Sujata Gamage’s presentation is here.

Rohan Samarajiva’s talk on policy entrepreneurship is here.

Development research is also like that. The true effects may be seen 25 years later, but by that time the unit that funded the research may no longer exist. The Information Science Division of the International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC) supported Dr Ravindra Fernando to establish the National Poison Information Center somewhere in the 1980s. Here is testimony in 2012 from someone who had no direct contact with IDRC about its effects:

As a young intern in the early 1990s, working in a Base Hospital in Nuwara Eliya, we had to treat many patients who arrived in hospital after poisoning. They were mostly poor people working in the estates or who were in vegetable cultivation. Poisons, especially insecticides and weedicides were household items for many of them. Some died, especially those who came late to hospital, but many survived.

Relatives of those who died gradually accepted the fate of the deceased; they said it was the wish of the gods. They thanked us for our heroic efforts, often in the middle of the night to save their kith and kin.

For the families of those who survived, we were the gods who performed a miracle. It was the humble gratitude of these poor people who kept us going. Little would they have known that it was not us but science that saved their lives. The science on the principles of management of poisoning was put into pen by the renowned academic and the most senior Professor of Forensic Medicine of the University of Colombo, Prof. Ravindra Fernando who was also the pioneer who started the National Poisons Information Centre many years ago.

And the reviewer goes on to describe the author, including the funding support from IDRC. The Information Sciences Division is no more. The program officer who approved the project has long moved on. But the fact that Canadian tax payers’ money continues to save lives is acknowledged.

No review of a book is complete without a few words on the man whose pen was behind the writing. Professor Ravindra Fernando, my beloved teacher, qualified as a doctor with M.B.B.S. (Ceylon) from the University of Sri Lanka in 1975. He passed his Diploma in Medical Jurisprudence (Clinical and Pathology) London in 1980. He also has the degrees of FRCP from the Royal Colleges of Physicians, London, Edinburgh and Glasgow, FRCPath.(UK), MD (Sri Lanka), FCCP and FCCGP. He is the recipient of WHO Fellowships on ‘Medical Education’. He has over 80 academic publications and presentations to his credit and has written over 15 books, published in Sri Lanka and abroad.

He has held many prestigious positions including as the President of the Asia Pacific Association of Medical Toxicology, the founder Secretary General of the Indo-Pacific Association of Law, Medicine and Science, President of the Sri Lanka Medical Association, President of the Ceylon College of Physicians, President of the College of Forensic Pathologists of Sri Lanka and the Chairman of the Board of Studies in Forensic Medicine, Post Graduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo. Most of all he is the Father of the National Poisons Information Centre, which he established in the General Hospital, Colombo using funds mobilised from his own personal efforts through the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada and other donors.

Anyway, Chanuka Wattegama has written about all this in the Daily Mirror, and included references to two of our projects:

The aim of the Last-Mile Hazard Warning System, an IDRC supported joint research project of Sarvodaya and LIRNEasia immediately after the 2004 tsunami, was to deploy various alert and notification wireless technologies intended to reduce the vulnerability of local communities to natural and manmade hazards in Sri Lanka. Adopting an ‘all-hazards, all-media’ approach, designed around a set of five wireless communication technologies: addressable satellite radios for emergency alerting, remote alarm devices, mobile phones, fixed phones and VSATs this research evaluated the pros and cons of each technology. The pilot project involved deployment, training, and field-testing of the technologies, in various combinations, across 32 tsunami-affected villages, using the ‘Common Alerting Protocol1’ (CAP) for data interchange with content provided in three languages (English, Sinhala and Tamil). The research concluded that the most reliable means of warning people was a mix of satellite and mobile phones.

LIRNEasia’s Knowledge to Innovation in Government Services is based on the belief that policy initiatives on innovations in the developing world, should be about making the governments innovative to provide infrastructural services. The objective of this project is to link 330 local government bodies to a single network enabling them to share knowledge on solid waste management, one of the key issues faced by all. The project tests the research hypothesis that these linkages may lead to a sustainable culture of innovation.

Influence on telecommunications policy reform has been one of the strongest areas of the program’s outcomes, at least in terms of explicit causality, specifically from the work of LIRNEasia.  According to many informants, however, LIRNEasia, is a special case given the organizational culture, the numbers of people devoted to working almost exclusively on policy issues, the specific policy arena in which they work, and the strong personality at the center of the group. While LIRNEasia successes are notable, the external review panel urges the program not to set LIRNEasia as a standard for outcomes, since their achievements would be difficult to replicate elsewhere.

