Using Technology to Make a Positive Social Impact

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Tech innovations. They help us work smarter and faster. But project teams are also using them to transform lives. Artificial intelligence. Machine learning. Even smart sensors. Those are just some of the cutting-edge tools teams are deploying to make a positive social impact in communities across the globe. Today, we’ll hear from two project leaders whose tech-driven efforts are helping to make the world a better place.

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This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.

Technology can serve as a force multiplier for projects in any industry. But it also has the power to lift up communities and break down barriers. That’s why organizations of all dimensions are leaning into tech to ensure their projects deliver lasting social impact—whether the tools make processes more efficient or do the heavy lifting for project deliverables.

Today, we’re speaking with project leaders who are putting tech to work in the service of social impact. We’ll start in Stockholm, where Oumayma Raimi-Rodé, the gender equality innovation portfolio lead at UNICEF’s Office of Innovation, leads the Game Changers Coalition. Projectified’s Hannah LaBelle spoke with Oumayma about the program—and how it’s teaching girls skills in science, technology, engineering, arts and math—or STEAM—so they can create their own video games now and become future leaders in the tech sector. Plus, learn how UNICEF’s team is working with gaming companies to help them boost diversity, equity and inclusion in the industry.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

HANNAH LABELLE
Oumayma, I want to start our discussion by talking about your career. You’ve had a lot of roles throughout your professional life that have all really focused on making a positive social impact. What inspired you to work on projects with this goal?

OUMAYMA RAIMI-RODÉ
When you go back and look at your life as a child, you had these dreams about who do you want to be. And I think a lot of people can relate. We all want to do good things, and we all [are] going to have big dreams. I grew up and I was very good at mathematics. But when I studied engineering and the STEM field in general, it was so different from what I expected. All the creativity aspect of my life, on what I liked, and my inner voice, I felt like everything was boxed in, and I didn’t feel like myself anymore.

When I turned 19 or 20, this is when I realized there’s still time to do good and to have some meaningful impact. And if there’s one thing that brings me joy, is to support community, support women, have some meaning in the day-to-day job. So that’s why I joined the U.N., and the job does not disappoint. It’s really about a commitment, responsibility, accountability. And what people see as a huge bureaucracy, I like to see it as the way to hold ourself accountable and make sure that we’re serving the rights of children in the best way possible.

HANNAH LABELLE
Given your STEM background, the focus of your work makes a lot of sense. You’re leading a project to help adolescent girls develop STEAM skills and take on roles in the tech sector in the future. Let’s talk about the project that’s a big driver of this skills goal—the Game Changers Coalition. First off, what is the overall goal?

OUMAYMA RAIMI-RODÉ
We have three goals with the Game Changers Coalition. It comes from an ideation session we had with the gaming industry, tech industry and adolescent girls from all over the world. We invited them all to come to Stockholm to think about what’s the future of tech. How can UNICEF be relevant and credible? As a project manager, this is also something that’s very important, is once you established the problem you’re trying to solve, the way to solve it is you have to map who are the stakeholders and what everybody brings to the table that you cannot bring. But what the Game Changers Coalition is trying to do is to build the girls’ foundation, building strong STEAM skills in the new generation of adolescent girls.

The second one is to build the game and making sure that the gaming industry, tech industry, people using tech in general have this understanding that diversity, equity and inclusion is not only a good thing to have. This is crucial to make your business thrive. This is crucial for the well-being of your employees. Specifically for women employees who are part of the tech industry, and making sure that we [are] changing the game so that the tech that is designed responds to diversity, equity and inclusion principles, but also have gender equality as a focus and a priority, to be a welcoming environment for all these girls who are learning STEAM skills.

And the third pillar is about building the network. So building a coalition that is strong, and that takes the advantage of everybody’s capabilities and knowledge and institutional memory to make sure that we’re building a network of partners who want to change the tech space for good, and having the social impact included in the tech space.

HANNAH LABELLE
Now let’s dive into the role tech plays in this project. What tech is being used, and how is it helping the project make a positive impact?

