The inesha face.

Sometimes the best of outcomes comes from the most serendipitous of encounters.

*This post is a part of a series, vignettes really, meant to capture the work I’ve been up to in Sri Lanka this December & January and my own thoughts and impressions of the changes I’ve seen and the people I’ve met. Check back here daily for more :)

When I was in high school, I had the grandiose idea of planting a plant-a-row for the hungry garden at my school for my “personal project.” I drew up these elaborate landscaping plans, subscribed myself to all of these gardening magazines, and for months on months memorized all the names of my favorite flowers. I learned about vertical gardening and new horticultural methods, lasagna gardening and weed killing, and, trust me, everything in between.

Somewhere around the middle of August I started to really dig in– yes, pun intended. To start, I needed some seed funding to cover everything so I designed these elaborate (in retrospect, much too gaudy) donation letter requests and started ringing every local greenhouse to see if I might collect some in-kind donations. At first, inevitably, I was ignored. So I just kept on calling. And calling. Eventually a guy from the Lowe’s on West Broad Street called me back.

“We have a bunch of old flowers on the lot here – you come take a look and we’ll see if we can’t give you a good deal.”

It was my first breakthrough in a month. I was ecstatic. I forced my dad that night to take our little Honda Accord to buy some flowers. I’m pretty convinced he didn’t know the half of what he was getting himself into. I loaded up three trolleys worth of geraniums, soil, petunias, fertilizer, coleus, lettuce, tomatoes, you name it – it was in there. I was determined to nurse those damaged plants back to life. I rolled up my loot to the cashier’s desk where my dad was standing with the Lowe’s guy who had called me earlier.

My dad, shocked, just about fell over, shook his head, and said no way are we taking all those flowers home. I stood my ground and made my best determined face. The Lowe’s guy chuckled – “I’m afraid sir that she’s just like my wife – I’ll bet she gets exactly what she wants.”

That day we rolled home with a carload of flowers, a trunk load of soil and fertilizer, and one very happy 9th grader.

I tell this story mostly because the reaction my dad gave me that day – that you must be kidding-who the heck is this girl-half whimsical smile is one I haven’t stopped getting since.

———

So on an otherwise normal Thursday in Colombo when I pranced into Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Youth and Skills Development Office and somehow explained (and demonstrated) GrowLanka well enough to land me in the Director of IT’s office, I wasn’t so surprised when the Director gave me that look too.

I had bounded in saying, “Hi I’m Inesha. I think I have something that might be able to help your efforts. Let me show you.” And the rest is history.

I could tell he was amused. I do tend to talk realllllyyyy fast when I get excited. And when the Director started explaining that the Ministry itself had just launched a job vacancies database customized for youth but was having trouble getting people subscribed because they didn’t have access to internet, I couldn’t help but say Exactly! That’s where we can help!

I apologized, I swear, for my persistence. He was quite forgiving: “No, no it’s ok – you’re trying to help us for free,” he insisted. He asked to meet again soon so that our developers could have a conversation with the government’s about modifying our system to complement the larger audience we’d be serving if we collaborated.He didn’t roll his eyes when I said, “So can we meet tomorrow then?” At this point, I think he saw that coming. (In my defense, I was leaving town the following Tuesday so time was of the essence.)

And so like a whirlwind, I was back there the next day facilitating a conversation between our developers and their’s, talking next steps, and getting ready to sign an MOU with this Sri Lankan Ministry. Then suddenly, a gentleman entered from the corner office adjacent to the conference room we were sitting in. He was introduced promptly as the Director General of the Ministry. I hadn’t quite expected to be talking to him just yet. Nervous, I launched– and I mean launched, full motor mouth and all– into what GrowLanka is and does and believes.

He stopped me. Bemused. He pushed his spectacles to the tip of his nose so that he could look directly at me. It was that face again. That face I had seen before on the IT Director’s face, the same one that Lowe’s guy and my dad gave me so many years ago.

“Why are you doing this?”

I started to explain the bevy of reasons- the gaps we were seeing, the things I had learned about the labor market.

He shook his head.

“No, no, why are YOU doing this? I’m trying to understand why you care,” he told me.

If I have one regret from that day it was that I gave him all the reasons and explanations except the only one that really mattered.

Because really for me, making sure Sri Lanka has the economic and technological infrastructure to move forward is insurance to make sure she doesn’t turn back.

———

Looking back, I can’t help but chuckle. That Thursday was a rather normal Thursday in Colombo but a serendipitous encounter led to a conversation and a partnership that I hadn’t planned for. But as I sat in the Director’s office talking about what I had seen on the ground in the north, questioning him as to what he thought were the root causes of growing youth unemployment in particular, and asking him what he defined as success for a system like this, what he thought would be the best performance indicators, I realized his Ministry was the one that GrowLanka needed to be working with. I couldn’t be more grateful for those two gentleman there – patient enough as they were to listen to an over-excited college student and daring enough to take a risk on me.

At the Ministry of Youth and Skills Development after a day of hard work :)

I ain’t the leaving kind.

Into one country, and out of another. Inesha and I seem to be doing a lot of that lately.

I can distinctly hear the Rascal Flatts crooning that song, “He Ain’t the Leavin’ Kind“ (I can’t remember where I heard it first, but most likely blasting from Inesha’s room) and I can’t help but think about it now, as I picture the pile of boxes sitting innocently amidst the bare walls of our small suite storage room.  Stuffed and stacked, they are alien to my now-empty dorm room.

It’s the start of the spring semester of my Junior year at Harvard. Deep breath.

But on Monday morning bright and early, I left. I left the hustle and bustle of a typical semester behind. I left my room empty and boxes stuffed. I left my friends and family and the Cambridge winter.

But here’s the thing–this time, everyone else is staying. Including Inesha.

