dustry in more countries. Working in Africa and India, I have personally met many talented developers and small software companies committed to working with NGOs. More opportunities and resources must be provided by governments and funding agencies to encourage them to serve the nonprofit sector. This could help bootstrap IT service businesses in countries with limited access to outside markets. Enabling these relationships requires a better social network connecting NGOs, soft-ware-training institutes, fledgling software companies, and funding sources, including (social) venture capital.

Better software-development tools would also help, particularly for mobile applications. Microsoft’s .NET framework is a well-integrated, well-documented, full-featured proprietary development platform for which there is significant infrastructure worldwide for developer training and support. However, many NGOs are unwilling to pay license fees for software and uncomfortable using pirated software and may oppose being tied to a particular operating system. As a result, there is a notable push by NGOs toward open source. For mobile applications, more openness and standardization are sorely needed, as is better support for cross-platform development. Recent efforts by Apple, Google, and Nokia to provide more open development platforms seem to be a step in the right direction.

In terms of application software, neither the shrink-wrap nor the pro-prietary-software-plus-services model has worked for rural NGOs. Providing

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a suite of useful open source applications could be an effective alternative, potentially having a cascading positive effect on local economic development. Each open source application could create a number of opportunities for local IT companies to serve NGOs, each in turn serving a number of local communities and individuals. This is the kind of public good that governments and donors should provide.

Several open source applications have been developed for NGOs, including for managing microfinance programs ( www.mifos.org) and maintaining electronic health records (www. openmrs.org). This trend allows local software providers to focus on adding value, including customization, local-

ization, installation, maintenance, and support. Improvements and additions to the code can later be fed back to the main branch, lowering the barrier to entry for future implementers. Working on such globally distributed projects requires effective collaboration-and-governance tools that work across time zones and cultures.

Finally, the global research and development community must address the challenges of computing in the rural developing world, one of the last frontiers of computing adoption. Researchers working in this field have already provided novel insights into shared computing, interfaces for semiliterate users, and long-distance networking technologies for reaching remote locations.

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Working systems

To illustrate these concepts, I describe two systems—Self-Help MIS and Digital ICS—my students and I built in collaboration with rural NGOs and CBOs. These systems demonstrate how information technology is being used to automate existing processes and provide new opportunities for development. While a formal long-term evaluation is pending, initial results have been positive and generated additional demand from other civil society organizations. (For more, please see ^{13, 18}).

Self-Help MIS. Self-help groups, or

SHGs, are semi-independent microfinance groups located throughout rural and peri-urban India. They usually consist of 15 to 20 members, mostly women (see Figure 2). Group members save money during regular group meetings, rotating the accumulated capital in the form of loans that are repaid with interest, increasing the group’s corpus. When the total amount becomes too much for the SHG to manage, it is disbursed back to the group members. The cycle then starts again, sometimes with the reshuffling of members among groups. SHGs are promoted by NGOs, banks, farmer groups, individuals, and government agencies in India. Beside the immediate benefit of providing access to financial services, SHGs are also a mechanism for organizing other community development activities.

Working with SHGs is attractive for local banks, as they lessen the need to build physical branch offices in remote areas and thereby reduce the cost of providing financial services. However, banks often have no way to address SHG quality and history, making it difficult to determine the risks associated with various products and services (such as the lending of money). Due to limited literacy and education, many SHGs keep inconsistent and/or incomplete records. Many need the help of literate people, sometimes the field staff of a local NGO, to maintain their records

 

figure 2: field staff capturing data from a self-help-group meeting.