James Cropper (United Kingdom)

Civil society organisations (CSOs) are critical to the advancement of human well-being, particularly in the Global South and in Small Island Developing States (SIDS). In these developing spaces, civil society's impact often faces barriers due to resource constraints ranging from human capacity to finance. It is well established that data science and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) play a key role in the digital age in improving the efficiency and productivity of for-profit companies. However, such benefits have yet to be accrued in the work of civil society in small developing states as they often lack the resources to use tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve their operations. Simply providing funding or ICT resources may not solve the problem. We propose a framework in which Data Science resources can be provided to CSOs in such a way that all parties benefit, through an adaptation of the technology stewardship model. The proposed model describes a distributed framework for technology stewardship that comprises a coordinating agency, client and beneficiary civil society organisations, students and expert mentors, that all work together to deliver value to the beneficiary organisations, as well as to each other. This Framework has been trialled with 10 beneficiary civil society organisations in Trinidad and Tobago with exceptional results. We provide details of this framework as well as the outcomes of its first deployment.