The quotation has been taken from the Findings Brief, prepared by the IDRC Evaluation Unit, though the same sentiments are also found in the External Review Report.

This time the focus was on “what next.” Implicit was the question whether we need to now focus on applications since the access problem had been solved. In my first intervention I used data from Burma/Myanmar to show that the access problem had not been solved everywhere (interestingly this resonated with Amartya Sen who had spent his youth there). Many more interesting things were said particularly by the other Nobel Laureate in the room, Michael Spence (I have a LBO column coming based on that discussion), but still the phrase that stuck in my mind was that of Laurent Elder: incentives, not intervention.

Here is what Hernan Galperin of DIRSI had commented. He has included all the links to the real-time blogging and commenting that Ethan Zuckerman did.

The proposition won. I was the proponent, so not entirely unbiased, but it did, as evidenced by the cheering and the congratulations that followed. Given this was a topic that fully resonated with LIRNEasia’s 2008-10 research program, it was understandable that we won. The slides that were used are here.

In the opening statement, I showed that the mobile is the only ICT actually reaching the poor and that it is both transforming their lives and they are transforming it. I also showed that there was some “more-than-voice” use even now, but the immense potential was evident if we looked at how different age cohorts were with regard to knowledge, trial and use.

The opponent Rafal Rohozinski’s arguments can be viewed in the following clip: 

Of course, well argued facts do not win debates. What did was vicious rebuttal (video clip  below), including every rhetorical trick in the book. Sadly, all that will remain of this debate in people’s memories a few months down the road is my challenge to my opponent to save his remaining braincells by throwing the evil mobile on the ground and and stamping it to smithereens. Then and only then, I said, I will take his arguments seriously.

It is not for nothing that I was introduced as Rohan “Pit Bull” Samarajiva.

She answered, saying that the good use made of resources entrusted to LIRNEasia could be illustrated through three examples:
1. The 2007 intervention that resulted in the rolling back of the regressive LKR 50 tax that was to be imposed by the government of Sri Lanka on all SIMs, resulting in all mobile users paying below LKR 1800 keeping more money in their pockets and not being blocked from teleuse.
2. The multi-year effort to remove distortions from the Indian Universal Service funding mechanism that collected money from those at the bottom at the pyramid and did not spend it as intended, directing most of it to an inefficient government-owned incumbent.
3. The protracted effort to convince the government of Indonesia that leased line prices that were 48 times that of India were harmful to the ICT sector and the economy, resulting in the halving of these prices.

We are ratcheting up our emphasis on evaluation now that we have a substantial body of work to talk about. A key element in this will be Chanuka Wattegama’s participation in the most important evaluation training program currently being offered, the International Program for Development Evaluation Training offered every Summer at Carleton University in Ottawa, with the cooperation of the World Bank and IDRC. Chanuka has been selected for a scholarship through a competitive process. Our congratulations to him.

Sponsored by the IDRC, Canada, the conference will bring together distinguished scholars and practitioners who are experts in the area to address essential issues in regulations through conceptual and empirical studies.

The conference will address the following questions: Does regulation work? What kind of regulation works? What kinds don’t work? Why do some forms of regulation work and not others? How do we know whether they work or not? How do we isolate the effects of different political, economic and legal contexts? Are there systematic differences among water, telecommunications, energy and transport infrastructure that necessitate particular regulatory design?

Proposals including a short abstract (500 words), professional position and contact email address must reach the organizers by 5 December 2008. Please send proposals to regulate[at]hku.hk. A limited number of travel grants covering the cost of travel, accommodation, and meals are available to participants on a competitive basis.

More information on the conference, including its tentative program, can be found here.

Development organizations are pressed to demonstrate that their programs result in significant lasting changes in the well-being of their intended beneficiaries. However, such “impacts” are often the product of a confluence of events for which no single agency or group of agencies can realistically claim full credit. As a result, assessing development impacts is problematic, yet many organizations continue to struggle to measure results far beyond the reach of their programs.

Outcome Mapping is one methodology used to address this issue. The originality of this approach lies in its shift away from assessing the products of a program to focus on changes in behaviour, relationships, actions, and activities in the people, groups, and organizations it works with directly. In doing so, Outcome Mapping debunks many of the myths about measuring impact. It will help a program be specific about the actors it targets, the changes it expects to see, and the strategies it employs and, as a result, be more effective in terms of the results it achieves.