OUMAYMA RAIMI-RODÉ
When you’re trying to build a strong tech project, you have to also think about how do people gain access to connectivity, gain access to computers, gain access to the basic tools that they need to be able to conduct this project and to make it sustainable. So what we do is we start low-tech. That the curriculum can be taken with a pen and a paper and learning how to code. We do rent computers. We do rent these different tools that they need, but what is important is that technology is something that you build incrementally. It’s not something that you just dump on people and say, “Hey, now you’re supposed to be using all this new tech, and good luck with that.” Our role is to train the teachers, to talk to the parents, to have this community engagement so that the material is being taken care of. We’re using coding softwares and platforms to make sure that at the end of the six-month curriculum, after 100 hours of learning, they’re fully capable of designing their own video game. And that’s fantastic. We’re up to like a library of 3,000 video games as we speak. It’s fantastic to see each girl’s identity and her own story reflected in the type of video game that they are creating.

HANNAH LABELLE
Obviously, another side of this tech piece is the team that’s running the project. Like you said, you’re working with girls across the globe, but this also involves training folks and doing all these other things. How are you and the project team using tech to execute the project?

OUMAYMA RAIMI-RODÉ
It’s been a difficult choice to decide what are the aspects of the tech that we want to use in the project and what are the aspects that we want to just use between us to make the project run more smoothly because it is an investment. You have to think about where your data is being stored. You have to think about your carbon footprint. You have to think about a lot of different aspects of how you want to run a project using tech. What we decided is that half of the team is working remotely, and making sure that we have weekly meetings with all the platforms that allow people to have meetings remotely these days. That’s been a great way that tech has facilitated the exchange between my team members.

We’re using tech for monitoring and evaluation. We ask the girls what do they want. And when you ask 500,000 girls what do they want, you don’t have necessarily the time to read all the answers one by one. So you do need tech to be able to do natural language processing. What is the sentiment analysis of what is being said? How do you assess if the respondents are majority positive about this or are there some areas that we can improve? What are the type of complaints that should be automatically brought to our attention? And we would carefully give attention to these messages where girls are saying, “No, we don’t like this,” or “We want this to be improved.” We’re using what we call U-Report. It’s a tool that UNICEF has designed, and I’m saying hi to the U-Report team if they’re listening to this podcast because they’re doing a fantastic job. And it’s using WhatsApp to send messages to people all over the world, kind of a massive survey tool, to make sure that we stay on track. We can evaluate the results of our programs and change the course if we’re off course or make it more relevant to them or respond to immediate needs. That’s a way that technology has definitely shifted how much impact we can have.

We’re working in 190 countries as UNICEF, but in this program specifically, the Skills4Girls program of UNICEF is in 30 countries, and the Game Changers Coalition at the moment is six countries. We’re getting to the 190 countries, and we cannot scale without technology.

HANNAH LABELLE
We’ve kind of hit a little bit about this, but let’s spell it out a little further, how the tech is helping to make a positive social impact. But also the other side of that is, how are you measuring that impact? What are the KPIs [key performance indicators] that you guys are looking at as a team to say, “Yes, this is making a positive social impact”?

OUMAYMA RAIMI-RODÉ
So you have two types of big categories of KPIs. The first one is the direct reach and the second one is the indirect reach. When you’re running a project with social impact, you have to ask yourself, “How am I reaching people directly, and what is attribution and what is contribution?” Can I attribute this social change, this environmental change to me, to my action, to my program? If the answer is yes, then it’s attribution. If the answer is no, then it’s contribution. And the contribution leads to your indirect impact. So in terms of direct impact, the KPIs that we’re using is the number of girls involved in the program who have completed the program. The dropout rate at the moment is still 0%, so fingers crossed that we’re going to stay below the 10%, knowing that the industry average is 40% dropout in STEAM programs. I’m knocking on wood. That tells you something about the quality of what you’re delivering. If you did all your program management steps before, making sure you’re answering your real need, then people are not going to drop out or drop out less because they do think that you’re answering something that they’ve been voicing because they were part of the design.

So, see you’re monitoring an evaluation of social impact programs as the response to your social impact question. Are we measuring how we’re responding correctly to the problem that we have identified? So number of girls, number of schools, number of parents, number of teachers, dropout rates. But the monitoring and evaluation of this type of program is really what makes you feel better about your job, because numbers speak louder than words and I think it’s important to see the result of what you’re doing in a pragmatic manner with the dashboard, making sure that you are contributing to the bigger picture. But some of this bigger picture is attributable to your program, and this attribution is so rewarding when you can quantify how much you have changed a girl’s life and transformed the way that her parents are seeing the future for her.

