Emily Lesk

Before working with Solo Kota Kita, I took data’s great power largely for granted. I had synthesized and analyzed demographic data while working in private sector land use consulting, where we assumed that the quantitative information needed to solve any problem existed somewhere. The numbers may have taken some legwork to find, but between censuses, public records, and privately-compiled for-sale data sets, we never went without the critical context they provided.

In Solo, the opposite is true. Without systematically-collected hard facts about local characteristics and needs – andwhere those characteristics and needs occur – well-meaning governmental and NGO programs cannot assist as effectively as they might otherwise. Whereas in my former private sector consulting world, a lack of good data might prohibit a corporate client from positioning maximizing revenue, in Solo, the impact could be much more fundamental. A neighborhood might continue drinking polluted water despite funds available for a better well, or overcrowding housing conditions might persist unnecessarily.

In other words, I became profoundly aware of how critical good data can be to meaningful change. This realization has recently directed my graduate studies to a course on entrepreneurship in the developing world in the MIT Media Lab. Also involved in the class is a multidisciplinary group of students and professors interested in issues of data collection and spatial representation as they relate to a range of development issues. I hope that what I learned from Solo Kota Kita can contribute to this collaboration, and that I may in turn share new insights from the class with the Solo team.