055 – Scalability vs Sustainability in IDEMS Internships

[00:00:00] Santiago: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I am Santiago Borio, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:18] David: Hi Santiago. We’re still discussing internships, which is great.

[00:00:22] Santiago: Yes, we have now three episodes specifically on internships, and I would strongly recommend anyone listening to this to listen to those if you haven’t. But we ended the last one, which was the story about how the internships emerged, with a final comment about scalability.

[00:00:45] David: Yes.

[00:00:46] Santiago: Do you want to say a bit more about that?

[00:00:49] David: I can, but I think one of the key points and one of the reasons you are wanting this extra episode on this is why did I say scalability and not sustainability?

[00:01:00] Santiago: Yes. I was going to ask you that question after you did a bit of a recap of your last thoughts. But it is a very important question. These internships the way I see them, they were very opportunistic. We always made sure we had ways to fund them, or try to make sure we have ways to fund them, but I’d love to have another set of STACK interns, but we can’t afford it right now. So is it sustainable?

[00:01:28] David: Well, this predates IDEMS, just to go back to the previous episode, these internships have been a motivating factor behind IDEMS, in many ways, to make them sustainable. These are happening at a very small scale, small numbers of opportunities, this started really in Kenya and, one of the things is that these aren’t sustainable.

They’ve been sustained for over 10 years without being sustainable, you know, where the people running them have changed institutions, they’ve changed roles, they’ve changed jobs. All sorts of different things have happened and they have been sustained, all while never being sustainable, and recognizing that they’ve never been sustainable.

[00:02:10] Santiago: Is that not a problem?

[00:02:12] David: Well, is it a problem or is it a mark of resilience? So the point is that developing something which is sustainable but doesn’t actually work and isn’t actually useful, there’s no point. The fact that they have reinvented themselves in so many different ways to be able to sustain themselves without being sustainable for over 10 years is in itself, an interesting observation. And I don’t believe they can be formally sustainable without really becoming scalable. And there’s no point in them becoming sustainable without becoming scalable, because sustaining them without scaling them is not useful. There’s others doing better things where they are trying to do sustainable, scalable models.

I would argue that there are elements that we’ve learnt over the years, which have built in this resilience that add value to anything else I’ve seen that mean that I believe in the approach we do. But the approach is not yet sustainable or scalable.

[00:03:22] Santiago: Okay, but you focused on your last comment in the previous episode on scalability and…

[00:03:28] David: Yes.

[00:03:28] Santiago: …you talked to that just in terms of not wanting them to become sustainable until they’re scalable. You understand potentially business better than I do. The way I always imagined these things progressing is you have your initiative, you make sure that that initiative is sustainable, it can maintain itself, it can outlast us, and then you think about, okay, is it necessary to look forward and make it bigger? Or is it sufficient to have that small directed impact that can be sustained in time?

[00:04:14] David: But it can’t be sustained because the whole point is, where does the funding come from? And this is really critical. I would argue that one of the real successes that we’ve had is that the funding has never been for internships.

[00:04:32] Santiago: Okay?

[00:04:34] David: The funding has always been for elements of work in different ways for elements of different projects, where internships have been a way of delivering on that piece of work. And that’s been sustained for, as I say, over 10 years in different ways. That’s outlasted any individual. This is all sorts of different people in different ways finding that this approach to internships is useful.

[00:05:02] Santiago: Okay, so just to give an example of that. I was involved at the start of one of our parenting projects, the Parent App. And we built in some internships within the funding that we got to develop software development skills of a team in Kenya, so that they could contribute to the development of the app itself.

[00:05:31] David: And it was very sad that that was disrupted as it was by COVID. But even so, those interns, that was one of our more ambitious internship projects. We decided not to take university leavers, we took school leavers. That was the 21st century skills, taking people straight out of school and giving them internships. Oh, that was fun. It’s a shame it was disrupted by COVID, but some of those people have really gone on to do interesting things. That was a nice initiative. But yes, that’s exactly right. That’s the sort of thing we’ve been doing, just writing it in when we’re doing something.

It’s a cheap component of the work that we do, and it builds in the capacity, it builds local capacity, it has low stakes in terms of the internships, but it creates these opportunities which then mean that people gain experience and they’re part of real teams doing real things.