We’re sending surveys for everything that is qualitative. I highly encourage people to have both quantitative measures and qualitative human interest stories and talk to the communities that you’re impacting, because this is going to balance the story that you’re telling about your program. And in social impact, the stories are very, very important. It takes time to achieve results. So if you’re not doing this work of collecting human interest stories, having the numbers to back up your claim that you can scale, a lot of programs get shut down early on because they didn’t do this KPI work, and that’s too bad. So an advice that I have for the social impact community is [to] make sure that you have what we call a result framework. You have your goals, your mission, and how to get there, what are the KPIs and the outcomes and the outputs that you need to get there, and hopefully, we contribute to something bigger altogether.

HANNAH LABELLE
And speaking of that scale up, what’s next for the Game Changers Coalition? How will tech help you scale this initiative and make a bigger positive social impact for the girls?

OUMAYMA RAIMI-RODÉ
Well, hopefully, we are going to be able to scale in many more countries in the next three years. At the moment, the Skills4Girls program—that is the umbrella for the Game Changers Coalition—has 6 million girls involved in the program. Our goal is to reach 12 million girls in three years. So the way that we’re going to scale is, first of all, we are going to try to have online classes. This is what we’re doing this year, is we’re designing an online class to kind of condensate the 100 hours’ learning into 20 hours. And tech is helping with that because when you are using technology and artificial intelligence to have the exams that the girls are taking being automatically corrected by an algorithm, that gives them the immediate feedback that they need to improve. And this way we can scale with online classes at the same time that the teachers in many countries are continuing to give in-person classes.

The second one is national curriculum. Of the six countries that we have in the program, we are talking to governments to scale and include the curriculum into their national curriculum. So that means making sure that we have the API [application programming interface] for the tech to be transferred and used rapidly. But we also try to plug into local ecosystems with local tech companies. We’re partnering with 25 local tech companies at the moment to make sure that the tech industry is not raising expectation wrongly for the girls, but managing expectations and having opportunities like internships and mentorship opportunities so that the girls learn more about the tech industry.

And the last one is scaling by changing business models. When you run a program that has social impact in it, you have to look at your whole supply chain. How do we make diversity, equity and inclusion part of everything that we do, and not just a good thing at the end, like, check the box, but make sure that the tech that we’re using is helping us get there?

HANNAH LABELLE
Let’s zoom out and talk about project professionals who are looking to lead projects with tech involved. How can project professionals build their tech acumen for such initiatives? And tech trends can change quickly. So how can folks keep up?

OUMAYMA RAIMI-RODÉ
That’s something that is super, super important to ask yourself is, am I already outdated? So when you’re trying to bring tech to your project, not only [do] you have to look at the trends, which, as you said, they fade so fast. But you have to look at what is this tech tool solving at this moment? What is it that the tech is answering to? And with artificial intelligence, there’s a huge risk for a lot of the work that people are doing around tech to be obsolete. And it’s okay to realize that. I think it’s also very healthy to realize that some of the work that we’re doing with tech is going to be replaced, is going to be done differently, but also be hopeful that not everything is going to be replaced, especially not the conception of the impact and the social impact that you want to have.

In my opinion, this is the only way you can have meaningful impact is if you’re not saying, “I’m going to replace everything with tech.” But you’re saying, “Where can tech make me faster, more accurate, more relevant? And where do I still have the need to be hands-on on the design and with the communities and with my environmental impact?” You have to have this self-assessment of where tech is important and where it can make your work more relevant. And I think we should all look at our projects this way.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT
One of the challenges in implementing any sort of tech-driven solution is getting user buy-in—and that’s especially challenging when the technology is performing a function that’s traditionally been the province of Indigenous knowledge. That’s the situation with SmartICE, a social enterprise that reimagines how tech tools can help Indigenous communities in northern Canada gauge whether nearby fields of ice are strong enough to cross. I spoke with Dave Noseworthy, the field operations lead at SmartICE in St. John’s in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

MUSICAL TRANSITION

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Dave, let’s start with a little bit of background on SmartICE: What’s the organization’s mission and how did it get started?

DAVE NOSEWORTHY
SmartICE is a community-based work integration social enterprise, or WISE. We offer climate change adaptation tools and services to various communities in the north. As we’ll get into I’m sure, one of my responsibilities is to make sure that all the communities that we operate in, there’s a coordinated effort to get sea ice measurements across all those communities and get the data uploaded to the appropriate social platforms.

