Mahmood Enayat

Not quite sure that your Platform or Hosting Service Providers will back you up in trouble times (e.g. Defamation Case of Governmental pressure to remove the content)? Reading this is strongly recommended.

In Iran, there has been a number of cases of shutting down a server , a US based hosting company removing the content under the pressure of a filed Defamation case or many removal of blogs hosted by Blogging Platform Provides inside Iran.  As a result WordPress and Blogger are getting more popular for Iranian Blogger but still I think there is more awareness is required for selection of hosting service and their respective countries.  How about considering hosting services in Ghana or Sri Lanka? Based on the Article 19 Defamation Map, They have a pretty relaxed defamation legislation! (Ignore the Big yellow chunk!)

One of incumbent effect of Oxford is the great opportunity of meeting people that it would be very hard to meet otherwise. On Tuesday, I met the director of an Indian Developmental NGO on the train from London to Oxford, which will be remained anonymous, till I get permission from him.

He was still wearing a badge of a conference that he had attended earlier in London and it indeed act as the ice breaker to start off the conversation. Through out the conversation he mentioned few points on how his organisation is working and structured that was very much in line with few literatures that I read in the IT and Development course back at LSE.

First of all he was totally against the idea of getting funds from International donors and specially charities and the his reasoning for this?: the difference in the long term strategy of organisations in developing countries with the short term strategy of donors. He said, although, they have accepted funds from UNICEF which was completely on track with one of their educational project.

He explained that he runs his organisation as a profitable business however, the profit is not the main motive and any profit minus the administration cost will be carried back to organisation. Banks are the main source of the investments for his projects, particularly the microfinance projects, which he was very proud of the system that he had in place: for checking and managing risks, maintaining a very healthy cash flow in the customer level and a sophisticated and bureaucratic process that they had in place within for loan allocation to overcome the problem of corruption.

He gave me a limited insight to a very interesting deal between his organisation and a housing association in UK (his main reason for traveling to UK), where the housing association will provide them with the capital for the micro finances loans and due to difference between UK & India interest rates, it is a profitable deal for both of them (and probably will fill the corporate social responsibility section of the housing association annual report.) Nevertheless I found it an interesting way to bring liquidity to the very much in need of western banking system.

And finally just to do a reality check on “ICT for Development”, I asked him if they have any ICT project in their portfolio, He replied in a way that apparently I have asked a ridicules question that all the people whom his organisation is working with are “really poor”. Then he continued by explaining the projects they have on proving sanitary pads for women which not having access to it is a major risk to their health in rural area.