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By Wayan Vota on January 25, 2016
In the research article Paying Per Diems for ICT4D Project Participation: A Sustainability Challenge by Terje Aksel Sanner and Johan Ivar Sæbø of Univeristy of Oslo, Norway, the authors note what we all have experienced.
By paying for attention, ICT4D projects obtain immediate responses from an understaffed government system, which sooner or later will have to retract its attention to cater to other equally important tasks. Yet for ICT4D practitioners, the number of workshops and participants are measurable indicators by which projects are evaluated, and are crucial to obtain, keep, and grow international donor funding.
The researchers note that the use of per diems to attract project participation is certainly not the only obstacle to ICT4D sustainability. Other obstacles include:
- Underdeveloped technology and support infrastructure.
- Technical bias of projects to focus on the technology vs. the users.
- Lack of alignment of interests between projects and users.
- Pilot project orientation, or “pilotitis”.
However, the researchers contend that per diem is a contributing factor that has not received its fair share of attention, and per diem is a complicating factor that may induce recipients to abstain from critiquing unsustainable interventions.
But how to combat this issue when civil servants expect that their low salary positions will be enhanced by workshops with monetary incentives such as per diems, which are perceived as legitimate income? If ICT4D practitioners don’t pay per diems, and others do, their projects may seem to have less user engagement and adoption, which would directly threaten project sustainability in the short-term, much less the long term.
Two Possible Ways to Stop Paying Per Diems
The researchers argue that on-the-job training is a viable option, especially for refresher training. It allows for ICT4D practitioners to:
- Perform a reality check on the intervention.
- Identify the right people for training.
- Become sensitive to participants’ actual work practices.
- Learn how technology innovations may coexist with equipment and routines already in place.
Of course, on-site training can be more costly in time, effort, and funding and sometimes it is unrealistic due to the sheer number of potential users. However, the main barrier to adoption could be the perception that it’s unfair because it cheats participants out of “legitimate” allowances.
They say that another way to strengthen the capacity of local institutions is for donors to establish a shared pool of financial resources and technical assistance that stretches beyond the lifespan of individual projects in close collaboration with ministerial functionaries. This resource pool would be utilized by ICT4D projects to cultivate public sector structures that can implement policies and harmonize ICT4D projects over time.
What is Your Opinion?
We can all agree that paying per diems creates false incentives for ICT4D project participation, and the practice should stop. But how to do it? Should we focus on on-the-job training and shared local resource pools? Or is that a fool’s errand and we should do something else? If so, what?
What has worked for you? What hasn’t? Please tell us in the comments.
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