International Digital Rights Days: A Conversation with Reina Yaidoo
Reina Yaidoo is a leader in technology, innovation, and data and digital strategies for under-served sectors, markets and communities. Her award-winning work uses action research, public engagement, and the design plus development of data and digital infrastructure to leverage underserved knowledge into a distinct and strategic business advantage.
In 2015, Reina founded Bassajamba, a social enterprise committed to developing ground breaking data and digital infrastructure, that provides organisations with fair, inclusive, and unbiased systems for cross-sector collaboration.
Manchester’s Digital Strategy: In 2015, you founded Bassajamba, a social enterprise focused on enabling digital and data infrastructures that help overcome challenges in underserved communities and combat inequalities. Would you be able to tell us a little bit more about your work, and your ambitions for Bassajamba going forward?
Reina Yaidoo: Bassajamba focuses on how technology could better impact social and economic challenges faced by underserved communities. We collaborate closely with many of these communities, including global majority groups, women, disabled individuals, and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Many face exclusion due to systemic and structural challenges that affect their ability to grow economically - from being able to develop products and services to benefit their own community to participating in investment and growth activities.
Currently, we’re focusing on Smarter Cities with a particular emphasis on fostering smarter economies within these urban environments. This involves exploring how digital and technologies can impact systemic change within cities. Our work intersects and identifies new programs linked to learning, innovation, creativity, networks, the green economy, and more. We also investigate how data and knowledge could be integrated into larger systems around health, housing, education, and economic growth.
MDS: This year, we’re thrilled to become a part of the International Digital Rights Days campaign, joining cities around the world to champion the defence of human rights online. What do ‘digital rights’ mean to you in the context of your work with Bassajamba, particularly regarding data infrastructure?
RY: International Digital Rights Days defines digital rights as human rights. Online, this encompasses the right to privacy protection, access to information, non discrimination, equality, and inclusion.
In the context of our work, we apply these questions to the real challenges underserved communities face and how these rights could be applied to data infrastructure:
Where is the principle of fairness in the development of new systems and infrastructure?
How can the green economy be integrated into these systems to benefit underserved communities?
Are there issues around collaboration and collective impact when working systemically or across sectors?
Which tools, infrastructure, technologies, and methodologies best underpin these rights?
Responses to these questions are key to identifying the types of systems and infrastructure that might enable these rights within the wider economy.
In our recent report, Tech for Good in a Human Centred Economy, asking these questions led to new pathways for designing, developing, and implementing data infrastructure. The report highlights approaches for fostering a fairer, greener and more collaborative economy and developing ethical frameworks using living systems data.
MDS: Would you be able to share some examples of projects that Bassajamba have been involved with that have helped to safeguard the rights you’ve highlighted and have enabled positive change for underserved communities?
RY: Our projects, which provide insights and platforms around social and economic challenges, have run the gauntlet - from creating new mechanisms to help dentists to recognise people being affected by domestic abuse, to developing different methodologies for preventing mental health difficulties in global majority populations.
A project we have recently initiated explores the development of digital and data infrastructure to impact informal learning economies within the voluntary and community sector. In the project’s initial phase, we engaged with refugee groups to co-develop the concept, with an intrinsic aim of safeguarding their rights as part of the platform.
Dap is a conceptual prototype for an informal learning technology within a Smarter City. It uses collective impact methodologies to bring together different stakeholders in the design of new activities - building social capital, and widening the assets and resources available to diverse communities.
The platform aims to offer a digital learning and health record for members of underserved communities participating in informal learning within community and voluntary sector spaces. The record builds a profile documenting knowledge and experience; validates evidence of learning; and highlights capabilities, competencies, and skillsets gained through a wide range of activities, including innovation and lived experience. It also analyses for risks to health and wellbeing and provides preventative strategies to enable vulnerable communities to remain resilient.
Finally, a collective intelligence section explores data and digital methods that take a more ethical and systemic approach, analysing not only individuals but groups and communities across a city and helping them work towards a sustainable learning environment.
MDS: At a city level, how can we ensure that the data systems we develop avoid entrenching existing inequalities and biases, and instead drive more equitable outcomes for all?
RY: If we really want to avoid entrenching existing inequalities and biases, and instead drive more equitable outcomes for all, then a more human centric approach to Smart Cities is needed. At Bassajamba, we call it the “Smarter City”.
A human-centric Smarter City should address the needs, wants, and capabilities of the full range of organisations, communities, and stakeholders within its boundaries. It should underpin equitable opportunities for economic and social growth; innovation; integration of assets, resources, and capabilities; and rely on inclusive and resilient systems and structures to create a sustainable and balanced economy.
Bassajamba completed work, supported by Co-Op Foundation, bringing together Black and global majority-led organisations and communities. They worked with additional linked experts to explore new approaches, systems, and models for a human-centric approach to not only Smart Cities, but developing cities and economies that run smarter.
The project - Yaquimo - explores human centric frameworks needed to make cities and economies run smarter, and novel approaches to data and digital.
MDS: What do you see as the biggest barriers to building data and digital infrastructures that are truly equitable and inclusive?
RY: One of the biggest barriers to building these infrastructures could be the level of funding needed.
One Smart City example was the £10 million CityVerve project which used Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to help Manchester City Council improve the way it designs and delivers services for the people who visit, live, or work in Manchester.
This was an older technocentric approach. However, approaches with reduced costs might now be just as viable.
A second barrier might be the current asymmetric ecosystems around tech itself, which divides into a for-profit tech ecosystem vs a non-profit tech ecosystem. Truly inclusive and equitable digital and data infrastructures would require both ecosystems to collaborate to develop a fully functional system.
MDS: Looking ahead, what actions would you like to see organisations in Manchester take to protect and promote digital rights in the context of systems change?
RY: Looking ahead, I would like a better vehicle for establishing standards that organisations can join which demonstrate their commitment to meet, align, protect, and promote digital rights.
Other vehicles for promoting and promoting digital rights might come through the creation of Digital Public Goods (DPGs) such as open-source software, open data, open artificial intelligence models, open standards, and open content. DPGs are becoming critical levers for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They should adhere to privacy and other applicable laws, standards, and best practices.
The UN’s Roadmap highlights key recommendations to guide these efforts:
Digital Public Goods Platforms: These platforms share digital public goods, engage talent, and pool data sets.
Promote Robust Human Rights, Governance Frameworks, and Inclusion: This is essential for ensure that these goods are developed and deployed ethically and inclusively.
Promote Digital Public Goods: This includes through greater investment, amplifying efforts, and strengthening coordination to support DPG’s widespread use and impact.
Deploy Digital Public Goods: Immediate responses and future approaches should prioritise DPGs as key tools for achieving the SPGs.
