ICTworks by Inveneo

In the global market for personal computers, 2010 was a watershed year. For the first time PC shipments to emerging economies outpaced those mature markets, 174 million to 173 million. The Business Software Alliance celebrated this milestone by reporting that emerging economies now account for more than half the global value of PC software theft, $31.9 billion by their count.

In their 8th Annual Software Piracy Study, BSA found that:

The commercial value of the unlicensed software installed on personal computers in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA), which excludes South Africa, reached $109 million in 2010. The figure stands at almost double the global piracy rate for PC software, which is around 42 percent. BSA also notes that the figures have risen by 3.6 points on the previous five-year average.

Here is a real question to ask: Does this piracy matter?

I don't ask this question to be flippant. In economies where a majority of the population lives on less than $2 a day, every dollar counts. The cost of commercial software can be a major barrier to ICT adoption. Even Microsoft recognized it when they discounted Windows XP to less than $5 per license before they discontinued it in 2010.

At the same time, software developers need to be paid if we want them to develop new and exciting software. And without a robust credit card payment system, developers cannot offer subscription or pay-per-use systems for their efforts. They must expect to be paid fully at the time the software is purchased in a physical retail outlet, which adds friction and cost to the transaction.

So I can see where there is a demand for free and a supply that is anything but. So in the middle there is much software piracy. Should we be overly concerned about it? Does it matter that many people are stealing intellectual property? Or should hackers continue to be modern-day Robin Hoods freeing us from the corporate overlords? Or does piracy hurt everyone - from the foreign multinational to the neighborhood coder?

What are your thoughts?

Eva Kagiri works in the field of eLearning creating educational content for different ICT platforms. She has a background in Environmental Engineering, Development and International Co-operation. In the last 2 years, she has been working on educational projects in Africa which have involved the use of LMS, Radio, TV and Mobile platforms for Learning.

1) First of all, can you tell me about your current work in ICT for Development?

I work for a Swedish social enterprise - MKFC (it is a Swedish name translated into English as Multicultural Centre for Adult Education). The enterprise has 4 branches under it :

1. An adult education school in Sweden (Folk High school)
2. Stockholm College (which provides education within and out of Sweden)
3. Helsinki College (works the same as Stockholm College and also where I work)
4. Sharing Awareness (the NGO through which we raise funds to offer support for projects we are unable to support ourselves)

MKFC's main work is Education through ICT. In the organization, we have experts in different fields - pedagogy, development work, ICT and specialized studies like Environment, Health, Teacher Training, and others. This team is the one that creates content. Our learning content uses two main pedagogical approaches, PBL and Action Learning.

The adult education school was the first to be formed, and was purposely for educating immigrants in Sweden. In 2000, the school started running parallel courses online, it turned out that most of the students preferred this system than the face-to-face sessions. So in 2001, the school sold the school building and transferred all its courses online, increasing enrollment and cutting costs.

Our aim is to make education accessible to all through ICT. We have created different educational material and offer it through:

- Online LMS - Opit, a Finnish learning management system.
- CD's and USB's
- Educasts through MP3's
- Mobile phones - so far we have mostly done SMS based education

As you may know, exporting technology, systems or knowledge into developing countries doesn't work for sustainability or applicability if there are not localized, home-grown solutions or a sense of ownership. As a result, MKFC always works with local partners. We have been working in:

1. Eritrea - with Eritrean immigrants in Sweden. This educational project was based on Project development and Implementation. There were many immigrants in Sweden who were interested to go back and develop their country but they didn't know how. MKFC educated them online and provided an idea incubation centre virtually. They developed their business ideas and transformed them into reality in Eritrea.

2. Ghana - in Ghana, we are working with eCAP Ghana Foundation. Through mobile phones and our online LMS platform + USB's we educated a group of 3 young men on Community Health Management. They then transferred this knowledge to a village up North, Niliyungdo. The transformation of that village was remarkable - environmentally and in health related issues like diarrhea and malaria. The village was taught how to clean water using the Solar Disinfection Method, Waste disposal and environmental issues to avoid spread of diseases. The 3 young men did this through role play, pictures and videos.

