A Special Power for
TECH FOR GOOD The Web is Safe • Digital Truth Our Kids are Safe • Connecting People Connecting Things • Connecting Health • Connecting Farming
Ever yone A Changemaker ™
A Special Power for
TECH FOR GOOD There are two forces driving the world’s transformation. They are both accelerating exponentially, and each feeds the other. They are: (1) the rate of change and (2) the extent and degree of interconnection. These drivers create the tech tools they need—which, of course, only further accelerate change and connection. Social entrepreneurs are critical to this unfolding history. They ensure that society’s new tech infrastructure works well—and works well to best serve the good of all, now and long term. All parts of the Ashoka community are engaged. In creating key institutions such as Wikipedia. In creating and defending the necessary legal, economic, and organizational framework. In putting in place new mechanisms to ensure that the giant, instantaneous flows of information are truthful. In enabling all people, starting with children, to be digitally literate and therefore both safe and fully able to benefit. This paper gives examples of all these contributions. Ashoka Fellows are also helping key sectors of society use these new synaptic tools to connect many, many previously fragmented elements—with many big benefits. Here we take health and farming as examples.
This is Ashoka’s special power at work. That power flows from the fact that Ashoka is the global community of most of the world’s truly leading social entrepreneurs and their partners. It is a community of trust and omnidirectional collaboration. The magnetic attraction of this community, much more than a network effect, is strengthening as (1) the community’s team of teams architecture grows new sinews and effectiveness and (2) the historic emergence of the “everyone a changemaker” world gives the members, especially if working together, opportunities to be midwives to big history.
HELP BUILD THE “EVERYONE A CHANGEMAKER” WORLD www.ashoka.org
PROTECTING THE WEB A Constitution for the Internet
When the time came to draft an important new “Internet bill of rights,” Brazilians took matters into their own hands.
Defending the Internet There are many, many threats to an open, accessible, and private internet. TIFFINIY CHENG (elected in 2016) and partners (including Nick Reville (elected 2009)) and their organization, The Internet Defense League (IDL), have shown how to use the internet to save the internet and thereby protect online rights and continue to make possible true, bottom-up civic engagement. The IDL now has over 1.5 million members clustered into microteams and local chapters across most of the continents. The IDL has had a number of dramatic successes. When the cable industry sought to end net neutrality through regulations, four million IDL calls overwhelmed the regulators on IDL’s Internet Slow-down Day. One hundred thousand websites displayed the
Brazilian Fellow RONALDO LEMOS (elected in 2015) led the open, collaborative (largely online) process that led to the drafting and enactment of one of the world’s first constitutions for the internet, his country’s Marco Civil da Internet. It defines many of the fundamental rights people must have in the new digital era, including privacy, freedom of speech, net neutrality, and the role of the internet in strengthening citizenship. He then helped spread it to other countries and catalyzed complementary changes in patent law and open education.
spinning icon of a stalled internet connection. The industry lost. The net needs IDL.
The protests against Sopa and Acta have shown that internet users can influence politics...The IDL wants to build on this success of grassroots activism on the Net. In the future, it should be easier to draw attention to protests. Everyone who has a website can join in.”
DIGITAL TRUTH True News In 2016, ATAKAN FOÇA, a young Turkish journalist, set out “to stop the spread of fear and doubt in times of crisis by giving people reliable sources of information.” His Teyit (meaning “confirmation” in Turkish) movement engages people and groups all across society first to flag questionable news and then to test these suspect stories using a rigorous four-stage process that actively engages citizens every step of the way. During the two and a half months of the spring 2018 elections, for example, users sent Atakan 1,460 reports of 315 cases of suspect content, of which only 45 proved accurate. In just two years, Teyit engaged 3.5 million users. 2019 has seen 14 percent further growth. They have been building their media and digital literacy as they work to bring to bear the power of truth. To further ensure media literacy and a culture of truthfulness, Atakan has also been drawing in and educating key partners in the media, academia, and citizen sector. Democracy around the world is increasingly being threatened by the decline of independent media and the rise of untrustworthy news. Recent Turkish government actions closing
Atakan Foça (Turkey) Ashoka Fellow (2017)
independent media organizations and censoring journalists have significantly accelerated this problem there. Atakan has, with remarkable speed, built Teyit into an objective, transparent, and therefore trusted, powerful force for truth. As those it touches see the challenge and become active news consumers who know the different sides of an issue and have the power of fact-checking and challenging falsehood together, more and more media organizations are being forced to retract and apologize. Indeed, increasingly leading newspapers and journalists call Teyit before going with a story. Teyit’s next step is to release an open-sourced software, called Dubito, that helps the editors scan social media and the Teyit community quickly spot misinformation that should be investigated.