[00:06:24] Santiago: And it fits in quite well with our mission and vision. There’s episodes on that as well. And we talked about creating opportunities in those episodes.

[00:06:35] David: Yeah. So the point is, I don’t want an internship program to be sustainable. I want the integration of interns into work to be sustained. This is the scalability element. That unless we actually build real opportunities at scale…

One of the motivating factors about this, and why in Africa, the youth of tomorrow is African. This is the continent with the highest population growth, birth rates are still, on average, much higher across the continent than anywhere else in the world, as any other continent.

[00:07:20] Santiago: And that means that the youth in Africa is the workforce of the future.

[00:07:26] David: It is, a potential workforce of the future. And is that youth going to be the boon which really enables African development to rise to amazing levels? That resource of the youth is really critical but to do that they need to be really productive, they need to have opportunities to create opportunities, and have the skills to do that.

Now, there’s lots of discussions now. We’ve got the responsible AI discussions about, well, what does AI mean for all this? What does it mean for the jobs? But the simple element that actually you are going to have this amazing workforce coming out of Africa, if they could have the skills, to be able to really contribute to the world’s economy in ways which are valued and valuable, this then is going to be not only their success, this is success globally.

There are alternative hypotheses of what that youth might do and become. I believe very strongly that creating opportunities in that way at scale is what’s needed. And this ties in with so many problems that people worry about. Migration, you know, all these other things. People won’t migrate if they can get good jobs and opportunities where they are because that’s not the way the world works.

And the point which I think is so interesting on this, and this is why scalability is so important, if we’re looking specifically at the African context, is that there’s real need for these digital skills and there is a youth that would lap it up given these opportunities. And if we could create some of these opportunities at scale…

We’re not the only people to think this. I mean, there’s whole UNICEF programs about this, and youth empowerment, and in different ways. So this is not unique to us. But this is a genuine sort of large scale issue. I would argue that one of the areas where I’m really amazed that more people are not doing this, is digital jobs in rural environments, we seem to be one of the only groups that is seriously really looking at this but it’s so important it has so many opportunities. I don’t know if this is the right time to dig into that.

[00:09:52] Santiago: I think that’s the topic for another episode.

[00:09:55] David: Okay.

[00:09:56] Santiago: I want to question you on one aspect. You keep saying digital.

[00:10:01] David: Yes.

[00:10:01] Santiago: Now I’m trying to think about any of the internships that I’m familiar with that we ran that is not related to something digital.

[00:10:12] David: You’ll struggle.

[00:10:14] Santiago: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So why that focus?

[00:10:19] David: Because digital jobs create opportunities where people are, but that are global opportunities potentially. You’re creating skills for people where you’re not tied to just the local economies. One of the key things, and I’m afraid you’re getting me stuck into this topic you said is going to be another episode, but your rural communities, if you have digital jobs, this is bringing money from outside into those rural communities. Just the cash flow balances of rural communities. If you don’t have digital jobs, then it’s remittances. Things, people sending money back from the city.

[00:10:59] Santiago: Okay. Okay, let’s get into that now then. So my understanding is that one of our objectives is to create opportunities for people to stay in their rural homes and develop professionally from the rural homes because firstly, they tend to want to stay in the rural homes if the opportunities exist, and secondly a lot of rural areas are getting, I don’t know what word to use, decimated?

[00:11:39] David: Yeah decimated’s a good word for it. But what you’re talking about is the fact that, and this is really something which you observe across the African continent, where many rural areas, the youth are leaving. The youth are having to go to get opportunities elsewhere.

[00:11:55] Santiago: And that is very problematic as well for urban areas that are not prepared to receive so much young population.

[00:12:02] David: And it’s not just, of course, urban areas. This is the source of migration, global migration trends, and all sorts of other things are tied in with this as well. So there’s all sorts of different layers to this, but I think there is a layer which I think is really important. I’ve observed this in many different African contexts, and this is not all African context, there are some places where it’s too late. There are other places where it’s not the right moment, but it’s consistent in a lot of places across Africa, where you still have rural communities, which are relatively traditional communities, but a lot of the youth are leaving because they have to leave to get opportunities. And there are no opportunities in those rural communities.

