12. Funding the Commons or Funding the Youth? - Paris 2023

most of the work that I do um uh is uh conceptually and actionably U framed by sustainable development goals un sdgs uh can I get a raise of hands who's heard of those nice uh so these are anchored in the ideas of intergenerational solidarity universal access and replenishment of public goods so the notion of of the comments runs pretty deep there at least on the conceptual level on the Practical level though it's a really really confusing uh world to work in so first of all it's a world of immense structural uh inequalities and very little meritocracy it takes no genius to be born in Switzerland and it's very difficult to explain what Switzerland is to a kid in an African slum and I tried once and it gets very sad very quickly uh then there is the history part uh you cannot have a group of people subjugating and enslaving another group of people for hundreds of years and not come out of the exercise uh with some sort of a sense of superiority and guilt so it's a it's a visous mix then you have the capitalism and globalization bit um we commercialize every element of our of Our Lives Down to the walk through the park and we're being told it's progress and I actually have been told that kit in Bangladesh that's sewing my sneakers that I get on sale here in Western Europe it's progress as well and then there's the racis part uh I'm from Poland so we as a nation we were like applauded that we welcomed one 1.5 million uh Ukrainian refugees um uh let me tell you we're not so welcoming U to the syrians so it's all like confusing um and the funding surrounding this reality is also pretty confusing so you have like major stakeholders um who are sometimes arguably and sometimes obviously contributing to the damage that their funding is trying to fix okay so there's the World Bank for instance uh which is a bank uh so they make profit of the loans that they give um like any other bank but unlike any other bank uh they very often tell you how you should spend this loan and who you should invest it with so that didn't work that well for many countries just look up structural adjustments um then there is funding from foundations which have their own agendas and some of those agendas are about upholding IP regimes intellectual property regimes which I understand it's for them to earn money and save millions of lives which they've done but on the flip side of it without those regimes millions of lives would have been saved so it's like confusing then there is funding from Bono and the likes uh yeah I mean he mobilized a lot of resources and for good reasons but he's completely Unapologetic about dodging taxes then there's the funding from private sector and these guys like really take the cake uh with their sdg uh teams and websites and being the biggest poters of the planet at the same time there's funding from the member states which always goes with some sort of a geopolitical muscle and that there is funding from virtually everyone which is very heavily earmarked so in January there is a big announcement you get a million dollars uh by May June the paperwork clears from that paperwork you learn that you have to spend it on very specific things and you have to commit it or better yet uh just spend it all by December 31st so good luck with that so seemingly like in this world of funding of International Development everyone is exercising some sort of a uh economic or or or political influence and that's not even all of the challenges that we have so there are like conceptual challenges so first of all like the the customer um that receives the the product or the service they usually don't pay for it so like the kind of commodity level of validation of the product or service like it's not there um then anyway like a lot of things that we care for are intangibles like sense of empowerment uh resilience well-being so like this is very difficult to evaluate for and finally our emotional math and geographies are just like stupid around these space P so like we care less about uh a group of 100 or a thousand or 10,000 people and they like story of despare we care more about a single individual story of a single person preferably a child preferably if it's like you know present that very very like neat aesthetic way like this so it's all like confusing you know so like when you try to get to like the comments here like the waters are really murky so it's complicated so I work for Unicef and UNICEF is okay who's heard of Unicef show of hands nice uh so UNICEF is one of the biggest United Nations U agencies and its mission is to make the world uh more Equitable for every single child in the world and if you look at these stats you would see that there is great horizontal bread and vertical depth so I don't think there is a nation u a a country and the world that has as many field offices uh embassies that UNICEF has country offices so that combined with our mandate around young people and our deep programmatic expertise means that first of all we're out there and we kind of understand what the problems are out there in the trenches and second we really very often punch above our weight in terms of who we can get into the room and kind of push these policy points to make world a more Equitable place I work for the office of innovation at UNICEF and we really stand on the shoulders of previous you know Concepts Innovations and if that's your idea of geeking out just take a photo and and and Google those it's it's actually pretty cool uh but today what we do is we look at existing and emerging Tech and how it can support unicef's program goals and Education Health was and sanitation Child Protection Etc we have our own venture fund um that provides Equity free funding for startups that develop an open source up to $100,000 um who here has known that UNICEF has a venture fund not bad we have a crypto fund who here knows that we have a crypt fund okay like the the number of hands just goes down the further I'm in the slides yeah so we do accept and this be crypto uh we support an initiative called Giga uh which uh wants to connect all of the schools in the world to the internet and they're going to succeed I know it we have testing drone testing corridors in various parts of the world um and so these are just a couple of examples of the work that we do and we're also committed to digital public goods now another show of hands who's familiar with the concept of digital public goods oh okay uh so digital public goods uh yeah it's a concept that has its own definition governance structure registry and standard it came out of the UN system uh and a bunch of high level stakeholders including country governments uh around 201819 um so the definition is that it's open software data AI models centors or content um it has to adhere to uh privacy laws and other best practices Do no harm and support attaining sdgs it has its own governance structure digital