About the Development Gateway

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis honors the opening of the American West; it seemed a suitable image for this posting.

I have been volunteering for several years as an editor of a couple of the Development Gateway community pages:

* Information and Communication Technologies for Development (more than 13,700 members and 9,600 online resources)

* Nanotechnology for Development (more than 2,000 members and 600+ online resources) This was set up as an experiment and Anil Srivastava have been donating our time and the Foundation donating the hosting service. Sometime soon we are going to need a little outside funding if this service is to continue.

I have also served in the past as an adviser for its community:

* Knowledge Economy (nearly 13,000 members and 4,000 online resources. Note my current highlight on the community portal home page.)

These are three of some 30 online dgCommunities which together have more than 50,000 online postings. When I started in international development in the 1960's and even into the 1990's, my colleagues in developing countries had very limited access to professional literature on development, and very little opportunity to understand what was going on in their fields in other developing nations. Those of us in donor agencies had only a little better access to development information, and went from country to country learning as we went and sharing what we could. The dgCommunity pages now give practitioners direct access not only to 50,000 current resources online but to many millions of indirect development resources through its links to key sources on the World Wide Web. Each community portal also gives its users the ability to search its collection, to comment on resources and read the comments of others; all the resources are structured according to the key issues. The community portals also give users news, a calendar of events, etc. Of course anyone can use these resources which are freely available on the Internet, and if I recall correctly less than 5% of the resources pulled down are by members; however, it is only members who can submit new content for approval by the editors or who can receive the email newsletters and alerts sent by the communities. I use other development portals such as Dev-Zone and Eldis, but the Development Gateway is much richer; it takes some investment of time to learn to use it well, but that investment pays off.

For a donor organization, university department, government ministry or NGO, the community pages provide a free way to disseminate publications widely. They also publish announcements of development job openings (very much appreciated by community members) that can reach tens of thousands of readers in the field at no cost to either the organization offering the job or the job seekers. The site allows one to publicize upcoming events free of charge. Since the member directory is available online, it provides a means of finding and communicating with experts in a given field in a specified country. Indeed, an organization could act as the guide for a dgCommunity in partnership with the Development Gateway Foundation, as many organizations already do. (I personally would love to see new communities formed on topics such as one on higher education in developing nations or a complementary portal to the UNESCO library portal.)

The dgCommunities were seen as more than a library, but also as means for forming international communities of practice and communities of interest in selected development fields. That is why the member directories are online and can be searched electronically. The platform also allows bulletin boards, discussion groups, list serves and other means of communication among members. (I would love to see more such use of the community portals.)

I am also the editor of Monitoring and Evaluation (ICT Projects) (nearly 1,500 resources online). This illustrates a different aspect of the Development Gateway. It has created an open source software platform for its dgCommunities which is freely available. It also hosts websites using this platform for a number of users (I think it is no longer in a position to do so free of charge, and would expect a modest contribution for those services, but I don't speak for the Foundation.) There have been dozens of different portals set up using this facility, such as that of the eDevelopment service group of the World Bank (They don't need to have the DG brand, since that can be changed on the platform.)

Anyway, a couple of us used that platform to set up a website with resources for those involved in monitoring and evaluation of the Development Gateway Foundation's own projects, and its collection has grown over the years. We saw that it would be useful to a wider community, so we opened it to the public, but it is not one of the core Development Gateway portals. The last year I checked, 2004, some 8000 of its resources were pulled down and viewed by users.(Incidentally, I wish some organization like Council on Foundations would take over as guide on this portal, and provide the token funding that the DG Foundation would need to make it a full fledged community. It could then provide a complementary service to the UK's MandE serving non-profits and foundation,)

The Development Gateway Portal provides some other very important resources for the International development community:

* AIDA (A directory of over 500,000 activities of major bilateral organizations, multilateral development banks and UN agencies. Over 130,000 are ongoing and planned, residing in the live database. For each entry there is a meta-description, and a link to more detailed information about the project.)