If we imagine what’s happening now in many places in Europe where rural communities have been abandoned and lost and people are now finding with digital jobs that they can go back out to rural spaces and they’re trying to repopulate.

[00:13:00] Santiago: Yeah, there are whole places in Italy that I know of where they actually, sell you a property for very small amounts of money just for you to be there and keep a village alive.

[00:13:20] David: Exactly. And this is it, these communities are really struggling. But there is a tendency now, which is just emerging to recognize that actually with digital jobs, you can work remotely from these places. If they get internet infrastructure, without needing much else, that opens up the possibility for remote working.

[00:13:40] Santiago: Well, that was going to be my next question. Is the infrastructure there for opportunities to be created in rural communities in African contexts?

[00:13:52] David: It’s a difficult question. So how rural do you want to get? What technologies and where we’re talking about. I mean, it’s just very recent that Starlink, of course, has started in Kenya, in fact, the more rural you are, the better the internet will work. This is an irony there.

[00:14:09] Santiago: But I spent a lot of time going to a rural village in Zambia where there wasn’t electricity. So the internet is not the only limitation.

[00:14:21] David: Well, but solar panels now exist and, you know, you’re talking about things which are 10 years ago. You’re 10 years out of date. And the possibilities are changing very fast. Mobile phone signal is the obvious one, and that’s still problematic in many rural communities. Electricity is another issue. Electricity is now easier to solve in different ways, the sort of orders of magnitude that people need can be solved in many rural communities.

[00:14:49] Santiago: And in some ways, the solutions that are coming are more stable than the current infrastructure. The number of times I had to postpone meetings with interns because there was a power cut.

[00:15:00] David: Exactly.

[00:15:01] Santiago: It’s frustrating.

[00:15:04] David: Yeah, and this is the thing, you could leapfrog technologies in certain ways, where, if you’re looking at this in really rural cases, and at the moment we’re not looking at really rural cases, we’re looking at places which are outside the big urban centres, but that are not extremely rural, because they’re sort of in that in between zone.

And yes, it’s frustrating at the moment, there are power cuts, there are internet issues, the whole of West Africa got really bad internet because of the cable got cut. So, you know, this just happened very recently, and, you know, in a whole big part of the continent, suddenly the internet was not working for anyone in different ways. This is a reality of that environment.

But these things are all… they’re changing fast. And there are opportunities which are coming up, which are transforming that. They might work, they might not work, but I’m looking 10, 20 years ahead because that is when the youth of today is going to be driving the economies of tomorrow.

By then, if people could actually create some of these opportunities, they could then be settling back into their sort of home environments. They could be then creating the local economies around their home environments because they’re not out in the field growing things because they’re too busy working on their remote work.

So they then need to buy from their neighbours. But of course it’s much cheaper for them to buy from their neighbours than it would be if they were not there. So they’ve got a really high quality of life for a low cost of living. And these are the sort of scenarios which can be built and can be created, I believe, in rural settings across the continent.

You know, the question is what infrastructure is really needed? And probably that infrastructure is really not there yet. It’s close. It’s really close.

[00:16:56] Santiago: And there’s huge developments happening at the moment that is making it closer and closer.

[00:17:02] David: Exactly. Many of them are not necessarily aligned with making this happen, but it’s the sort of thing where if the movement starts, then suddenly the technology demand will change and maybe that will follow suit because there’ll be demand for it and so on, you know, it’s a supply and demand question which might come in here. That if this did take off as an approach, then the supply of being able to make it possible, then the cost of that might become less, and so on.

There’s hypotheses around this, but the thing which really motivates me on this so strongly is, if you go to Nairobi in Kenya, it’s expensive. Getting a high quality of life there costs the same almost as other parts of the world where the skill sets are higher on average. So it’s really hard to be competitive in Nairobi. You go to the rural areas of Kenya, and suddenly the cost of getting a good quality of life is affordable.

[00:18:12] Santiago: Not just having a good quality of life. Access to your own property.

[00:18:17] David: All these things, that’s part of a good quality of life. Yes, whatever that means.

[00:18:22] Santiago: Well, there is a distinction, in my mind at least, in quality of life for you right now and quality of life long term.