I’ll be spending the spring term in Mexico as a Global Health in Equity Option (GHEO) Scholar. I’ll still be taking my Harvard classes while working with Partners in Health’s sister organization, Compañeros en Salud, in the beautiful and rural Sierra Madre region of Chiapas. And leaving though I may be, I’m terribly excited about all of it.

It’s been hard to explain this experience to my friends and classmates because, after all, this program really is quite the newcomer on the “study abroad” scene. I think the technical term for it is “sorta studying abroad” :) It’s my chance to explore the field that I want to go into via both my books and my feet.

 I know, I know, I won’t drink tap water and I’ll keep my money in multiple different places. I’ll have all of the emergency contacts written down both in my phone and in my travel notebook. I’ll call or text whenever I get cell reception just to let you know that I’m OK. I reassure my mom of all of that. But when I try to squint into the future and imagine what I’ll be thinking and writing three months from now, I feel both excited and scared because in my heart, I know that I ain’t the leaving kind. The traveling kind, maybe. The sitting-and-staying-for-a-while kind, always. But the leaving kind?

No, that’s just not me. Even as I think about the countries I’ve visited and the people I’ve been blessed to meet during these past 2.5 years, I know I’ve never viewed my travels with the idea that entry into one place inevitably means exit out of another. I realize now that this was because everyone else around me was moving too. My friends and roommates and sister would scatter to different parts of the country and the world as the summer months set in and we all began our next adventures. But this time, as February sets in and my friends begin their classes and readjust to the college dining halls on Harvard’s campus, I will be setting foot in a new country and settling in amidst tortillas and rolling hills.

Even as I sit here in Mexico City today, and get ready to board my flight to Tuxtla, I know that I didn’t really leave my crazy college world behind. I didn’t leave the friends and roommates and sister who have kept me warm even when the temperatures dip below freezing. I didn’t leave the learning I’ve done there or the growing that inevitably came with it. I’m just making this semester my own in a new town and a new time zone.

That’s not leaving–

nope, it’s more like using my creative license.

Nuwara Eliya

Nuwara Eliya is many things. Cold temperatures and outdoor shopping stalls, tea estates that roll on for miles with fresh vegetables that line the streets and crisp spring air. There are roses in February and frost some mornings. Dutch and English influences pervade its streets and relaxation hangs in the air, no longer an afterthought but a permanent state of mind. But most of all, Nuwara Eliya is one of my most favorite, favorite places on earth. This trip to Sri Lanka I got to escape there with my uncle and aunt for a few days. We even got the perk of latching on to the president’s motorcade as he was leaving town. From the golf club we always stay at to the food to the sights and sounds that feel like coming home, I loved it all. I always do.

Up next: gettin’ work done in the city

Rethinking Technical Solutions

Sitting in the corner office at Dialog, I was glad that I had taken Microeconomics. After a lot of time up north, I’d returned to Colombo for a bit to meet with some folks and chart out a path forward for GrowLanka. It’s really important to Ishani and I that this service project be sustained in the long term. So in Colombo I was busy meeting lots of people to figure out if there might be a fruitful partnership we could wager with an organization on the ground who shared our vision and commitment to bridging the information gaps in the labor market, an objective that I was able to achieve — but more on that later :)

Dialog (a mobile carrier akin to Comcast, AT&T, etc.) has a job alerts system for their users that is similar in function to ours’ so they seemed like a good place to go to. I got to meet with an executive at the company – and the 30 minute meeting we had was probably my most productive in the city. Boy did I learn. A lot. Dialog specializes in technological solutions. Hearing this executive talk, I was blown away not by just how business savvy they were but also by how committed to sustainability they seemed. Granted, my conversation was not really based in the business world — as this guy told me, “this is far more theoretical stuff.” Still, to know that people at the top tiers of organizations as expansive as Dialog are thinking long term about not just about how to do business but also about the right way to do it was really comforting. You need good leaders to move a country forward — in the political realm, in civil society, in the community. I was lucky to find them too in the business world in Sri Lanka.

It’s hard to boil our conversation down, but here are some of the takeaways — ones that really helped me rethink how I approach technological solutions to social problems and hopefully will help you rethink them too.

(1) You can’t just release your code into the world. A lot of funding these days goes into building the technical infrastructure for new apps, services, you name it. But less thought and follow through goes into how that service will be implemented, rolled out, scaled. We spent a year developing and iterating GrowLanka – but that wasn’t the end of it. We’ve been working on promoting our service, talking to people about it, campaigning for more than 5 months now and we’re not done yet. Eventually if this system is to sustain itself, we have to figure out a way to “create demand” for it but in the initial phases there has to be some momentum, there has to be enough of a critical mass of people using the system thinking, woah this is really helpful. Once you get that critical mass into the system, you get what some might call the hockey stick — suddenly all those people are telling there people about your system and your subscriptions skyrocket. The thing is it’s a rare day when you just get to that critical mass over night. So, even if you have the most brilliant app in the world, you have to figure out how to get the word out, how to tell people about it. And that’s not as easy as it looks! The point being, technology in and of itself isn’t enough. An app can be perfectly built but may gain no subscriptions – the rollout and active deployment of the app may just as well determine it’s success.

(2) Market Failure. A good way to think about where a technological solution might be useful is to think of market failures. Take the case of GrowLanka. There’s a labor demand and a labor supply – but somehow there’s a market failure, a mismatch such that the two aren’t lining up and feeding the other. The system isn’t working so there’s a better way to fix it, to get a more equatable and efficient allocation of that labor. Thinking about GrowLanka in terms of market failure helped me to think about why that market failure was occurring, among the most pressing reasons: a lack of trust, an information gap, distance, a skills gap, culture.