* dgMarket (This is a service which publishes announcements of tenders for goods and services. It promotes transparency in procurement, allows the buyers to inform a large group of potential suppliers with the tender, and allows suppliers of goods and services to easily find large variety of sales opportunities. The use of Internet technology makes this affordable. The Foundation has also helped developing countries set up their own online procurement marketplace using its software platforms.)

* A data and statistics page which is really very useful.

* The Foundation has also funded a program of eGovernment grants with the Government of Italy. It conducts Development Gateway Forums (face to face meetings on ICT for Development, and offers the Development Gateway Prize (Its first Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus, just added the Nobel Peace Prize to his collection.). It provides an online directory of consultants working in Latin America and the Caribbean as part of dgMarket. It has an "Aid Effectiveness" tool which it makes available to governments and donor agencies. (I don't really understand the tool, but it is designed to help organizations to coordinate aid and reduce waste and overlap.) It runs a number of Training and Research Centers in collaboration with the governments of their host countries (as a consultant, I helped set up this program.)

I want to go into more detail on the network of Country Development Gateways. These are 50 locally owned and managed country-specific development portals. The Development Gateway Foundation and the World Bank collaborated to provide seed money for the network and the large majority of its member organizations, but they are independent. (I organized the grant competition in the early years and provided oversight for the grant review process, and can affirm that independence and sustainability were important criteria for selection of the organizations to receive the seed funding.) The country specific portals all share the same goal of using the Internet to provide development information to the communities within their own nations. They have gone about realizing their goals in different ways, and while their portals share a common look and feel, they have very different content and organization. They include a range from government supported portals in large developing nations, to civil society portals in small nations.

The network (as opposed to the country gateways individually) seems to me to be an immense potential resource that has been underutilized. On the one hand, it seems to me that donor organizations which frequently face the need for dissemination of information from their projects should regularly utilize the development gateway and the local development gateway organization within the host country to do so. On the other hand, the network of country gateways provides an exceptional opportunity for regional organizations and projects to reach out via portions of the network to the groups of countries they wish to serve and inform. (Would it not be great to equip each of the country gateways with a computer conferencing facility so that one could organize Internet mediated conferences among civil society organizations in any combination of 45 countries? The CG organizations have ICT literate staffs to run such facilities, and generally are located in capital cities with facilities open to the public. The cost of doing so would be cheap because I am relatively sure that the country gateway organizations could fund the operating costs from sales of international Internet conferencing services -- if only to the international NGOs.)

The Development Gateway portal now has some 400,000 visitors a month and over 200,000 registered users. The Foundation newsletter goes out to over 45,000 recipients, and the individual community alerts and newsletters thousands of subscribers each. The country gateways further extend the outreach.

Andrew Carnegie changed the world when he used his vast fortune a century ago to build thousands of libraries. A self-educated man, he knew the power of knowledge and knew that if information were available millions would improve themselves as he had done. Indeed, hundreds of millions of minds have been enriched by what they have read in the thousands of Carnegie libraries. The Development Gateway provides the kind of information dissemination and knowledge sharing that Andrew Carnegie would have appreciated. The Internet makes it possible at a cost he would have recognized as a real bargain.

The Development Gateway Foundation has had its birthing problems. It had a number of different directors over the years, and probably suffered from lack of continuity in leadership. The initial financial expectations of its founders proved excessive, but the organization has downsized its expectations and is working with partners to share costs (gaining expertise in the process), On the other hand, Jim Wolfensohn was able to swing tens of millions of dollars in initial support for the Foundation, and its software platforms and the social capital built with that investment can now be used with much less expense. The DG Foundation has now distanced itself from the World Bank, overcoming the criticism that it was too subordinate to the Bank's interests, and is located in facilities provided by the InterAmerican Development Bank. (It is formally a 501 (c) (3) non-profit, incorporated in the District of Columbia.) The new director, Mark Fleeton, is the former Assistant Director General of AusAid, and seems to be getting good reviews. The Foundation has, as it always has, an independent Board of Directors. The chair is now Michael Hofmann from Germany. The Foundation now has about 40 employees and works with hundreds of partners around the world. It has direct activities in 60 countries. There is an independent evaluation of the program done in 2005.