With the right plan I think you can be more effective if you stay at home and deploy your Hacker skills.

Mechanical-fish wrote in another thread: "Wake me up when you have an actionable plan to solve a problem. That would be interesting."

We identified a big internet service/applications gap in the development-aid water and sanitation sector. Essentially these people are stuck in the LP/cassette tape age, when the rest of the world moved on to iPods and p2p networks.

Some basics:

Market size: 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation, 1.1 billion lack safe water to drink. Some US$10 billion is spent every year to try to resolve that problem. The goal is to halve those numbers by 2015 (UN MDG goals), but that isn't going to happen.

Problem: There are lots of problems with development aid, but we are focusing on a couple of specific areas:
information exchange, funding and monitoring and reporting.

Information exchange – Information about low cost, appropriate technologies and sustainable water and sanitation solutions for low-income households and communities is very hard to find and collect for the non-specialists. Information is available, but spread over a large number of sources, and essentially disorganised.

Funding – The water and sanitation community struggles to attract additional flows of money and connect funds directly to where the demand is. It is estimated that around 15-30% of budgets are directed away from intended beneficiaries due to corruption and high overhead costs, partially due to a lack of transparency. It is specifically difficult to find grants and loans for local initiatives, even though these initiatives have proved to be very efficient.

Monitoring and reporting – Monitoring and reporting are often used as a means to ‘justify’ a correct use of funds, not as a tool to intervene pro-actively in projects while they are evolving. The sector is stuck in the “thick Word report” process, rather than using easy to use IT tools. Additionally the sector struggles to visualise and share results in an appealing way to those outside the sector.

You can take what I considere basic internet tools and drastically improve the "state of the art" that the people working in this field today use. Which is what we are doing, like picking low hanging fruit. We are putting together a non-profit foundation to work on this and deliver some tools.

We are putting together three integrated products:

- Akvopedia – the first truly open knowledge platform dedicated to water and sanitation
- Akvo Matchmaking – an unique marketplace for water and sanitation projects screening and funding
- Akvo Really Simple Reporting (RSR) – an easy and transparent way to track projects in the field and to share and visualise results

Essentially a Wikipedia for water and sanitation knowledge, eBay, Blogger and YouTube for water and sanitation projects, rolled into one.

The tools we develop ourselves will be available under GPL and the platform is available at an "at cost" basis to the users, who are NGOs, government departments and companies. Which will be way below in cost what they can provide for themselves.

We are in the process of deploying the platform and building out the first product, Akvo RSR. The web site is essentially a wireframe which we used as part of our fundraising, which will be swapped out with the real thing during the summer.

We have more than a dozen development-aid partners and we are working with hundreds of field partners lining up to use the system, and expect to put the first 25-50 projects on the system over the next couple of months. The goal is to scale this up to thousands of projects over the next year and then further.

I could go to Africa and work as a hydrologist (I have the education) but I think that I am going to be much more effective rolling out some modern internet systems to make all these people working in this field more effective. Our funders agree with me, otherwise I don't think they wouldn't have given us money.