ICTworks by Inveneo

1) Can you give a little background to the BOSCO Uganda Project and your role in the project? How did you become interested in working in the HCI field.

BOSCO Uganda (Battery Operated Systems for Community Outreach) is a rural communications project based in Gulu, Northern Uganda. It was launched in 2007 as a solar-powered, long-range wireless network covering locations in former Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps across several districts in Northern Uganda. Using adequate, low-power computer equipment BOSCO brought access to the Internet for schools, youth groups and health centers in rural areas.

The first implementing phase in 2007 was carried out by Inveneo and BOSCO, Inc. from the United States, with major support from private donors and other activists in the US, under the umbrella of Gulu Archdiocese as the local implementing partner in Uganda.

My own involvement as a Technical Advisor (based in Gulu) began early 2008 and ended just recently. It was initiated through HORIZONT3000 (Austrian Organisation for Development Co-Operation) and its personnel program, whose main objective is to support capacity building for local organizations in the developing world. For BOSCO, I was mainly focusing on organizational development and technical capacity building for Ugandan staff.

Thus, in 2008, we started to establish BOSCO as a local organization in order to maintain and expand the rural ICT infrastructure, to provide further trainings for its users, and to become a reliable implementing partner in ICT4D in the whole region of Northern Uganda.

Meanwhile BOSCO has been internationally awarded with the “Breaking Borders Award” (by Google and Global Voices) in 2010 and also attracted other international donors, like Unicef, supporting further expansion and more advanced trainings.

2) What kind of design challenges did you face with the project and how did you overcome these design challenges?

Sustainability is always a major challenge, especially when we talk about long-term self-sufficiency of an organization in the development context. Northern Uganda has seen many local, national and international organizations; mainly also due to the ongoing shift from humanitarian and emergency aid to short-term recovery and long-term development. Many of the organizations I have seen are completely dependent on donor funding and injections from outside.

At BOSCOUganda we discussed sustainability on two different levels. We founded BOSCO as an organization in order to support the performance and impact made through the rural ICT centers. Therefore sustainability meant whether 1. these centers run in a sustainable and self-sufficient way, and 2. BOSCO as an organization can in the long-run become more independent from outside support and remain an active player in its local context? For both questions we've found principle possibilities and solutions which are still in the process of implementation and thus need to be proofed.

1. The ICT centers have started to use the provided equipment for Income Generation (for example through phone charging services using solar power, office/typing services, etc.). Due to the technology used (solar power, etc.) the running costs of each of the rural ICT centers are extremely low which makes it easier for these centers to become independent.
2. We've also implemented an organizational structure in the rural centers, which is defining their internal bodies and roles that are independent from BOSCOUganda – but still with a strong link to BOSCO that can give them guidance and support in case of any challenges.
3. For BOSCOUganda, as a Non-profit-organisation we've started to establish an ICT-Training Center in Gulu Town itself. The idea here is to generate income through that training center, offer practical courses for IT students and other relevant programs, and thus – through cross-financing – give BOSCO the necessary means to continue its ICT for rural development efforts.

3) What kind of lessons do you take from your experience at BOSCO and how do you plan to apply them in the contexts of other cultures?

In Northern Uganda I've seen that the cultural context is a very important factor for the implementation of any kind of ICT4D project, although I'd say it's not only about culture but also about other relevant circumstances, backgrounds and identities – and each situation needs its specific adaptations.

If I look at BOSCOUganda, the whole project is embedded into a rural setting and still facing the challenges of a post-conflict society that has just started to rebuild their homes and leave the IDP camps. Participatory approaches are probably one important method in order to consider the relevance of a cultural context and to involve the user into the design process. But at the same time we have also been aware that BOSCOUganda has brought a completely new technology to still marginalized communities.

