Since 2014, Africa’s Voices and Well Told Story (WTS) have worked together to develop a set of social change metrics within the digital space that can sidestep the many fallibilities of traditional monitoring and measurement. AVF Director, Dr. Sharath Srinivasan, together with Rob Burnett of WTS, presented ‘Monitoring and Measuring Social Change’ at the annual TICTec conference, showcasing...
Learning is core to Africa’s Voices development and innovation. Recently with our partner, Oxfam Kenya, we reflected back on the challenges and lessons learned from our interactive radio project that sought to understand peoples’ motivations for paying taxes and their perceptions of the quality of public services. In Oxfam’s write up of the discussion are suggestions for improving the...
The World Bank states that we’re “in the midst of the greatest information and communications revolution in human history”. Harnessing ICT for development can be transformative — yet pitfalls exist. “SMS surveys are cheap, easy and accessible, and reach a large number of people quickly. But many surveys are implemented without testing or providing enough...
Our Director, Dr. Sharath Srinivasan, set the scene at the Founders Pledge meeting on Human Rights. This organisation encourages founders of tech start-ups to pledge support to charities. Other speakers included Catherine Zennström (Zennström Philanthropies), Regan Ralph (The Fund for Global Human Rights), Patrick Ball (Human Rights Data Analysis Group) and Oren Yakobovich (Videre est Credere). Watch Sharath’s presentation
Our interactive radio project in Uganda has been featured in a magazine that celebrates research at Cambridge University. Exploring the socio-cultural side of complications in pregnancy, this research was in collaboration with Dr. Annette Nakimuli (Makerere University) and Prof. Ashley Moffett (Cambridge). In the article, they describe their genetic research into pre-eclampsia, and how an...
What are the opinions, knowledge and beliefs of Kenyan citizens about tax? What do they think are the government’s roles and responsibilities for tax justice, budgeting and public service delivery? With radio stations in Nairobi, Turkana, and Wajir, we gathered the views of over 550 people using interactive radio and SMS (from 35 counties, mainly...
Africa’s Voices has won The Market Research Society (MRS) President’s Medal, for our work with UNICEF Somalia. It is awarded annually to an organisation or individual that has made an extraordinary contribution to research. Our Director, Sharath Srinivasan, says: “To be recognised by the Market Research Society with the President’s Medal so early on in our journey...
The London International Development Centre (LIDC) facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration between the London colleges and worldwide to help address global development challenges. Africa’s Voices’ Rainbow Wilcox was recently invited to contribute to the LIDC blog. Using our pilot project with UNICEF Somalia as an example, the article looks at how our approach about more than the data, but...
Our collaboration with Well Told Story has led to the development of a unique new tool, which helps to analyse online conversations with ever-growing precision. Already we’ve gained insights into exactly how collective discussions can lead to normative shifts among youth in East Africa. For example, we found that during Well Told Story’s pro-contraception campaign, more...
Africa’s Voices’ Sharath Srinvasan and Claudia Lopes have contributed a chapter, titled ‘Africa’s Voices Versus Big Data? The Value of Citizen Engagement through Interactive Radio’, to the ‘Voice and Matter‘ anthology. The volume brings together research that was presented at the fourth Ørecomm Festival in September 2014, and makes “important contributions to how we think about...
