Define a narrow target but engage the entire community: Training should be specific to the needs of participants and designed with these in mind. However, whether the training is for youth, women or disabled persons, it is equally important that the broader community is to some extent engaged and supportive. In other words, in order to guarantee the functioning and sustainability of the centre and its activities, ownership and buy-in are crucial. This can be done by extending training to other groups; or facilitating their access to specific services (internet café, printing, etc).
- Make a centre out of the centre: Without community and connection (not only digital), but there is also very little left to a Community Connected Centre. A centre should go beyond itself, and beyond the tech part to create a space for discussion and exchange around both what happens online and offline. In Venezuela, the training on privacy and digital risks was also a pretext to discuss, offline, about other forms of exploitation and abuse and share resources and provide support with and among participants.
- Create a ripple effect: What is done and learned within the centre should not stay there if we want the larger community to also have benefits. In Venezuela, for example, youth that received training on digital safety and good online practices, were then assigned to design their own project to bring some of their learning and build capacity in their respective communities.
Long live the ICT Centre
In hindsight, the initial reaction to Connected Centres had little to do with idea and loads to do with ideals. Innovation is a word of promises and magic, it evokes creativity, imagination, and invention, and it seemed that Connected Centres were defying the very definition of innovation. However, looking at these two very different examples of Community Centres seems to suggest that a lot can be achieved in connecting the most vulnerable populations if we allow things to happen at the margins of innovation. After all, one of the greatest opportunities of this first Fund was to be able to challenge our own definitions around innovation and connectivity and see how they are interpreted in each context and in which forms they manifest.
True, half of them were Connected Centres, but they all differed in how they would have been set up, why, and for whom, and they all reflected a different reality. Therefore, when deciding whether a solution is appropriate we should focus not so much on the solution itself, but rather on the context where it is applied. Likewise, it is not the definitions that matter, but how they are interpreted and how meaning is (and should be) negotiated.
We have been rotating around the Connected Centres and realised that they are a universe of their own, yet they are all but universal. But what if it’s not an ICT centre? What was the other type of solutions proposed? Stay tuned as we look at the other half, and see what happens when connectivity is not another Connected Community Centre.
If you are curious about the other ideas, projects, and approaches tested through the 2018 Community Connectivity Fund you can read more here.
Have you been experimenting with ICT Centre solutions and want to share your experience with us? You can send us an e-mail at hqconref@unhcr.org