(3) Fulfillment. The data shows that technical solutions work best and are subscribed to most when they get the closest to fulfilling whatever need the user has. For users of GrowLanka — the need was getting a job. But GrowLanka wasn’t giving them a job, it was giving them information about a job, a crucial difference. A better GrowLanka might build on our initial layer of getting job alerts out to also then connecting people interested in a given alert directly to the employer or giving them an edge in the application process, an automatic interview if they expressed interest, for example. We had considered this before – the idea of matching people to jobs not just information about jobs is however an optimistic goal at best. There’s a plenary of challenges– technical, ethical, and practical– that come with trying to match people technologically; hence why human resources (emphasis on the human aspect) still exists!

(4) Ecosystems not value chains. Thinking about your technological solution not just in terms of how it creates value for the users– employers and job seekers in our case– but too how it functions within the greater “ecosystem” (labor organizations, government, confederation of businesses, the unemployed, etc.) allows you to better assess costs and benefits and figure out…

(5) Net Value Creation. Net value creation for GrowLanka, service project and student-headed social venture that we are, is about creating a surplus benefit on the whole for the communities we engage. Metrics are hard and are often murky for organizations like ours. We could measure GrowLanka’s impact by how many subscribers we have, how many text alerts are sent out each week as a business might do – but I’ll be honest with you that’s not really the best metric. A far better one would take into account the costs we’re incurring, how much it takes to maintain our system, the potential negative externalities we might be causing (are we, for instance, pushing out contractors from the labor market — by doing their job are we depriving them of theirs?), and all that considered, the overall value we’re providing. But measuring all that is tough and calls for far more rigorous analytics, such that we might be investing the same amount of our operational costs in running our system — and analyzing it for efficacy. That’s a trade-off that every organization needs to figure out. I will say this though, there’s no point creating an amazing system if there’s no net value creation or, even worse, you’re incurring more costs than you are benefits.

(6) Different forms of capital, different actors. There are many different forms of capital as far as I can see – finance, human, systems intelligence, environment, social, etc. The trick is figuring out which ones you care about most and which ones you need to measure to figure out how effective you’re being. But it’s still not that easy. Some forms of capital — human capital for instance– aren’t as easily measured as others. So you have to develop proxies to measure them. Again, that’s more work – you have to figure out where you stand and walk in knowing that depending on what sector you’re in – private, public, government – the answer and approach will be different. Knowing that and understanding that will help guide your priorities. It might even lead you to believe that a new investment or business model is needed for the kind of organization you want to run. Governments have a really crucial role to play here as well — in incentivizing the right kinds of capital, in regulating those that deplete value, in making sure that those actors that are doing good for the community have a shot.

Just some thoughts/takeaways on my end — sorry I know this post was a bit more technical but I do hope it helps. I sure learned a lot!

Up next: my favorite place in Sri Lanka

Unconventional means.

*This post is a part of a series, vignettes really, meant to capture the work I’ve been up to in Sri Lanka this December & January and my own thoughts and impressions of the changes I’ve seen and the people I’ve met. Check back here daily for more :)

The plans were set. We were crashing convocation. So I exaggerate – but not really. We had spent all of Friday registering women and farmers through our Sevalanka workshop. Midday I broke away for a meeting with MAS, an employer in the north, and ended up talking to a young woman working there. She suggested we try talking to young people about our system. “They could really use it,” she told me. “And you know what – tomorrow is my convocation at Jaffna University — there will be like 1000 people there that you could tell about GrowLanka.” And the lightbulb went on. She called her dean at the school and arranged for us to have a table set up outside of the University. We made a big GrowLanka banner and printed up instructions for subscribing people to the system. I made a gazillion more subscription cards and got to cutting them out. We sent out a facebook alert. Everything happened so quickly, it was bizarre. But there we were on Saturday morning at 6:30 am leaving Vavuniya to make the 3 hour drive along the A9 highway to Jaffna.

We set up shop right near one of the gate entrances. The grounds were filled with people. Garlands, lights, colors. Ladies in pretty saris and gents dressed up in suits. It was clearly a day for celebration. I felt like one of the wedding crashers. But it was a venue that made so much sense for GrowLanka. Here these young people were graduating from college or from their degree program and inevitably, they would be looking for a job. Helloooo, perfect. (To give you some insight into what an aha moment this was for us – the weeks prior we were sitting around asking us ourselves, where can we find a lot of unemployed people in one place who are looking for a job? We’d come up with employment centers and community centers and the villages but a university had never once made our list. Go figure.)

As soon as we got there, people rushed to help us set up. Guys helped us hang up our banners and our driver/translator for the day started telling people about GrowLanka. We got about 10 people signed up in one go. But then what was really astonishing to me was how they stuck around. The student body president of the junior class was with us. These kids– actually, I should refrain from using that word, most of them were older than me!– stuck around and called their friends over, explained the system to them, and helped us get people subscribed.

On the left, two of the young women who stuck around till the very end to help us get people subscribed

As more and more people gathered around our table, more kept coming. At times I felt like I was at the floor of some massive arena with a bunch of people peering down at me itching to get signed up. It was so critical for us to have those first people advocate for us, to have them translate for us, to get their friends to come over and to get people they knew interested in the system. They peppered us with many questions — about the nature of our project, about our service, about why we were doing it, the jobs they might see come across the system. It was busy work. There were ebbs and flows of people for sure and more often than not our hands and eyes and mouths were occupied with completely different tasks.