Therefore it would have been difficult to only expect these communities to express themselves in terms of technology and content. How can somebody know and express his or her expectations (for example in terms of content), if that person doesn’t even know what possibilities exist? A participatory approach focusing on more general development needs combined with its “translation” into a solution that sees ICT as a means for supporting these needs can help to take care of different contexts – as we tried to do it in our work.

Furthermore a regular feedback loop was then also essential in order to provide content which is useful in the specific context instead of just copying as much as possible of the content that would be relevant in western countries.

4) In terms of contextual innovation and user experience design, what steps do you take in the design process?

As already mentioned in my answer above we've tried to combine a “semi-participatory approach” together with different injections from outside, including a regular feedback loop and adaptations during the design.

In some cases for BOSCO that also meant a kind of “trial-and-error” approach. The advantage of our infrastructure was that all rural ICT centers are connected through a long-range wireless network to a central server in the main office in Gulu and then to the internet – although these centers are up to 50km outside Gulu. Through that Internal Network we had the opportunity to also experiment with “Offline” content and internal forums and chat rooms, which gave us the flexibility to use applications that would have been unavailable via the Internet due to speed limitations.

In general our approach was focusing on Web2.0 applications. For example Uganda's school curriculum in ICT (for secondary schools) is still mainly focusing on theory in computers, its components and then some office applications. Students are supposed to first study the whole history of computers, its hardware, etc. I've seen exam questions, where they are then supposed to know what the abbreviations “html” and “DOS” mean, or similar question – yet most of them still don’t even know how and why they could really use a computer.

At BOSCO we've used a completely different concept. Emails, Discussion Forums, Google Applications, Facebook, Wikispaces, Games or YouTube have been our main entry points in order to support computer literacy in rural communities. This approach has the main advantage that it focuses on “learning-by-doing” and thus gives users a much clearer picture and also the opportunity to express themselves while communicating through ICT.

Especially in the context of Northern Uganda our Web2.0 trainings also contributed to post-war recovery, as people were still suffering from more than 20 years of insurgency, abductions and many other traumatic experiences. Offering new forms of information and communication opportunities might have also helped to overcome that isolation and provided a platform for rural communities to express themselves.

5) Many contest that HCI is one of the first aspects considered in many ICT4D project, do you see ICT4D primarily as a Design Challenge?

Looking at this question I would like to start with the differentiation between ICT (Information and Communication) and “knowledge”. I'd say, “knowledge” means a much more comprehensive and relevant development aspect, than just the provision of Information and Communication facilities.

And in any ICT4D design, the focus question should be, how it contributes to “knowledge”, not only if or what information has been provided. Or the other way around, does the provided information really mean the production of any new knowledge? This question also brings me back to the cultural (and many other) circumstances that influence the processes and project implementation.

I've seen ICT4D projects were the criteria for success was rather determined by the quantity of information (offline versions of Wikipedia, huge databases of agricultural materials, etc.) provided to the beneficiaries than by the real impact of all that information and its contribution to increased “knowledge”.

Also at BOSCO we have gone through that learning process. What sense does it make to provide tons of information, if it is just not adequate or relevant – in our case also due to the quite low educational level especially in rural areas, cultural influences, etc. Therefore, yes, ICT4D is a Design Challenge, and we have realized that the provision of information and communication facilities itself cannot be the main factor of success.

The second important design challenge I would see is, how much emphasize is put on the foundation and support of a proper (local) organizational structure that can make projects sustainable. The current success of BOSCOUganda can be determined by the fact that we have created such a structure, including the training of local technicians in maintenance, and regular user trainings for the rural ICT centers. This process can't happen within months or a year, as it takes time for a structure to establish itself and to grow with the right speed. Sometimes international ICT4D projects probably fail because they try to create “Ownership” as fast as possible (often just because of the fact that donor funding is tending to push quick results and thus shorten the available time for implementation).

6) An issue that seems to weigh heavy in the use context of ICT’s in developing regions is linguistic variation. How do you foresee ICT4D practitioners, researchers and implementers overcoming the challenges of illiteracy, multilingualism and dialectal variation?