In the Internet era, getting the right news is actually more difficult than ever. ... Atakan, founder of Teyit.org, has a comprehensive solution that makes this possible.”
DIGITAL TRUTH Is This Science True? How confident are you that you can tell if a scientific fact you see in an article is accurate? If you aren’t so sure, what about the rest of the public? Given the blinding rate at which information is being generated and shared across the world, we could be the most informed population ever. However, we are fast losing the fact-checking old media did for us. Instead, the audience-maximizing imperatives driving Facebook, Google, et al., favor inflammatory and emotional (more likely to be inaccurate) stories. Initially, they avoided fact-checking. As a result, society is increasingly dangerously misinformed. This is an urgent problem that requires major systems-change. This is what EMMANUEL VINCENT brings. He has proven that his system works —initially in the climate and health fields in English. He will grow the fields (extending even to history) and languages. In September, he is opening a far bigger, faster system. He is working with and beginning to change how the biggest social media
Emmanuel Vincent (France) Ashoka Fellow (2019)
firms behave. And he is catalyzing changes in the law. Here, step by step, is how Emmanuel’s Science Feedback’s global campaign to counter the dissemination of false, pseudoscientific information (usually for political or financial gain) works. Using stringent criteria, he enlists top scientists worldwide to become volunteer expert evaluators of purported scientific information circulated on the internet, building on something scientists do well, reviewing and commenting on others’ assertions. Science Feedback flags questionable content shares it with the experts, and collects and summarizes their comments and ratings. Critiques go to authors, editors, publishers, and any who have shared or help spread the report being reviewed. Although Science Feedback is still young, it has had a growing number of satisfying wins. For example, recently, Facebook accepted its verdict and directly flagged the offending article as “false” on the 15 sites (several with major followings) sponsoring it. Facebook also sent a notice to everyone
who shared the article with others inviting them to read Science Feedback’s review. If any of the offending sites publish false information again, they risk being categorized as a “repeat offender” and therefore having the algorithm cast them far down the rankings. Emmanuel has made participation something scientists want to do. By systematically convening first-class scientists to review articles, he has given the role stature. It also gives the participants a public leadership voice in their fields. More and more participating scientists mention their contribution to Science Feedback in their resumes and advise younger colleagues to join. To review many more articles and engage dramatically more contributors—and do so much faster, Science Feedback is automating the review process. Beginning in September 2019, scientists will be able to log in to the Science Feedback platform and see articles in their areas of interest in need of verification. Their online review and feedback will automatically be sent to the editor. The scientists can contribute whenever is easy for them, and the system will be able to deflate misinformation quickly after it is released and trending, thus short-circuiting its virality.
Emmanuel is working purposively to build his credibility with and understanding of Facebook, Google, YouTube, and a few others because they are unavoidably central to today’s information distribution and because they must change if there is to be a solution. As he iteratively designs services for them, he is coming to understand them more deeply. Meanwhile, Emmanuel is influencing a new European legislative framework for these platforms that will recognize their responsibility in the problem and for finding solutions. He has chosen to concentrate on European institutions because he knows they are the most concerned and stringent. As part of this work he is developing statistical measures of the responsibility of these platforms for spreading misinformation regarding health. His goal here is to help Google develop the means and then the will to track the credibility of sources and systematically relegate misleading sources to the end of the search results list—thus reversing today’s incentives. Emmanuel is both opening up the world’s digital infastructure and adding a critical ingredient—a planned one million scientists proudly engaged in ensuring the truthfulness of the knowledge on which we all must rely.