Amidst the chaos, there were a few things that really made me pause. For one, the men were always eager to sign up. They questioned us less. The women hung back in groups. Once the crowd died down, I’d see groups of women flung out a couple feet from our table. They’d send over an emissary to our table, I suspect the woman who among them spoke the best English. She’d ask us many thoughtful questions. She’d take her measure of us. And then she’d take a whole handful of subscription cards and get the women in her group to sign up from an area removed from our table. Eventually, she’d come back, gifting us with a whole load of papers. Many women (and I didn’t even realize this until I started data entering all these new subscribers) entered several numbers– not just for themselves but too for their kids, husbands, family members. Women, I found, were far more timid to approach us – just as they were far more discerning of our services. They proved to be some of the best advocates for our system.

We also had to get innovative on the ground. There’s a glaring problem we face whenever we talk to people in the north: we don’t speak Tamil. So it takes routinely 2-3 times more longer to get administrative tasks done. More than that, it’s not always clear to us that we’re being understood and let’s be real, not speaking the language that everyone else does can make you feel rather quickly like a complete foreigner who is probably being left out of the conversation. Not to mention, not speaking the language didn’t exactly win us trust points. But we had to get people to come to our table. At first, it was easy because our “advocates” — a group of guys and girls who hung around for most of the morning into the early afternoon– really got the word out. They were quick to translate for us and to bring over their schoolmates to our stand. But mid-afternoon, they had to leave: it was “cab collection time” (a funny little tradition in the north – the graduating seniors give a bit of spare change to their younger counterparts who are staying behind.) When we lost our advocates, we got to making signs. We had one of our friends translate a GrowLanka promo into Tamil and then my teammate Casi went out holding the sign and directing people to our subscription table while I manned everything at base. It was tiring with the Jaffna heat pouring down on us but remarkably successful – even if we felt rather silly standing there waiting/watching people read our make-shift Tamil signs. For all we knew, our friends could have written something incredibly embarrassing on there – but by the turnout we saw it seems thankfully that that wasn’t the case :)

But beyond anything else, the thing that sticks out to me most was the exchanges I had with the people on the ground there. A second year law student, Tamil speaking, came to the table with his Sinhalese friend. They were talking in Sinhalese so I interjected even as my language skills in that department aren’t the strongest. He said you know, I’m so glad you’re doing this – you don’t even know how much this is needed. The people here really suffered during the war. He explained to me the trials of finding a job, features not all that uncommon in post-conflict environments. He explained to me that a lot of people had taken 2-3 times longer to complete their degree because of the fighting going on. Some students couldn’t go home because during term time their home villages turned into battlefields. The library on campus was burned one night. Students couldn’t do internships over summers because businesses had left the region – meaning that when they graduated, they didn’t have any experience to market to potential employers. All these things and more he ticked through methodically and then he turned over his subscriber card and wrote a note about the specific kind of job he was looking for — beyond just the routine category (medicine, law, government work, etc.) that our system required users to input. I could see then how he really believed in our system. That got to me. How ten minutes later he came back with his friends and explained our set-up to them. How he shook my hand. The promise in his eyes, his belief in our system pushed me even harder, is the thing at the back of my mind when I think about how we scale and grow GrowLanka and better service the people who use our system.

I’ll be honest, not all our exchanges were good — one man came up to our table and threatened us. His distrust evident and understandable. “You better make this system work – I know the people here. They suffered a lot. And then all the NGOs left,” he berated, his voice rising. Some guys laughed at us and a few of our advocates had to chase them away. But these were the anomalies, not the norm. And still, the day I spent in Jaffna folded into a part of the action, the celebration as people ended their year and looked forward at Jaffna University… well that was pretty special.

Up next: rethinking technical solutions

Last Sunday, I was religious.

Today is a day of the week that many religions around the world deem sacred or worthy of a special kind of observance amidst the chaos of our otherwise bustling lives—in other words, it’s a Sunday.

I was born and raised a Buddhist, the religion that is predominant in our sweet Sri Lanka. But I didn’t grow up going to temple on a regular basis, and certainly not every Sunday. While it’s true that Richmond, Va has few temples to boast of, mostly I think that our family’s lack of religious regularity is a testament to the fact that religion for me and my family has never really had a schedule. And gcals and sticky notes aside, I like to think that this is the way I live my life, too–well, for the most part :) Buddhism is a “go-with-the-flow” religion I would often tell my friends when I was younger; you just have to be a good person. Turns out that most religions believe that. They would grin in a “yeahh, right” sort of way. But I also felt responsible for portraying this anomaly of a religion as honestly as I could to friends who had most likely only ever met one Buddhist in their lives. To my five-year-old self, this seemed like a pretty good way of going about it.

I may not know all of the Pali words of the ancient text, but even if I am not convinced entirely of the ritual of saying them , I believe wholeheartedly in their purpose. They grant solace. Familiarity. Comfort. Peace of mind. Sitting next to my mother as I hear her quietly repeat the chants that I have grown up listening to, I am comforted as I feel them come to my lips as well. I don’t remember learning them, but yet they are an inextricable part of who I am and how I was raised. From the days when I would walk with my sister and grandmother down the lane from our home in Colombo to the temple that has not changed in 20 years, to the snow-ridden homes-turned-temples that I visit with my parents in the dead of a U.S. winter, I can find those chants anywhere. Even before the books that I love, these chants were the first to show me the power of storytelling. And now, I can usher them forth even when the walls of a temple do not surround me. They give me the power to build my own.

Besides the lightly falling snow that made for an idyllic setting, last weekend was a peaceful favorite of 2014 because of one thing in particular: mom & dad came to visit me here in Cambridge. Yes, they made the 10 hour drive from Richmond. Yes, my mom still rolled up her sleeves and spent hours helping me pack and clean my room. And yes, my dad willingly helped and provided “instructions” as to what he thought should be packed where (my mom and I let him believe that we were paying heed).

