Everyone loves to win an award! We now have participation awards to celebrate just showing up. This prize inflation is happening in digital development too. There are a proliferation of prizes – many of them no more than shady marketing and bad branding.
Better Vetting for ICT4D Award Applicants
My good friend Josh Woodard pointed this out recently:
I believe it is time to pause all of the different recognition awards that are handed out for digital development, unless and until the development sector has the resources and capacity to conduct deep due diligence on applicants.
He is rightly concerned that many ICT4D prizes are awarded by a panel of famous judges or by a popular vote. Both groups are only reviewing brief applications focused on flashy marketing, not verified impact.
The teams with the best marketing and sales efforts usually win, and then use the awards for public relations and more marketing, leading to winners acquiring new business and investment based on glitz. Teams focused on true digital innovation and impact can lose and be forgotten.
Why do we allow digital development awards to prop up programs with great pitches, but do not deliver sustainable impact? Why not celebrate teams with great results, regardless of storytelling acumen? Digital development, by its nature, demands a deep understanding of sustainability, scalability, and impact—factors that can’t be adequately judged through a brief review.
Josh ends with another key point:
If we want to systematically promote top notch examples, then it needs to be done through top notch due diligence. To do otherwise is not only bad practice, it can actually lead to bad development outcomes.
Better Vetting of ICT4D Awarding Organizations
I would humbly submit a corollary to digital development awards based on flash versus substance – award ceremonies that are really marketing for the awarding organization.
I get endless ICTworks Guest Post pitches to showcase contests that have no tangible benefit for awardees. The real goal is to have a fundraising gala for the organizing entity. A celebration of its rich donors with fancy awardee Hunger Game entertainment.
These contests usually don’t offer actual cash awards to the winners – just vague promises of global recognition and valuable networking with the organization’s donors and other awardees. This is in stark contrast to the number one request of every entrepreneur – more cash funding, please!
I would like to see these types of award programs end. Shallow award events makes me wonder which is more useless: digital development awards, hackathons, or app contests.
It would be great to have a second look at all the prize winners over the past 25 years and to assess which ones of those have had any real impact on development. My guess is that very few, if any, stood the test of impact and/or sustainability…
I fully agree with Josh Woodard – and we might extend the idea to the numerous international and national ICT4D hackatons and other costly ICT4D venues which generate more CO2 emissions than anything else… !
Thank you all for these awards that amount to nothing much
Definitely an interesting topic. To highlight the other side of the debate, one positive I’d say for digital development awards is that they help identify success stories in the digital development field. In my experience, people always want success stories, they want to know- where’s an example of where implementation went well and digital tools were used effectively to address a problem? Digital development awards are a way to extract that information from global projects in an organized way. Anyway- just my comms perspective on this.