[00:18:31] David: I agree with you and when I say quality of life I’m looking at sensible, sustainable livelihoods.

[00:18:37] Santiago: Okay.

[00:18:38] David: And I think that’s hard to achieve in the big cities like Nairobi because people often don’t finish up there, they sort of put things aside and then leave, but that means that there’s all sorts of disruptions. Anyway, there’s a whole set of things around that. But I would argue that if you do take this opportunity, or create these opportunities in more rural areas, suddenly being internationally competitive is achievable. At the moment in the big cities across Africa, it’s not. And this has been a problem that it’s had for ages with Asian countries, that the cost of living is high.

[00:19:17] Santiago: Okay, but let’s refocus slightly. We started with sustainable versus scalable and I think that we are ready to come back after that analysis. If we just have something that is sustainable then so what? But if it’s scalable, it can really change the landscape of these rural areas and create opportunities.

[00:19:46] David: Exactly, and if it’s scalable, it might not need to be sustainable because the change it might bring might be a generational change where it serves its purpose for a generation. And you know, what does sustainable really mean in this context, if you’re looking for generational change? The next generation’s needs might be different.

The needs of the next generation in Africa might be more like the needs in Asia right now. Because you get that generational change. And to sustainability is a very different concept when you think about scalability if you’re looking for societal change. And scalability is what you need for that societal change.

[00:20:27] Santiago: Yes and I finished the last episode on two of our principles, there’s a third principle that comes to mind now, viral scaling which could be achieved through these internships and capacity building.

[00:20:44] David: It’s not just that the internships and capacity building are a tool to achieve viral scaling. It’s that viral scaling applied to the internships is a different approach to trying to make them scalable and sustainable.

[00:21:00] Santiago: Let me see if I understand it. We have four former STACK interns working on this STACK project, which is detailed in the first internships episode. If each one of them could train a team of four other.

[00:21:17] David: Yes, that would be a form of viral scaling, but that’s not the point. So to me, it’s the fact that if you take that STACK project as demonstrating that internships applied to STACK are able to be impactful, then, if two other projects get inspired by that and then include internships as part of what they’re doing…

[00:21:38] Santiago: I see.

[00:21:40] David: And then who does that, how that works, that’s a whole different matter. How we build systems, so that when they look at what happened, they take it, they adapt the model, they evolve the model, continually evolving, another one of our principles, we’re really digging into them now. But they actually take it, they adapt it to what they need, and then others get inspired by them. It’s the projects, it’s not the people.

[00:22:02] Santiago: It’s not the individual project scaling virally, it’s the idea scaling virally, being adopted in other contexts and areas.

[00:22:12] David: So the point would be that if STACK as a project grew virally, that’s great, and if that all included internships, then the STACK project would grow virally with internships within it. But for the internship approach to grow virally, it’s not about growing within a project.

[00:22:27] Santiago: Yeah.

[00:22:28] David: It’s about it going from project to project and those projects growing and so on, but it’s about it evolving in the way it goes from project to project. And that inspires other projects to take it up. And this is really critical to how I see this as being fundamentally different. It’s not just the rural aspect. It is this element that it’s embedded, it isn’t about the internship. The internship is embedded within the projects and the programs, you know, the work. Internships embedded within work, rather than as an individual program.

That approach is different. Now, of course, you kind of need both sides of that to work, because it’s hard to embed them from scratch into work. Whereas if you have a program you can tie into, it becomes easier. So there’s an internship approach and you build those in and that exists, you know, this is sort of built into many developed economies.

[00:23:25] Santiago: Can I perhaps finish off by mentioning a grant proposal that we put in. Because we wanted to see if we could apply that sort of internship program in the UK. And unfortunately we didn’t get the grant. We were shortlisted and other projects won the competition, and that’s perfectly fine. We’ll find other ways of doing it potentially in the future. But we really wanted to embed that into IDEMS.

[00:24:01] David: Yeah.

[00:24:02] Santiago: We want to create internships so that people end at school, end at university, end at graduate education, with skills that we need to apply to our work directly.

[00:24:15] David: Yep.