Nevertheless, they came. And that means the world to me. It’s a funny thing that happens when you all of a sudden turn 20 and are no longer the one who is always walking through your front door at home to see your parents before you gallivant off on your next adventure. I suppose it’s a sign of my transition from teenhood to adulthood that my parents now come to visit me. They come to make sure that I’m ok and to wish me well. They come to buy me the things that I need and many more that I don’t. They shower me with advice and love and warmth amidst this frigid Boston winter. They may not be the family I choose but I would never choose anyone else.

I’m glad that I could go to temple with them last Sunday. It is something that my mom has been wanting to do for a long time. It is rare, though, that I was the only one in tow. But with my sisters elsewhere, it was just me and mom and dad. Parents + one college miscreant—we made quite the group.

I miss them already, but just like those Pali chants, it’s a good thing that I can always carry them with me.

#technicalfail

Joy – our trusty translator – helping to subscribe people to our system. It shouldn’t have involved pen and paper – this post is about why it did & the lessons we learned in the process

*This post is a part of a series, vignettes really, meant to capture the work I’ve been up to in Sri Lanka this December & January and my own thoughts and impressions of the changes I’ve seen and the people I’ve met. Check back here daily for more :)

We were heading up to Vavuniya and Kilinochchi to do a series of subscriber workshops — workshops that would allow us to talk with potential users about our free service and then subscribe those interested to the GrowLanka system. We had left for the north at 2:00 am. At about 5 am, after a bumpy car ride of me putting the last minute touches on our preparations – putting together our workshop signs, little pamphlets, a banner, going over logistics one last time – I looked up from my computer in panic. Among my bevy of last minute checks, I’d done one last system check: I’d tried to register as a pseudo job seeker. But no text message was coming back; I wasn’t even sure if my text was going through. I tried ten more times. And then really started to panic. We needed the system to work — if it didn’t work how were we going to subscribe all the people we were set to meet? Not just that – this was an incredible disappointment. How would we convince people of the merits of our system when it wasn’t even working? And the time we were wasting? The money we were spending to go on this trip? My mind started to front wheel through all the options.

At 6:30 I called the team that helped to develop GrowLanka and frantically explained the situation. They told me to calm down. Our SMS gateway was based in South Africa. It wasn’t even dawn there yet. I thought to myself: we need a back-up. I asked one of our developers if there was any way to develop a wifi-enabled gizmo to register people using my computer. It was a temporary fix but if we could get them into the system and auto-send them a message, we might lose them completely. He got to work.

By 10 am, our back up plan was our only plan and we were going with it. The folks in South Africa were still sleeping. Instead of getting people to sign up via SMS, we had no choice but to go the old fashioned route: I printed up a massive amount (somewhere on the order of 1000) subscription cards. Instead of getting people to subscribe instantly via text, we were going to have to get them to spend the 30 seconds to fill out this sheet and then I was going to have to manually enter them into the system. It was in my mind a massive technical fail. One that I think is worth looking back to — because in the realm of user products and technological solutions it wasn’t just a massive fail because it was inconvenient. Quite frankly, as a back up plan goes, our subscription card-method was probably easier to explain to new users and enabled us to subscribe far more people more quickly than what we would have originally been able to. Still even as the system (thankfully) was up and running in a day, there were major lessons to be learned. Here’s just a few:

1. Double, triple check any technological system at least 2-3 days in advance of deployment. The last systems check we had run was on the Monday prior. There’s a real chance that the technical glitch happened at 4:55 am on that Friday but I’ll be honest – I wouldn’t have had any idea if that was the case. Because I hadn’t checked. If I had covered all my bases say on Wednesday I would have had more of a time window to default too – in this case, I could only give our developer less than 5 hours to remedy the problem. It worked this time but that’s never a guarantee.

2. Make (actual) checklists. And triple and double check them too. I’m a list maker – don’t get me wrong. But I’ve been working on GrowLanka for so long, that all my checklists are mental. Logistics. System. Workshops. Accommodations. I reel through these in my head quickly and often just before I head out. Problem with this is mental checklists don’t leave much room for someone else to double check and make sure you’re not screwing up. Moving forward, our team will be sharing our checklists and everyone of us will be checking them. System failures fall on everyone’s shoulder– so everyone should be checking and everyone should be ready to react quickly when things go wrong.

3. The healthcare.gov problem. A lot of people talked about how the failure of the original healthcare.gov website was problematic because people couldn’t get signed up. If they couldn’t get signed up on their first visit to the site, users — the critics argued– would be unlikely to visit again meaning the Obama administration had blown their one good shot at getting people subscribed. How many people would end up not subscribing because of this technical glitch was a number that would never be known. Going through our own mini “healthcare.gov crisis” I started to realize the bureaucratic challenge that exists when rolling out major new technological systems and devices. The critics raged after the failed launch of the website: how could Obama not have double-triple-checked this system when his administration knew how big a deal this rollout was, when it was such a legislative and administrative priority for him? But you see when you’re overseeing so many different things — the administrative rollout, the locational distribution, the training of personnel, the ensuring of new user resources, etc. — you’re probably more likely than not to delegate the responsibility of maintaining and checking the actual system to the people who developed it. That’s what we did. And that was a massive failure on our part. Checking the system should have been a priority – not an assumed check on our to do list and EVERYONE on our team should have been charged with it as their number one task regardless of whether they were a developer or a logistics coordinator or a finance manager. Chief responsibility should have been with the developer (you can’t make everyone responsible for everything after all – then who’s actually responsible for getting things done) but that is not an excuse for everyone not taking the 5 minutes needed to do a quick, daily systems check. The more people checking, the better.

4. You have to give users an experience.  In not being able to provide users at subscription with an accurate user experience that allowed them to first interface with the system via phone, we curbed our ability to really ensure that new subscribers understood how exactly the system functioned. That said, one of the key components of our system that made it so unique was the very fact that a user could subscribe via text. He could do everything he needed to with the system via text. To not have that functionality up and running on our first day precluded us from developing on Day 1 user trust in our system. And I’ll be real with you, that sucks.

