051 – Digital Jobs in Rural Environments

[00:00:00] Lucie: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name is Lucie Hazelgrove Planel. I’m a social impact scientist and anthropologist and I’m here with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:18] David: Hi Lucie. Looking forward to another discussion.

[00:00:22] Lucie: Good, me too. So we had a few discussions lately when we’ve been talking about how people are working. Actually, in lots of the episodes, you’ve been mentioning future of skills, you’ve been mentioning about how people work in, well, in so many different contexts, and I know you have big ideas about well, to put it simply, digital jobs in rural environments. I think it’d be great to hear about how those ideas came out and why you’re interested in this.

[00:00:48] David: Oh, that’s a really good question, and I wasn’t expecting it to come from this angle, but I’m really happy it is. Actually, my wife Giovanna did her PhD in development economics in Western Kenya. She was looking at rural businesses and urban businesses and peri urban businesses, particularly with a focus on women’s businesses.

And while she was doing her PhD research, there’s a need which emerged to sort of these big surveys she was doing to get the data digitized. It had all been done on paper and somebody needs to do the data entry, and for various reasons, there was a space which wasn’t being used.

[00:01:37] Lucie: A physical space, do you mean?

[00:01:38] David: A physical space, yes, in, well, maybe I should give a little bit of context. We were in Maseno University, which is out in western Kenya and the nearest big town is Kisumu, which is on the lake. Halfway between, there was this beautiful space with a round house and it had been sitting empty for a while.

And somehow we got to know about the person who was owning it and the rest of it. And they said, well, you know, could you use it to help the community in some way? And so we got from, I’ve forgotten exactly where they came from, but ten small laptops, and we put them with interns, if you want, in that space and said to the community, if people want to come and learn to use computers, they can come and use the space. We set it up in such a way, after a while, there’ll be people who start to come to use it. And then we sort of set it up, while you’re learning to use computers, you could learn by actually doing some of this digital data entry and you could get paid for it.

[00:02:32] Lucie: That’s a bit like citizen science in a way.

[00:02:34] David: Well, in a sense it is, but the key point here was that, because we were able to pay a small amount to do this, what was amazing is that actually most of the people who were there, who were coming in, were young women, often with young children and they set up their own crèche, and they then did this data entry. And they learned how to use the computer while being paid to do data entry.

[00:02:58] Lucie: That’s amazing.

[00:02:59] David: And, and it was amazing. It was incredible. It was a very small scale, but it was incredible because it was so important in so many different ways. And one of the things it reiterated was that in that particular part of the country, the youth were all leaving to go to the big cities.

But what this highlighted was they weren’t leaving because they wanted to leave. Actually, if they could have opportunities in their rural environments, many of them would have wanted to stay. Not all, but many. They were leaving because they didn’t have opportunities there. I mean, the farming was not profitable, really, in that region, it was survival, subsistence farming, not for everyone, but at the small scale of the small holder farmers, that was often the case. There was fishing in the lake, and again, that was sort of subsistence fishing more than anything else, though, for most people who were involved in it.

And then if you wanted other opportunities you had to go to towns, and the rural communities were emptying, particularly of youth.

[00:04:08] Lucie: Visibly so?

[00:04:09] David: Visibly so, yes. I mean, these were very visibly ageing communities. And what was really interesting is just that little injection of opportunity and learning and so on from these digital jobs was transformative in a very simple way. This created community so quickly, who then supported each other and, you know, and it wasn’t needing much.

They weren’t needing much for it to be useful, I mean, this is where absolute poverty is generally defined as less than two dollars a day. But if you can get people two dollars a day in that environment to do digital jobs, suddenly it changed their opportunities. So, actually putting them just above the poverty line, in some sense, as a starting point was already impactful. And then of course, where do they spend that money? Well, they spend it on the local businesses.

You know if they only have a small amount of money they spent on the local businesses, now the local businesses are doing better. And of course that means that the farming has the opportunity to supply the local businesses because now there’s people who can buy it because otherwise these communities are often surviving off remittances, coming back from the cities or abroad or wherever it might be.

And this sort of pattern is surprisingly common across the continent. And it’s not been uncommon across the world historically. This has been patterns which have been observed historically, in many ways, all over the world.