Of course linguistic variation can be a challenge, although my experience in Uganda might not be representative and comparable to other countries. In Uganda, English is widely spoken in all regions of the country and students are (except for lower primary school classes) taught using English as the main teaching language. In terms of multilingualism, communications facilities (such as Emails, Skype or Facebook) probably can easier help to overcome these challenges, and our users just used their own, local language then anyway.

Our major challenge at BOSCO was rather the generally weak educational system, which does not mean illiteracy, but rather poor writing and reading skills which therefore also influences the effect of any provided ICT infrastructure and content. The usage of more creative Web2.0 applications – as a means – has in that way also helped us to face these challenges and make ICTs more attractive.

I'd say the more ICT4D projects become interactive instead of just being designed “one-way” and drop-down, the more they can overcome linguistic variations right from the beginning.

7) What advice do you have for those designing information systems for the developing world?

ICT4D is an important and still probably underestimated field although many initiatives have started to go into the right direction. But I think it’s also important not just to design information systems for the developing world, but to really design them with the developing world.

I am still grateful for all the things that I could learn from my colleagues in Uganda. And we, especially those of us coming from the so called developed world, need to think about development and needs first, not about ICT. Thus I'd say it first needs an understanding how to define development and what it really means in a specific context. Just by that, information systems can then – as a means – really support these efforts.

The practice of storytelling is a fundamental practice in communities through out the developing world. Storytelling allows for monumental moments of times past to be preserved through oral history, it is seen as a form of intangible cultural heritage. Because of this, storytelling is a practice already entrenched in the minds of youth from developing communities. They understand the implications of storytelling and the positive impacts it has.

With that said, the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) field is all about empowering denizens of third world communities in the interest of socio-economic development. How can empowerment be achieved? By affording these denizens the tools they need to present their voices and ideas on a global stage. It is for this reason, digital storytelling amongst youth is increasingly becoming used in the education sector of ICT4D. Cybersmart.org says:

"Digital storytelling is a term used to describe how ordinary people can use digital media to tell authentic, real-life stories. It's a grassroots movement that has been adapted by educators, the media, and social activists who see value in applying today's digital tools to the age-old storytelling process."

In the context of education, digital storytelling affords students many skills that will be beneficial to them as they enter the global marketplace and the opportunity to create something that they can contribute on a global platform. According to Yuksel, Robin and McNeil:

Digital storytelling can be used with students to allow them to construct their own understanding or experience in a content area , facilitate collaborative activities in which students work together in a small group , promote in-class discussion, help them learn problem solving and critical thinking skills, understand complex ideas, and introduce them to new content.

YETAM

In 2008 Nokia and Plan teamed up to produce Youth Empowerment through Arts and Media (YETAM). YETAM is an initiative that allows youth to discuss issues impacting their lives through media arts and technology.

Using mapping, participatory video, visual arts, and performing arts as a means of investigation and expression, youth, aged 12-18, work in small teams to identify resources and challenges in their communities, understand more about causes and effects of key issues impacting on youth, and learn about different viewpoints held by community members and community leaders around those issues. They then produce arts and media about the issues and develop an action plan to raise awareness and community support to begin resolving the issues.

YETAM is unique, in that this project that is tackling the issue of digital literacy and global communications. Exhibiting the ways in which media technology can be used to bring about change in communities. The video below is a prime example of the goals of YETAM, as one girls interviews another about the use of ICTs. What is beautiful about this video is that after the video, the girl conducting the interview says: “When I was there, speaking, I felt like I was on top of the world because people were listening to my voice.” Quotes like this are a true testament to the confidence endowed by ICTs.

Wafalme Boys

An example of a Digital Storytelling success can be found with the Wafalme Boys of Kenya. They are a group of young Kenyan teens, won the '1 Minute to Save the World' competition hosted by Passion Pictures for their 'Me and My Bike' video. Wafalme is a group out of Nairobi, Kenya known for using hip hop music as a medium to deliver their message. “The group offers the simple yet very real message that bicycles are an environmentally-friendly mode of transportation that can cut down on worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.

