Institute For The Future

Designing Tech for Social Change Part II

If you missed Part I, click here.

In July I spent a few days around the Co-Creation Hub in Lagos, Nigeria. The CcHUB, or simply, the Hub, is the hottest, newest, co-creation, co-working, and innovation hub. It’s aim is to find tech-based solutions to Nigeria’s challenges. Since it opened in September of last year, it is abuzz with young energy and brilliant entrepreneurs.

On my final day in Lagos I sat down with co-Founder and Director of Programmes at the CcHUB, Femi Longe, to hear more about how it all happens.

You call them start-ups, the CcHub calls them solutions:

The Hub is currently mentoring 21 solutions. Each start-up is guided through the entire process of product and business plan development into the product launch, and beyond. The mentoring happens by one of six core members of the Hub. In the past week the Hub brought in their first intern, a bright young woman from George Washington University, who is going to be working with two solutions. One of them is a mobile education app aiming to ensuring that Nigerian culture as well as traditional history, institutions, and knowledge are still being taught in schools. Eventually they want to expand their app to the whole of Africa, so that whatever country you are in you can open a tab for your country and have access to local education tools.

BudgIT 

When I asked Femi to tell me about his favorite or most exciting solution, he quickly began talking about BudgIT. BudgIT was first conceived of in March of 2011 during an Open Living Lab (explained in Part 1) focused on democracy in Nigeria. The founder of BudgIT—a young guy working in a bank—noted that Nigeria's current budget isn't presented in a way that is clear and easily understood by your average person, and he felt that this blocked proper civic engagement. After winning 2nd place in the Lab, and receiving some money to build and launch the app, BudgIT went live 6 months later in September of 2011.

BudgIT uses a simple approach of turning budget documents into infographics. As an avid tweeter however, BudgIT founder quickly saw how much people loved it when he tweeted bits and pieces of the budget, and was quick to make that part of his overall strategy. BudgIT's tweeting (@budgITng, now with over 4,000 followers) helped turn the Occupy Nigeria Movement from being purely about the fuel hike into a broader discussion about the government budget. One of BudgITng’s most popular tweets was about the President’s 1billion naira annual food budget! For the first time Nigerians could see where the government money was actually going, and could back up demands that the government cut back on other expenses in order to keep the fuel subsidy many Nigerians rely on.

The next step for BudgIT was quite clear, create the Budget Cut app that allows individuals to alter Nigeria’s budgets in order to see where things can be cut to make space for other funding opportunities. In the case of Occupy Nigeria, if the government said they needed to end the fuel subsidy in order to properly run the government, Budget Cut wanted to give civil society a chance to see for themselves. The app has a viral component to it, through a Facebook share plug in. Suddenly Nigerians were seeing how their friends had saved the government 800 billion naira without having to end the fuel subsidy.

Exciting positive results:

Individual Nigerian states have now begun to reach out to BudgIT to help them make their own budgets more transparent and open to the public.  Some states have even approached BudgIT to look into participatory budgeting options.

When the Minister of Communication Technology gives speeches on the role that technology can play to advance development in Nigeria, she regularly refers to BudgIT.

Women and tech in Nigeria:

I, of course, had to ask Femi what he was doing to bring more women into the fold. Of the 21 solutions, there are 2 that Femi can recollect as being led by women. He mentioned that the winner of the Lab that grew Budgit was a woman, but her solution has not yet been launched.

Femi answered that they are not quite a year old, so they are still learning what works and doesn't work. While he is in discussion with an organization that deals with women and technology, their main priority is more focused on staying productive and being able to provide the necessary tools for success. I wish I had taken the time to mention that while they may be a young organization, if this isn't addressed early as part of their core principle, it might be too late. And, for true social change and progress, both parties need to be equally represented from the beginning.

Femi noted that the CEO of the Internet company that provides the CcHub with free Wi-Fi is a woman, and a Nigerian tech startup that is providing them funding for an upcoming Lab is also run by a woman.

Of the 6 people who work at the core of the Hub as full-time members, 1 is a woman. But let me not paint a picture that I never saw women at the Hub. Everyday I was there I saw women with their heads in their computers. Sometimes 2, sometimes 5, sometimes more. But at most I would say they represented 10% of the daily Hub community.

Femi and I talked a bit about how this problem isn't just local to Nigeria, or even Africa—despite the fact that they most certainly face different reasons as to why women are left out of the engineering space—and that Silicon Valley is still a man's place. Femi explained that the gender imbalance happens long before someone reaches the level of joining the CcHUB. When he studied Electronics & Electrical Engineering at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, in a class of about 128 students there were maybe 8 women. He also explained that for women to become entrepreneurs living ‘insecure’ lives, as in, deciding the 9-5 isn't right for them, is very unusual. Nigerian women are expected to get regular jobs and live secure normal lives that, I suppose, can lead to productive child rearing.

We finished off the issue of gender equality with a mutual shrug. 

About an hour later my taxi called to say he was waiting to take me to the airport and my 24-hour journey back to California began.