Wrote this post for Plan International (my employer) on the occasion of Plan endorsing the Principles for Digital Development.
The fictional kingdom of Wakanda, in the box-office hit Black Panther, is a highly technologically advanced, affluent, closed-off kingdom. To outsiders, it presents itself as poor, partly because its rulers don’t want the kingdom’s powerful technology to end up in the wrong hands. As the story unfolds, it becomes evident that the Wakandans' concerns regarding misuse of their technology are valid.
Isolation, however, becomes increasingly untenable. At the end of the film, Black Panther – now rightfully the kingdom’s ruler – decides to open up and share their technological advances with the world.
In ending their isolation and embarking on a new road to use their tech for good, one can only hope the Wakandans are following the Principles for Digital Development.
The power of tech for good
Designed to help development practitioners successfully integrate technology into programming, they are a set of nine best practice guidelines, written for and by international development actors. To date, they have been endorsed by over 100 UN agencies, INGOs, tech companies, and civil society groups. And today, Plan International has joined that community by formally endorsing the Principles.
Much like the Wakandans, we at Plan International believe in the power of tech for good and want to use it to advance children’s rights and equality for girls all over the world. We know it can work: we have seen first hand how an app is preventing child marriages in Bangladesh, how a predictive text keyboard is breaking gender stereotypes, and how virtual learning environments are making education accessible to girls who would otherwise be left without.
But we are also aware of the risks. Risks related to dealing with data on vulnerable groups, the harassment and bullying that girls face online, and the potential of technology, and particularly artificial intelligence, to further entrench gender inequality, by reproducing current and historical biases.
The potential benefits outweigh the risks, but only when technology is used thoughtfully and responsibly. Which is where the Principles of Digital Development come in, as best practice guidelines that will help us use digital technologies increasingly effectively and responsibly so that 100 million girls can learn, lead, decide and thrive.
Using the Principles to steer our work
Already, the Principles have guided our extensive work on digital birth registration, and, more recently, our ground-breaking work on OpenCRVS, a software platform for rights-based civil registration and vital statistics.
Central to the latter is the principle of openness. Recognising the need to create a global good that can be re-used and improved over time, OpenCRVS will be built on open source technology. The system will also be built on the principles of open standards and open architecture so that it can work with and complement existing systems of registration.
How we practice the Principles is further evident in our Free To Be crowdsourced city safety maps, which recently launched in 5 cities around the world following a successful pilot in Melbourne. At the heart of the initiative has been designing with the user, i.e. girls and young women.
“I was proud to be part of developing Free to Be because it’s designed by young women like me, for young women, to help make our streets safer,” said Alice Rummery, a university student who helped co-design the Sydney city safety map for Plan International Australia. “I don’t want to have to change my behaviour so that I’m not harassed. I want decision makers, authorities and men to act.”
Digital Principles with a gender lens
Our endorsement of the Principles for Digital Development is a statement of how we intend to use tech for good. But we also intend to give back to the Principles community by looking at the Principles through the lens of gender.
Given the digital gender gap, a key question for us not only how we can use tech for good, but how we can and must use tech to further gender equality and bridge the digital divide. This involves not just designing with the user, but designing with girls and women; not just understanding the ecosystem, but also its gendered dimensions; not just being data-driven, but recognising that there are significant gaps when it comes to availability of gender-disaggregated data.
Gender inequalities in the real world are reflected in the digital. So while Plan International doesn’t have the revolutionary high tech of Wakanda with which to make the world a better place, we do have expertise and insights on patriarchal structures and how to break these, both online and off. And that’s something the kingdom of Wakanda could learn from too.