3. Palestine, Kenya, Pakistan, Somaliland, Tanzania, Syria - In this countries, the main education has been on Teacher Training in service. The biggest challenge that sub-Sahara Africa is facing and many other developing countries is the lack of trained teachers or poorly trained teachers. In our Teacher training in service, we educate teachers on pedagogical methods, specifically PBL and Action Learning. We also teach them how to integrate ICT into their teaching. The reason why it is Teacher training in service is to ensure that the teachers practice their knowledge in an authentic environment and to enable them to continue teaching while they study, avoiding teacher shortages.

The local partner in East Africa for our projects is eCAP East Africa, of which I am also the director and founder.

2) People in developing countries such as Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania etc may have daily life challenges such as securing food, shelter and water, what is the significance of ICT to their lives?

This is a very interesting question. Before I can say whether ICT is significant, perhaps we should first discuss what exactly people in the developing countries perceive ICT to be. The term ICT in the development context (and therefore ICT4D) has only come to be widely used say in 2000, especially in Africa (China might have began in the 1950s). Even though by 2000 Television and Radio were widely used in many African countries, people hardly related these tools to development or as tools for promoting development. They were simply entertainment and social.

As a result, while carrying out many projects in this field, when I ask the locals (and I am now not talking about the elite who have perhaps obtained a degree from some foreign university or studied IT), in 90% of the cases, they always answer 'Computers'. People in the BOP begin perceiving ICT then as something complex, inaccessible and which can only be made use of if you have gone to school. This approach of complexity (which has not been made any easier by governments insisting that schools be equipped with computers instead of enough trained teachers) has resulted in what I call the African syndrome of Education and ICT, where students learn about computers instead of learning through computers.

But I doubt you are in that group of people who have a narrow view of what ICT comprises. Knowing what we both know about ICT being any technology designed to relay/transfer Information and enable people to Communicate, I will say a very big yes, ICT is very significant to the people in the BOP. What we should be asking is not whether it is significant, it is whether the information they are getting through the different ICT's is relevant in enabling them to transform their lives in terms of food security, accessibility to their basic needs or contribute in any way to their general development.

The most important thing in ICT4D is: the content (what is the tool being used for? is the use relevant? is it solving a problem in my life? is it helping me make my life better today than it was yesterday?)

3) How do you think sustainability is achieved for ICT projects?

The only way sustainability can be achieved for ICT projects is if the applicability is homegrown. I am very, very adamant about this. The users or intended users must first identify what their need is. As it is difficult perhaps to do information and communication analysis for say a 40 million population, local people should be involved in the development and implementation of ICT projects - only they know best the problems their fellow citizens face. Engaging local expertise will make the content relevant and the tool easy to use.

One of the other issues why ICT tools are failing is due to limited funding and lack of technical expertise to maintain them once they are in existence. Important ICT applications made to enhance development HAVE to be adopted locally by governments or institutions. For instance, there are currently many mobile apps being developed to deal with problems of health management or agriculture. The institution that is in charge of health or agriculture has to adopt these applications and bear the financial burden. In terms of technical expertise, this is an issue of knowledge transfer. The traditional method of how the West operates in the South has to change. Companies/organizations interested in doing ICT projects in developing countries need to:

1. Support local innovations in this area/develop and together with the innovators put them into the local market or,
2. Import their own innovations but engage locals from the start - conceptualization, to development to production and lastly to dissemination.

Watch this video, it is very interesting:

4) Unlike old technologies such as radio and television, which benefit from high social penetration regardless of income, the new ICTs require continual updating and economic investment, which could lead to the poorest sections of developing countries being excluded…How do you address this issue?