[00:05:35] Lucie: And continues to happen in Europe. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:05:37] David: And continues to happen in Europe. But at the same time in Europe, we have the opposite trend happening. Because of digital jobs, people are leaving the cities.

[00:05:47] Lucie: Yeah, that’s true.

[00:05:47] David: To go to local areas where they can have better quality of life, where they can actually work digitally and remotely and they’re now supporting their local communities wherever they move to.

[00:06:00] Lucie: I’m sort of an example of that. I’m not sure if I fit in with the supporting the local community where I am though.

[00:06:05] David: Well, how much do you buy from local shops?

[00:06:09] Lucie: Yeah, a bit.

[00:06:11] David: So this is the thing, I mean, it’s something where there’s more that can maybe be done in this. But what if, instead of waiting for some of these communities to be decimated by all the youth leaving and so on, what if these opportunities could be created? And I’d love to be supporting this in Europe and the U. S. as well, where you could get this sort of re ruralization in different ways, where you build these rural communities which integrate remote working and digital work.

That’s attractive to me as well. My wife is now living in rural Italy, where we are discussing this, and we’re trying to sort of say how her community, which is a very small rural community there, how could this maybe use that to reinvigorate some of the historic towns or villages nearby, [that] go back to Roman times, but currently have 500 people living in them?

And maybe this could be a place where that remote working could work. So I’m interested in this in Europe. But the aim for me and the opportunity for me is that there’s potentially an opportunity to nip things in the bud in certain African communities by providing those opportunities for youth not to leave through digital jobs.

[00:07:30] Lucie: You feel that the impact there can be bigger or something?

[00:07:33] David: The point is that you then don’t lose culture. Because the thing which often has happened is that once the youth leaves you’ve got a break in the cultural traditions because a lot of this is all oral history in different ways.

So this could be doing amazing things for supporting, you know, some of the… losing these local languages, which is happening across the African continent. There’s such an incredible diversity of cultural languages, which are being lost because of the urbanization processes. And, you know, whereas actually this could be preserved maybe better through some of these sorts of ways, providing opportunities in these rural environments.

[00:08:15] Lucie: I can’t remember who wrote the book, but someone wrote about Papua New Guinea. Someone, like a local Papua New Guinean, thinking of development, not as development, but as develop man in terms of, you know, using money just to develop what you do and do it better, basically. Which is exactly this I think, idea of what you’re talking about here, where you’re enabling people to have opportunities, but therefore to do what they want to do, as opposed to just continuing in the line, the only line that they have perhaps.

[00:08:42] David: I would argue the real power of this comes when you really think of this combining it with some of the agroecology ideas. Because if you now think about the circular economy in that context, what you’re also doing is you’re producing consumers in the rural environment who have disposable income, who could choose what they want to consume and start supporting the local enterprise and the value chains being local as well as extractive in this.

And this is something where I’m not against urbanization. I think urbanization has served incredible progress goals and has been very positive. I am against urbanization being the only option.

[00:09:30] Lucie: Exactly.

[00:09:31] David: If you take a vibrant village, if half your youth left, well, they’re seeking different opportunities, they’re gaining things, they’re contributing to a wider world and so on. And half the youth remained, with opportunities to develop locally and then they would stay in touch and the fact that rural environments tend to have higher birth rates than urban environments for all sorts of different reasons, you know, I can see that being sustainable.

The problem is when all your youth are leaving, that’s bad. It might be bad if all your youth have to stay as well. But, you know, that balance between these where your sort of urban centres could be continually populated because my guess is that they are. Also people come back and they quite like to retire to rural environments.

[00:10:14] Lucie: Yes.

[00:10:14] David: There could be really positive flows and this is sort of getting those balances right. And of course, I’ve just picked 50 percent out of the hat because that’s easy, I don’t know what the right percentages are or would be. I’ve not done any research on that to understand this, and I’ve not seen constructive research happening to try and think, well, what level of urbanization can actually sustain vibrant rural communities? We definitely don’t want people to be trapped in a rural area when they want to experience opportunities that urban centres provide.

[00:10:46] Lucie: What’s fairly interesting though with the idea about remote working and you know, they can then change location in fact. You’re not stuck in that area.

