Male Attitudes and Behaviours Towards Women and Digital Technologies in Pakistan

I am delighted to see the research practice paper that I worked on and wrote with my dear friend and colleague Dr. Akber Gardezi has now been made available within the UNESCO Chair in ICT4D working paper series. It is one of the most important pieces of research that I have ever done, but academic journals did not see fit to publish it. Perhaps this is because it is indeed worthless, and we have done a disservice to all those who contributed to our research, but perhaps it may also be because it challenges too many of the taken for granted assumptions about style and content of publishing in ICT4D academic journals in the 2020s. Both Akber and I are immensely grateful to the many people in Pakistan with whom we spoke for this reseach, typified by the group of amazing women illustrated in the photo above from 2020.

I wanted the paper to be published in a good academic journal to help Akber’s career, but in the end after journal rejections we decided that the messages were too important simply to be binned in the rejection folder. I will let readers judge whether it is indeed worthless – but for those of you who think it is, please at least take away some of the important messages contained within it.

Abstract

The full paper is available here, but the abstract reads as follows:

This paper reports on qualitative research undertaken to explore men’s attitudes and behaviours towards women and technology in Pakistan (in Azad Kashmir, Islamabad, Punjab and Sindh) in January-February 2020.  It is premised on a concern that much research and practice on gender digital equality is based on ideas emanating mainly from North America and Europe, and may not be nuanced enough and sufficiently culturally appropriate to be relevant in different contexts, such as an Islamic state in South Asia.  It builds on our previous research on mobile ‘phones and identity, as well as the use of mobiles for sexual harassment in Pakistan.  Four main conclusions are drawn: first, wider aspects of Pakistan’s society and culture would need to be changed before substantial gender digital equality (as conceived in most “Western” literature) is achieved; second, there was considerable diversity in the views expressed by our participants about gender digital equality, and whilst we do draw some general conclusions these should not mask the importance of such diversity; third, despite the challenges, the last decade has seen substantial changes in the use of digital technologies by women, especially in urban areas and among the higher classes, with many more girls now studying STEM subjects and a small but growing number of women taking jobs in the tech sector; and finally, it highlights complex and difficult questions about universal and relativist approaches to gender digital equality.

Acknowledgements

Very many people contributed to this research, and it is their voices that we wanted to reproduce in the paper. Many of them asked to be named in anything we wrote, and so I reproduce the paper acknowledgements here in full:

We are extremely grateful to colleagues in COMSATS University Islamabad (especially Dr. Tahir Naeem), the University of Sindh (especially Dr. Mukesh K. Khatwani) and the International Islamic University Islamabad (Dr. Bushra Hassan) for facilitating and supporting this research.  We are also grateful to those in Riphah International University (especially Dr. Ayesha Butt) and Rawalpindi Women University (especially Prof Ghazala Tabassum), as well as senior management of those companies (Alfoze and Cavalier) who helped with arrangements for convening the focus groups.

This paper is above all, though, an expression of our efforts to share the views of the many people who contributed so passionately and openly to our questions.  These people (listed in alphabetical order of first names) are therefore, in practice, the originators of the views that we have sought to combine and share more widely: Aakash Kumar, Abdul Bari, Abdul Maalik, Abdul Manan, Abdul Rehman, Abdul Saud, Afsheen Altaf, Ahmed Bilal, Ali, Ali Shah, Dr. Alina Zeeshan, Amir Gohar, Amna Anwar, Anam, Andleeb Ismail, Anmol, Anzalna, Arslan Ahmad, Asad Malik, Atia-Tul-Karim, Awais Ahmed, Awais Rahat, Ayesha Kayani, Dr. Azhar Mahmood, Babar Ali, Balaj Chaudary, Bilawal Ali, Bushra Kanwal, Ch. Hussain, Ch. Murtaza, Danish Shoukat, Danyal Malik, Darima Habib, Darshana, Fahad Saleem, Fahim, Faiza Kanwal, Faiza Shah, Faizan Abrar, Fatima Seerat, Ghazala Tabbassum, Heba Mariyam, Habibullah, Hafeez ur Rehman, Hafsa, Hamid Nawaz, Hamza, Hassan, Hina Akram, Humna Ikhlaq, Ihtisham Ijaz, Kainat Aslam, Kainat Malik, Khuda Bux, M. Hamza Tahir, M. Hassan, M. Riaz, M. Wajahat, M. Hassan Zehri, Maira, Manzoor Ali, Maryam Rehmat, Mehmoona Akram, Memoona, Mishkat, Mohsin Tumio, Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Sarwar, Muhammad Zeeshan, Munawar Gul, Muqadas Saleem, Muqaddas Abid, Noman Javed, Noor Nabi, Noor ul Ain Maroof, Osama Osmani,Paras, Qayoum, Rajesh, Ramsha, Rashid Ali, Rashid Shah, Raza Asif Ali, Rehan Arshad, Renuka, Rohit Kumar, Rumaisa Feroz, Saeed Ahmed, Saima Mehar, Dr. Sajjad Manzoor, Saleha Kamal, Sameen Rashid, Saqib Hussain, Sara Shahzad, Sarfraz, Sarmed Javed, Sarwan Nizamani, Shahid Sohail, Dr. Shahwawa, Sharjeel, Shehrol Asmat , Sonia Khan, Sumaira Tariq, Syed Ahmed, Talha, Tasneem, Tehmina Yousaf, Tehreem, Usama Basharat, Usama Nasir Khan, Usama Thakur, Usman Farooq, Waleed Khan, Waqas Masood, Yasir Iqbal, Yousif Khan, and Zahra Ali.  We hope that we have done them justice.  All of them ticked the box indicating that they wished for their names to be recorded in material that we wrote; those few who chose to tick the box saying that they did not want their names recorded are not mentioned here, but we are very grateful to them nonetheless.

Some of the brilliant people with whom we spoke are illustrated in the images below, and I hope that what Akber and I have written does indeed do justice to the time you spent sharing your thoughts with us, and that together we can indeed begin to change attitudes towards the interactions between women and digital tech.

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All of the material resulting from our research is available on the TEQtogether site in the section on our research in Pakistan, including the guidance notes that have subsequently been produced in Urdu and English based on the research.

The influence of environmental factors on Covid-19: towards a research agenda

Considerable attention was paid in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic to its spatial distribution in the hope that environmental factors might be found to play a key role in influencing its spread in two ways: by restricting it to a narrow band of countries with specific environmental factors; and hoping that a rise in temperature in the summer would kill it off.

• Researchers at Maryland University (Sajadi, M.M. et al., 2020) thus used maps of the early stages of Covid-19 to suggest that it spreads more easily in cold, damp climates, and that its highest incidence would be between latitudes 30-50 N.  At the time, I suggested on 3rd April that there were too many anomalies for this to be valid, that it was only based on limited data (where the coronavirus had spread by early March 2020) and that it was necessary to understand better the actual physical processes involved.  However, the idea that there might be environmental factors that will control Covid-19 still persists.
• Likewise, in the early days of the pandemic there was much optimism that the new coronavirus might act in similar ways to some of its predecessors and be seasonal in character, waning in the summer months when it gets warmer.  Again, this was in part based on the timing of its outbreak (in China in December 2019 ) and its rapid spread through Europe with an approximately similar timing to seasonal flu.  However, many experts were cautious about this possible scenario (see Jon Cohen in Science, 13th March 2020, and Alvin Powell in the Harvard Gazette, 14th April 2020).

Nevertheless, the much more rapid spread of Covid-19 in Europe and North America than in Africa and South Asia has led some to continue to argue that the devastating impact of lockdown in countries nearer the equator, particularly on the lives of some of the poorest people living there, may be un-necessary if this pattern can indeed be explained by environmental factors.  The lockdown has already been partially rolled back, for example, in countries such as Pakistan (with some factories reopening on 12th April , and congregational prayers at mosques durong Ramadan being permitted from 21st April) and South Africa (with initial steps being taken to reopen the economy on 1st May).  Clearly, the rate and distribution of the spread of Covid-19 is influenced by many factors, including government policies (with the UK performing especially badly, see my recent post),  demographic characteristics (with the elderly being particularly vulnerable), population distribution (spreading slower in sparsely settled areas), characteristics of the several strains and mutations of the Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus (summary in EMCrit), and the inaccuracy and unreliability of reported data about infections and deaths (see my comments here).

The role of environmental factors remains uncertain, despite a considerable amount of research (see systematic review by Mecenas, P. et al., 2020 – thanks to Serge Stinckwich for sharing this) which has sought to draw conclusions from the distribution of cases in parts of the world with different climates, and has suggested that cold and dry conditions helped the spread of the virus whereas warm and wet climates seem to reduce its spread.  A more recent study by Jüni et al. (8th May 2020) has claimed that epidemic growth has little or no association with latitude and temperature, although it has weak negative associations with relative and absolute humidity.  Unfortunately, very few studies have yet sought to do experimental research that actually measures the survivability and ease of spread of Sars-Cov-2 under different real-world environmental conditions.  Moreover, if as appears likely, most infections actually occur indoors, it is not the external climatic conditions that will influence rates of infection but rather the artifical environments created indoors through heating and ventlaltion systems that will be of most significance in influencing its spread.

