ICTworks by Inveneo

In November, I uncovered Envaya's work mentioned briefly in a posting about Tanzanian innovators on Afrinovator. I reached out and spoke with its cofounders, heard more of their story, and decided that an organization profile would be valuable:

Envaya is a new initiative and nonprofit website (software) platform for NGOs, specifically community based organizations (CBOs) across Africa, developed by two computer software engineers in Silicon Valley and one Tanzanian civil-society organization coordinator. Personal outreach is a central part of the idea so the platform is temporarily bound to Tanzania. A Tanzanian team explains the system through an ongoing series of free workshops for grassroots NGOs. A mostly Tanzanian and American non-profit advisory board provides firm guidance to the platform.

For the past six months, through seminars and meetings across Tanzania, the Envaya team has worked to engage civil society organizations around Tanzania with the new content and services support that they offer.

The near-universal mobile phone access around Tanzania and Africa has already defined the ways that grassroots organizations function. It is now routine to find organizations communicating across their district, city or regions. Internet presence is an unrealized opportunity for most CBOs. Envaya is founded on the idea that a specialized internet software can offer formal and semi-formal organizations in Africa three things:

1. improved communication,
2. streamlined reporting,
3. painless transparency.

By these three headline objectives, Envaya feels it can help CBOs, stakeholders, and their support institutions to communicate their successes and expectations about their work as mobile internet reaches out into society, just as the mobile phone did over the last 10 years.

East African ICT successes like M-PESA have taken off by putting a human face on banking. For a web platform it is not clear that this is required--plenty of websites around Silicon Valley have taken off without face-to-face marketing. Based on the team's start in East Africa, Envaya considers it crucial.

Explaining the Platform by Seminar

One of the co-founders, Joshua Stern volunteered with Peace Corps Tanzania from 2006 on the island of Pemba. His experience in his own community led him to use uncompensated training seminars around Tanzania in order to explain the Envaya platform and build the online community of CBOs. Tanzanian seminar leaders adapt the presentation to local needs. Participants take ownership because they value their time and involvement in exciting ICTs with clear productivity benefits.

In many African countries, stakeholder meetings and staff trainings are the main tool to transfer skills and techniques. The approach is occasionally critiqued in government and can feel incredibly tedious for dispersing important ideas. Still, it is a powerful forum for airing new practices in a setting where mass media has only lately reached any sort of critical mass.

Seminars can be friendly and accessible in a way that most foreign technology is not. Besides the main message, they establish useful rapport between users. The users can then continue to work together via ICTs to solve problems they may encounter. So far more than 200 organizations across wide Tanzania are using Envaya after attending the seminars. Buses and public transport bring seminar participants together and then return them to their home organizations, and sign ups are increasingly occurring through pure word of mouth.

When I talked to Joshua about why he did not get on Social Networking sites like Twitter and Facebook earlier, he told me that they wanted to prove their concept before making too much chatter. The team knew that the great majority of their target users were as yet unreached by any internet site. The value of their work is rooted in introducing a good solution and explaining it with a personal touch.

Communications

Until recently, Envaya has been a fairly simple, though carefully crafted, content management and social blogging site for CBO users around Tanzania. An example use would be Fadeco Community Radio in Karagwe, TZ. It has been designed with complete cross-language localization in Swahili and it has been thoroughly optimized for low bandwidth and small screens for distraction-less information exchange by organizations. Internet familiarity in Tanzania is fairly low. Internet pipes in East Africa are often overworked and slow. Many target users are just now becoming comfortable with computers in workplaces. Senior organization leaders users are easily intimidated by complicated interfaces. These are challenges that deserve more attention than existing solutions can offer.

