Our Common Humanity in the Information Age. Principles and Values for Development

USE OF ICT IN PARTNERSHIPS
Carolyn Miles, Executive Vice-President, Save the Children (US)
I would like to discuss the idea of sharing responsibility with a little bit of a different 
twist. I think that we have to remember that the people that we are trying to serve with 
the MDGs, which is the poor of the world, also want to take on responsibility for their 
own development. It is a very important thing to remember that sharing responsibility is 
for everyone. One of the critical questions is if we are talking about partnerships and 
specifically if we are talking about technology, how do we get technology into the hands 
of poor people so they can use that technology to take responsibility for their own 
development, which is something that they desperately want to do.
I am going to give two quick examples:
1. Save the Children and other NGOs are working with Microsoft, establishing a 
partnership with a large corporation, to use PDAs - hand held instruments to 
collect data on health programs. We are not teaching health workers fro m the 
Ministry how to use the PDAs, but we are teaching people in the community 
how to use those PDAs and collect data on the health of their own children. We 
are putting the power of information into the hands of the people, in 
communities who are really very motivated to change the future for their own 
children. This is an example of a low-tech solution.
2. The second is an example where Save the Children helps HIV/AIDS victims by 
using digital cameras, again putting the cameras into the hands of youth in 
Africa, specifically in Ethiopia, to document their lives and how HIV/AIDS has 
affected their lives. Then we use those photos to bring that story back from the 

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134 | Our Common Humanity in the Information Age 
perspective of the youth, who are in these communities, and experiencing these 
problems on a daily basis.
The question is: “Are there more concrete examples of how we form partnerships that 
actually bring the people we are trying to serve through the MDGs into that shared 
responsibility and how can we do that more often?”