Two related approaches to this challenge are necessary: identifying its survivabililty in a range of different environments (and surfaces), and analysis of the effect of different environments on the distance that it can be spread by infected people.

Research on the survivability of Sars-Cov-2 in different contexts

Several reported studies have explored the stability of the new coronavirus on different surfaces.  In a widely cited study, van Doremalen et al. (13th  March 2020) suggested that the stability of HCov-19 (Sars-Cov-2) was very similar to that of Sars-Cov-1 (the SARS outbreak in 2003), and that viable virus could be detected as follows:

• in aerosols up to 3 hours after aerosolization
• up to 4 hours on copper
• up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to 47-72 hours on plastic and stainless steel.

This important study has subsequently been used as the standard estimate for the survivability of the coronavirus.  However, it was undertaken in the USA under very specific relatively humidity (for aerosols at 65%; for surfaces at 40%) and temperature conditions (for both at 21-23^o C) (See also more recently, van Doremalen et al. 16 April 2020).  A rapid expert review of Sars-Cov-2’s survivability under different conditions (Fineberg, 7th April 2020) notes that the number of experimental studies remains small, but that elevated temperatures seem to reduce its survivability, and that this varies for diffferent materials.  Nevertheless, Fineberg emphasises that laboratory conditions do not necessarily accurately reflect real-world conditions.  In referrring to natural history studies, he also emphasises, as noted above, that conflicting results have emerged because such studies are “hampered by poor quaity data, confounding factors, and insufficient time since the beginning of the pandemix from which to draw conclusions” (p.4).

If a better understanding of Sars-Cov-2’s survivability in different parts of the world is to be gained, it is therefore essential urgently to undertake real world studies of its viability on similar surfaces in various places with different temperature and humidity profiles.

The dispersal distance of Sars-Cov-2

The standard advice across many countries of the world is that people should maintain a minimum distance of 2 m (in some countries 1.5 m) between each other to limit the spread of Covid-19 (see, for example, Public Health England).  This is double the WHO’s advice for the public, which is to “Maintain at least 1 metre (3 feet) distance between yourself and others. Why? When someone coughs, sneezes, or speaks they spray small liquid droplets from their nose or mouth which may contain virus. If you are too close, you can breathe in the droplets, including the COVID-19 virus if the person has the disease“.  The 2 m figure was adopted early by some CDCs, and appears to be more of an approximate early guess (based on the previous Sars-Cov-1 outbreak) that has taken root, rather than an accurate scientifically based figure.

Since then, more rigorous research has been undertaken, much of which suggests that 2 m may not be enough. Setti et al. (23rd April) thus note that Sars-Cov-2 has higher aerosol survivability than did its predecessor, and that a growing body of literature supports a view that “it is plausible that small particles containing the virus may diffuse in indoor environments covering distances up to 10 m from the emission sources”.  They also conclude that “The inter-personal distance of 2 m can be reasonably considered as an effective protection only if everybody wears face masks in daily life activities”. A particularly interesting laboratory based study a month previously by Bourouiba (26th March 2020) provides strong evidence that the turbulent gas clouds formed by sneezes and coughs provide conditions that enable the coronavirus to survive for much longer at greater distances: “The locally moist and warm atmosphere within the turbulent gas cloud allows the contained droplets to evade evaporation for much longer than occurs with isolated droplets“.  She concludes that the “gas cloud and its payload of pathogen-bearing droplets of all sizes can travel 23 to 27 feet (7-8 m)”.  Furthermore, another study by Blocken et al. (9th April) noted that the 1.5 m – 2 m distance was based on people who were standing still, and that there could be a potential aerodynamic effect for people cycling and running.  For someone running at 14.4 km/hr the social distance in the slipstream might be nearer 10 m.

Such studies have been controversial (for a summary, see Eric Niiler in Wired, 14th April), but they highlight that in practice:

• the “safe’ distance between people is unknown;
• there is little strong scientific evidence for the 1 m – 2 m recommendations for social distancing; and
• this distance is highly likely to vary in different environmental contexts.

Not enough conclusive reseach has yet been undertaken on the extent to which environmental factors, such as humidity, pressure, altitude, wind and temperature actually affect how far Sars-Cov-2 will disperse, and at what infectious dose (see Linda Geddes, NewScientist, 27th March 2020, where viral load is also discussed; see also ECDC, 25th March 2020).  It seems likely, though, that dispersal will indeed vary in different conditions, and thus in different parts of the world.  We just don’t yet know how great such variability is.

The latest systematic review published in The Lancet, and cited in The Guardian (2nd June 2020) sugggests that distance does matter, and that not only is 2 m safer than less than 1 m, but also that face masks can indeed reduce substantuially the risk of infection.

Towards a research agenda

This post has emphasised that we actually know remarkably little with certainty about how Sars-Cov-2 physically survives and disperses in different environmental contexts.  This has hugely important ramifications for the spread of Covid-19 in different parts of the world, and thus the mitigating policies and actions that need to be taken.  If, for example, Covid-19 does not survive in hot humid conditions, and is also dispersed over shorter distances in such circumstances, then it might be possible for governments of countries where such conditions prevail not to have to impose such stringent social distancing requirements as those that have been put in place in Europe.

Urgent experimental research is therefore required in real-world environments on:

• the survivabililty of Sars-Cov-2 in a range of different physical environments (and surfaces), and
• the effects of different environments on the distance that it can be spread by infected people.

A standard protocol and methodology for such research should be created that could then be used collaboratively by scientists working in different parts of the world to address these crucial issues.  Contrasting environments that would warrant the earliest such research (given the high number of economically poor countries therein) would include: high altitude savanna (as in the Bogotá savanna, and the much lower montane Savanna of the Angolan scarp), tropical and subtropical savanna (as in parts of Brazil and Kenya), tropical rainforests (as in Indonesia and Brazil), semi-arid and arid landscapes (as in much of northern and south-west Africa, the Arabian peninsula, and parts of South Asia).  It is also very important to undertake such resaerch both in urban and rural areas, and indoors as well as outside.  If scientists can indeed co-operate to provide a swift answer to the questions raised in this post, then it would be possible to provide much more tailored advice to governments concerning the mitigating measures (including the use of masks) that they should be taking to protect the highest number of people while also maintaing essential economic activity.

[Updated 8th May, 12th May, 30th May 2020 and 2nd June]

Collaboration and competition in Covid-19 response

A week ago, I wrote a post about the potential of crowdsourcing and the use of hashtags for gathering enhanced data on infection rates for Covid-19.  Things have moved rapidly since then as companies, civil society organisations, international organisations, academics and donors have all developed countless initiatives to try to respond.  Many of these initiatives seem to be more about the profile and profits of the organisations/entities involved than they do about making a real impact on the lives of those who will suffer most from Covid-19.  Yesterday, I wrote another post on my fears that donors and governments will waste huge amounts of money, time and effort on Covid-19 to little avail, since they have not yet learnt the lessons of past failures.

I still believe that crowdsourcing could have the potential, along with many other ways of gathering data, to enhance decision making at this critical time. However the dramatic increase in the number of such initiatives gives rise to huge concern.  Let us learn from past experience in the use of digital technologies in development, and work together in the interests of those who are likely to suffer the most.  Eight issues are paramount when designing a digital tech intervention to help reduce the impact of Covid-19, especially through crowdsourcing type initiatives:

• Don’t duplicate what others are already doing
• Treat privacy and security very carefully
• Don’t detract from official and (hopefully) accurate information
• Keep it simple
• Ask questions that will be helpful to those trying to respond to the pandemic
• Ensure that there are at least some questions that are the same in all surveys if there are multiple initiatives being done by different organisations
• Work with a globally agreed set of terminology and hashtags (#)
• Collaborate and share

Don’t duplicate what others are already doing

As the very partial list of recent initiatives at the end of this post indicates, many crowdsourcing projects have been created across the world to gather data from people about infections and behaviours relating to Covid-19.  Most of these are well-intentioned, although there will also be those that are using such means unscrupulously also to gather data for other purposes.  Many of these initiatives ask very similar questions.  Not only is it a waste of resources to design and build several competing platforms in a country (or globally), but individual citizens will also soon get bored of responding to multiple different platforms and surveys.  The value of each initiative will therefore go down, especially if there is no means of aggregating the data.  Competition between companies may well be an essential element of the global capitalist system enabling the fittest  to accrue huge profits, but it is inappropriate in the present circumstances where there are insufficient resources available to tackle the very immediate responses needed across the world.