[00:10:55] David: Absolutely. And it is true that actually establishing the ability to remote work, maybe they do need to go and get education in an urban context to be able to get the skills to be able to do remote work in rural centres because, actually, if you don’t centralise some of that skills acquisition in some way, but maybe it doesn’t need to be urban centres, maybe that skills acquisition could be happening in sort of more centralised rural communities, which actually then serves the training hubs, which then people come to, but they’re not leaving rural areas.

I don’t know, but this is sort of manor house. And our collaboration with Manor House has always been, we did these 21st century skills there with exactly these ideas in mind.

[00:11:39] Lucie: And just to clarify, so Manor House is an agricultural centre, which was an agricultural training centre, I think, to be more precise, in Western Kenya. A couple of hours away… down in?

[00:11:50] David: Kitale.

[00:11:52] Lucie: Yeah. Is it in the region, Kitale? Or it’s…

[00:11:55] David: Well, it’s just outside of Kitale.

[00:11:57] Lucie: Near Kitale. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

[00:11:59] David: And it’s somewhere where, again, as a training centre trying to sort of get digital skills as part of what they’re doing and what they’re training, they’ve now shifted towards agroecology, integrating digital skills in was a real effort. Of course, our timing on that was rather bad. We started that real effort in January 2020.

[00:12:20] Lucie: Yes, okay, just as COVID started and when people weren’t able to travel, where…

[00:12:25] David: Exactly, and it was then really tough. Everybody got locked in together and then the computer scientist type people, the mathematical scientists who were doing that training were now locked up in this agricultural centre. And then It was, the timing was not perfect to start such an initiative.

[00:12:46] Lucie: But you couldn’t have known that.

[00:12:48] David: We couldn’t have known that. It was very exciting though, the way it did start and the potential it sort of proved to be able to do this. We’ve not been able to really restart it since because actually, you know, it’s been difficult since COVID.

I don’t know, most people in the world have noticed, but there hasn’t been that real space to take up these innovations and make them happen because it’s just been difficult. Everybody’s been struggling and it’s been difficult in different ways.

[00:13:22] Lucie: Okay, yeah and like, just to also explain, why are digital skills useful in agroecology and the agroecology work? I mean, there, I’m thinking of data collection straight away.

[00:13:33] David: It’s not just data collection. Why do you want data collection? If you extract it, then that’s no point. The point is data collection to be extractive is no point. The powerful element that we’ve been observing, and we’ve seen this in Niger, and we’ve seen this elsewhere is that done well, that data collection can really, not just data collection, those digital services, can serve the rural communities in really powerful ways. And so actually getting it so that there are digital tools to help the…

[00:14:09] Lucie: So to help people, to inform people as well, and sort of connect, well I don’t know about connecting people.

[00:14:14] David: No, inform, connect, also just support. I mean, a very simple one is that, and this is a reality check, Beth, who you know, has often discussed with me the fact that a number of the subsistence farmers she knows in the region, one of the things is that they don’t keep their accounts because if they did, they wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning; if they knew how unprofitable what they were doing and the work they were doing was, how it really wasn’t helping them. So there are issues around that.

But if you just think about accounting as an important digital service, being able to help people recognize this is the inputs that are going into the farming processes, this is their expenditures, this is what they actually make out of it. Being able to understand that can help decision making.

[00:15:06] Lucie: And we’re even supporting a researcher in Mali who’s working on developing a toolkit, let’s call it, I guess.

[00:15:13] David: And the key point there is that he’s wanting to do it not to extract the data, but to provide the data to the farmers to help them support their decision making. And that sort of thing clearly could be extremely beneficial, and it’s, I would argue, well, very simply, I would argue that such tools developed locally, rather than internationally, are more likely to be locally useful. But then the data that comes out of them could provide global insights, which could, if used correctly, support the local sort of situation to actually then identify areas where Global efforts could help, you know, there’s many different… how can I put this?

Well, there’s many different components, which really come into, making rural societies function, where if you actually had information about them, maybe you could serve them better.

[00:16:18] Lucie: Sorry, just to go back one step, I was thinking in terms of digital jobs, I was thinking of people using computers, doing just normal data, well, normal computer literacy, I guess I would say. But then we started talking about farmers as well. To me, that’s a different use case, or a different example.

[00:16:37] David: Thank you for bringing me up on this, because you’re absolutely right. The way I see it is twofold. That I see, if you start with people having remote working digital jobs, and this could be building a website, you know, anything, you know, analysing data, you know, you, all these things that you don’t have to be there. We work totally remotely. The sort of work we do can all be done remotely.