One lyric states, "It's good for my health, because I need to exercise, it doesn't need any gas, just my feet and my eyes." These boys have brought notoriety to a an issue that not only plagues Kenya, but plagues developing communing all over the world. What these boy did embodies not only the idea of digital storytelling but it embodies the idea of IT for development, empowerment.

Simeon Oriko is a young entrepreneur, age 21, who is the founder and Executive Director of The Kuyu Project, which is a digital literacy initiative aimed at teaching African high school students how to use social media and other digital tools to effect social change in their communities.

His very interesting blog can be found here .

1) Can you tell me a little bit about your background in the ICT4D field? Did you have formal training?

My foundation in ICT4D began at the University of Eastern Africa, Baraton as a leader of the computer science student organization. We organized an ICT literacy drive targeted at high school students and teachers in schools around our university. A certain experience then introduced me to the ICT4D spectrum. A young girl wanted to know how to be a pilot and I took out my phone and we Googled for information about the topic. I later taught her how to use the internet to look for information and she used that skill to achieve her goal. She is now learning to be a pilot at a college near her home.

It is from this experience that I learned the value of technology for development. So quite honestly I have never had formal training in ICT4D. My work in the field is purely based on passion.

2) What is the mission and the goals of the Kuyu Project?

The mission of The Kuyu Project is to teach African High Schools how to use social media and other digital tools to effect social change in their communities and also to achieve their own objectives.

We strongly believe that by doing this, we are fueling the dreams and ambitions of these young people which in the long run may turn out to be the solutions and innovations that change Africa and the rest of the world.

We hope to get kids to learn the value of technology and how to use this to seek out opportunities for themselves and their communities.

3) What inspired to create the Kuyu Project and what aspects of your upbringing motivated you to see change?

My personal experiences with technology inspired me to create The Kuyu Project. I grew up as the world wide web was evolving and had been amazed at how simple and easy it was to accomplish many things through the Internet. Activists were using the Internet as a tool to organize. Businesses were using the Internet for marketing and transactions. Many others were using the Internet to connect, to create, to collaborate, to learn and to share.

I figured if we taught people about the tools and techniques of using web tools to achieve the above, then we could effectively create a ready avenue for people to achieve their objectives and to better themselves. I later came to single out high school students as the best target group to train because students at this age, age 14 - 18, are at a creative peak in their lives and that this program would help tap into that potential.

4) What do you hope the Kuyu project will do for rural communities? for Africa as a whole?

My hope lies in the realms of self reliance and sustainability. Most communities are able to define their needs, their problems and been outline solutions for them. The one thing they do not have, is the resources or methodologies to implement these solutions. I hope that through the trainings and other initiatives of The Kuyu Project, these communities will be able to use digital technologies to achieve their objectives.

As for Africa, I believe that this initiative will help many youth to bring their ideas to life so as to effect social change and also create innovations and solutions that will change the continent.

5) Where do you hope the Kuyu Project will be in 5 years? 10 years? How do you see the Kuyu project expanding?

It is my hope that in five years, The Kuyu Project will be putting technology in the hands of our trainees and in ten years, to be in a position to aid students to practically implement their ideas and to grow them.

We believe to expand our focus on our target audience to include a more global outlook. We also hope to expand our mission to include trainings in other technologies other than the Internet.

6) What impact do you currently see the Kuyu project making in the communities implemented?

The strongest indicator of impact is a shift in our students mentality. On a number of occasions, we have gone out to various high schools to conduct digital literacy camps and we're met with a somewhat pessimistic outlook from the students. Very few of them believe they can be an agent of change in their communities let alone their continent.