Several communities in the Arctic over the past 10 years, in response to climate change, have noticed the ice is not forming properly during the season. It’s breaking up early, it’s raining in January, those sorts of things. So they had a little uncertainty about how to travel on the ice and what risks they could take or even how to identify such risks, based on these changing conditions. Some of the members of SmartICE determined that there were technologies available to monitor sea ice thickness in those communities, and we started working with them. We had a couple of pilot programs set up in Pond Inlet in Nunavut and Nain in Nunatsiavut or Labrador. And since then, other communities have become interested, and our reputation has grown from the Eastern Arctic right across to Northwest Territories and the Yukon.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
So you’re working with Arctic communities so they can use tech tools to measure sea ice and share that data. What’s the impact of traveling on ice for these communities? What does it mean to their lifestyle and culture, and how does this tech fit alongside traditional Indigenous means of evaluating and communicating about the ice?

DAVE NOSEWORTHY
The Inuit depend on ice travel during ice season to do a variety of things. It may be harvesting food, it may be hunting, it may be visiting other communities or going to their cabins for the weekend. And the ice trails that they travel on are no different than the highways and roads that we use in our vehicles in big cities. So they depend on that for their everyday needs.

SmartICE’s role is to work with the communities and monitor sea ice conditions. We engage with them and let them decide where that information should be taken from. We work with elders, ice users in the community, and basically say, “Hey, where would you like us to help you get this work done?”

The other thing that we do too is we try to integrate traditional Inuit knowledge into our technology, and that may simply be just using the proper terminology that they use and things like that. One of the things that has happened over the years is that the Inuit terminologies, based on oral exchange from generation to generation. So a lot of it hasn’t been documented. We’re doing that now and helping to come with dictionaries and different types of glossaries that sort of capture that terminology. And the other thing too with our technology is that we can actually capture sea ice thickness and start developing trends and patterns from year to year that they can use as well to determine safety and address risks.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Tell me about the original tech alignment. The technology already existed, and the organization figured out how it could be applied in this context. What was the initial potential marriage of this application and the tech?

DAVE NOSEWORTHY
The technology did exist. We didn’t invent the technology. Researchers have been measuring sea ice thickness for a long time, but I think what SmartICE did, and some of the founders of SmartICE did, was take those existing technologies and then look at how they can be utilized at the local or community level, and that’s sort of in a broader research level. We came up with two types of technology. One is called the SmartBUOY, which is basically a big thermometer that goes in the ice and measures ice thickness, snow thickness, air temperature and water temperature. It’s a stationary sensor that measures all those four areas in whatever area the community chooses that to be in.

The second one of course is what we call the SmartQAMUTIK, and that’s more of a mobile technology based on conductivity between the sea ice and the ocean. So they can actually drive that one behind a snowmobile, on the trails, and essentially they can get real-time ice thickness data as they drive along the trail or whatever route they choose. And this data gets posted to social media platforms, one of which is called SIKU, that a lot of Arctic people use.

Our first equipment tests were probably around 2015, 2016, when we piloted a couple of communities. Since then, more communities have come on board, and now we’re operational every year in 30-plus communities across the Arctic.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
So you’re training people in these communities to use these two tech tools. What’s that process like?

DAVE NOSEWORTHY
So we work very closely with the communities in terms of forming community management committees with elders, other ice experts, hunters and trappers, the people who know the ice. These are the guys who make the informed decisions of where the equipment should go and where the ice thickness should be monitored. Coupled with that are the employment opportunities and the economic opportunities that we give these communities when we go into them to train operators and use the equipment throughout the ice season.

Typically, all of our projects in these communities are based on funding opportunities that we go for. Some communities who are interested in having SmartICE equipment and SmartICE operations in their community are able to manage the funding by themselves. Other communities don’t have that opportunity or the resources to do so. So we often manage the funds for them. So in that respect, the engagement in the communities is loose in some because they have better infrastructure and resources to manage that funding. So we can provide some training and technical support, but we kind of step back and let them run the show. Other smaller communities who don’t have that infrastructure or the human resources, there’s more of a hands-on approach. I think it provides a good balance. Some of the larger communities are able to use SmartICE technology but are able to manage it on their own. Other communities rely on our input a little more.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
As you’ve expanded, maybe the implementation in every new community is a little bit different than last one or stakeholders want something else and so on. So what has that looked like? In what ways is this now a well-oiled machine and, conversely, what are you continuing to learn or encounter that sort of causes adaptations and so on?