public goods Alliance which has many members the important bit here is that it has a governance board there are only uh five or six members there and UNICEF is one of them so we are really prominent in this space and pushing this common narrative there is a registry where uh vetted dpgs are placed with an idea that everyone can pick them up um and localized easily because they're open source and then there's the DPG standard which is nine indicators that you have to clear to be Ved as a as as a DPG and uh probably the most important of them is that a DPG has has to be open source and so open source um open source and digital public goods are unicef's commitment um to make sure that the commons are U the scaffolding and the foundation for the digital future and so we really think that uh dpgs ensure uh long-term Vision digital sovereignty um building local capacity so the young people are actually the future owners and maintainers uh of these platforms uh we also think that uh they reduce the risk of digital colonization and vendor lacking and so two questions on offer here how do we fund and support this work and then how do we find the funding for this work so on the global level we support the digital public goods Alliance and the robustness of the registry the standard the Secretariat of the alliance um we are also also very active in the policymaking space so we're really making sure that dpgs are part of the global digital public infrastructure conversation which is actually very very strong these days um on the local level we support building DPG functions uh within the government we make sure and encourage it Regulators to um look at the to use the standard uh to use the registry to build their open source capacity but there's one more thing that we do and that is that we support young people so we support young entrepreneurs that develop digital public goods because we think that what's better way to funding the commons than funding these people I would actually argue that funding these people is funding uh the commons so this is what we do um we uh through our country offices uh we um work with local startup EX ERS and we include the DPG element in their curricula so we upskill young people in open source capacity we explain to them the open source business models uh licensing uh we give them an entry point to the UN system and our network of Partners and we support them in registering their products as digital um public goods and we also provide them with funding now they do need funding because they work in really peculiar context so this is a snapshot from Ghana where I spent some time so it's somewhat familiar to me this is the context I would say that it's pretty daring trying to build anything in this kind of context um so in May I was in Acra with a group of maybe 10 15 heads of innovation departments from the biggest funders in the world some of these people have hundred million do to spend um and we set these young people that you so just few slides back and and and we ask them um you know how should we how can we fund you better and basically their their short list of suggestion was I don't have to read it like the short list was um be more flexible uh trust us be responsive responsible and uh supportive which kind of sounds like a short list for any relationship to work like yeah like if your ex goes to buy eggs and like doesn't come back like that's what like they leave on the on the piece of paper this is what you didn't do um so this is it like you know so young people we always try to gravitate to young people everyone here in this room you have some sort of a project uh you manage You Lead You coordinate if you don't have a young person as part of this project I would encourage you to include young people if you have young people as part of include them more I really think that young people are perhaps the the greatest um public good that we have and so like the second question how do we find money for this work so this is again at the minican Acra one of the people said that one of the heads of innovation we know the problems we usually know the solutions the question is how to pay uh I would say it's accurate but I would say it's not an accurate statement when it comes to dpgs and the comments because these are not known Solutions solons so there are two bottom lines here first of all like UNICEF we have to work with the governments because that's that's like what real scale happens uh the second bottom line is governments are just not ready for this they're not ready to include dpgs systemically in they're thinking about digital public uh infrastructure okay um and so these are some problems that you have on the local level there is lack of technical capacity people don't understand just what open source can bring and if you don't understand something you don't invest in it there are broken systems uh there is an IT regulator in the country that I'm not going to specify uh on paper every Ministry every Minister should send them an email where when they procure or develop internally some sort of a digital solution well they don't send the email so the poor I regular the guy like he never gets any mail uh you know so so so that doesn't work and also there is little appreciation for um just Community Network repositories as a as a valid uh Roi and that's on top of just novelty bias uh people thinking that dpgs are idealistic abstract at conflict with their agendas and that's on top of this okay so it's complicated um so towards the end of this talk I want to leave you with two images don't underestimate at the mountain um like how to fund the commons is a good question to have but in the first place you have to explain to people why the commons is the way to go um and there is a reason why I didn't talk here about Dows and back bounties and quadratic funding and we do all of this at the unicef's office of innovation um and I think it's a valid conversation how to move money more more quickly and creatively from like converted funders to conver converted implementers but it's really of a high urgency to to explain to people why the why the common approach is is is is the one uh to take and then this one um so it's really difficult to to pitch dpgs in my work so I always try to think like you know what else I can use that kind of serves the same purpose and like for Unicef it's it's it's young people so Tran horse it's not full of Consultants but it's full of young people um and so like we fund young people we will continue to fund them uh because we really think that they they are the key to to to building this this this future including digital future that's based on on the comments so another thing that I would encourage you is like if you think you need a trojan horse what would be inside of it um so there you have it like all this talking and I'll leave with this two images the hiker and the horse [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thanks