ICTworks by Inveneo

Back in 2009, a few MIT students started "Fab Labs" in Afghanistan to teach Afghans how to fabricate small-scale projects, one of which was wireless WiFi antennas. From this humble beginnings, grew JLink, a DIY Wi-Fi network, free for Afghans to use, covering the city of Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

JLink had good press for a while, and rightly so. Rolling out a city-wide WiFI network is no easy task, and in Afghanistan a doubly hard challenge. Wired has now published an update on JLink and the news isn't good:

JLink is not something the Taliban destroyed. Its impending collapse illustrates what happens when grand ambitions lead to grand achievements that ultimately prove unsustainable — perhaps because they proceeded from unstable, utopian premises. And like the war itself, the group that created JLink is out of time to salvage its project.

“The demise of the JLink is going to be a huge blow to Jalalabad’s nascent community of tech entrepreneurs — creative, dedicated young people who are pushing innovation in their own communities and creating well-paying, skilled jobs for their peers,” says Una Vera Moore, a development worker in Afghanistan who’s part of a last-ditch effort to save JLink. “What kind of message will we, de-facto representatives of the international community in Afghanistan, send when the network finally goes down? A message of fatigue and abandonment.”

I really admire the JLink team for deploying a municipal network in Afghanistan, its certainly a technical challenge to get multiple nodes up and running even with professional equipment, much less homebrew electronics. Yet in reading the article and reflecting on Inveneo's work deploying WiFi in Haiti, there are two aspects of JLink which may be key factors in its impending downfall - neither of them technical.

Financial Sustainability

First and foremost, it seems that there wasn't a reliable income stream to pay for the Internet backhaul. And satellite bandwidth in Afghanistan isn't cheap - between $5,000 and $15,000 per month per the article. The JLink founders were paying that bandwidth bill themselves, which isn't a long term solution.

Now its always hard to get individuals to pay the real cost of connectivity, especially expensive satellite bandwidth. Another option may have been charging local organizations, though any practical level of bandwidth may have also been too expensive for them. It sounds like the JLink team did look for donor support to keep the link up, but it may have been too late in both the JLink project lifecycle and in donor support of Afghan projects.

A lesson to learn from this is to think about financial sustainability from the start. Here's a helpful primer on financial sustainability.

Stakeholder Buyin

I am sure that the users of JLink appreciated the free Internet access - connectivity in Afghanistan is rare and expensive - so there was certainly grassroots buyin with JLink. But what about the decision makers who may have been a step or two away from direct usage?

The hospital and university administrators who could allocate staff and resources to JLink? Or the government functionaries who support both types of institutions with annual budget allocations that could be increased for Internet bandwidth provision? Did these people have personal buyin to the network? Were they also reliant on JLink for Internet access?

One way to ensure long-term survival of a project is to make sure that everyone has a vested interest in making sure the project continues, especially traditional power centers who may not be apparent at first glance. Its these influencers who can support or sabotage a good idea purely on how it may benefit them.

An Open Invitation

Looking from afar, and with only press accounts to go by, its very hard to know what may have gone wrong (or right) with JLink. My thoughts above are rudimentary at best. Better would be a deep dive into the JLink experience with one of their founders or operators. So I hereby issue an open invitation to Todd Huffman, Peretz Partensky, Una Vera Moore, or any other member of the JLink team to present at Fail Faire DC 2012 (sign up to get invited).

Fail Faire DC is a celebration of risk taking and innovation - attributes that JLink certainly earned - and I invite them to share their experience so we can all learn from failure. Failure is no reason to be ashamed. Failure shows leadership in pushing the boundaries of what is possible in scaling ideas from pilots to global programs. There is great value in examining our mistakes as we go beyond the easy and the simple.

And I dare anyone to say that JLink was either simple or easy.

In The China-Africa partnership: effective for education?, Stephen Haggard argues that, up to now, China’s presence in Africa has had disappointing impacts on learning. As in no impact at any scale.

What's your thoughts on China's impact on ICT4D?

I know Chinese companies have done much on the commercial side to introduce low-cost technologies and make IT investments. But I am not talking about ICT components - I am talking about systematic change.

What have Chinese companies or the Chinese government done to increase school or teacher educational use of ICT? Or community health worker efficiency or effectiveness via technology? Yes, all now have cheap handsets, and that's laudable but also commercial. Have they done anything altruistic?

Tim Unwin says:

Within China itself, a very considerable amount has been done on using ICTs effectively for education - and there is much good research on subjects ranging from the use of electronic whiteboards to mobile phones for students and ICTs in teacher training. The energy and vitality there - where electricity and connectivity are very extensive even in marginal rural areas - is impressive. There is a challenge in sharing this expertise more widely across the world.