After teaching them how technology can aid them in their endeavors, a number of the students realize the potential they have and even go ahead to experiment on achieving various objectives using the tools we have taught them to use.

7) Can you talk a little bit about the StorySpaces project?

StorySpaces is an initiative of The Kuyu Project. It is a social network anchored on the idea of translating global online conversations into practical offline initiatives. It stemmed of an idea of communal learning where everyone is encouraged to 'teach each other'. The social network is primarily mobile web based with an Android app as well as a desktop web version. The app is still in development.

We hope that people will be able to use the tool to converse with their own communities and others outside of it with the aim of learning and practically applying the newly gained knowledge.

8) What challenges have you come across in trying to implement the Kuyu project and StorySpaces?

The major challenge we come across in implementing our programs is resistance from the parents of our target audience. A number of these parents strongly believe that technology is more of a distraction than an aid. Most parents rightfully argue that they took their children to schools to be learn and not to waste time on the internet. A number of parents have gone a step further and have pulled their children from schools that have computers. Some school administrators also side with the parents.

Our greatest challenge is to convince the parents that digital literacy is as valuable as any other education.

Other major challenges have to do with logistics including lack of computers and other equipment and lack of electric power in certain school.

9) What kind of impact do you see ICT's making on the youth of Africa.

ICT's in my view are enablers. By enablers I mean that these tools and technologies provide a means for an objective to be accomplished. In the light of this I strongly believe that ICT's will provide African youth with a means to carry out their missions and achieve their dreams.

10) Last but not least, your tag line reads "the boy who changed the world" do you forsee the Kuyu project changing the world, if so how?

My tag line stemmed of a monicker I picked up as a child that meant if I was going to be different from the rest of the world, them i had to make different decisions than the majority of the world was making. One such decision led to starting The Kuyu Project.

In line with my own personal mission, my plan with The Kuyu Project is to grow it into a catalytic role for enabling African youth to achieve their dreams.

I am very interested in HIC4D, the emerging discipline of human computer interaction for development, and recently interviewed Tapan Parikh.

Tapan is an assistant professor of at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include HCI, ICT4D, information systems supporting microfinance, smallholder agriculture and public health and his research focuses on research focuses on the use of computing to support sustainable economic development across the World.

1) First of all, can you tell me a little about the work you do at the University of California-Berkeley ?

Well we employ easier to learn user interfaces that could empower all kinds of users around the world to be both more active producers of information and more informed consumers of information. So there are a bunch of projects in that space that we do.

Some themes that we pursue in this work are leveraging existing media formats and capabilities to more quickly and effectively moderate people towards online information services. This includes using stuff like paper maps and leveraging peoples ability and familiarity with voice communications as a way of proving basic services.

2) So, what is Human Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) in your words?

I think there are a number of ways to interpret that. I don’t know if I necessarily identify with that term. I tend to see HCI4D as not being any different from HCI in general. HCI in general is concerned with understanding new types of user content and constraints and that opportunity that exists in the real world. ICT4D or HCI4D just happen to present a new set of the constraints and opportunities of how to create knowledge that helps other people work with these kinds of groups.

3) HCI4D is a discipline that transcends almost all disciplines of ICT4D and is crucial for the sustainability of projects yet is rarely mentioned in ICT4D debate, why do you think that is?

I would say it is mentioned even more than anything else. It’s really the first thing people think about and the last thing people think about when they think about ICT4D and are these really sustainable solutions or are they really the most effective and long term ways of addressing issues?

I think there are some success and some failures and I think all of these products could mean something are either inclusively or exclusively being evaluated in terms of sustainability and more broadly on the impact they are having. I really think the most important thing to consider is the impact, the impact of your project relative to the resources they consume. That really seems to be the more precise thing to think about when you’re thinking about sustainability.

4) What contributions for you foresee HCI making to the ICT4D practice and what kind of impact do you see HCI having in the internationalization of ICT’s?