Treat privacy and security very carefully

Most digital platforms claim to treat the security of their users very seriously.  Yet the reality is that many fail to protect the privacy of much personal information sufficiently, especially when software is developed rapidly by people who may not prioritise this issue and cut corners in their desire to get to market as quickly as possible.  Personal information about health status and location is especially sensitive.  It can therefore be hugely risky for people to provide information about whether they are infected with a virus that is as easily transmitted as Covid-19, while also providing their location so that this can then be mapped and others can see it.  Great care should be taken over the sort of information that is asked and the scale at which responses are expected.  It is not really necessary to know the postcode/zipcode of someone, if just the county or province will do.

Don’t detract from official and (hopefully) accurate information

Use of the Internet and digital technologies have led to a plethora of false information being propagated about Covid-19.  Not only is this confusing, but it can also be extremely dangerous.  Please don’t – even by accident – distract people from gaining the most important and reliable information that could help save their lives.  In some countries most people do not trust their governments; in others, governments may not have sufficient resources to provide the best information.  In these instances, it might be possible to work with the governments to ehance their capacity to deliver wise advice.  Whatever you do, try to point to the most reliable globally accepted infomation in the most appropriate languages (see below for some suggestions).

Keep it simple

Many of the crowdsourcing initiatives currently available or being planned seem to invite respondents to complete a fairly complex and detailed list of questions.  Even when people are healthy it could be tough for them to do so, and this could especially be the case for the elderly or digitally inexperienced who are often the most vulnerable.  Imagine what it would be like for someone who has a high fever or difficulty in breathing trying to fill it in.

Ask questions that will be helpful to those trying to respond to the pandemic

It is very difficult to ask clear and unambiguous questions.  It is even more difficult to ask questions about a field that you may not know much about.  Always work with people who might want to use the data that your initiative aims to generate.  If you are hoping, for example, to produce data that could be helpful in modelling the pandemic, then it is essential to learn from epidemiologists and those who have much experience in modelling infectious diseases.  It is also essential to ensure that the data are in a format that they can actually use.  It’s all very well producing beautful maps, but if they use different co-ordinate systems or boundaries from those used by government planners they won’t be much use to policy makers.

Ensure that there are at least some questions that are the same in all surveys if there are multiple initiatives being done by different organisations

When there are many competing surveys being undertaken by different organisations about Covid-19, it is important that they have some identical questions so that these can then be aggregated or compared with the results of other initiatives.   It is pointless having multiple initiatives the results of which cannot be combined or compared.

Work with a globally agreed set of terminology and hashtags (#)

The field of data analytics is becoming ever more sophisticated, but if those tackling Covid-19 are to be able readily to use social media data, it would be very helpful if there was some consistency in the use of terminology and hashtags.  There remains an important user-generated element to the creation of hashtags (despite the control imposed by those who create and own social media platforms), but it would be very helpful to those working in the field if some consistency could be encouraged or even recommended by global bodies and UN agencies such as the WHO and the ITU.

Collaborate and share

Above all, in these unprecendented times, it is essential for those wishing to make a difference to do so collaboratively rather than competitively.  Good practices should be shared rather than used to generate individual profit.  The scale of the potential impact, especially in the weakest contexts is immense.  As a recent report from the Imperial College MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis notes, without interventions Covid-19 “would have resulted in 7.0 billion infections and 40 million deaths globally this year. Mitigation strategies focussing on shielding the elderly (60% reduction in social contacts) and slowing but not interrupting transmission (40% reduction in social contacts for wider population) could reduce this burden by half, saving 20 million lives, but we predict that even in this scenario, health systems in all countries will be quickly overwhelmed. This effect is likely to be most severe in lower income settings where capacity is lowest: our mitigated scenarios lead to peak demand for critical care beds in a typical low-income setting outstripping supply by a factor of 25, in contrast to a typical high-income setting where this factor is 7. As a result, we anticipate that the true burden in low income settings pursuing mitigation strategies could be substantially higher than reflected in these estimates”.

 

Resources

This concluding section provides quick links to generally agreed reliable and simple recommendations relating to Covid-19 that could be included in any crowdsourcing platform (in the appropriate language), and a listing of just a few of the crowdsourcing initiatives that have recently been developed.

Recommended reliable information on Covid-19

• WHO resources
  • Protect yourself
  • Country and technical guidance
• Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention
• Africa Centres for Disease Control (very slow to download – can someone urgently please help them get better connectivity)
• European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control
• UK National Health Service Advice for Everyone – and good graphics from the BBC
• Survey instrument questions developed and shared by Imperial College MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis (UK)

Remember the key WHO advice adopted in various forms by different governments:

• Wash your hands frequently
• Maintain social distancing
• Avoid touching eyes, nose and mouth
• If you have fever, cough and difficulty breathing, seek medical care early

A sample of crowdsourcing initiatives

Some of the many initiatives using crowdsourcing and similar methods to generate data relating to Covid-19 (many of which have very little usage):

• Global/Generic
  • Redaktor (mainly European)
  • Folding@Home
  • Safecast – an international volunteer driven non-profit organization whose goal is to create useful, accessible, and granular environmental data
    • Covid-19 testing map
  • WhatsApp Coronoavirus Information Hub
  • Good Judgement Open Platform
  • Metaculus
• Argentina
  • Coronavirus Argentina (very little usage)
• France
  • Coronavirus in Toulouse (very little usage)
•  Italy
  • Anpas
• India
  • Covid-19 in India (press report)
•  Kenya
  • KEPSA and Liquid Telecom
• Madagascar
  • MDG – Covid 19 (very little usage)
• Nigeria

  • Supporting Response Effort to the Corona Virus (COVID-19) in Nigeria

•  Singapore
  • covid19 SG
• South Africa
  • Chatsworth (very litte usage)
•  Spain
  • Frena La Curva
  • coronavirusmakers  (very little usage)
• Sweden
  • Corona Help (very little usage)
• Switzerland
  • Corona-Work
• UK
  • Let’s Beat Covid-19 – a million doctors need your help (anonymous survey)
  • Covid Symptom Tracker – Guy’s and St Thomas’ Biomedical Research Centre
  • Public Health England – UK Covid-19 update maps
• USA
  • Covid 19 Connectus (very little usage)
  • Covid Near You
  • Opendemic (by students at Harvard and MIT)

Lists by others of relevant initiatives:

• Open Gov Partnership: Collecting open governments approaches to COVID-19
• NESTA: Mobilising collective inetlligence to tackle the COVID-19 threat
• Noel Patel’s (MIT) listing of 10 coronavirus dashboards

 

Global Covid-19 mapping and recording initiatives

The following are currently three of the best sourcs for global information about Covid-19 – although I do wish that they clarified that “infections” are only “recorded infections”, and that data around deaths should be shown as “deaths per 1000 people” (or similar density measures) and depicted on choropleth maps.

• thebaselab
• Johns Hopkins University CSSE
• Worldometer

 

The attitudes and behaviours of men towards women and technology in Pakistan

Gender digital equality, however defined, is globally worsening rather than improving.[1]  This is despite countless initiatives intended to empower women in and through technology.[2]  In part, this is because most such initiatives have been developed and run by and for women.  When men have been engaged, they have usually mainly been incorporated as “allies” who are encouraged to support women in achieving their strategic objectives.[3]  However, unless men fundamentally change their attitudes and behaviours to women (and girls) and technology, little is likely to change.  TEQtogether (Technology Equality together) was therefore founded by men and women with the specific objective to change these male attitudes and behaviours.  It thus goes far beyond most ally-based initiatives, and argues that since men are a large part of the problem they must also be an integral part of the solution.  TEQtogether’s members seek to identify the best possible research and understanding about these issues, and to incorporate it into easy to use guidance notes translated into various different languages.  Most research in this field is nevertheless derived from experiences in North America and Europe, and challenging issues have arisen in trying to translate these guidance notes into other languages and cultural contexts.[4]  TEQtogether is now therefore specifically exploring male attitudes and behaviours towards women and digital technologies in different cultural contexts, so that new culturally relevant guidance notes can be prepared and used to change such behaviours, as part of its contribution to the EQUALS global initiative on incresing gender digital equality.

Meeting of EQUALS partners in New York, September 2018

Pakistan is widely acknowledged to be one of the countries that has furthest to go in attaining gender digital equality.[5]  Gilwald, for example, emphasises that Pakistan has a 43% gender gap in the use of the Internet and a 37% gap in ownership of mobile phones (in 2017).[6]  Its South Asian cultural roots and Islamic religion also mean that it is usually seen as being very strongly patriarchal.[7]  In order to begin to explore whether guidance notes that have developed in Europe and North America might be relevant for use in Pakistan, and if not how more appropriate ones could be prepared for the Pakistani content, initial research was conducted with Dr. Akber Gardezi  in Pakistan in January and February 2020.  This post provides a short overview of our most important findings, which will then be developed into a more formal academic paper once the data have been further analysed.

