Togo Made a Digital Government Stimulus System In Two Weeks (bloomberg.com) 55
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Bloomberg report: In Togo, a nation of about 8 million people where the average income is below $2 a day, it took the government less than two weeks to design and launch an all-digital system for delivering monthly payments to about a quarter of the adult population. People [...] with no tax or payroll records, were identified as in need, enrolled in the program, and paid without any in-person contact. According to Anit Mukherjee, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, "the U.S. program looks like a dinosaur" in comparison.
[The program called Novissi], which means "solidarity" in the local Ewe language, is the brainchild of Cina Lawson, who heads the Ministry of Digital Economy and Digital Transformation. [...] Togo had run some cash transfer programs in the past, but they were small-scale and typically involved registering households one at a time and distributing physical money by hand. According to [Shegun Bakari, a close adviser to the president], other cabinet members objected to the idea of using mobile technology, arguing that many in rural areas didn't have access to phones or identification, and even those who did might lack the wherewithal to navigate a digital system. Yet in fact, Togolese -- like people across Africa -- had for years been using "mobile money," stored on and transferred from their mobile phones. The president quickly embraced the proposal. [....] Covid pushed countries to move quickly beyond age-old debates over who is deserving of government aid and whether transfers should be unconditional. The sheer breadth of suffering undercut the paternalistic attitude that the poor brought their suffering upon themselves.
Even with the president's support, Lawson's team faced big challenges. For starters they didn't know which Togolese were most in need: Tax rolls were no help in a country where four out of five working-age people toil in the informal economy. The last national census, conducted almost a decade earlier, hadn't gathered information about households' wealth or income. To ensure payments were made only to verified individuals, the team sought to build the platform off an existing database. Few Togolese possessed a driver's license or national ID card, but 3.6 million adults are registered to vote, according to the country's electoral commission, which requires potential voters to indicate their occupation and address. This electoral database was thought to represent somewhere between 83% and 98% of the adult population. Lawson and other members of the cabinet decided to focus the first round of support on anyone with an address in greater Lome who had listed an informal occupation, including shopkeepers, seamstresses, maids, hairdressers, and drivers. With the funding allocated by the government, they could provide each beneficiary one-third of the minimum wage, about $20 per month. Lawson insisted that the platform be able to offer an instantaneous payoff; otherwise, she warned, Togolese would doubt the promise of "free money" and fail to enroll. "You register, the platform determines you're eligible -- because once you enter your voter ID, the platform knows your profession and your geographic position -- and bam! You receive an SMS with the money," she says. The program wasn't without hiccups, however. When Novissi first began on April 8th, there were millions of registration attempts and tens of thousands of people calling for troubleshooting help, causing the platform to briefly buckle. But, as the report notes, it "largely worked," with more than 567,000 people receiving payments in the first round of disbursements.
"In part because Novissi proved so successful, the ministry teamed up with GiveDirectly and researchers at the University of California at Berkeley to fund a round of payments for the 200 poorest cantons," adds Bloomberg. "To find them, the researchers trained an algorithm to identify impoverished communities based on their urban layout and housing materials, using satellite images. The researchers couldn't pick individual beneficiaries by occupation because many rural residents didn't have differentiated professions; instead, they created a second algorithm that used data from mobile phones -- including the frequency and timing of calls, texts, and data use -- to identify the poorest users. Over the next few months, this round pushed funds out to 138,000 more beneficiaries."
[The program called Novissi], which means "solidarity" in the local Ewe language, is the brainchild of Cina Lawson, who heads the Ministry of Digital Economy and Digital Transformation. [...] Togo had run some cash transfer programs in the past, but they were small-scale and typically involved registering households one at a time and distributing physical money by hand. According to [Shegun Bakari, a close adviser to the president], other cabinet members objected to the idea of using mobile technology, arguing that many in rural areas didn't have access to phones or identification, and even those who did might lack the wherewithal to navigate a digital system. Yet in fact, Togolese -- like people across Africa -- had for years been using "mobile money," stored on and transferred from their mobile phones. The president quickly embraced the proposal. [....] Covid pushed countries to move quickly beyond age-old debates over who is deserving of government aid and whether transfers should be unconditional. The sheer breadth of suffering undercut the paternalistic attitude that the poor brought their suffering upon themselves.
Even with the president's support, Lawson's team faced big challenges. For starters they didn't know which Togolese were most in need: Tax rolls were no help in a country where four out of five working-age people toil in the informal economy. The last national census, conducted almost a decade earlier, hadn't gathered information about households' wealth or income. To ensure payments were made only to verified individuals, the team sought to build the platform off an existing database. Few Togolese possessed a driver's license or national ID card, but 3.6 million adults are registered to vote, according to the country's electoral commission, which requires potential voters to indicate their occupation and address. This electoral database was thought to represent somewhere between 83% and 98% of the adult population. Lawson and other members of the cabinet decided to focus the first round of support on anyone with an address in greater Lome who had listed an informal occupation, including shopkeepers, seamstresses, maids, hairdressers, and drivers. With the funding allocated by the government, they could provide each beneficiary one-third of the minimum wage, about $20 per month. Lawson insisted that the platform be able to offer an instantaneous payoff; otherwise, she warned, Togolese would doubt the promise of "free money" and fail to enroll. "You register, the platform determines you're eligible -- because once you enter your voter ID, the platform knows your profession and your geographic position -- and bam! You receive an SMS with the money," she says. The program wasn't without hiccups, however. When Novissi first began on April 8th, there were millions of registration attempts and tens of thousands of people calling for troubleshooting help, causing the platform to briefly buckle. But, as the report notes, it "largely worked," with more than 567,000 people receiving payments in the first round of disbursements.