I think broadly this kind of research is providing methods that could be useful for designing and evaluating any kind of developmental intervention, not even necessarily a technological one and so I think making use of principles such as user centered design, participatory design and iteration and evaluation have a long tradition in HCI.

5) An issue that seems to weigh heavy in the use context of ICT’s in developing regions is linguistic variation. How do you foresee ICT4D practitioners, researchers and implementers overcoming the challenges of illiteracy, multilingualism and dialectal variation?

Well I think you have a number of separate points there. So one is the linguistic variation and that has a number of ramifications. One is the question of the technology or how the system or the interface itself has been localized to the appropriate language. In general that is fairly straightforward for most languages that have good fonts and input methods and good operating system support with those. So I think open source has some advantages there because it is easy to localize technology, even when the company may not have any marketing reasons to do that.

Maybe there is a question of is there a business case for localization and the second is, if there is not, are there opportunities for doing it yourself. Then there is a whole separate question of getting content that supports the local language and I think that is a much bigger question and not as well suited for top down approaches and I think content generation becomes crucial. Finally there is illiteracy and that creates a whole other set of challenges related to the content generation question because it is very difficult for illiterate people to generate content, specifically text content and that comes back to what we do [at UC-Berkeley] in trying to leverage more acceptable and familiar types of media including voice content.

The practice of Information and Communication Technology for Development enjoys a host of disciplines within the sector (m4d, health informatics, e-governance, etc), some enjoying more popularity then others. Although, a discipline that is making a more commanding presence in the ICT4D arena, is Human Computer Interaction for Development also referred to has HCI4D.

The significance with HCI4D is that it investigates ways of appropriately designing ICT’s so that they are conducive to the unique user and infrastructural requirements met in multicultural environments. The importance with HCI4D is that it emphasizes the user rather than any other entity. Melissa Ho, Thomas Smyth, Matthew Kam and Andy Deadren best define HCI4D as:

A subfield of ICT4D that focuses on understanding how people and computers interact in developing regions and on designing systems and products specifically for these contexts.”

I remember one day, in a class I was taking on HCI, my professor was talking about a dvd player sold at Best Buy, top of the line, ornate and beautiful....to look at. Surprise to no one, this product sold very well for Best Buy. Although while it sold very well it also yielded one of the highest return rates in Best Buy’s history. Why? Because while the product was beautiful, people could not operate the DVD player.

The confusing interface of the product made it extremely difficult for people to understand how to use. While the design was aesthetically pleasing, user centered design principles were not employed. Now if this philosophy is applied in an ICT4D context, what is to be said of all the technologies brought to the third world designed for people in the western world?

That being said, the question becomes how can ICT’s properly be designed with the customs of third world users in mind? How can ICT’s be properly designed that take into account local technical, economic, cultural and financial aspects and what other socio-technical constraints should be addressed?

Low literacy rates is a factor that is increasingly taken into consideration when ICT’s are designed for third world users. Other areas taken into account in HCI4D research according to Dearden, Light, Dray, Thomas, Best, Buckhalter, Breenblatt, Krishnan and Sambasivan in ‘User Centered Design and International Development’ include:

1. Interaction Metaphors: Exploring beyond the Western-centric Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers (WIMP) metaphor to other interaction metaphors that are more culturally and socially relevant to the intended user groups.
2. User Analysis: Developing methods to most effectively understand the users and their context, practices, and wants, by understanding SocioCultural and Economic differences unique to them.
3. Interaction Methods: Localization and customization / alternatives to traditional input output methods.
4. Evaluation Methods: Thinking outside traditional methods by making evaluation more appropriate to the target user audience to elicit accurate and actionable feedback.

ICT4D is a highly contextual field that is built upon empowering the rural poor with ICT’s. The needs and wants of the user are key to the success and sustainability of ICT4D projects. HCI4D is a practice that transcends all disciplines of ICT4D, it is also a discipline that addresses these contextual issues and is an integral part to any ICT4D project.