How about a Ureport brasileiro?

A successful story of social impact in Uganda, brewing political change in Brazil, and how private capital might be able to help.

Earlier this summer, two seemingly unrelated events came to my attention. I heard Dr. Sapra, the UNICEF Representative in Uganda, tell the story of Ureport at the United Nations Summer Academy and, on the exact same day, headlines about the political protests in Brazil reached my RSS feeds.
 
The difference between the two scenarios is evident. Yet the literal coincidence in the explanation for each was striking: a crippled government struggling to tackle issues of corruption, inflation, poor education, collapsing health services and infrastructure, combined with a young population eager to take ownership over social and political change in their communities. In 2011, a vanguard team in Uganda came up with an innovative tool to untie a few of the many knots inherent to the picture I just described.
 
Ureport is an SMS-based system through which the local UNICEF office carries out countrywide polls to collect real-time data, and helps foster popular engagement and accountability. It started with a few simple but important research questions, such as how many youth were within a ten-minute walk from safe water, and has gone on to conduct over 470 polls and two million responses (and counting). The qualitative and quantitative information collected has been used to shape policy and actions, and to monitor results. Parliament members started to employ Ureport to obtain up-to-date input from the national youth before lawmaking sessions. In addition to polls, the program involves regular radio programs and newspaper articles to share stories from the Ureport community. Thousands of Ugandans continue to sign up every month.
 
Two features make Ureport unbeatable. First, its cost-effectiveness: the initial capital was around 200,000 dollars and participation is free. Second, the simplicity of the concept yields great versatility and scalability. It is no surprise that the World Bank decided to roll it out for the monitoring of its own financed projects. An analogous structure could certainly suit the needs of the millions of Brazilian twitters and Facebook members, who frenetically expressed their views on our country’s most critical matters in the past weeks. I also see that the Ureport concept can be adapted to generate profit, for instance, if telecom companies putting money into infrastructure were to charge a nominal amount for the SMS service. There are myriad other profit opportunities, and I invite consultants and bankers aboard. 

Indeed, a healthy dose of skepticism accompanies every talk on impact investing and how it might translate into financial return. It is a challenge for all of us. At this point, I would venture to suggest that we borrow another brilliant idea from Dr. Sapra - he has instituted "Fail Fridays", during which every member of his team tells their trials and failures of the previous week. In my view, discussions like this post must proliferate quickly if we want to find the answer. Let’s talk, act and even fail more often in trying to do what is right.

By Mariana Castro, Goethe University Frankfurt