This is quite true. Nothing can beat the breakthrough of inventions, and telecommunication is one of them. We need to take up some lessons from past technologies that African countries adopted. Let's get back to basics - the radio. Prior to the colonial era and even way back before that, Africans communicated in very different ways than they do now - drums, word of mouth and horn-blowing. Introduction of conventional media happened in the 1900s, bringing with it - A new era!! This new Era managed to sustain itself because:

1. People widely adopted it and added it to their already existing culture
2. Because it was widely adopted and very much recognized as something which are needed/useful, governments supported the use of this conventional media. Governments began using this conventional media, governments promoted the use of this Medias and Governments Supported the continuous development of this media.

It is exactly the same thing now. While the principles of what current ICTs are operating on nowadays are old, their development is phenomenal, and we can say in the African context (and globally), we are in a new era! For this new era to sustain itself, we need to do the same things we did with the radio - governments need to be more active in adopting, showcasing, promoting & developing. In this way, the ICTs will gain high social penetration, and therefore the costs will drop. Just look at the mobile phone adoption in Africa now, who would have thought...and now phones are becoming cheaper, and cheaper.

5) Furthermore what significant benefits have you noticed in ‘‘making education accessible to all through ICT’’?

The most significant benefit I have seen is how the use of ICT breaks down the barriers of space, distance and time. The use of ICT has enabled education to move from the traditional classroom and institutional buildings to anyplace, anytime learning. We could also say that it promotes inclusion regardless of a child's economic status, but that is relative as it depends on other factors like cost. In cases however where the consumer is not bearing the cost, it definitely does promote inclusion regardless of economic status.

Other forms of inclusion are very evident - inclusion regardless of race, culture, gender etc. Institution based education has sometimes had serious limitations in promoting education accessibility - for instance, religious based schools may sometimes be highly biased against students who are not of the same religion or who do not meet their standards of religious beliefs. ICTs can also go a long way in increasing the efficiency of teachers - ICT's should never replace teachers, and using ICT's cannot upgrade poorly trained teachers - what ICTs can do is act as a tool through which very well trained teachers can efficiently teach/manage their classes.

The use of ICT's in informal or formal education has reduced the struggles that many young people in developing countries have always had to go through just to attain basic education. For instance, a child who belongs to a nomadic family can still learn mathematics and English, through say, a mobile phone game based application. Before, this child would have had to forfeit any form of formal learning as he/she could not attend school.

6) Last but not least, do you have any recommendations for future ICT projects in developing countries?

1. Homegrown solutions - you cannot assess the needs of people sitting in an office in New York, and no amount of research can compare to life-long personal experience in an environment. If an organization/company would like to implement an ICT project, they need to involve the locals. They can come with an idea and technology expertise, but they will never be able to come with userbility expertise unless they understand how the locals think, behave, believe or live and why.

2. Fulfill a need - not a Want, a Need. There is a big difference. Wanting is something that people can do without, something through which their entire survival does not rely on. We all know human beings basic needs - and they can all be summed up as, 'The right to live'. The right to live encompasses accessibility to food, shelter, clothing, sanitation, water, healthcare and security. Without these things, the risks of dying are multiplied ten-fold. Around these needs comes what I call facilitators (they facilitate and enhance the possibilities of attaining the needs), and this is where Education and things like ICT come in. ICT's should be seen as Facilitators to fulfilling the needs of a society.

3. Transfer Knowledge - this is of course a very complex issue, as it depends on which side of the fence you are standing on. If you are corporate/innovator, the last thing you want is to allow anyone to know 'your tricks', if you are an NGO, humanitarian etc. you work endlessly to ensure the community you are involved in gets all the knowledge they need. I am the latter and am therefore constantly insisting if you are going to do some ICT4D project, sell your product to the people and government then take off, without transferring knowledge on maintenance or development, then don't do it at all. I know that is what is happening everywhere because corporates have the money, even though the locals have the ideas. Practitioners need to leave something behind in the countries they work other than a problem of eWaste.