DAVE NOSEWORTHY
Yeah, that’s a good question. One of the things that we pride ourselves on is the continuous improvement model. You always do a year-end review, and you improve upon the next ice season, or hope to improve upon the next ice season, what you learned from the previous one. That goes with training as well as it does with our technology. We’re continually improving on our technology.

Currently the SmartBUOY is going through a version 5 review, so there’s always ways to make things smaller or make them collect data faster or transmit data faster. The sensor that we use on the SmartQAMUTIK, we’re trying to make that smaller, more compact. And eventually, maybe it doesn’t need to be dragged behind a Ski-Doo on a qamutik. Maybe we can put it into a sensor on a drone and start flying drones around.

There’s always a review on how to make things better, and then there’s always a bit of a vision for the future of where we would like to be two, three, four, five years down the road. And some of that is engaged by us, but also we look for community involvement, too, to say, “Hey, how would you like to see this done better? You are the guys that are operating the equipment. What advice do you have? Or what would you like to see changed?”

STEVE HENDERSHOT
How do you measure success on this? And I mean that both sort of internally, or in your own sense of legacy, but also even in terms of some of the funding and grant stuff. I mean, do people care about install base? Is it accident avoidance? What are the key metrics?

DAVE NOSEWORTHY
That’s a really good question. There’s a ton of key performance indicators, metrics, analytics, whatever you want to call them, that we measure. Because a lot of people have different ideas of what success is. We have a board of directors who looks at things. We have funders who look at things. We have the community themselves who look at different metrics to see how successful we are.

One of the big things that we’re trying to do is collect data on the social impact at the community level. How many people are we training? How many are hired? How much money has gone into the community? Has that turned around and helped the community, in terms of economic development and social well-being? So we’re trying to track a lot of things. Employment is the big one. The number of kilometers of SmartQAMUTIK trails that we’ve measured, things like that.

At this point, it’s the quantifiable numbers. Hopefully, we can move on beyond that and tell some stories based on the data, to say, “Hey, communities are really, really, supportive of SmartICE and are benefiting from the fact that this work is being done. Sea ice thickness can be measured around their communities.” That’s often done through direct contact with community members through surveys, evaluation forms after training.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
Let’s zoom out to the overall impact. What do you think about SmartICE’s legacy, both in terms of the current communities you’re working with and especially as the footprint expands?

DAVE NOSEWORTHY
I’m very proud of what we’ve done. In the two years, two and a half years that I’ve been here, I’ve seen huge change in the amount of communities that we’ve expanded to. But also, one of the goals of SmartICE, or probably, I guess, the ultimate goal, is a sustainability model where everything we do is managed at the community or regional level in the Arctic. It may take a long time to get there, but I think we’re heading in the right direction with some of the people we’re hiring. SmartICE has Indigenous staff in half a dozen communities across the Arctic, now full-time staff. We’re starting to train a lot of operators who are coming back each year to continue doing the great work. We’re continuing to expand to new communities. I think it’s great, the footprint is huge. But at some point, we need to step back and hope that the communities that we’ve trained and operated in are in a position to be able to take over and do that stuff at the local level.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
What advice would you give to project professionals looking to put a greater emphasis on the social impacts of their projects, no matter the sector?

DAVE NOSEWORTHY
One of the things that—and I’ve been guilty of this before, too, in my previous careers—is when you’re managing a project, you’re so focused on getting the project done and the impact of the project itself, you don’t look at sort of the peripheral types of impacts, such as social or things like that. One of the things that SmartICE has done really well is we have a person here who has a social work background. So she’s able to actually sort of drill down into the data in a lot of the projects that we do and look at things from a socio-emotional learning and a social employment impact as well.

SmartICE is not just about getting the project done in terms of the equipment in the community and measuring the sea ice, but it’s really big on the social impacts of that project. How is it contributing to the community? What are some of the socio-emotional learning aspects, training youth and things like that? If people are looking at project management, it’s not just about getting the project done, but it’s also, like I said, the peripheral impacts of that project.

STEVE HENDERSHOT
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