If you have people with those skill sets embedded in rural communities, then they can earn a living where they can have a better quality of life because they’re living in an environment where the cost of living, to get a nice house, a nice place to live, to have space for the family, to have good food, which is grown locally.

All of these things become possible. Okay, there are challenges. Health care may be a challenge in these rural environments, but if you get enough people, then those problems can be resolved. If there’s enough money in that system, then those problems get resolved relatively naturally. Not necessarily easily, but it’s a sort of natural evolution in some sense.

You can get a really good quality of life by living on the same salary in a rural environment. This is one of the reasons that remote working has been so important in Europe and beyond. But it’s not just that.

[00:18:01] David: Then you have people with skills, proper digital skills, embedded in communities where digital solutions can help them and support them. So now they can actually be involved in building the tools which are needed and useful locally. And so that’s the second part of the role.

[00:18:23] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:18:24] David: Actually having people living in these communities, understanding the needs to build the tools that work for them, that’s then even more powerful. There’s playing that double role of both getting external income being part of a global market of skills, but also using their skills locally. And that can have educational impacts, that can have impacts on all sorts of areas because they could be helping to build the solutions. I don’t like solutions, the tools that can support people in that case. That would be the real dream of getting these digital jobs embedded in these rural environments.

[00:19:04] Lucie: So I really like, already, I really liked the idea of people being able to work in rural environments and to have those opportunities. But in terms of that next step, the added level of, then sort of adapting things for the rural environments, for the local communities, I find that really interesting.

[00:19:21] David: And of course, right now, that’s not easy or possible. But that’s exactly the nature of the way we think that digital tools need to change, where they become easier to adapt at that last mile level, in that rural context, you know, or in these marginalized contexts.

So this is where, again, there’s a need to change the way digital products are created, what’s possible. But that’s, again, exactly the same thing that we’re aiming and working towards with the work we’re doing with our parenting apps and chatbots, where they need to be adapted to many different groups to get to reach people in the marginalized groups, so that they have tools which serve them.

And so these two things actually go together. And this is one of the reasons that, you know, why haven’t we picked up on… on building this out. Well, actually, we’ve recognized all of this complexity of these different things are needed to really enable us and it all goes together. So a lot of it is just being patient enough and ambitious enough.

[00:20:27] Lucie: Exactly. You just mentioned the parenting apps and things, chatbots, which it should be said that you have created them in a way which can be accessible for other people to adapt and to change. So using languages, you don’t need to be a highly skilled software developer in order to do it.

[00:20:46] David: And this is exactly where we now have a team in Kenya in a relatively rural environment who are the ones adapting it for Uganda and supporting it in Tanzania. And now that’s not quite as localized as I’d like to get. I’d like people in maybe the village doing it for their neighbouring village and so on.

But that’s big picture stuff, a long way down the line. But really getting those skills out widely so that people can get enough skills to support and use those skills both to get jobs outside and also within.

[00:21:20] Lucie: Hmm. Well, fascinating. It’s been a nice chat, David. So thank you for sharing your ideas on the future of employment, perhaps, or potential futures of employment…

[00:21:29] David: Well, I suppose the key point here…

[00:21:31] Lucie: …and community building.

[00:21:32] David: Exactly. The other thing which is underlying this whole thought process, which is where the very first efforts came out of the thinking with my students and with others about the fact that the youth of tomorrow is broadly African. This is where there are the highest birth rates still, the largest number of youth coming through. And the hope is that that youth will be the boon to the African economies and societies and communities, where it will really enable them to develop in positive ways.

But for that to happen, they need to have opportunity. And part of that opportunity, they have to have opportunities within their rural context because a lot of that high birth rate is in rural contexts. And there’s reasons for that, that historically in rural contexts you have high birth rates because that is your future labour to be able to work the land.

So this is conceptually, once you’re in an urban context, children are expensive. In a rural context, children are what’s going to help you to actually do the work. So that’s why the birth rates have remained high in those contexts. And so all of these things are tied in together in very interesting ways.

[00:22:57] Lucie: Great. Well, thank you, David. We better end it there for today. I look forward to another conversation soon.

[00:23:03] David: Great. Thank you so much.