Chile Beyond Good Wine

I am spending three days this week in and around Santiago, Chile, at the foot of the Andes with a packed schedule of meetings and events. I must say that while the wine and food are fantastic (recommendation: come to Chile on a wine tour as soon as you can), what I am really impressed with is the ongoing partnerships we have with a number of organizations in Chile, the Latin America region and globally.

This video gives more detail about what I am doing here this week.

Yesterday, we held a roundtable with our NGO partners from across Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina. Last time we had a similar meeting was in Cartagena over two years ago, so it was a great opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues to hear what is happening in the programs they are implementing in places ranging from the most remote rural regions, to urban slums, to disaster zones.

As you might expect, we wanted to hear about how they are using technology to strengthen their organizations and achieve their missions more efficiently and effectively. I must say that I am deeply impressed and very optimistic that a new era of innovation in the NGO world is upon us. Social media serves as one example - these NGOs are using social media tools to track program impacts, reach out to new stakeholder groups and plan events. We learned about a wide range of great examples:

Marcelo Bahamonde from the Chilean NGO Hogar de Cristo, who provides food, medical attention and other social services to over 30,000 people across Chile every day, shared how they are using technology to better engage with their beneficiaries. As a very lean organization, you can imagine that a technology project would be daunting. But Marcelo saw the value and communicated it in terms his leadership could understand. Hogar de Cristo uses Dynamics CRM to serve beneficiaries with a focus on a positive customer experience based on the philosophy that every human, regardless of their current situation, deserves to be treated with respect and care.

Marianella Santiago from Venezuela sin Limites spoke about how they are using SharePoint to link over 300 nonprofits in their country.
Marilyn Silva from Superatec spoke about using social media and Facebook to keep in touch with young participants during and after training to help them find jobs and opportunities.

There's incredible optimism.

I am also meeting with several of our local NGOs independently. Our partnership with Fundacion de Vida Rural is really a great example. We met with a colleague from Vida Rural, along with other members of the partnership Entel (a local telecomm) and Olidata (a local computer manufacturer) to review the Chile Conect@Chile project. This effort has actually been in place since 2003, but the value of our long-term partnership became immediately clear on February 27^th last year.

Within days of the devastating 8.8 magnitude earthquake, Chile Conect@Chile delivered the first mobile Community Technology Center in the disaster zone. Since then, 16 other centers have been delivered, with three more on the way. These centers provide a vital link in the impacted communities, helping residents find lost friends and family, stay in communication, access public resources available to them, and perhaps most importantly complete skills training to help them find jobs when their former jobs have disappeared (literally, in some cases). Tomorrow, we will make a site visit to one of these communities, so stay tuned on that front.

Finally, I am attending the 3^rd Global Telecentre Forum, being held at the impressive Gabriela Mistral Center in Santiago. Telecentre.org represents a group of people committed to bringing technology to underserved individuals around the world. There has been much debate about the role of community technology centers (telecenters) in the face of rapidly advancing internet connectivity even in the poorest and most remote areas of the world. I think this video created by the Telecentre Europe team tells a compelling story, highlighting that as societies we simply cannot afford to exclude people from the digital revolution, from both the social and economic perspective. The conference theme is employment, productivity and empowerment - all tangible outcomes that go well beyond simply providing access to the internet. This is another area where innovation is the name of the game - in a multitude of scenarios, these organizations are creating and providing relevant services and content to individuals and communities to facilitate creation of small business, prepare people for the workforce and give people a voice in their country and in the world. Our colleagues from Egypt are here with us and the positive role of telecenters in recent events there is undeniable.

Coming to Santiago has been an eye opener in many fronts - the beauty of the environment is there for all to see but clearly this corner of the world is at the forefront of innovation especially with regards to bringing the benefits of information technology to underserved communities. From innovation through government agencies, businesses, academia and the nonprofit sector, there is vast movement. My friend and colleague Claudio Orrego who has been at the forefront of this effort in Chile and is the Vice President of ATACH, the network of telecenters in Chile, said in his opening remarks ''information technology is here to stay and we have to make the best use of for the community at large".

Over the last two days it's become apparent that there's more to life than good wine.