The beauty of GrowLanka also exists in that we had a vision of the system creating a demand for its services– a sort of self-sustaining means for growing its own market. If it took off and people found the system to be helpful, we figured they would tell their friends and family and people they knew. We’d have essentially trained the initial user to be a mini workshop interlocutor — having already subscribed to the system under our guidance, they could easily tell their friend: hey it’s easy, it takes 30 seconds to subscribe and like 4 steps and you get this great service to boot. And these community members we figured would be far better ambassadors for GrowLanka than we would ever be because  a) they spoke Tamil and b) people in the community would trust them. Problem is, with our system out on the first day of workshops, we had double the work — we had to teach people how to subscribe instead of showing them and we had to convince them that this service a) worked and that b) it would be valuable. We debilitated our own chances that day at selling GrowLanka.

Casi, one of my GrowLanka teammates, heading up a Sevalanka workshop for women in a little village outside of Vavuniya

4. Listen to the community – be serious about incorporating their feedback into your process. We were out in the community subscribing primarily women and farmers to the system vis-a-vis 30 minute workshops that we had pre-arranged and scheduled through our partner organization Sevalanka. Sevalanka is an aid organization working in the north that is trusted by the community. They believed in our service and have served as an instrumental partner to us since our freshmen year. The people at Sevalanka have a very intimate understanding of the communities in Northern Sri Lanka and have an acute sense of the people’s needs there. Even more – they have what they call “community mobilizers,” volunteers who work to get information out to the communities. So – in short, the folks at Sevalanka made it such that these pre-arranged workshops were a good plan and they were effective. But what we noticed on site when we were registering women from a little village outside Vavuniya is that they would ask more often than not to subscribe their kids. This observation was complemented by something one of our partner employers had told us – “you know who would really love this service? young people.” There’s a reason – overall unemployment may be at about 4.5% in the country but in the north that figure is much higher and for young people that number is in the double digits. Newspaper headlines talk a lot about how this milennial generation is more educated even as less of them are employed. Our system, to be frank, was designed with a very different user in mind – the uneducated, underserved peoples in the village who had less access to resources. And yet when MAS suggested that we head over to the University of Jaffna and see if we could sign people up there, it didn’t seem like half a bad idea. What unfolded there, I’ll leave for the next post. But the takeaway is this: in designing these solutions, let the community you’re working in – not your own assumptions – inform who and how you serve. In our case, it turned out that our system might be attractive to an entire subset of the population that we hadn’t even considered!

5. Repeat loudly after me: field work never goes as planned. My best advice to people working on service projects like GrowLanka – anticipate the worst. Make contingency plans. Role play scenarios. And try and stay on the ground as long as possible. Inevitably, the skill it takes to respond to crises in real time is one that takes experience and the one you’ll probably draw on most when things go wrong. That being said, if you have some vision for a back up in your mind, you’re better off – if not for the only reason that having created that plan in the first place would have forced you to think about all the things that just might go wrong and how you can avert them. And stay on the ground longer since inevitably you will start to get in a rhythm. I was on the ground in the north for a month. The technical fail I talked about was a problem for a day. After I had led more workshops, I knew the kinks in our process and resolved them. And then I had 20+ more days to go out and get people subscribed. Giving yourself a lengthy runway to iterate, to user test, to deal with administrative and technical fails can mean the difference between successfully deploying a system and not. Not to mention, returning to a region and spending a lot of time there helps a bunch when it comes to establishing a relationship predicated on trust with the people you work with and serve on the ground.

Up next: Crashing Convocation 

Some background: my month in Sri Lanka

*This post is a part of a series, vignettes really, meant to capture the work I’ve been up to in Sri Lanka this December & January and my own thoughts and impressions of the changes I’ve seen and the people I’ve met. Check back here daily for more :)

It’s been a really great long month here in Sri Lanka. I’ve been primarily on the ground here working on  GrowLanka, a mobile system Ishani and I co-founded that sends job alerts to job seekers in northern Sri Lanka. You might remember that we were here last year working in the north. Then, we talked to a whole lot of people on the ground – factory workers, UN officials, city commissioners, war widows, young people, employers – and identified an information gap between new employers who were just coming to the region and job seekers. There’s a mismatch you could say: after the war, lots of people are in need of work and businesses are slowly but surely coming in. Despite the labor supply and the new need, vacancies weren’t being filled.

It’s a problem that still exists for a bevy of reasons. Some might tell you that there’s a skills gap – that workers just don’t have the skills needed to fill some of these new jobs. But even for those jobs that require no skills, there has been a lag in recruitment. Some might say that is for cultural reasons: these are jobs people don’t want or after war, people aren’t used to working without constant interruption. Some even argue that job seekers, contrary to what you might think, can wait it out until they can find the job that they want – the ideal job being one in banking or finance or in government. An interesting side note: even in telling you their job of choice, those in the north reveal their basis for job selection – stability, security, and long term benefits. Risks are something they’re not willing to take. They may be entrepreneurial but they’re not necessarily (at least right now) scaling their businesses extensively beyond, say, a family-sized business or what we might call a small/medium enterprise (SME.) Others might say there’s an information gap – those in outlying villages don’t know about new jobs in the town center – jobs that they would have had to have biked to but that now are more accessible with the new roads and bridges the government has built. It’s this last factor that we chose to tackle with GrowLanka.