Michael Trucano says:

While comparatively few representatives from Chinese firms and organizations participated at eLearning Africa 2011, after engaging in a few dozen informal discussions with many MOE staff, vendors and consultants, it is clear that Chinese support for the purchase of ICT infrastructure for schools will most likely increase greatly in the coming years.

Scattered existing examples of small cooperation were cited by many people as a harbinger of things to come. Almost every ministry of education official with whom I spoke mentioned that they had contact of some sort with Chinese officials or partners around the use of computers in schools, and expected this to increase in the near term (many remarked on how this contrasted with their dialogue, or lack thereof, with most 'traditional' donors on this topic).

Now what do you say?

Wow! The World Bank is really taking Open Data seriously now. They've just Creative Common'ed all their publications in a new Open Knowledge Repository:

In support of the new Open Access Policy, the World Bank is adopting a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) copyright license for content published by the Bank, the most accommodating of all licenses offered by Creative Commons. It allows anyone to distribute, reuse, and build upon the Bank’s published work, even commercially, as long as the Bank is given credit for the original creation. The CC BY license helps the Bank to maximize its impact while simultaneously protecting the Bank's reputation and the integrity of its content.

While much of the Bank’s research outputs and knowledge products have been available for free on the institution’s web site, and on other channels, the new Open Access policy marks a significant shift in how Bank content is disseminated and shared. For the first time, the Bank will have an aggregated portal to research and knowledge products, where the metadata is curated, the content is discoverable and easily downloaded, and third parties are free to use, reuse, and build on it.

You may not realize how momentous a shift this is. Once upon a time, the World Bank didn't realize much data, and then only sold its publications and often they were not cheap. But now under its on-going Open Development Agenda, the Open Knowledge Repository builds on two earlier initiatives, the Open Data Initiative and the Access to Information Policy. As Richard Poynder explains:

Introduced in April 2010, the Open Data Initiative ended the Bank’s practice of selling its World Development Indicators data, when it made its more than 7,000 development indicators — along with more than 60 other datasets — freely available on its web site.

The Access to Information Policy, introduced in July 2010, transformed the way in which the Bank makes it data available to the public, and saw the release of more than 17,000 historical documents from its archives.

Now with the Open Knowledge Repository, the World Bank is transforming yet again how it shares it knowledge with the world. May it soon be complimented by imitation across the international development community.

The Mobile Monday Fourth Annual Mobile Africa Research Report, produced by MobileMonday and released at the annual Innovation Africa Digital Summit, addresses the growing strength of mobile innovation practices in Africa. The material is drawn from interviews with over two-dozen digital media experts as well as extensive research from news and market reports.

The focus of the Mobile Africa report this time is on the overall innovation ecosystem, which includes a range of stakeholders: industry, entrepreneurs, government, academia, civil society, donors and multilateral organisations. The report also addresses the crucial role of innovator networks and incubators.

Sustainability of the innovation ecosystem requires the right blend of bottom up entrepreneurial energy and top-down facilitation of investment policies and infrastructure. These roles are played by global+local networks of mobile startups and professionals, such as MobileMonday. They are also augmented by industry-government-academic incubator networks such as the infoDev m:Labs.

The Mobile Monday Fourth Annual Mobile Africa Research Report identifies best practices and emerging directions for mobile innovation in Africa, and highlights the increasing profile of award winners from Africa in mobile excellence competitions in the region and globally. Overall shifts in the mobile industry are tracked in areas ranging from connectivity options and apps to operator dynamics and political impacts. The report ends with in-depth analysis of the emerging opportunities, challenges and recommendations for ensuring the growth of the mobile industry in Africa in a sustainable and inclusive manner.

The questionnaire and analysis used in this report is based on the author’s “8 Cs” framework of digital media, ie. the components of a digital ecosystem include connectivity, content, community, capacity, culture, cooperation, commerce and capital. In other words, holistic analysis of digital ecosystems should address not just connectivity devices and operator tariffs, but also localised content and services, payment options, knowledge-sharing culture, multi-stakeholder alliances, Role models and human resource capacity in technology and socioeconomic development.

This report, along with earlier annual Mobile Africa reports, will be useful and informative for innovators, incubators, policymakers, analysts and all those interested in the broader development processes and impacts of new media. The report also serves as a call to action and collaboration for other researchers interested in publishing regular insightful snapshots of mobile innovation dynamics in Africa.