Research Methods

The central aim of our research was better to understand men’s attitudes and behaviours towards women and technology in Pakistan, but we were also interested to learn what women thought men would say about this subject.[8]  We undertook 12 focus groups (7 for men only, 4 for women only, and one mixed) using a broadly similar template for both men and women, that began with very broad and open questions and then focused down on more specific issues.  The sample included university students and staff studying and teaching STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), tech start-up companies, staff in small- and medium-sized enterprises, and also in an established engineering/IT company.  Focus groups were held in Islamabad Capital Territory, Kashmir, Punjab and Sindh, and they were all approximately one hour in duration. We had ideally wanted each group to consist of c.8-12 people, but we did not wish to reject people who had volunteered to participate, and so two groups had as many as 19 people in them.  A total of 141 people participated in the focus groups.  The men varied in age from 20-41 and the women from 19-44 years old.  All participants signed a form agreeing to their participation, which included that they were participating  voluntarily, they could withdraw at any time, and they were not being paid to answer in particular ways.  They were also given the option of remaining anonymous or of having their names mentioned in any publications or reports resulting from the research.  Interestingly all of the 47 women ticked that they were happy to have their names mentioned, and 74 of the 94 men likewise wanted their names recorded.[9]  The focus groups were held in classrooms, a library, and company board rooms.  After some initial shyness and uncertainty, all of the focus groups were energetic and enthusiastic, with plenty of laughter and good humour, suggesting that they were enjoyed by the participants.  I very much hope that was the case; I certainly learnt a lot and enjoyed exploring these important issues with them.

This report summarises the main findings from each section of the focus group discussions: broad attitudes and behaviours by men towards the use of digital technologies by women; how men’s attitudes and behaviours influence women’s and girls’ access to and use of digital technologies at home, in education, and in their careers; whether any changes in men’s attitudes and behaviours towards women and technology are desirable, and if so how might these be changed.  In so doing, it is very important to emphasise that although it is possible to draw out some generalisations there was also much diversity in the responses given.  These tentative findings were also discussed in informal interviews held in Pakistan with academics and practitioners to help validate their veracity and relevance.

I am enormously grateful to all of the people in the images below as well as the many others who contributed to this research.

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Men’s attitudes and behaviours towards the use of digital technologies by women in Pakistan

When initially asked in very general terms about “women” and “digital technology” most participants had difficulty in understanding what was meant by such a broad question.  However, it rapidly became clear that the overall “culture” of Pakistan was seen by both men and women as having a significant impact on the different ways in which men and women used digital technologies.  Interestingly, whilst some claimed that this was because of religious requirements associated with women’s roles being primarily in the sphere of the home and men’s being in the external sphere of work, others said that this was not an aspect of religion, but rather was a wider cultural phenomenon.

Both men and women concurred that traditionally there had been differences between access to and use of digital technologies in the past, but that these had begun to change over the last five years.  A distinction was drawn between rural, less well educated and lower-class contexts, where men tended to have better access to and used digital technologies more than women, and urban, better educated and higher-class contexts where there was greater equality and similarity between access to and use of digital technologies.

Whilst most participants considered that access to digital technologies and the apps used were broadly similar between men and women, both men and women claimed that the actual uses made of these technologies varied significantly.  Men were seen as using them more for business and playing games, whereas women used them more for online shopping, fashion and chatting with friends and relatives.  This was reinforced by the cultural context where women’s roles were still seen primarily as being to manage the household and look after the children, whereas men were expected to work, earning money to maintain their families.  It is very important to stress that variations in usage and access to technology were not always seen as an example of inequality, but were often rather seen as differences linked to Pakistan’s culture and social structure.

Such views are changing, but both men and women seemed to value this cultural context, with one person saying that “it is as it is”.  Moreover, there were strongly divergent views as to whether this was a result of patriarchy, and thus dominated by men.  Many people commented that although the head of the household, almost always a man, provided the dominant lead, it was also often the mothers who supported this or determined what happened within the household with respect to many matters, including the use of technology and education.

In the home, at school and university, and in the workplace

Within the home

Most respondents initially claimed that there was little difference in access to digital technologies between men and women in the home, although as noted above they did tend to use them in different ways.  When asked, though, who would use a single phone in a rural community most agreed that it would be a male head of household, and that if they got a second phone it would be used primarily by the eldest son.  Some, nevertheless, did say that it was quite common for women to be the ones who used a phone most at home.

Participants suggested that similar restrictions were placed on both boys and girls by their parents in the home.  However, men acknowledged that they knew more about the harm that could be done through the use of digital technologies, and so tended to be more protective of their daughters, sisters or wives.  Participants were generally unwilling to indicate precisely what harm was meant in this context, but some clarified that this could be harassment and abuse.[10] The perceived threats to girls and young women using digital technologies for illicit liaisons was also an underlying, if rarely specifically mentioned, concern for men.  There was little realisation though that it was men who usually inflicted such harm, and that a change of male behaviours would reduce the need for any such restrictions to be put in place.

A further interesting insight is that several of the women commented that their brothers are generally more knowledgeable than they are about technology, and that boys and men play an important role at home in helping their sisters and mothers resolve problems with their digital technologies.

At school and university

There was widespread agreement among both men and women that there was no discrimination at school in the use of digital technologies, and that both boys and girls had equal access to learning STEM subjects.  Nevertheless, it is clear that in some rural and isolated areas of Pakistan, as in Tharparkar, only boys go to school, and that girls remain marginalised by being unable to access appropriate education.

Boys in rural school in Tharparkar

Furthermore, it was generally claimed that both girls and boys are encouraged equally to study STEM subjects at school, and can be equally successful.  Some people nevertheless commented that girls and boys had different learning styles and skill sets. Quite a common perception was that boys are more focused on doing a few things well, whereas girls try to do all of the tasks associated with a project and may not therefore be as successful in doing them all to a high standard.

There were, though, differing views about influences on the subjects studied by men and women at university.  Again, it was claimed that the educational institutions did not discriminate, but parents were widely seen as having an important role in determining the subjects studied at university by their children.  Providing men can gain a remunerative job, their parents have little preference over what degrees they study, but it was widely argued that traditionally women were encouraged to study medicine, rather than engineering or computer science.  Participants indicated that this is changing, and this was clearly evidenced by the number and enthusiasm of women computer scientists who participated in the focus groups.  Overall, most focus groups concluded with a view that generally men studied engineering whereas women studied medicine.

In the workplace

There is an extremely rapid fall-off in the number of women employed in the digital technology sector, even if it is true that there is little discrimination in the education system against women in STEM subjects.  At best, it was suggested that only a maximum of 10% of employees in tech companies were women.  Moreover, it was often acknowledged that women are mainly employed in sales and marketing functions in such companies, especially if they are attractive, pale skinned and do not wear a hijab or head-scarf.  This is despite the fact that many very able and skilled female computer scientists are educated at universities, and highly capable and articulate women programmers participated in the focus groups.

Women employed in the tech sector in Pakistan

Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly simply the cultural expectation that young women should be married in their early 20s and no later than 25.  This means that many women graduates only enter the workforce for a short time after they qualify with a degree. Over the last decade overall female participation in the workforce in Pakistan has thus only increased from about 21% to 24%, and has stubbornly remained stable around 24% over the last five years.[11]

Nevertheless, the focus groups drilled down into some of the reasons why the digital technology sector has even less participation of women in it than the national average.  Four main factors were seen as particularly contributing to this:

• The overwhelming factor is that much of the tech sector in Pakistan is based on delivering outsourced functions for US companies. The need to work long and antisocial hours so as to be able to respond to requests from places in the USA with a 10 (EST) – 13 (PST) hour time difference was seen as making it extremely difficult for women who had household and family duties to be able to work in the sector.  There was, though, also little recognition that this cultural issue might be mitigated by permitting women to work from home.
• Moreover, both men and women commented that the lack of safe and regular transport infrastructure made it risky for women to travel to and from work, especially during the hours of darkness. The extent to which this was a perceived or real threat was unclear, and there was little recognition that most threats to women are in any case made by men, whose behaviours are therefore still responsible.
• A third factor was that many offices where small start-up tech companies were based were not very welcoming, and had what several people described as dark and dingy entrances with poor facilities. It was recognised that men tended not to mind such environments, because the key thing for them was to have a job and work, even though these places were often seen as being threatening environments for women.
• Finally, some women commented that managers and male staff in many tech companies showed little flexibility or concerns over their needs, especially when concerned with personal hygiene, or the design of office space, As some participants commented, men just get on and work, whereas women like to have a pleasant communal environment in which to work.  Interestingly, some men commented that the working environment definitely improved when women were present.

It can also be noted that there are very few women working within the retail and service parts of the digital tech sector.  As the picture below indicates this remains an environment that is very male dominated and somewhat alienating for most women.