We offered up a technological solution to the information gap. There’s more than 85% mobile penetration in this region; that means that while people don’t necessarily always have the resources or the means (or quite frankly, the time) to travel to find jobs, they can still access information about new vacancies if they get an SMS about them. Job alerts systems exist in the country but we found quickly that there’s a gap. These systems require the user to interface at some point with a computer screen – that is, to register you need a reliable internet connection and the ability to sign on to get information about how to subscribe to the system. Once you’ve subscribed online, you’ll get the SMSs. These are valuable systems but they service primarily middle income users who have access to wifi and computers in the first place. The average user in the north has a phone but not a computer – meaning they were in essence being excluded from these job networks. That’s where we come in. We designed a mobile system in which every function—subscribing, unsubscribing, getting job alerts, talking to employers—could be completed using just a simple mobile phone. We’ve been developing and iterating the system for a while now but this December/January was our real subscriber push. That means I’ve spent this month criss-crossing between Colombo and Jaffna, Vavuniya, and Killinochchi in the north essentially campaigning, telling people about our system, and getting people subscribed.

In the process, I have learned so much – about the people of Sri Lanka and the transition point this country is at, about the labor market, about technological solutions and what they really need to succeed. I’ll be talking more about these lessons in upcoming posts. What I hope these posts will reveal is that Sri Lanka is an incredible case study for a post-conflict society. Economic success here is not just important to increase the livelihood of the people. Given the transitional state this country is in economic success could mean the difference between the country charting down an authoritarian path or a democratic one. While I don’t think economic development is in and of itself enough to sustain the people in the north (in other words: a political settlement will be needed soon), economic development does serve a valuable purpose: it helps to foster a sense of inclusivity, a perception that a kid being educated in Jaffna has just as good a shot at a good life as a kid being educated in Colombo. Arriving at a lasting peace in Sri Lanka requires then both political reconciliation and the somewhat more novel idea of economic reconciliation. Inequality must be thwarted, the people of the north have to be given a fair shot at integrating into the country’s economy, and the public and the private and the individual have a huge role to play in making sure that happens.

Up next: a post about the technical fails of field work 

What magic is a highway

*This post is a part of a series, vignettes really, meant to capture the work I’ve been up to in Sri Lanka this December & January and thoughts and impressions of the changes I’ve seen and the people I’ve met. Check back here daily for more :)

Driving down the A9 that connects Jaffna to Kilinochchi to Vavuniya and beyond, I can’t help but think to myself how much this country has changed. I was talking the other day to a CEO of a bank here and amid my flurry of questions, he stopped me.

“You grew up here, right?” I nodded. “Well, do you see a difference?”

Change, so quick, so imperceptible it seems, is an understatement for what has happened in Sri Lanka since the end of the war in May of 2009. A new highway, roads, infrastructure development, wifi coded coffee shops, and the chance after so many years to go all the way from one tip of this island to the other not worried about the army or suicide bombers or a land mine. Some people will tell you that change hasn’t come quick enough or that the changes we’re seeing while good aren’t the changes we need to be seeing right now. I won’t bore you with the arguments. The point is that even as this is a Sri Lanka that I have known for so long, it is a far different Sri Lanka from the one I grew up in. The fact that there’s no military checkpoint outside my gate, no soldiers to make faces to is a sign in and of itself.

A lot of people are scrambling now to describe Sri Lanka, a formerly developing nation, it seems she’s graduated to a middle class economy. People don’t quite know what to make of a country that is building roads as fast as this one, that is seeing literacy rates and healthcare as high as it is with unemployment as low as it is, and that seems—if all that weren’t already enough— to be on the cusp of geopolitically and strategically repositioning itself as a valuable maritime port for trade.

The problems are rife. They always are. And the verdict is still out – is this a peace that’s here to stay, some will inevitably ask. There are the critics and the optimists. But as I drive down the newly paved roads of Colombo, the highway up to Jaffna and to the airport, I can’t help but think about the amazing things a country can do when it’s not at war. And I can’t help but think about the people I’ve met here who want so badly for everything to work out, who love this country so much – not as Sinhalese or as Tamils but as Sri Lankans. There are many people who would like to bet against Sri Lanka right now but I’m not one of them.

the house that built me.

Too fast, too fast. The world moves too fast, I think as I pace back and forth across the black marble of my grandparents’ house. There in the very living room where my grandfather used to walk, his even, slow steps, one after the other in a trail across the floor with my baby sister in his arms. Patient to the core, he was the only one among us all who would carry her in his arms when she cried. And for a while it was his touch uniquely that would soothe her. Now it is me pacing back and forth, wondering what comfort he must have sought from those walks inside our garden’s gates even as it was his strolls outside it that he relished most. My mind reels back and forth, my thoughts racing, pausing to chuckle only for a few seconds at this memory, one that spurts forth a recollection of many more.

In this living room with its marble floor and paneled window door. In this house on Longden Place. With its garden that my grandmother laid. Gone is the shelf of trinkets she used to collect – the purple hand sized chair with a bouquet placed upon it that I once proudly selected at some random craft bazaar in Colombo. The big bowled plastic red chairs I used to sit in. Gone now just as she is. Memories of her casket laying here in the dining room that lays just beyond where my grandfather used to pace come back slowly and quickly all at once, her passing so quick, her loss so deep, her memory… everywhere. Not just pictures but places and things, thoughts in the air that chase me like memories from long ago. The little magnets she placed on the fridge that are still here. The kitchen where she used to cook lunch before day even broke. The ash trays of my grandfather’s that she kept long after he had passed.

From this dining room I take in the foyer, its tiny prayer room in the corner. Sealed now, it’s where I once spent an afternoon in front of my grandmother’s Buddha statue playing with matches despite all my mother’s warnings (what else, after all, to do on a lazy afternoon?). There’s the table where she once taught me how to draw real fish not just little curves that intersected with abandon. The place where the organ once stood now replaced by a mini bar with my uncle’s dinner party alcohol collection, the chest in the corner that not even time has been able to move – even as I have no earthly clue what lays inside it.