OUR KIDS A Safe Digital Life What parent, teacher or, for that matter, child does not worry about the impact of the digital immersion that now envelops children earlier and earlier? YUHYUN PARK, an Ashoka Fellow from Korea with a Harvard doctorate in computational biology, certainly did as her two children entered this new environment. She looked for but did not find helpful tools. So she decided to develop her own. She understood that fixed rules, algorithms, digital filters, or top-down parental controls on children’s online activity don’t work -- because the digital world changes so rapidly, it quickly finds ways around them. Since so much of online content kids encounter is unfiltered, they need their own internal “filters.” That requires tapping kids’ own agency, expanding their capacity for self-guidance, empowering them to make better decisions. Yuhyun dubbed this “digital intelligence” (DQ), analogous to the intelligence quotient (IQ). “We want our children to be loving and caring in their communication in the digital world,” Yuyun says. “We want them to be resilient in fighting privacy invasions, cyber threats and security issues.” In 2017, a year after coining “DQ”, she conducted a survey of 38,000 8–12 year olds in 29 countries to define the challenge. She found that 56 percent were involved in at least one major cyber risk; 47 percent were victims of
Yuhyun Park (South Korea) Ashoka Fellow (2013)
cyberbullying; 10 percent connected with and then met strangers from the internet face-to-face; 11 percent met the test for gaming addiction; and 17 percent engaged in online sexual behaviors. The statistics are 30 percent worse in countries where the digital revolution and cell phones are relatively new. All of which has serious social consequences: poor health; lower social skills; loneliness; increased aggressiveness; lower school performance; family conflict; and more. To enable children to reap the benefits of the digital world and avoid these risks requires what Yuhyun calls a “vaccination” in digital citizenship, a many dimensional set of skills that now is essential for all ages. However, like a language, it is best absorbed early. Her next step then was to develop the vaccine. This is #DQEveryChild, which includes an 8–12 hour free-to-all
program. It diagnoses a child’s DQ and then helps her develop eight core skills. These include early steps such as protecting one’s data and goes on to screen time discipline, cyberbullying management, protecting privacy, telling truth from fiction, and ultimately reaches digital empathy. She combines deep, substantive understanding and mastery of every trick that social media and digital game designers use to make their products so sticky. It is engagingly interactive and requires little of teachers (or parents). The vaccine works. Children who complete Yuhyun’s DQ World see a 10% increase in their DQ score, corresponding to a 15% reduction in cyberrisks. For example, with an average score of 100, the likelihood of a child becoming exposed to cyber-risks is 56%. However, by increasing their DQ score to 110, this likelihood drops to 40%. Raising their score to 120 further reduces it to 28%, and raising the score to 130 reduces it further down to 18%. However, a great vaccine by itself is not enough. Yuhyun’s entrepreneurial challenge is captured in her strategic goal: “To empower 1 billion children with DQ”. More precisely, her goal is to encourage and support every country to provide digital literacy through public schools to all their children within three years. She provides the diagnostic and learning tools; and, as important, she is building the consensus that
action is essential within the countries and globally.
For Dr. Park, parental denial is not an option, and opting out is unrealistic. The key is to give children the skills and critical-thinking tools to make better decisions online...A pilot program in Singapore last year demonstrated that children who did the course showed a 30 per cent reduction in risky cyber behaviours.”
She provides a DQ baseline for the country. She builds a DQ team of citizen groups, ICT companies, school network administrators, universities and others. She modifies her platform to fit a country’s needs, trains teachers, has a role modeling rollout in 100 schools, and then helps with the national rollout for the young people, for their parents and teachers, for schools, and for the systems. All along she gives DQ performance test results. All of which helps the schools adopt the new curriculum. She won critical early support at the global level, which has provided key encouragement and leverage. She won two UNESCO awards and the backing of the OECD, IEEE, and the WEF. Yuhyun is well on the way. After early success in Singapore, Mexico, Nigeria, South Korea, Australia, Turkey, Thailand and the Philippines, her creation is now in 110 countries and is available in 25 languages.
CONNECTING HEALTH Connecting People DR. SANJEEV ARORA pioneered “telementoring” techniques that build capacity to treat patients with chronic and complex diseases in underserved places. His model has now spread around the world. Born in Nangal, India, Sanjeev’s mother was an OB/GYN physician serving underserved populations, and his father was a leader in the World Health Organization and Government of India effort to eradicate smallpox. Sanjeev studied medicine in India, became a hematologist, moved to the United States, and established himself as one of the leading specialists treating patients for Hepatitis C in the country.