Digital technology retail and service shops in Rawalpindi

Changing men’s attitudes and behaviours towards women and technology

The overwhelming response from both men and women to our questions in the focus groups was that it is the culture and social frameworks in Pakistan that largely determine the fact that men and women use digital technologies differently and that there are not more women working in the tech sector.  Moreover, this was not necessarily seen as being a negative thing.  It was described as being merely how Pakistan is.  Many participants did not necessarily see it as being specifically a result of men’s attitudes and behaviours, and several people commented that women also perpetuate these behaviours.  Any fundamental changes to gender digital inequality will therefore require wider societal and cultural changes, and not everyone who participated in the focus groups was necessarily in favour of this.

It was, though, recognised that as people in Pakistan become more affluent, educated and urbanised, and as many adopt more global cultural values, things have begun to change over the last five years.  It is also increasingly recognised that the use of digital technologies is itself helping to shape these changed cultural values.

A fundamental issue raised by our research is whether or not the concern about gender digital equality in so-called “Western” societies actually matters in the context of Pakistan.  Some, but by no means all, clearly thought that it did, although they often seemed more concerned about Pakistan’s low ranking in global league tables than they did about the actual implications of changing male behaviour within Pakistani society.

Many of the participants, and especially the men, commented that they had never before seriously thought about the issues raised in the focus groups.  They therefore had some difficulty in recommending actions that should be taken, although most were eager to find ways through which the tech sector could indeed employ more women.  Both men and women were also very concerned to reduce the harms caused to women by their use of digital technologies.

The main way through which participants recommended that such changes could be encouraged were through the convening of workshops for senior figures in the tech sector building on the findings of this research, combined with much better training for women in technology about how best to mitigate the potential harm that can come to them through the use of digital technologies.

Following the main focus group questions, some of the participants expressed interest in seeing TEQtogether’s existing guidance notes.  Interestingly, they commented that many of the generalisations made in them were indeed pertinent in the Pakistani context, although some might need minor tweeking and clarification when translated into Urdu.

However, two specific recommendations for new guidance notes were made:

• Tips for CEOs of digital tech companies who wish to attract more female programmers and staff in general; and
• Guidance for brothers who wish to help their sisters and mothers gain greater expertise and confidence in the use of digital technologies.

These are areas that we will be working on in the future, and hope to have such guidance notes prepared in time for future workshops in Pakistan in the months ahead.

Several men commented that improving the working environment for women in tech companies, and enabling more flexible patterns of work would also go some way to making a difference.  Some  commented how having more women in their workplaces had already changed their behaviours for the better.

 

Acknowledgements

We are extremely grateful to colleagues in COMSATS University Islamabad (especially Dr. Tahir Naeem) and the University of Sindh (especially Dr. M.K. Khatwani) for facilitating and supporting this research.  We are also grateful to those in Riphah International University (especially Dr. Ayesha Butt) and Rawalpindi Women University (especially Prof Ghazala Tabassum), as well as those companies (Alfoze and Cavalier) who helped with arrangements for convening the focus groups.  Above all, we want to extend our enormous thanks to all of the men and women who participated so enthusiastically in this research.  It was an immense pleasure to work with you all.

 

[1] Sey, A. and Hafkin, N. (eds) (2019) Taking Stock: Data and Evidence on Gender Equality in Digital Access, Skills, and Leadership, Macau and Geneva: UNU-CS and EQUALS; OECD (2019) Bridging the Digital Gender Divide: Include, Upskill, Innovate, Paris: OECD;

[2] See for example the work of EQUALS which seeks to bring together a coalition of partners working to reduce gender digital equality.

[3] See for example, Manry, J. and Wisler, M. (2016) How male allies can support women in technology, TechCrunch; Johnson, W.B. and Smith, D.G. (2018) How men can become better allies to women, Harvard Business Review.

[4] Especial thanks are due to Silvana Cordero for her important contribution on the specific challenges of translation in Spanish in the Latin American context.

[5] Siegmann , K.A. (no date) The Gender Digital Divide in Rural Pakistan: How wide is it & how to bridge it? Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI)/ISS; Tanwir, M. and Khemka, N. (2018) Breaking the silicon ceiling: Gender equality and information technology in Pakistan, Gender, Technology and Development, 22(2), 109-29; see also OECD (2019) Endnote 1.

[6] Gilwald, A. (2018) Understanding the gender gap in the Global South, World Economic Forum,

[7] Chauhan, K. (2014) Patriarchal Pakistan: Women’s representation, access to resources, and institutional practices, in: Gender Inequality in the Public Sector in Pakistan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

[8] This research builds on our previous research in Pakistan published as Hassan, B, and Unwin, T. (2017) Mobile identity construction by male and female students in Pakistan: on, in and through the ‘phone, Information Technologies and International Development, 13, 87-102; and Hassan, B., Unwin, T. and Gardezi, A. (2018) Understanding the darker side of ICTs: gender, harassment and mobile technologies in Pakistan, Information Technologies and International Development, 14, 1-17.

[9] All names will be listed with appreciation in reports submitted for publication.

[10] Our previous research (Hassan, Unwin and Gardezi, 2018) provides much further detail on the precise types of sexual abuse and harassment that is widespread in Pakistan.

[11] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Pakistan/Female_labor_force_participation/

Inter Islamic Network on IT and COMSATS University workshop on ICT for Development: Mainstreaming the Marginalised

The 3rd ICT4D workshop convened by the Inter Islamic Network on IT (INIT) and COMSATS University in Islamabad, and supported by the UNESCO Chair in ICT4D (Royal Holloway, University of London) and the Ministry of IT and Telecom in Pakistan on the theme of Mainstreaming the Marginalised was held at the Ramada Hotel in Islamabad on 28th and 29th January 2020.  This was a very valuable opportunity for academics, government officials, companies, civil society organisations and donors in Pakistan to come together to discuss practical ways through which digital technologies can be used to support  economic, social and political changes that will benefit the poorest and most marginalised.  The event was remarkable for its diveristy of participants, not only across sectors but also in terms of the diversity of abilities, age, and gender represented.  It was a very real pleasure to participate in and support this workshop, which built on the previous ones we held in Islamabd in 2016 and 2017.

The inaugural session included addresses by Prof Dr Raheel Qamar (President INIT and Rector COMSATS University, Islamabad), Mr. Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui (Federal Secretary Ministry of IT & Telecom) and Dr. Tahir Naeem (Executive Director, INIT), as well as my short keynote on Digital Technologies, Climate Change and Sustainability.  This was followed by six technical sessions spread over two days:

• Future of learning and technology
• Policy to practice: barriers and challenges
• Awareness and inclusion: strategizing through technology
• Accessibility and Technology: overcoming barriers
• Reskilling the marginalised: understandng role reversals
• Technical provisio: indigenisation for local needs.

These sessions included a wide diversity of activities, ranging from panel sessions, practical demonstrations, and mind-mapping exercises, and there were plenty of opportunities for detailed discussions and networking.

Highlights for me amongst the many excellent presentations included:

• Recollections by Prof Abdful Mannan and Prof Ilyas Ahmed of the struggles faced by people with disabilities in getting their issues acknowledged by others in society, and of the work that they and many others have been doing to support those with a wide range of disabilities here in Pakistan
• The inspirational presentations by Julius Sweetland of his freely available Open Source Optikey software enabling those with multiple disbilities to use only their eyes to write and control a keyboard
• Meeting the young people with Shastia Kazmi (Vision 21 and Founder of Little Hands), who have gained confidence and expertise through her work and are such an inspiration to us all in continuing our work to help some of the pooorest and most marginalised to be empowered through digital technologies.
• The very dynamic discussions around practical actions that we can all take to enable more inclusive use of  digital technologies (mindmaps of these available below)
  • How can we best change men’s attitudes and behaviours so that gender digital equality improves in Pakistan?
  • How can digital technologies be used better to support learning in deprived contexts?

Enormous thanks must go to Dr. Tahir Naeem (COMSATS University and Executive Director of INIT) and his team, especially Dr. Akber Gardezi and Atiq-ur-Rehman, for all that they did to make this event such a success.

A shortened version of this workshop was also subsequently held on Monday 3rd February at the University of Sindh in Jamshoro, thanks to the support and facilitation of Dr. Mukesh Khatwani (Director of the Area Study Centre for Far East and Southeast Asia) and his colleagues.  This also focused on the practical ways through which some of the most marginalised can benefit from the appropriate use of digital technologies, and it was once again good to have the strong involvement of persons with disabilities.

Quick links to workshop materials and outputs:

• My short keynote on Digital Technologies, Climate Change and Sustainability given at both workshops.
• Introduction to Technical Session I. The future of learning and technology: understanding the deprived context.
• Introduction to Technical Session III. Awareness and inclusion: strategising through technology.
• Introduction to Technical Session IV.  Accessibility and technology: overcoming barriers.
• Introduction to Technical Session V. Reskilling the marginalised: women and technology.
• Mindmap of workshop discussion on How can we best change men’s attitudes and behaviours so that gender digital equality improves in Pakistan?
• Mindmap of workshop discussion on How can digital technologies be used better to support learning in deprived contexts?

