Imagine that you are rich and want to give a poor African nation a library with an Internet hotspot to improve the local quality of life. You make a large donation and six months later the site is up. An honorary plaque with your name on it goes up.

Then it turns out that two other similar centres were built in the same small town at the same time, financed by other wealthy people from the same industry as yours. Now there are three libraries with public Internet access in the town but the next town a couple hundred miles down the road has none!

A group of Finns and Estonians (among them Ahti Heinla, former Skype hand) and one Ethiopian are making sure that unenviable situation doesn’t happen. In mid-January, they developed a new site likened to the Facebook of development assistance – called AidBook48.

Changing the way people communicate

AidBook is a social networking and collaboration platform for development aid projects and aid workers. The aim is to change the way communication and collaboration is conducted by development workers.

A prototype could be glimpsed in Helsinki three weeks ago, quickly drawing the first client – Community Development Association from Ghana. The site is now being polished and fine-tuned before it goes public.

AidBook is looking for capital and reportedly intends to make its voice heard by the world’s biggest aid organizations, with the UN chief among them.

One of the initiators of the project, a Finn named Ilona Mäkinen who has volunteered in Africa and come face to face with various communication barriers, says after the competition, the AidBook team repaired to the cinema to watch “Social Network” movie for inspiration. Then they laid out the development plan: find seed capital to take AidBook into a beta version. The beta would feature various functions ranging from an interactive map (showing the locations of the projects in progress) to various interactive elements such as a Twitter-like message feed.

All aid projects would benefit

AidBook, says Mäkinen, is intended for anyone who is tied to some development or humanitarian aid project. “It can be a small local organization distributing malaria nets in Burkina Faso, an Estonian organization educating teachers in Ghana, or a Finnish lady who donates one teacher’s salary monthly to a school in Gambia – they would all benefit greatly from Aidbook48,” Mäkinen says.

The aim is to collaborate with Finnish and Estonian umbrella organizations for development organizations as well as those working in the grassroots when developing the application so that it would meet the users needs as well as possible. At this point Aidbook48 has partnerships, but it doesn’t really have clients.

One of the AidBook team members, Taavi Raidma, says the goal is to get “nearby projects talking and collaborating with each other to avoid overlap.” With AidBook, it will also be easier for volunteers to find a suitable project and track its progress.

What are white people doing in Africa?

“Even when I am in Africa, I look around and I see white people moving but there is no easy way of finding out what they are doing and where,” says Raidma. AidBook fills in that information.

Raidma says what is also important is that AidBook will increase financing for aid programmes, as use of money will become more transparent and clearer. The result may foster greater boldness in contributing financially to various programmes.

As to how to use the social network to earn money, Mäkinen says that is not the goal. “Aidbook48 is not about making money but about making development efforts more effective, and giving this power to the individual projects and organizations. We’re looking into setting up either an NGO or a social enterprise with a functioning business model in order to sustain the site and provide its users further value. The goal would naturally be to make the site self-sustaining,” she says.