Ten years ago Dr. Sanjeev Arora, a hepatologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, realized that he would need to change the way he practiced medicine if he was going to prevent his patients from dying. Today, the solution he developed could transform health care.”
But just as in India, where essential health services and supplies often don’t reach rural recipients, Sanjeev found service gaps in the U.S. had deadly
Dr. Sanjeev Arora (United States) Ashoka Fellow (2009)
consequences. In 2003, 30,000 people in New Mexico suffered from Hep C, but only 5% had access to treatment. Community-based primary care physicians were not trained to treat it. Lack of treatment would predictably result in 6000 cases of cirrhosis and hundreds of cancers across the state. Sanjeev and experts like him had the knowledge and skills to prevent that, but they could only see so many patients themselves, and needed ways to extend their reach to meet the need. He created Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes), an online platform that connects primary care providers and local clinics with a network of specialists via weekly videoconference. ECHO is different from “telemedicine,” which lets doctors treat individual patients remotely, one at a time. Instead, it trains rural doctors, nurses, and other clinicians, helping them stay current with advances in treating chronic disease, so they can fan out and meet the community’s needs. After Sanjeev began working with the first Hep C clinic in New Mexico in 2003, ECHO “teleclinics” quickly spread across the state. A 2011 New England Journal of Medicine Study
use “technology-enabled collaborative learning” models—another nod to ECHO. As a result, there has been a spike in demand, and to keep pace ECHO is training more than 100 people every month to build and run their own “telementoring” systems. found ECHO to be “an effective way to treat Hepatitis C infection in rural and underserved communities.” “Project ECHO brings academic medicine to this part of the state,” says Ray Stewart, director of a regional public health office in Las Cruces, New Mexico. “It’s probably the most significant single event for the good of public health in our area. Now people don’t have to travel three to four hours to Albuquerque for specialized services.” It’s a simple but powerful and necessary idea. “One of the major challenges in the U.S. health care system is that new knowledge is being created at an exponential rate, but the way we distribute this knowledge is linear,” says Sanjeev. “We need a knowledge distribution methodology that has the same logarithmic characteristic as knowledge creation. The game is changing fast, and if we want doctors to go and read a book and then treat patients, it won’t happen.” In 2017, the Congress passed the ECHO Act, which tasked the US Health and Human Services Department (HHS) with studying ways of integrating the ECHO model more widely into health care. Sweeping federal opioid legislation, the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, was recently signed into law. It directed HHS to give funding preference to opioid recovery centers that
Just this year, Congress enacted the ECHO 2019 Act. This act, which builds on the findings from a study required by the previous ECHO Act, increases access to health care services in rural areas and for medically underserved populations through grants and technical assistance to develop and expand the use of technology-enabled learning and capacity building models. “A lot of people in the federal government and in many universities reached a place where they realized that this is important enough to incorporate into the fabric of the health system,” says Sanjeev. “What we’re saying is, in five years, we want to see ECHO become the standard operating system for U.S. health care system, so that the right knowledge is available at the right place at the right time.” Sanjeev realized ECHO’s Hep C teleclinic program could serve as a model for distributing medical knowledge in general and treating a wide range of diseases and chronic conditions. ECHO formed partnerships around the world, and today operates more than 308 Hubs: 197 domestic hubs, 111 international hubs. Furthermore, the hubs have moved on from just treating Hep C infection and are now treating more than 100 diseases and conditions in 35 countries, including major global health issues like HIV and tuberculosis. Sanjeev and ECHO have set a goal of helping one billion people by 2025.
CONNECTING HEALTH Connecting Things From “last-mile” villages in hard-toreach rural areas, to urban markets that face dangerous drug counterfeiting, getting medicines, vaccines, and other essentials safely and reliably to all those who need them has been an
70% of India’s population, or nearly a billion people, live in those rural areas, and often can’t get the medical supplies they need. In Karnataka State alone, 75% of medical stores run out of stock at least every other day. India is the
Anup Akkihal (India) Ashoka Fellow (2016)
intractable problem, despite mobilizing large government and donor resources to help. But Ashoka Fellows are solving it with innovations that connect the medical supply chain to people’s needs, and empower patients and citizens.
world’s largest producer and exporter of vaccines, yet two thirds of India’s children are not vaccinated on time. Partly due to this, India’s mortality rate for children under three is the highest in the world.