 

Failures and corruption in DFID’s education programme in Pakistan

DFID’s much-vaunted education programme in Pakistan has been beset by problems since its very beginning.  Many of these issues could have been avoided if people responsible had listened to the voices of those on the ground who were working in the education systems and schools in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.  Those responsible for designing and implementing the flawed programme need to be identified, and take responsibility for their actions.  Many are still in highly paid and “respected” roles in private consultancy companies that are at risk of delivering such failed projects over and over again unless they are stopped.

A recent report in the Financial Times (by Bethan Staton and Farhan Bokhari, 24th August 2019) has gone largely unreported elsewhere, as a coalition of silence continues over this failure and corruption in a prestigious DFID programme.  As their report begins, “Buildings in more than nine in 10 schools in Pakistan delivered under a £107m project funded by the UK’s Department for International Development are not fit for purpose, leaving 115,000 children learning in makeshift classrooms as a new academic year begins”.  Some 1,277 out of the 1,389 schools that were meant to have been built or renovated are potentially at risk from structural design flaws, which put them at risk of collapse in earthquakes.  Pakistan is one of the most seismically active countries in the world and has had six major earthquakes over 6 Mw in the last decade.  The earthquake in October 2005 killed over 86,000 people, and set in train various initiatives to try to ensure that schools were indeed built to protect children in earthquakes.

The UK government has responded quickly to the FT’s report, with the new Secretary of State, Alok Sharma, saying that this is unacceptable and the contracting company would be retrofitting all affected classrooms at no extra cost to the taxpayer.  Stephen Twigg, the chair of the House of Commons International Development Select Committee, has also pledged to investigate this as part of an inquiry into the impact and delivery of aid in Pakistan.

However, all of this could have been avoided if earlier warnings had been heeded, especially from people in Pakistan on the ground who really knew what was going on.  The suspicion is that those who designed and benefitted from the programme thought that they could get away with benefitting personally from these contracts.  Yet again, suspicion falls on the probity of “international development consultants” and “implementing agencies”.  As a very good Pakistani friend said to me, “follow the money”.  So I have!

I first warned about problems with DFID funded education projects in Pakistan following a visit there in 2016.  I raised my concerns in a post in May of that year entitled Education reform in Pakistan: rhetoric and reality, and shared these with colleagues in DFID, but was assured that this was a prestigious DFID programme that was above reproach and was delivering good work.  My comments were, I was told, mere heresay.

That post ended with the following words:

“The main thing that persuaded me to write this piece was a Facebook message I received this morning, that then suddenly disappeared.  It read:

“It is true though Tim Unwin.  What is really pathetic is that neither Dfid nor Sindh/Punjab government are made accountable for those children whose education will discontinue after this debacle. Education Fund for Sindh boasted enrolling 100 thousand out of school kids. Overnight the project and project management has vanished, website dysfunctional…Poof and all is gone. There is no way to track those children and see what’s happening to their education”

This is so very sad.  We need to know the truth about educational reform in Pakistan – and indeed the role of donors, the private sector and richly paid consultants – in helping to shape this.   I cannot claim that what I have been told is actually happening on the ground, but I can claim that this is a faithful record of what I was told”.

I wish I knew why the words were taken down; perhaps the author did not want to be identified.  More importantly, I wish that people in DFID had listened to them.

My earlier post alluded to the coalition of interests in international development between individual consultants, global corporations, local companies, and government officials.  Let me now expand on this.

• McKinsey, Pearson, Delivery Associates and Sir Michael Barber.  Barber is curently chairman and founder of Delivery Associates (among other roles) and was in many ways the mind behind DFID’s recent educational work in Pakistan.  From 2011-2015 he was DFID’s Special Representative on Education in Pakistan (as well as Chief Education Advisor at Pearson, 2011-2017), and in 2013 he wrote an enthusastic report entitled The Good News from Pakistan: How a revolutionary new approach to education reform shows the way forward for Pakistan and development aid everywhere, which explored in particular ways through which expansion in low-cost private sector educational delivery might spur the government to reform itself (pp.49-50).  However, as the Mail Online pointed out Barber was paid £4,404 a day for his advice.  As this source goes on to point out, “Sir Michael was handed the deal 18 months ago as part of a wider contract with management consultants McKinsey.  Originally McKinsey was planning to charge £7,340 a day for Sir Michael’s advice on improving Pakistan’s education system over 45 days, making a total of £330,300.  Overall, four consultants were to be paid £910,000 for 250 days’ work, although this was reduced to £676,720 after the firm agreed a ‘social sector discount’, which took Sir Michael’s daily rate to £5,505. A fellow director was paid the same rate while two ‘senior consultants’ were paid £2,350 a day”.  There is no doubt that Barber played a key role in shaping DFID’s educational policies in Pakistan and was paid “handsomely” for it.  The 2016 review of the PESP (II) (Punjab Education Support Programme) clearly describes his involement: “More formally, the bi-monthly stocktake of the Roadmap provides a high-level forum to discuss a range of key education indicators (such as student attendance and missing facilities) with the CM, Secretary Education and Sir Michael Barber, as the UK Special Representative for Education in Pakistan”.
• IMC Worldwide, the main contractor.  The British Company IMC Worldwide won the main contract for delivering much of DFID’s school building programme in Pakistan, and continues to claim on its website that the project is a great success (as noted on a screenshot of its home page earlier today, shown below).

This goes on to highlight their success in improving up to 1500 classrooms, with videoclips emphasising in particular their use of reinforced foundations, innovative use of Chinese Brick Bond, preserving history through innovations, and building community engagement.  It is, though, worth remembering that the Punjab Education Support Programme PESP (II) January 2016 review commented that “The school infrastructure component has been slow to perform. This was due in part to a delay in legal registration of IMC Worldwide (the international private sector implementing partner) in Pakistan. Unit costs have also risen dramatically since the last Annual Review and work is behind the original schedule. The quality of construction in the classrooms that have been completed is encouraging”.  In hindsight, the quality of work would appear to have been anything but encouraging!

• Humqadan-SCRP, the local initiative.  IMC needed to implement the programme through local contractors, and this led to the creation of Humqadan-SCRP.  The implementation phase started in May 2015 as a five year programme funded by DFID and the Australian government, and managed by IMC Worldwide.  It is very difficult to find out details about exactly who is involved in delivering the construction work on the ground (closed tenders are listed here).  Its newsletters in 2017 and 2018 mentioned that Herman Bergsma was the team leader, although he has now been replaced (his predecessor was Roger Bonner).

As with the IMC site, Humqadan’s media centre page above indicates great success for the initiative.  However, local media in Pakistan has occasionally reported problems and challenges with the work.  In December 2017, Dawn thus highlighted the case of a school building being demolished in 2015, but still remaining to be reconstructed.  More worrying, though, are suggestions that IMC may have failed sufficiently to do quality checks, and had challenges in ensuring that local contractors were paid appropriately and on time; there are even claims that IMC may have sought to keep much of the money for themselves.  DFID’s July 2016 annual report for the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Education Sector Programme (KESP) perhaps gives some credence to such rumours, noting that “Just before the finalisation of last year’s KESP annual review, Humqadam flagged to DFID an expected increase in their costs for construction and rehabilitation, but the detail was not clear at the time of publication. Humqadam subsequently confirmed that after going out to the market for the construction work, several cost drivers were significantly higher than in their original estimates. This had the effect of approximately doubling average classroom construction costs from PKR 450,000 (£2,813) to PKR 950,000 (£5,938)”.  The Pakistani construction sector is notoriously problematic and anyone the least bit familiar with the country should know the importance of good and rigorous management processes to ensure that appropriate standards are maintained.  A doubling of costs, though, seems remarkable; even more remarkable is DFID’s apparent acceptance of this.

• The donor’s role, DFID.  DFID’s regular reports on progress with the project are mixed.  Ever since the beginning, they have tended to over-emphasise the successes, while underestimating the failures. That having been said, it is important to emphasise that some attempts have been made by DFID to grapple with these issues.  As I noted in my earlier post relating to the Punjab Education Support Programme (PESP II): “DFID’s Development Tracker page suggests that there was a substantial over-spend in 2013/14, and a slight underspend in 2015/16, with 2014/15 being just about on budget.  Moreover, DFID’s most recent review of the project dated January 2016 had provided an overall very positive account of the work done so far, although it did note that “The school infrastructure component has been slow to perform” (p.2)“.  The July 2016 KESP report likewise noted that “Over the 12 months since the last KESP review, DFID has responded by strengthening its management of the Humqadam contract to increase scrutiny and oversight. The team produced an enhanced monitoring strategy and commissioned a Third Party Verification (TPV) contract to verify that this intervention still represented value for money.”  It is nevertheless remarkable that the programme score for this programme increased from C in 2012, to B in 2013 and 2014, and then A from 2015 to 2016.  As far as DFID is concerned it was indeed therefore being successful.  Not insignificantly, though, the risk rating rose from High from 2012-2015 to Major in 2016.  Unfortunately there is no mention of Humqadan in the first Performance Evaluation of DFID’s Punjab Education Sector Programme (PESP2), published in 2019.  On balance, some aspects of the overall programme would indeed appear to be going well, but DFID’s monitoring processes would seem to have failed to pick up a potentially catastrophic failure in actual delivery on the ground.