"In part because Novissi proved so successful, the ministry teamed up with GiveDirectly and researchers at the University of California at Berkeley to fund a round of payments for the 200 poorest cantons," adds Bloomberg. "To find them, the researchers trained an algorithm to identify impoverished communities based on their urban layout and housing materials, using satellite images. The researchers couldn't pick individual beneficiaries by occupation because many rural residents didn't have differentiated professions; instead, they created a second algorithm that used data from mobile phones -- including the frequency and timing of calls, texts, and data use -- to identify the poorest users. Over the next few months, this round pushed funds out to 138,000 more beneficiaries."
Time to go spread some democracy (Score:1)
Re:Time to go spread some democracy (Score:4, Insightful)
it's definitely a lot harder to turn a cargo ship than a small row boat.
that being said, that's pretty dope that they were able to do something so quick for their people.
As a counter argument (Score:5, Insightful)
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You've driven this metaphor off a cliff.
There is nothing about this that implies "better training." It was ad-hoc, incomplete, but they got it done fast and it helped. They missed a lot of people, too.
The IRS direct-deposited my payments without even communicating with me, and had a website where you could check the status if you didn't get it on time. They even sent out pre-paid debit cards to people they didn't have banking information for.
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government can be functional now, can we?
This program is interesting. But I'm not sure you should be holding up a squalid, crime-ridden West-African hereditary dictatorship as an example of good governance.
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If you call Togo functional. They've had inflation rates of 40% in the past and they don't even use their own money anymore as a result. Their government is highly corrupt and bribes up and down the chain are a regular business practice. Just printing and pumping money is generally a bad sign, especially in a developing nation.
Making it is not the problem (Score:2)
Every halfway competent person can click together something that sort-of works. Making something that is not total crap and keeping it working securely and reliably is. If they did this in two weeks, my guess would be they have neither security nor reliability.
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Well, they seem to have conquered some of their scaling issues, which is impressive. Security isn't too difficult, so long as it's planned. Bolting on security afterwards is where a lot of businesses go wrong.
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We will see, I guess. Sure, there _are_ people that can do this right with very little time. There are just very few of those.
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Well, no shit! Their success criteria was to disburse money. When you are giving away money for free, there is always motivation to receive it. The problem is that their success criteria apparently didn't include getting it to the right people, because there is no mention of how much fraud and waste was detected. (Don't tell me it was zero, I don't believe in humanity that much, even if it is just Togo)
Re: Making it is not the problem (Score:2)
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Small wonder (Score:2)
"The researchers couldn't pick individual beneficiaries by occupation because many rural residents didn't have differentiated professions; instead, they created a second algorithm that used data from mobile phones -- including the frequency and timing of calls, texts, and data use -- to identify the poorest users."
Violating the privacy and spying out phones of citizens is always easier than doing it the legal way.
Another method would be instead of waiting for tax-records, just kidnap people with expensive c
Re: Small wonder (Score:3)
It's not even a success or fail situation. It's literally "we enrolled these people and they got money so it was a success".
Without checks and balances in the process it can be both a completely success and an utter failure at the same time.
Re: Small wonder (Score:2)
I'm not surprised (Score:1, Informative)
When Obamacare's supporting website was released, at a cost over over $600M, it was full of bugs. Many of us here on this site could have taken two Stanford grads and a handful of programmers and built the thing for at least one zero less, and done a better job.
Government produces nothing worthwhile or efficient, because they have no incentive to do so. Only fools place their hope in it.
Re: I'm not surprised (Score:2)
This was like nails on a chalkboard. "You receive an SMS with the money".
Why do developing countries think SMS is secure enough for banking? Lol... I think Africa has a similar dumb system. "Mpesa" or something like that.
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This was like nails on a chalkboard. "You receive an SMS with the money".
Why do developing countries think SMS is secure enough for banking? Lol... I think Africa has a similar dumb system. "Mpesa" or something like that.
I believe it is what they have. The need was there (in 2005) and there was no banks, no internet, or other financial structures around, but people had cell phones. M-Pesa [wikipedia.org] met a need with the limited resources available. Still today it is the best they can do. A "PIN secured" SMS does not sound very secure for "banking" but it works and it has allowed the very poor to improve their lives.
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Governments are perfectly capable of competence when it suits them. The NHS and the early BBC were classic examples of competence because of how they were structured - the government funded them but the government didn't run them. They were run internally by people who knew what they were doing. And that's the correct way for government to do most things - lay down some standards via a charter but leave the implementation to those who know what they're doing.
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Honestly, government contracting produces terrible work - much worse than actual government employees. I know that's saying something. But you don't see major software vendors bidding on government work as a source of pride. It's always bottom feeders with no track record.
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That's not what Biden is doing and you know it. The disinformation would be hilarious from you guys if it wasn't the same as it was the last week, year, decade, etc, and still never happening. If you want to be a comedian, get new material.
Re:Biden responds ... (Score:4, Informative)
It's actually much worse than throwing open our borders, because if we did that, employers would have to follow US labor laws. Because the immigrants are illegal, employers can use the threat of deportation to abuse and underpay immigrants, rather than paying them what they deserve. This hurts everyone except the employer.
Creating a "leaky" border funnels money into the hands of smugglers, sex traffickers, unscrupulous employers, and the like.
Re: Biden responds ... (Score:2)
Fast, cheap, good, pick two (Score:2)
This plan was done very quickly. Was it done cheaply, or was it done well?