For example in India, Anup Akkihal solved the riddle of how to get vaccines and other vital goods to “lastmile” rural villages. He did it by creating open-source supply chain tracking tools, which have been called “the ‘Linux’ of low-resource logistics.” His system now enables shipments of 50% of all vaccines delivered to rural India.
Anup developed a way to change that. After university he went on to build supply chain technology and strategies for the automotive and healthcare industries and the military. He noticed analogies between military logistics – moving supplies and weapons into war zones under challenging conditions – and supplying remote Indian
villages—and he saw how to make a difference. In 2010 he co-founded Logistimo, an “inclusive supply chain” company which develops supply chain technology for rural emerging markets, accessible via mobile, smartphone, or computer. Logistimo’s software is cloud-based, so if there’s no internet connection (often the case in rural India), it stores information and waits for one before sending it. It networks otherwise disconnected actors along the far-flung supply chain -- manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, sales agents, etc. Isolation breeds invisibility, non-collaboration and suspicion, resulting in bottlenecks and consistent stock-outs at the end of the supply chain. But connecting them via a common platform enables structural and behavioral shifts, resolving inefficiencies and promoting reliability, teamwork and continuous improvement. That’s the logic behind what is now one of the world’s largest immunization supply chains, eVIN (Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network), a partnership between Logistimo, the Government of India, and the UN Development Programme. It ensures the availability and potency of 430 million vaccine doses each year, covering 17
million children. In 2015 Anup and his team launched “Tusker,” a live auction-based on-demand door-to-door transportation service for villages. It aggregates trips and loads to maximize efficiency and help drivers earn more, and optimize the economics of keeping last-mile destinations supplied with essential goods. Anup’s supply chain tools work both ways—they reliably bring medical and other essential goods (food, energy, industrial goods, and consumer products) to rural areas, and they also reliably connect rural producers to markets, helping village entrepreneurs stitch together new supply chains from the bottom up.
Logistimo can help organizations ranging from retailers to government agencies ensure that their goods get where they need to go. When it comes to things like delivering medicine to health clinics, the technology is potentially life saving.”
“Inclusive value chains for rural citizens will drive a renaissance for more than half the developing world,” Anup says, “fulfilling the promise of health equity and economic opportunity for 3 billion people across global emerging markets.”
CONNECTING FARMERS Connecting Through Data Indonesia’s agricultural sector (41 percent of the country’s workforce and 14 percent of national GDP) has productivity well below its neighbors. A central reason is that its farmers and all other elements of the sector (banks, insurance suppliers, traders, retailers, researchers and government) are largely invisible to the connected world and one another. REGI WAHYU, an Ashoka Fellow and data entrepreneur with roots in farming, has created a new block chain-based (for reliability and transparency) data exchange infrastructure that is rapidly bringing all these players together. As good, inexpensive data flows, for example, banks can lend to farmers because they have the necessary information to do so safely—at a cost 40 percent below what it would have cost them to collect. Regi believes that the emerging reality is that the agricultural ecosystem, the Innovation can be seen everywhere in the region. In Indonesia, data analysis powered by artificial intelligence (AI) is helping a blockchain-based data exchange platform called HARA to help small farmers produce bigger and more efficient crop yields”
Regi Wahyu (Indonesia) Ashoka Fellow (2018)
farmers, and all the others, increasingly are based on shared data (market prices, weather, risk profiles, etc.). As a result, smaller farmers are suffering because they are excluded from the data market. He is therefore pressing for data democratization. Regi targets the whole agriculture ecosystem but begins by enabling farmers to collect and input their own data— including things like land size and location, cultivation and yield information, pest analysis, and information about market transactions. Farmers are taught how to register their profile and collect agricultural data with the assistance of field officers in each village. These officers play an important role in building capacity among the farmers, middlemen, and others to be data providers. The officers train the farmers on the importance of data and facilitate the use and practice of technology as part of their daily routine. Most importantly, Regi has set up a process for every farmer to know their right to ownership of this data and their role as