This video, by International Development Research Center (IDRC) Canada, is based on the workshop on ‘Evaluation’ for their partners held in Kuala Lumpur, last November. Outcome Mapping was a key theme discussed at the workshop.

More about Outcome Mapping from IDRC website.

‘BSNL’s monopoly over infrastructure a hindrance to growth’ – Financial Express (India)

Rural connectivity is now the focus of every telecommunication player in the country. Almost all stakeholders, from handset manufacturers to service providers, believe that the next wave of growth is in the rural areas.”However, India’s roll out (of telecom services) in rural areas has been slow. BSNL has the backbone infrastructure but is not yet ready to share it with private players,” he added.

BSNL should be made to share its fibre and access networks, Samarajiva said. With shared infrastructure and innovation in marketing, costs can be brought down further, he said. Moreover, telecom companies should also shift their focus from calculating average revenue per user (Arpu) to average margin per user (Ampu), he added.

Also at:  http://asia.tmcnet.com/news/2007/12/26/3184529.htm
http://in.news.yahoo.com/071226/203/6ovtq.html
http://in.biz.yahoo.com/071226/203/6ovva.html

Book also discussed at Yahoo Tech Group forum.

‘Fact or fiction: Telecommunications in Asia By Liffy Thomas’ – Ergo (the Hindu, India)

At a time when GSM operators, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) are at an imbroglio over spectrum allocation, Prof Rohan Samarajiva’s book, “ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks”, makes for a timely read. In Chennai for the launch of the book, Samarajiva, Executive Director of LIRNEasia and former Director General of Telecommunications in Sri Lanka, spoke to Liffy Thomas.

BOOK EXTRACT: ‘Subsidising The Smart Way’ – Business World Magazine (India)The Latin American experience holds lessons for the development of rural telephony in Asia, says Harsha De Silva

The supply of telephony has traditionally been skewed towards the urban affluent as opposed to the rural poor. The literature describes this bias as having been caused by a ‘market efficiency gap’ and an ‘access gap’. The market efficiency gap is the difference between what markets achieve under existing conditions and what they can achieve if barriers are removed. This gap can be bridged through effective competition, private provision of services, and market-oriented policies and regulations that create a level playing field for new entrants. The access gap refers to people and places that remain beyond limits of the market due to inadequate income levels or its skewed distribution. Bridging this gap needs subsidies to encourage service providers to enter these areas.

‘Policies for ICT’ – New India Express (Chennai, India) 

WHILE the common perception remains that India has the lowest mobile phone tariffs, other countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have lower tariffs than India, Rohan Samarajiva, executive director, Lirne Asia, said on Tuesday.

Talking about his new book ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia – Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks, he said, when compared to all these countries, India’s cost is much higher.

The Deccan Chronicle, Chennai, 16.12.07:

 Policies and regulations are the main bottlenecks blocking the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure in India, according to Prof Ashok Jhujhunwala, Telecom and Networks (TeNet) Group, IIT, Madras.

Releasing the book ‘ICT Infrastructure in Emerging Asia: Policy and Regulatory Roadblocks’, a collection of articles edited by Rohan Samarajiva and Ayesha Zainudeen, ICT experts, here on Sunday, Prof Jhunjhunwala said any technological problems associated with ICT could be sorted out by scientists within two to three years. “But the policy-makers and regulators fail to move ahead with the times. We are living in an era when things which were socially desirable once have become commercial to the core,” the professor said. He pointed out that ICT has the potential of helping developing countries tackle a wide range of health, social, and economic problems.

“While urban India is marching rapidly ahead, rural India is being left behind. We have to use ICT to accelerate the growth of rural India,” said Dr Jhunjhunwala. Elaborating on the pace of growth of ICT, Dr Jhunjhunwala said the next two years will see payments through mobile phones catching up all over the country.

“Instead of going to ATM centres or Banks, you can have cash transactions through your mobile phones,” he said. Dr Samarajiva said the book was a step forward in identifying the reasons for under-connectivity in emerging Asia. “The book itself is an introduction, not a conclusion. It reports the findings of a cutting edge demand-side survey of telecom use at the ‘bottom of a pyramid’ in India and Sri Lanka,” said Dr Samarajiva, a former director general of Sri lanka Telecommunications.

He said there is enough scope to bring down telecom charges. “It is the outdated policies of the governments in the region which are playing havoc with the communication revolution. This is aggravating the digital divide which will lead to major catastrophe,” he said.

The publication of the book was co-funded by the IDRC and Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

More information on the book can be found on the book page.