[00:24:16] Santiago: So that they could contribute right away, or through their studies on a freelance basis, or after their studies as a sort of add on to whatever they’re doing, and also make them so that they included transferable skills and they could apply those skills in other contexts.

[00:24:37] David: Well, I mean, I want to take one of the key points of this. Working through their studies, particularly in the UK with universities, many people get bar jobs. They do work through their studies, it’s an important part. And I was very lucky that I took a gap year and instead of going traveling for my gap year, I worked in London as a computer programmer writing software for banks. And that meant that when I got, opportunities during my studies to do work, I was working as a computer programmer. I was earning more than I would have earned doing a bar job. And I was doing something which was building my skill sets.

[00:25:15] Santiago: Let me clarify one point. There is nothing wrong with getting a bar job to maintain yourself while you’re at university.

[00:25:22] David: No. There is nothing wrong with that, except wouldn’t it be nice if there were opportunities which allowed people who wanted to build technical skills to get jobs which enabled them to build technical skills alongside as part of working their way through university? So this is the key point. There’s nothing wrong with getting a bar job if you’re wanting to build social skills, because it’s great for that. But if you’re wanting to build technical skills and you don’t have any opportunities, and the best thing you can do is get a bar job, then you’re losing out on that opportunity.

So I don’t want there to not be the opportunities to get a bar job. I want there to also be opportunities to get jobs, which could build your technical skills. Because that’s something which will help people to grow in different ways. I’m not saying one is better than the other.

[00:26:11] Santiago: And not just the technical skills, skills that are relevant to what you want to do.

[00:26:15] David: Exactly. This is the thing, so many people, in different ways, have got skills through their university studies, which then have held them so well afterwards. I have a friend of mine who was studying something totally different, but got involved in university newspapers, and that’s what became their job. It’s not what they studied, but it’s what they did at university. These are the opportunities that can help grow people into sort of careers that they want by being exposed to these opportunities. And even in the UK, I don’t believe there’s enough effort or enough opportunities that exist for that.

And so that’s where a lot of that proposal, as you say, which we didn’t quite get, was really built on this idea of creating these opportunities in a way that this could, over time, create those opportunities for people, we’re particularly looking for minority students who can’t really afford the debt that they’re going to take on. But if you can work your way through when you’re studying, it changes the equation.

[00:27:17] Santiago: And if you work on things that are useful and valuable and enjoyable to you, it changes the equation even more.

[00:27:24] David: Exactly, exactly.

[00:27:26] Santiago: And that is essentially why this sort of model applies in the low resource environments, in the middle resource environments, in the high resource environments. And who knows, I might be able to do this in Argentina.

[00:27:44] David: Yes.

[00:27:44] Santiago: We are doing it in different ways in low resource environments, we’re trying to do it in high resource environments.

[00:27:51] David: And this is the whole point of actually having a principled approach. There’s principles which are common. There’s elements of learning which can cross from one to the other. But there’s also then the adaptability, this element of sort of evolving it for the context.

[00:28:06] Santiago: Options by context.

[00:28:07] David: Options by context.

[00:28:08] Santiago: So many, we can keep going with principles for ever and ever.

[00:28:14] David: Yeah. We really need those podcasts on the IDEMS principles to come out at some point. But that’s something which I think is a discussion for another time.

[00:28:24] Santiago: Indeed it is. Any final thoughts?

[00:28:28] David: I guess the final thought is we’ve gone around the houses a bit. It wasn’t so much about internships, I suppose, but internships provided that backdrop of where our experiences and our learning, taking into account real complexity and dealing with a whole set of different issues.

But that simple component, the internship component, which is capacity building can cut across those contexts, and cut across those different elements by not being central. It is a support activity, but including it as we do, as a support activity, rather than putting it front and centre, is exactly part of the value.

And that’s, I think, one of the things which is often lost in, you know, when we look at grant proposals and the rest of it, it’s that complexity, that multi layered element of actually thinking through, well, what’s the main focus and what are the things which are making this really valuable? Because some of those are where the true value lies.

I would argue we’ve had projects where the core project has been a success, but the real success has been the internships and the people who have gone through it and what they’ve gained and what they go on to do and where they take things because of that experience.

[00:29:51] Santiago: Great. On that note, thank you very much.

[00:29:54] David: Thank you.