Prepared For: Shubham Chaudhuri, World Bank Country Director for Nigeria
Prepared By: Justin DeShazor, Director of External Affairs for Vodacom Nigeria

Throughout the developing world, digital payment systems are reshaping the financial services sector and providing new tools to advance financial inclusion for vulnerable individuals— Nigeria need not remain an exception. Historically, Nigeria’s poor have been excluded from traditional financial institutions, and less than half of Nigerians possess bank accounts. As a result, they have been forced to rely on informal financial structures that are costly, unsafe, and unreliable. To address this inequity, mobile network operators (MNOs) have leveraged mobile…

Every day, Harvard University and its affiliates are subject to tens of thousands of attempted cyber attacks, many of which are designed to gain access to private personal information, advanced academic research, corporate data, and even sensitive government and military documents. While the perpetrators of cyber-attacks against Harvard are as varied as the “Syrian Electronic Army” and common cybercriminals, and motives range from financial interest to ideology to state-sponsored espionage, these attacks regularly exploit banal vulnerabilities like insecure passwords. In fact, according to a recent Verizon report, more than 80 percent of data breaches result from weak or compromised credentials.

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RE: Changes to Gmail Privacy Policies for Third-Party Developers
TO: Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai
FROM: R. Justin DeShazor, Google Product Policy Team
DATE: July 2018

Issue

Third-party developers are critical to the continued success of the Gmail platform, creating a wide array of tools, customizations, and enhancements that improve the Gmail experience for millions of users. Frequently, these third-party developers provide services to users in exchange for access to their Gmail data, which is then monetized or used to improve service quality. However, customers, regulators, and data privacy advocates are increasingly concerned about how digital platforms protect, utilize, and market…

Memorandum For: Amy Davies, Assistant Dean for Student Services and Programs at Harvard Kennedy School

Since its launch in 2013, the Harvard Kennedy School’s (HKS) KNET intranet has provided students, faculty, and staff with a private network for storing, disseminating, and discovering vast amounts of HKS-specific information. While KNET represents a tremendous centralization of useful information, its primary end users, HKS students, struggle to discover the up-to-date information that they need within its byzantine, multi-levelled, and irregularly updated pages. Crystallizing this challenge in a recent interview, Jane Finn-Foley, Assistant Director of Student Services, stated, “Users don’t really go directly to…

Memorandum For: The Honourable Joyce Murray, Minister of Digital Government

The Canadian digital governance strategy stands at a crossroads, and ministers must decide whether to adopt a comprehensive Ask Once framework and pursue the extensive legal, policy, and technical developments required for implementation. By enabling stakeholders to provide data to public institutions just once before that information is automatically shared between government departments, Ask Once offers citizens and businesses a more seamless and user-friendly government service experience. Furthermore, these policies may result in substantial efficiency gains through government-wide data standardization and the elimination of redundant data collection and storage systems…