Reporting

The Monitoring and Reporting component of the site is coming online soon. It allows users to file ongoing reports as required by support institutions that offer funding like Foundation for Civil Society. The inspiration for Envaya partly came out of collaboration with environmental organizations like Community Forests International CBO also from Pemba in Tanzania. It expanded from its environmental focus because any grassroots organization needs to share its progress to justify itself in its activities--whether it is planting trees, spreading awareness or sharing knowledge. Through this reporting, Funders can see that their support is making a difference and local stakeholders can see that their community is being made better.

Traditionally, reporting has been done using paper forms that are hard to review after they are submitted for funders or community members. The paper records require vast amounts of space to store, are difficult to reach, and so they are rarely accessed. Envaya guides organization leaders to use a computer or their phone to file these reports. The extra flexibility with improved ICT can change the way reports are written and consumed for the better--effortlessly sharing the documents with stakeholders and funding institutions.

Transparency

Tanzania, in particular is a very wide country. Mobile phones and even Facebook reduce the sense of distance between people, but a platform like this can flatten communication across existing NGO boundaries through openness. As the platform encourages organizations to be transparent in their work, it will be easier for funders to clarify their goals and communicate more effectively with new organizations all around the country. On the other side, rural CBOs often struggle to reach out and understand funders’ perspectives and get frustrated when they cannot pursue their social programs in their communities. Envaya can streamline these exchanges by minimizing the potential miscommunications. In this way, transparency has clear value for all users.

Envaya is taking the latest social technology closer to grassroots NGOs as few others are prepared to do. Any civic-oriented Tanzanian organizations are especially invited by the staff to create their own Envaya site. http://www.envaya.org. Other visitors can visit a featured site, linked from the home page.

The project has an open Knight Foundation proposal with more details about future plans and collaborations and their open source PHP codebase is available on github.

Disclosure: Since starting work on this article, I have been invited to work with Envaya's community as a volunteer outreach partner and engineer.

To an outsider, it can seem slightly incongruous that Kenya, Uganda, and small Rwanda have taken leading roles in leveraging mobile and internet technologies for strong social effect where Tanzania (and peripherally, still conflict torn Burundi) have lagged. When looking to explain ICT’s present day regional gaps, it is easy to grasp for many the obvious disparities like the relative lack of modern English proficiency, poverty rankings, cultural differences, the metropolis hub factor, or the historical figures about relative investments made in the colonialism era.

These are the facts, but to me, the clearest vantage on this landscape is the median higher-education student finished or finishing at government schools across the region. In Kenya and Uganda, this median student is already trained and seeking skilled work. In Tanzania, he (or a lucky she) is an A-level student, college freshmen or sophomore.

A while back, Jon Gosier of Appfrica offered the telling statistic that inspired Appfrica Labs to spring from the Makerere University, long respected as one of the prime East African academic institutions, in downtown Kampala:

In Makerere’s Computer Science program they graduate about 900 kids per year. Of those 900 between 5% and 10% find full time jobs by the same time the next year. Those that don’t find jobs by that time, now have the added pressure of competing with the next class – with a the added disadvantage of a slightly outdated and somewhat unequal education (as education should be getting better with each graduating class)

This, of course, showed that there was a vast amount of untapped talent to inspire in Uganda.

From my own experience working in the education sector, Tanzania isn’t in this situation: in contrast, they’re still ramping up the post-secondary education system to meet even the tiny job market. About eight years past, Tanzania massively expanded its primary school enrollment (East Africa comparison graph) (2002, PEDP). About six years ago, leaders started building a huge number of secondary schools (SEDP) and student numbers (& some teaching standards, like A-level) have gone way up with the greater student base and intense competition.

In the last year they’ve built several huge, new government universities which are starting to accept students in large numbers from these original student cohorts as they now reach adulthood. The government of TZ is also handing out many “loans” which are much like grants to a large fraction of the eligible post-secondary students who apply for them.