This is clearly a complex and difficult situation, but above all two things stand out as being extremely sad:

• Children on the ground in desperate need of good learning opportunities seem to have been failed, since so many new school buildings appear not to have been built to the appropriate standards; and
• DFID’s reputation as one of the world’s leading bilateral donors has been seriously tarnished, whether or not the scale of construction failure is as high as the FT article suggests.

All of these problems could have been resolved if:

• greater care had been taken in the design of the programme in the first place;
• greater attention had been focused on the problems picked up in the annual reporting process;
• greater scrutiny had been paid to the work of the consultancy companies and local contractors; and
• greater efffort had been expended on monitoring local progress and quality delivery on the ground.

Above all, if senior DFID staff had listened more to concerns from Pakistanis working on the ground in rural areas of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and had been less concerned about portraying its success as a donor agency, then these problems might never have arisen in the first place.  Yet again the coalition of interests of donor governments, international consultants and their companies and corporations, seem to have dominated the views and lives of those that they purport to serve.

If the Financial Times report is true, and the scale of incompetence and possible corruption is indeed as high as is claimed, I hope that DFID will take a very serious look at its processes, and ensure that those who have taken British taxpayers’ money for their own personal gain are never permitted to do so again.

---

Additional insights, August 2022

The above post was written some three years ago, but I have recently discovered additional materials that would indeed support some of my conjectures. Those interested might like to see the following by Matt Benson on LinkedIn about his resignation from what was then DFID:

• Resignation part one
• Resignation part deux
• Resignation part three
• Resignation continued
• Resignation part who knows…

These provide much more detail from the inside, and it would be good to know what the FCDO might have to say in response.

It strikes me that there are at least five fundamental issues that need to be addressed:

• The implications that these issues have for the provision of education in Pakistan, especially for some of the poorest and most marginalised children;
• The role of very highly paid individual consultants and international contractors in development initiatives across the world;
• The ways through which the UK funds its international development programmes, especially now that these are delivered through the FCDO;
• Mechanisms for assessing the impact of aid interventions openly and transparently, esecially where these are funded through taxpayer’s money; and
• The accountability of individuals within development interventions.

Hopefully, there can be an open and constructive discussion around all of these important issues, because it is surely time to stop the exploitation of the international aid system by companies and individual consultants as appears to have happened on a significat scale in Pakistan.

Updated 22 August 2022

The use of mobile devices for sexual harassment in Pakistan

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) continue dramatically to change our lives.  This is especially true with the rapid expansion of mobile devices connected to the broadband in many of the poorer countries of the world.  Whilst this can bring very many benefits, there is also a darker side to their use; ICTs tend to act as accelerators, both of good and of bad things.  With the  corporate ICT sector wishing to highlight the positive contribution that it can make to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the negative impacts of ICTs usually receive far less attention.  There is, though, now a growing body of evidence that in some contexts these may well outweigh their positive impacts.

In the course of qualitative research in 2016 with Dr. Bushra Hassan (formerly of the University of Sussex, and now at the International Islamic University in Islamabad) on the use of mobiles by young people in Pakistan as symbols shaping their identity (published in Information Technologies and International Development earlier in 2017), we discovered a striking level of concern over the use of mobile devices for sexual harassment. The commentary below on Mobilink’s controversial advertisement at the time of our research, for example, highlights some of the tensions in what is widely seen as being a tightly constrained society with very traditional values.

We therefore decided to explore more about the use of mobiles for sexual harassment in Pakistan, and enlisted the help of Dr. Akber Gardezi (COMSATS Institute of Information Technology).  Together, we constructed and distributed a largely quantitative online survey in Pakistan in November and December 2016, and submitted a paper summarising the outcomes of this research early in 2017 to a special issue of ITID on Gender, Mobile and Mobile Internet.  At the time, we considered this to be one of the largest and most rigorous studies of the subject in Pakistan, and indeed few other studies have been as comprehensive anywhere in the world.  Subsequently, important new research has also been published about Pakistan especially by the Digital Rights Foundation.  The peer review process associated with academic journals meant that we could not release any of our results at that time.  We had hoped, though, that the full paper would have been published in time to coincide with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on 25th November.  Given delays in the production process, we are delighted now therefore to have received permission from the editorial team to release some of our most salient findings.

More than 2000 people opened the survey, and we had 530 completed responses from people from all walks of life in Pakistan.  The survey itself explored both perceptions and experiences of sexual harassment through the use of mobile devices in Pakistan, and we were able to disaggregate and analyse the data in terms of a range of socio-cultural characteristics including age, gender, ethnicity, religion, occupation and place of residence.

Some of our most important findings are as follows:

• Mobiles are mainly used to harass women sexually, although men are also harassed; 48% of women and 18% of men in our survey had been sexually harassed through their mobile devices.
• Direct messages and phone calls are slightly more frequently used than online social media for sexual harassment: 17.5% of respondents who were harassed claim to be receiving daily text messages harassing them sexually, and 11.9% receive daily phone calls doing likewise.  It is therefore crucial to note that surveys that only focus on online harassment miss more than half of the ongoing sexual harassment that exists.
• There is considerable uniformity in the perceptions about and experiences of sexual harassment through mobile devices among people from different socio-cultural backgrounds.  Only about 10% of the many statistical tests that we undertook showed significant differences, and where there were differences these were usually relating to the gender, occupation or location of the respondents.
• One of the most striking findings from our research concerns blame attribution: 54% of all respondents thought the when a women is sexually harassed through her mobile device she is always or sometimes to blame.  Only 38% of respondents thought that a man was to blame when he is harassed sexually.
• The impact of sexual harassment through mobile devices on people living in Pakistan has a terrible cost: 53% of respondents claimed that they knew someone personally who had tried to commit suicide as a result of sexual harassment through their mobile devices; and a shocking 52% of respondents claimed to know someone who had been killed because of a loss of honour as a result of sexual harassment through mobile devices.  Blackmail is widespread.
• Four main reasons were cited to explain why mobile devices are specifically used for sexual harassment: it is easy to send multimedia content using mobiles; mobiles can be used to target people at a distance; it is quick to use mobiles to harass people; and the perpetrators can easily hide their identities.  Our paper goes into much more depth as to how social and cultural factors influence such harassment specifically in Pakistan; women much more than men consider that patriarchy is particularly important in causing such harassment.
• The three most important ways through which such harassment can be reduced were considered to be: requiring social media companies to monitor and delete users who sexually harass others; increasing penalties for sexual harassment; and requiring mobile operators to provide a free reporting service.  With respect to the last of these, it was great to see the Digital Rights Foundation opening a toll-free hotline (0800-39393) in December 2016 for victims of online harassment and violence.

Almost half of all respondents also provided detailed qualitative responses to many of the issues we raised in the survey, and we are immensely grateful to all those who took the time to reply.  For the full paper, which provides very much more detail on all of the above, do keep an eye open for the next issue of ITID (Hassan, B., Unwin, T. and Gardezi, A. “Understanding the Darker Side of ICTs: Gender, Sexual Harassment, and Mobile Devices in Pakistan”, Information Technologies and International Development, in press).

We are now undertaking directly comparable online surveys in the Caribbean and in India to examine how perceptions and experiences of the use of mobiles for sexual harassment vary across the world.  Please share the links below with people you know in these regions to encourage them to contribute to the survey so that we can get as diverse and large samples as possible:

• Caribbean survey in English
• Indian survey (being undertaken with the assistance of Anushruti Vagrani from IIT Delhi)
  • in Hindi
  • in English

It is time that all of us combine our efforts to reduce sexual harassment through mobile devices.  Such harassment is a horrible form of violence and abuse, and it particularly affects women.  Men especially therefore need to take greater action to influence each other in changing their behaviours so that the full benefits of ICTs may indeed be experienced by women across the world.

ICT4D: Mainstreaming the Marginalised

It was great to be back in Islamabad to participate in the second two-day workshop organised by the Inter-Islamic Network on Information Technology and COMSATS Institute of Information Technology with the assistance of the UNESCO Chair in ICT4D, and held on 5th and 6th October.  It was fascinating to see the progress that has been made in Pakistan since the first such workshop that we convened in January 2016,  particularly in terms of policy making, awareness, and entrepreneurial activity.  It was also very good to see such a diverse group of participants, including academics, entrepreneurs, civil society activities, government officials, and representatives of bilateral donors engaging in lively discussions throughout both days about how best we can turn rhetoric into reality.