Even as my uncle and aunt have made their own changes, slight additions, a new gate, a new bathroom even (!!), there remains these reminders like so many more just as the mosquitoes are still incessant, the whirring of the fan above still comforting. And I, I still remember the long days and quick nights I spent here as a child in this house, this house that built me.

I pace back and forth across the floor tears supplanted by memories that force me to laugh in recollection at myself. At how the mischievous miscreant I once was used to get up in the middle of the night, from between the sheets, tucked safely between my grandmother and grandfather, I’d dial the AC to the coldest degree possible. Waking up, shivering, I’d ask my grandmother why it was so cold. And to think! Ishani and I would fight to get up the fastest – racing to see who would get to help my grandmother cook for the day or bother our grandfather as he spread marmalade across his toast or a new concoction of bananas and seeni sambol – gross! Returned from his daily walk, he would settle in his chair to read his newspaper in peace, a prospect unimaginable with two rambunctious three year olds loitering about the place.

We were mischievous little ones, Ishani and I – more likely I was the real troublemaker, Ishani the coerced accomplice. And boy did we have adventures in this house–from refusing to eat the fish placed upon our dinner plates (and tip-toeing back into the kitchen to plop it back into its rightful pot) to sneaking behind the house and pressing  our eyes and ears against the back window to our grandparent’s room. From there we would observe quietly as our grandmother watched soap operas– and so did we, from right behind her through the window pane.

Pacing back and forth, these memories like fireflies that I try to catch come back to me. These have been quiet mornings here. Still jet lagged, I get up quite early, rise before the city outside our little gated home alights with the traffic and the birds and the honking. Colombo is a city unto itself. But it is in this house that I feel the most safe. It is here that  I have time, time to pace, to think, to sort out in my mind all that has transpired in these past years and all that has yet to come ahead. It is stressful at times, overwhelming even when I think of the 2014 that awaits. A job? More school? Senior year? Me – a senior in college? These things and so many others as time and the world outside pushes and moves. Too fast, too fast, I think.

It has been comforting, soothing even to start these first few days of the year here of all places, in a country that in the most magical and devilish of ways slows down all senses of time. It’s given me the space to process, to unpack, to settle for a while. If 2012 was the year I finally got my bearings in college, 2013 was the year I finally said to hell with it. I threw myself, perhaps prematurely, into so many new things, different things. We can wait for crises or create our own and this might have been the year I mastered the latter. 2013 was hard. Challenging. But I learned. Boy did I learn. I painted wide brush strokes on the canvas of my life and I’m excited to go back now and fill in the details, big and small, slowly, methodically as I pace back and forth across the contours of this living room and back into the life I lead halfway across the world.

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it

This brokenness inside me might start healing

Out here it’s like I’m someone else

I thought that maybe I could find myself

If I could just come in

I swear I’ll leave

Won’t take nothing more than a memory

From the house that built me.

You leave home, you move on

And you do the best you can

I got lost in this old world

And forgot who I am

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it

This brokenness inside me might start healing

Out here it’s like I’m someone else

I thought that maybe I could find myself

 

If I could just come in

I swear I’ll leave

Won’t take nothing more than a memory

From the house that built me.

 

Here’s looking at you, 2030.

As we rung in 2014, Inesha and I were in what is arguably our favorite place in the world: Sri Lanka. But amidst the showers of sparklers from above and fireworks that lit the Colombo sky, I thought about all of the moments and memories that would fill a year freshly begun. This was 2014. But in the past few days of revisiting some of my favorite articles from 2013, I began thinking about a year that we won’t be ringing in until more than a decade from now: 2030.

This Economist article from this past June presents a compelling look at the state of global poverty, and shares the hopeful news that at least one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set by the United Nations has been achieved–that of halving the global poverty rate by 2015.

Of course though, in order to assess trends, we need metrics. Here are a few of the stand-out ones shared in that same article:

Roughly, every 1% increase in GDP per head results in a poverty reduction of 1.7%.

To understand what a decrease in extreme global poverty “looks like” numbers-wise, one estimate says that 2/3 is the result of growth and 1/3 the result of greater equality. 

China has the most to boast about when it comes to rates of poverty reduction. 75% of the global poverty reduction seen in the past three decades is attributed to progress made by the modern giant.

So, what I am looking forward to in 2014? Time with my family and friends. My first semester abroad. The experience of knowing and loving people in more than one place. Inevitably this will mean more travel and frequent flyer miles logged. While I have loved the burst of travel opportunities that college and the past 2.5 years have brought, I also hope to move around the globe with a keen awareness of the economic and social environments that I drop in and out of as the months pass. They are all vastly different from one another, and if the trends continue, all will be increasingly more conducive to growth in the coming decade. Of course, there will be pitfalls and new obstacles too. For one, the rate of poverty reduction will have to slow down, and that will likely make the next great goal in poverty reduction much harder to reach. But if progress is made in both boosting growth and decreasing income inequality, then it seems possible.

If the story of extreme global poverty reduction were a book, then the authors of the Economist article posit that China wrote the first chapter of this three-part story. The second and last chapters must be about India and Africa, the regions of the world where the largest number of the world’s poor people remain. The issues of identifying the poor and revisiting the chronic problem of inefficient aid distribution will be paramount as global leaders strive towards the alluring promise of 2030.

But sitting here, looking at the first frost-bitten days of 2014, I am thankful that there is a good deal of hope to be had. 

 

Poverty used to be a reflection of scarcity. Now it is a problem of identification, targeting and distribution. And that is a problem that can be solved.

–Not always with us

 

Here’s to a joyous and prosperous new year!

 

xo I & I