The challenge of today is to help these still-green Tanzanian higher-education students realize the communities of ICT online as efficiently as possible so that they have a chance to compete in the regional marketplace. An effective ICT practitioner can not keep themselves current without engaging online. Think of all those students finishing Computer Science at Makerere and getting lost in the progress. Fresh ideas exchanged through newly liberalizing labor market initiatives like the strengthened East African Community (EAC), university-affiliated silicon tech hubs, and high profile competitions like Apps4Africa are fantastic for this.

I am happy to note that Tanzanian academics like Rakesh Rajani (e.g. his comments on the SEDP in 2006 & on Twitter) who led some aspects of the hugely important education expansions in Tanzania are getting behind it. Sure, iHub, Appfrica Labs and Hive Colab are big names in East African ICT today. Tanzania, (and though I can’t speak to them so directly, even Rwanda/Burundi) have a good chance at their own ICT silicon-style hubs as the higher education terrain swiftly develops in the greater Uswahili.

The tech publication Ars Technica warned recently that Android’s proliferation in China might not lift Google’s image in East Asia–many parties there are vivisecting it into a clone called OPhone.

I want to take the other side on this development: As the freely available and high quality mobile operating system becomes workable on most phones, the Chinese knock-off phones are now much more likely to be using Android/OPhone. It is the low-hanging fruit option. We should celebrate that! Those knock off phones are the present reality of many targetable markets today, including East Africa’s. Android fragmentation is replacing complete fragmentation.

A Chinese-make fake blackberry

Right now, those same high-end knock-off N0kia/B1ackb3rry phones are making their way into the East African dukas. They are generally using obscure operating systems (OS) soldered together using half-hardcoded bitmaps and quirky keyboards made for Chinese. They are utterly “fragmented” and impossible to code for. As a programmer, sometimes I wonder at the question: who were the lucky anonymous code monkey team that was given such a job: make this phone work (mostly).

You can just imagine the generation of Chinese Operating System (OS) programmers cutting their teeth, becoming experienced by solving the OS problems again and again for every new knock-off phone. But now, consider how easy Android is to use on arbitrary mobile hardware: one coder, in a month or so of bedroom hacking was able to bring it onto the iPhone. Just by that feat, it seems obvious that Android/OPhone is bound for the knock-offs in some substantial form.

The mobile computing revolution is happening already in rural Tanzania, in some sense. Every few days, a new teacher colleague of mine would come in with slick-looking phone with the requisite multiple SIM card support and big touch screen, but their phones didn’t enable anything really new. There were no apps, no stable browser. No way to make apps for that.

I visited AppfricaLabs in late 2008 and talked with Ugandan @VicMiclovich about their work developing locally relevant apps for Nokia, Java midlets, and various other prevalent phone dev targets. Still, at the end of the discussion we had to admit that, for the moment, there was very limited impact opportunity in the market, outside of savvy tech users because of this unprogrammable Fake-OS problem. Maybe the OPhone can be a second chance?

Returning to one of the thread in the original article, though the Google Android App Store might not be relevant to the hundreds of millions of users in China, it may be more useful than the OPhone Store to the unmentioned millions of users of these phones as they trickle out into other Asian and African markets, if the store can be added by vendors without much trouble. The common foundation offers new possibilities.

While on the subject, the originally noted article was a follow up to a another Ars Technica report several months ago on Android Fragmentation. It was wisely noted there that the catchy term should be used careful. It can refer to any of the panoply of versions, devices, OS repackagings, or device designers of Android. It has been thrown around a lot and is pretty beat up:

“Because it means everything, it actually means nothing, so the term [fragmentation] is useless,” he wrote in a blog entry. “Stories on ‘fragmentation’ are dramatic and they drive traffic to pundits’ blogs, but they have little to do with reality. ‘Fragmentation’ is a bogeyman, a red herring, a story you tell to frighten junior developers. Yawn.”

We should invite Android Fragmentation over the status quo, obscure, impossible to develop-for custom OSs in today’s knock-off phones. It is something tactile to code for and it extends the audience to share digital services with.