222 – The Five Interns of Christmas

[00:00:07] Lucie: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name is Lucie Hazelgrove Planel, I’m a Social Impact Scientist and anthropologist, and I’m here today with David Stern, one of the co-founding directors of IDEMS.

Hi David. 

[00:00:17] David: Happy holidays. It’s the festive season and time for a festive special. We’ve got a nice topic because we’re very fortunate that through a very interesting process called Float, we’ve just got a small grant, which is enabling us to be like Santa, giving out internships to our partners. It is an amazing, you know, a little bit of money, about $7,000.

But this actually goes a long way in some of the contexts we’re working, where we’re going to be able to provide partners with interns for just a few months to work on building technologies or supporting the technologies they’re building in ways that I think could be fascinating.

[00:01:03] Lucie: Yeah, exactly. Just to give a bit of context, so in West Africa, a lot of the partners that we work with are developing digital tools for their communities, for their farming communities, or other types of communities. There’s a lot who have already developed things, there are some who are in the development phase and there are some who would really benefit from community tech type projects but they haven’t yet got to that phase.

So yeah, there’s an idea, well, we now have funding for this internship project, how to call it.

[00:01:31] David: That’s sort of very much how I think of it. We just have little bits of funding, we can go to our partners and say, we could run an internship with you where we could recruit locally, a few interns for a number of months, give them then the mentorship, and actually support the development of the community tech. And then this feeds into, then we got a larger amount of $45,000 from the same funder to hold this workshop around community tech, African community tech for agroecology.

The hope is that then those projects would come and have got further along through these internships and the mentorship that goes with that, so that when they present at this workshop, they’re actually really able to present something in a way that captures the imagination of the other participants.

[00:02:21] Lucie: And at this workshop that you were just mentioning, the aim is that tech experts or software developers, perhaps, let’s say, internationally as well as African, people who know the context, well, know the African context and know the tech context, so they can get richer ideas and they can see how what they’re doing actually fits into much bigger pictures of things going on globally.

[00:02:42] David: Absolutely. Yes, so it’s this really nice combination of different sort of opportunities around this, and I think what we suggested was to do three sets. And with the $7,000, we actually have just enough to do that, to do a little bit in Mali, a little bit in Niger, and a little bit in Kenya.

We have partners who are really keen on this, so the next step, early in the new year will be to work with those partners, see if we can recruit interns, go through this process, and yeah, it’s just wonderful to be like Santa Claus sort of, you know, giving one intern working here, two interns here, three interns there, it’s gonna gonna be great.

[00:03:21] Lucie: With the end goal being ideally supporting projects to develop what they already have in head or already have on the computers.

[00:03:29] David: And all of the groups we’re suggesting working with already have something, no one’s starting from scratch. But all of them also have limitations because they just need manpower to work on them, skilled manpower to do this. And so to be able to bring this together and, actually in each case, just to have that little push forward.

In one case, it’s this sort of shift from having what is currently in ODK, this Open Data Kit structures where they already designed the data which is collected and so on, but putting that into an Android app, which is therefore better for farmers and can have embedded the feedback, and so on. That’s that transition.

So having a set of interns who we can support to work on that is gonna be really exciting, and that’s in Mali. In Niger, it’s very much this idea that you’ve got this farmer federation app, which has been built, which is wonderful, but has been built by a single developer and they’ve now got this long list of things that they’d like to do, a big backlog of tasks.

So getting a set of interns now working with that developer to be able to support him, enable them to go beyond a sort of project, which is just an individual developer to having a team of young people working on something under the lead developer. That’s what we can hope to achieve there.

And in Kenya, of course, it’s related to the Agroecology Hub itself and Manor House where they’ve been looking to integrate technology in certain ways. And, again, they’ve had this bit of support, but having people who would actually be there, being able to be on the ground supporting the data collection, making sure this is going through. And building that out into an app as well, which is really serving their needs, is something which I think is, it is really exciting that these three things could be happening at the same time. And of course we can try and bring the links between them. 

[00:05:23] Lucie: Exactly.

[00:05:24] David: This is $7,000 going a long way. Of course, we are able to do this because all this fits into our Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems work. So our time supporting these processes is sort of covered and it’s just little bit of extra funding to be able to enable the partners to have people.

[00:05:47] Lucie: Yeah. And what you mentioned about sort of connecting, you know, East Africa and West Africa, it’s something that you’ve been wanting to do for a long time, I know.

[00:05:55] David: And the workshop is a genuine opportunity to do this. First, we really need to thank Float, which is funded by the 11th Hour, amazing initiative. And really for us putting this together is something where there’s lots of reasons why the workshop is exciting, but I’m really excited about the fact we’ve just got this little bit of extra funding to be able to do these internships alongside it, it’s great.

[00:06:21] Lucie: Yeah, it should be good to be able to announce that to the partners.

[00:06:24] David: Yes, absolutely. And as a festive special. This is a little, a little gift which we’ve received from the funders and then we’re able to pass on.

[00:06:35] Lucie: Do you ever feel any of the other projects, or like successful grants, do you ever feel like they’re gifts or presents?

[00:06:43] David: It’s interesting, most of them are hard work. This one feels like it because it’s something we want to be doing and, you know, justifying these little bits of funding is difficult. And we didn’t expect this in the way that the Float worked. It was a very interesting process, we put in for the workshop and then there was a sort of discovery round to get small bits of funding. And so we put this as an additional idea. 

[00:07:06] Lucie: And just a few days before the deadline, I think too. 

[00:07:09] David: Yeah, it was just before, and it was actually a comment, so the whole Float process had all these feedback loops.

[00:07:15] Lucie: Within the community of other people wanting funding.

[00:07:18] David: Yeah and one of the people who sort of brought that said, but the capacity building stuff, which you’re saying is a stretch goal or something additional, that’s worth its own project. And they said that just a little while before the deadline to put things in. I thought, you know, they’re right, if we just did a little bit more, we could just do a separate project on that, and it got funded and so yeah, it feels like a gift.

[00:07:40] Lucie: And capacity building is something that IDEMS is always very, very interested in, that really believes that it’s the way forward to having more impact, increasing impact. 

[00:07:49] David: Exactly. I mean, it’s my passion. I am, you know, I’m an educator at heart. This is what I believe in, it’s what I love, it’s the core of what I want be doing. 

[00:07:59] Lucie: That’s why it’s like a present, because you’re finally able to do just that.

[00:08:05] David: It’s just a bit of capacity building on the side. Wonderful.

So, you know, taking a British Christmas dinner, this is your pigs and blanket, your special bit on the side.

[00:08:21] Lucie: And pigs in blanket are, I think, sausages wrapped in bacon.

[00:08:25] David: Yes, which is a real treat alongside everything else you’ve got, totally unnecessary, but delicious to add to the mix.

[00:08:34] Lucie: I’m glad you’re planning your Christmas meal already.

[00:08:37] David: Well, of course, this year we are in Italy, so it’s not gonna be part of my Christmas meal here, there are different traditions here, and I like the Italian food and traditions as well. But they don’t have pigs in blanket for a Christmas meal. Which is a bit of a shame because that’s what this is.

[00:08:52] Lucie: Okay. Well, I guess happy Christmas everybody and have a good festive season.

[00:08:59] David: Yes, happy Christmas, have a wonderful holidays, and we’ll see people in the new year.

[00:09:05] Lucie: Great. See you then.

[00:09:07] David: Thanks.