Social Impact Lab Foundation

With funding from a google Impact award, simlab partnered with landesa to use inclusive technology to improve and support a land titling program for rural and tribal villagers in odisha, india. Using sms and open source software, the improved land titling system will increase access to land titles for the titleless by making it easier for officials to report and manage hundreds of simultaneous titling applications and surveying processes. Since august 2015, odisha officials have reported that 507 government officials have used the technology to identify 47,489 titleless households in 9,230 villages. Of these, 15,952 households have received land titles.

In 2015 simlab supported organizations using inclusive technologies such as mobile, radio and analogue communications tools in their Social change work, through design, implementation and monitoring support. Simlab worked as part of a consortium as the technology partner to implement inclusive technology feedback mechanisms in three pilots. The pilots were conducted with local ngos supporting maternal healthcare in india, somaliland and tanzania. Simlab assisted the organizations to scope out, develop and implement feedback mechanisms using sms, voice calls, suggestion boxes and other in person, low-barrier to access mechanisms. The project resulted in a case study highlighting the opportunities and challenges in implementing mobile-based feedback mechanisms with local organizations in challenging contexts. Additionally, simlab co-facilitated a learning event with the uk department for international development and the consortium partners to share findings from the pilots. Simlab also created a website www.feedbackmechanisms.org which hosts all the case studies, best practices and learning from the project. The project has also resulted in speaking engagements both in the us and the uk. Simlab also supported american red cross to identify an appropriate basic phone-oriented offering for their first aid mobile project; built sms-based appointment reminders, client surveys, and an emergency text line for baylegal; and investigated how the dc public library could deliver better information on Social services to patrons, and prototyped an open-source tool that allowed librarians to build custom guided interviews.

The william and flora hewlett Foundation funded simlab to explore the implications of inclusive technology on governance and accountability, and to write and research on best practices in technology for governance. With this funding, simlab worked with partners to produce: a policy brief on the digital divide in anti-corruption efforts; a report on Social accountability initiatives in five countries; a report on efforts to use technology to support expungement of criminal records in the us; and a retrospective of a digital front door project in oakland, California. We also used this funding to develop the first version of our monitoring and evaluation framework, a public document to help our staff and ptnrs better evaluate tech projects in the context of larger Social good work.