data contributors. For every bit of data shared, they are incentivized through points materialized by stamps on a carton card that keep track of the amount of data they have collected. The points collected can be used to buy fertilizers or seeds, for example, through local partners that are also in the Hara ecosystem. The farmers, rather than Hara, maintain ownership of their data and benefit whenever a buyer in the ecosystem purchases the data. Hara takes only a commission for the exchange. Specifically, the cost structure is as follows: 80% of proceeds go to the data providers, data qualifier, field officer, and value-added service, 5% to storage providers and 15% to HARA itself. Through the platform, farmers become active contributors and owners to aggregate data that provides better, more localized information for them, while also monetizing their data. Additionally, with this system in place, banks, and insurance companies can, at low cost, access the data they need for risk profiling for loans and other financial and insurance products. This approach increases farmers’ opportunity to have access to loans and insurance, as well as value-added services, allowing them to invest in new equipment and technology. In addition to banks and insurance companies, retailers and market research companies can also purchase data on the platform. The data can help retailers cater their products to farmers based on the data, giving them an incentive to participate. This is because Regi’s target is really to improve the data market in part by offering more accuracy. He is also engaged in initiatives with other agriculture data providers, such as IoT and satellite companies, that
he incentivizes to share their data. In addition, retailers and market research companies also provide value-added services, taking raw data and enriching it with analysis and market intelligence. This data then goes back into the ecosystem for others to consume. They also act as data qualifiers, driving and justifying the demand for this data with on-the-ground sales visibility and demand potential.
Furthermore, the system enables peer to peer learning between farmers allowing for farmers to learn new techniques or helping them anticipate and forecast their activity (for example: being alerted by a neighbor to pest infestation in the area to be prepared for/ able to avoid it). One result of these changes is that farmers have been able to invest and to do so wisely. As a result, their yields are up 15 percent. Regi plans to reach two million additional farmers in the least developed parts of Indonesia over the coming several years. He has also started a partnership to pilot the system in Uganda and is exploring the application of this idea in other sectors in Indonesia, such as health, education, transportation, and technology.
CONNECTING FARMERS Connecting Supply and Demand At 22, TULIN AKIN recognized that Turkey’s farmers and, indeed, the country’s agricultural sector did not exist on the internet. Having grown up in rural Turkey, she grasped what this cost the one-third of the population dependent on farming. She saw farmers losing crops to easily prevented diseases. She saw them selling their crops to intermediaries way below market value because they had no market information and no alternatives. She saw that they had little access to products and services, let alone at a good price. They also needed fast, reliable information regarding changing regulations, pest and health alerts, new techniques, neighbors and potential partners, and more. So, she created an all-encompassing e-learning and e-connections home for farmers and all who could contribute to and benefit from the sector—ranging from banks to agriculture companies to phone operators to computer producers. She won her first 20,000 farmers through guerilla marketing at agricultural fairs. She was then able to attract the first bank and others, initiating what is now a huge network effect gravitational force. (She now serves over half of the country’s three million farmers.) That power and all that she has learned has now allowed her to build the world’s first smart village that shows farmers evolving best practices. It also
Tulin Akin (Turkey) Ashoka Fellow (2012)
creates and demonstrates improvements such as adapting the use of IoT technologies already applied in industrial farming to family farms. She has now also taken her approach to Africa, South Asia, and other regions.
She established the Farmers’ Club and launched information and services to 1 million 400 thousand farmers and their families through special practices for farmers. It has produced special farmer computer software, supported by Intel, which can be used by anyone who can read and write, and ask questions to experts in information, communication, marketing and needs.”
A SPECIAL POWER LUCIANA DELLA DONNE Ashoka Fellow Ashoka gave me a worldview that dared me to think more. Ashoka introduced me to many others like me, made me realize that I wasn’t toiling alone. Ashoka showed me successful examples that inspired me to keep to doing what I was doing, while thinking more and thinking broader.”
INDIA TODAY Critically, Ashoka leverages learnings from its rich global network to act as a strategic thought partner and help Fellows find the most efficient way to drive systemic change.”
HARVARD MAGAZINE [Ashoka is] establishing and sustaining an independent, international body which will nourish itself on the nearly bottomless, practical think tank of its Fellows.”
Ever yone A Changemaker ™
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