Following the official opening ceremony, there were seven main sessions spread over two days:

• Understanding the ICT4D landscape, in which the main speaker was Dr. Ismail Shah, the Chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority
• The road to facilitation: financial technologies for the marginalised, with a plenary given by Qasif Shahid (FINJA) about making payments frictionless, free and real time.
• Addressing the digital gender gap, at which I had the opportunity to talk about why this is a pressing concern, and it gave me a chance to talk about the new UN-led EQUALS initiative for gender equality in a digital age, as well as some of the challenges that face women in using ICTs (slide deck).
• No tech to low tech to high tech: an entrepreneur’s tale, with a plenary by Muhammad Nasrulla (CEO INTEGRY).
• Serving the most marginalised: accessibility and disability, with a plenary by David Banes on access and inclusion using ICTs, which included a very useful framework for considering digital accessibility issues.
• Developing technologies for the rural/urban slum needs, during which Muhammad Mustafa spoke about his vision of enabling all 700 million illiterate adults in the world to go online through his Mauqa Online initiative.
• Educating the marginalised, where I spoke about educating marginalised children (slide deck) and Shaista Kazmi from Vision 21 described their Speed Literacy Program.

Each session combined enthusiastic discussion around the themes addressed by the plenary speakers, and it was excellent to learn from all those involved  about using ICTs in very practical ways to deliver on the needs of poor and marginalised people and communities in Pakistan.

Full details of the event can be found on the INIT site, where copies of the slide decks from each main presentation will also be available.  Very many thanks go to all of the organisers, especially Tahir Naeem, Akber Gardezi and Muhammad Atiq from COMSATS IIT and INIT for all of the hard work that they put into making the event a success.  We look forward to convening the next such workshop in about a year’s time, once again bringing together people from all backgrounds intent on using ICTs to support  Pakistan’s most marginalised communities.

Perceptions and experiences of sexual harassment through mobile devices in Pakistan

Together with Dr. Bushra Hassan, and building on my research earlier this year on how people in Pakistan use mobile devices to express their identities, we have developed a survey on people’s perceptions and experiences of sexual harassment through mobile devices in the country.  This is a sensitive and difficult subject, and we are eager to have responses from as many people as possible.  I do hope that readers of this post will share the details through their networks, and if they are Pakistani will complete it themselves. The survey is available until the end of November 2016 at https://rhul.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/sexual-harassment-through-mobile-devices-in-pakistan.

Thanks so much in anticipation.

Education reform in Pakistan: rhetoric and reality

One of the most interesting aspects of my visit to Pakistan in January this year was the informal, anecdotal information that I gathered about educational change in the Punjab, and in particular DFID’s flagship Punjab Education Support Programme II.  I should declare right at the beginning here that I used to work for DFID (between 2001 and 2004), and I am a member of their Digital Advisory Panel.  I have many friends in the Department, and I admire much of the work that they do.  I was therefore indeed shocked by what I was told and what I summarise below.

When ever the subject of this particular programme came up in conversation in Pakistan, it was always greeting with severe criticism, even derision.  Most of my conversations were with educationalists, academics, landowners, and rural people in the Punjab.  I have not shared these comments before, because they were indeed anecdotal, and I did not see the evidence with my own eyes.  Nevertheless, a report that a colleague recently shared with me by Gethin Chamberlain in the Mail on Sunday (not a paper that I ever usually read!) updated on 14th April 2016,  coincides so strongly with what I was told that I do feel it is worth sharing some of my insights here.

In summary, the Mail on Sunday report commented that:

• “Department for International Development gives £700m to Pakistan
• In Punjab, which gets £383m, auditor general uncovered huge corruption
• 5,000 schools and 40,000 teachers syphoning off cash in other area, Sindh
• Rana Mashhood is under investigation for corruption”

To be sure, such allegations undoubtedly reflect internal political battles within Pakistan, and continuing complaints about corruption more generally in the administration of agriculture in Punjab (see for example, reports in the local press about matters such as laser land levelling technology, and the widespread corruption in the Agriculture Department of the Punjab Assembly). They are also intended to add fuel to the newspaper’s campaign to “end foreign aid madness”!  However, they nevertheless reflect poorly on the role of DFID and on the implementation of this particular programme.  There is an amazing dissonance between the rhetoric of success, and what I heard on the ground in Punjab.

The DFID programme is ambitious, as highlighted in a report in 2013 by Sir Michael Barber (DFID’s Special Representative on Education in Pakistan, and Chief Education Advisor at Pearson) entitled The Good News from Pakistan: How a revolutionary new approach to education reform shows the way forward for Pakistan and development aid everywhere.  In this, he says “This time it’s going to be different” (p.9).  The work of DFID is wide ranging, and has many elements to it, but one of Barber’s main contributions was to explore ways through which expansion in low-cost private sector educational delivery might spur the government to reform itself (pp.49-50).  The private sector is also involved heavily in other ways, with British Consultancy Firm IMC Worldwide (an International Development and Engineering Consultancy) being the main contractor in rolling out much of the school building programme on the ground, through the Humqadam initiative.  IMC maintains the rhetoric of success, claiming that “In Punjab, the programme is helping the government to meet overall provincial needs, by providing missing facilities in 16,000 schools and providing 27,000 additional classrooms”.  The Humqadam website itself provides further euphoric statements about Britain’s support for education in Pakistan, noting that “Evidence regarding Pakistan’s education opportunities comes from none other than David Cameron, the Prime Minister of Great Britain.  Following a recent visit to Pakistan, he laid the foundations for the initiation of this programme by highlighting the importance of education and Great Britain’s deep commitment, the Department of International Department (DFID), to support education sector reform and the promotion of a quality education for all school age children” (sic).  Humqadam goes on to note that they are working on school construction and rehabilitation using a £184 million allocation of funding from DFID, as well as funding from the Australian DFAT.

The reality, as it was relayed to me, is very different. Clearly, these are anecdotes, but the following were the main points that my colleagues mentioned:

• They felt that the project was well behind schedule, and feared that delays would mean that delivery would thus be rushed in an attempt to catch up, leading to poor quality.  The programme was frequently described as a “joke”.  In contrast, DFID’s Development Tracker page suggests that there was a substantial over-spend in 2013/14, and a slight underspend in 2015/16, with 2014/15 being just about on budget.  Moreover, DFID’s most recent review of the project dated January 2016 had provided an overall very positive account of the work done so far, although it did note that “The school infrastructure component has been slow to perform” (p.2).
• There was also a strong perception that those involved in the design of the project had not grasped the actual realities of the educational challenges on the ground in Punjab.  The truth of this is much more difficult to judge, but there was undoubtedly a feeling that the views of influential “outsiders”, who rarely visited schools and villages on the ground, but spent most of their time talking with senior government officials in offices in Lahore or Islamabad, had been prominent in shaping the programme.  Interestingly, I also overheard a fascinating conversation between two foreign aid workers over breakfast one day in a smart international hotel.  They were absolutely scathing in what they said about the programme in both design and delivery, and seemed to verify the comments that I had previously received from my Pakistani friends.  I so wanted to go over and ask them more, but I had felt guilty about listening to their conversation; in my defence, they were speaking so loudly that it was actually impossible not to hear what they were saying!
• For me, though, the most important thing was what people said about the actual delivery of school building on the ground, and how it did little to counter the  power of landlords.  I was, for example, told on several occasions that some landowners used the newly built school buildings as cattle byres, and that the first thing that teachers had to do in the morning was to clean out all of the manure that had accumulated overnight before they could start teaching.  More worryingly, I was given one account whereby my interlocutor assured me that on more than one occasion a landlord’s thugs had beaten teachers and threatened to kill them if they ever returned to their new school buildings.  The reality and threat of rape for women teachers was a common complaint.  Again, I never witnessed this, but the assuredness of those who told me these stories, many of whom I deeply trust, makes me inclined to believe them.  This is the perceived reality of education reform on the ground in Punjab.

Even if these stories are untrue, and are themselves myths designed to undermine DFID’s important work in trying to help deliver better education in the Punjab, they are indeed damaging to DFID’s reputation.  I would love to know more about the reality of these claims, but as was pointed out to me during my time in Pakistan, it is not easy for a white European to spend time in villages, especially overnight, in the parts of Punjab where such things might be happening.

The main thing that persuaded me to write this piece was a Facebook message I received this morning, that then suddenly disappeared.  It read:

“It is true though Tim Unwin.  What is really pathetic is that neither Dfid nor Sindh/Punjab government are made accountable for those children whose education will discontinue after this debacle. Education Fund for Sindh boasted enrolling 100 thousand out of school kids. Overnight the project and project management has vanished, website dysfunctional…Poof and all is gone. There is no way to track those children and see what’s happening to their education”

This is so very sad.  We need to know the truth about educational reform in Pakistan – and indeed the role of donors, the private sector and richly paid consultants – in helping to shape this.   I cannot claim that what I have been told is actually happening on the ground, but I can claim that this is a faithful record of what I was told.