4. Analyze the sustainability issue - transfer of knowledge is one way of doing this. However, the biggest question ICT delivery (and any delivery for that matter) is always, who will pay? A friend of mine told me the other day that NGO's, Companies, Governments all speak the same language, and the difference is that they all use different terminologies. This language is called 'Money'. I know that so far I have been emphasizing about governments adopting useful ICTs that will bring development. However, as we know, governments hardly ever pay for everything. To make ICT's sustainable, without relying solely on governments, create solutions that people can afford. It is utterly and completely pointless for say, introducing an SMS service for farmers to check market prices if the farmer gets 1 dollar/day and the service costs that 1 dollar or more (including the hardware costs which nobody ever mentions). If I was that farmer, I’d rather walk my cow to the nearest market and sell it for 5 dollars.

Thank you for your time!

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.

Computer lab deployment at Luteete Secondary School in Wobulenzi, Uganda

Being the first to do anything is tough. It is filled with challenges and unknowns. Thankfully, you don't have to be the first to deploy ICT in East Africa. In fact, you'll follow in a long line of others who have tried - some with failure others with success.

I'd like to help you be the latter group. So here are a few hard lessons-learned from deploying new technology for youth in East Africa. It is written in hopes that you will find it useful when planning your first deployment of development-focused technologies.

1. Never expect people to do what they say they will.

• Test the technology yourself in the conditions it will be deployed. Do not operate under the assumption that the company that produced it has done so already. If you are going to put your name, or the name of your organization, behind a new technology, do some checks and tests yourself over an extended period before committing.
• Make a detailed written agreement with all stakeholders about who is expected to do what and provide what. Include clauses for negative eventualities, such as recourse when one or both parties fail to meet commitments, or the procedures for dissolution of the partnership. It is best that this is in a written, legally binding form.
• Make sure the company selling the hardware and software have fulfilled or made arrangements to fulfill its commitments before the project is deployed. Here are some guiding questions:
1. Has the company selling the hardware fulfilling the promises they made in marketing?
2. Am I getting a new, untested technology?
3. Have all of the proper licenses needed to run whatever software is on the system been bought?
4. Am I getting new parts in this technology, or is some of it recycled when it should not have been, and therefore may cause erosion issues sooner than expected?
5. Does the final package have all of the parts advertised?

2. Keep everyone on the same page.

• Make sure your implementers fully understand what they are getting into. If it is a pilot, tell them it is a pilot. If it is expected to be fully operational (i.e., not a pilot), tell them what you expect. If you're not sure, it is up to your discretion to tell or not to tell your people on the ground, but, as your grandmother may have told you, honesty is the best policy.
• Communicate what is going on in the head office to your people on the ground. It creates a feeling of control even if there is no real transfer of power.

3. Make sure your hands are never tied.

• Part and parcel to never expecting people will do what they say they will do, expect that you are going to have to negotiate and make compromises with various stakeholders. Make sure that you have ground on the negotiations when/if they do occur.
• Retain your bargaining power by building mechanisms that allow you to have equal footing into your written agreements. Pay special attention to the following stakeholders:
  1. The technology providers
  2. Your implementers on the ground
  3. Technical support

4. Build in accountability tools

• If you are working with private contractors, make sure that they know their requirements up front, and that you have that you have recourse when they do not fulfill their requirements.
• If you want regular reporting from anyone involved, make sure there is some sort of punishment for failing to report.

5. Get regular reporting

• Especially during a pilot, reporting is key. Knowledge of what is going wrong and right on the ground can be used to improve future deployments.
• Regular reporting may include a lot of expenditure on your part, but if you really want to know what's going on, you may have to spend the money to call your people on the ground.

Building on last month's amazing Skype Chat on Nigerian Internet Business Opportunities we're now going to look beyond any one country, and investigate business opportunity in East and West Africa:

1. How might Internet business opportunity and entrepreneurship be different in East Africa versus West Africa?
2. What could each region learn from the other?
3. And what can we do now to improve cross-Africa collaboration?

These are the questions we'll discuss in the next ICTworks Twitter Chat - a freewheeling conversation around our central questions on the Twitter platform.

We'll start at 14:00 GMT (your timezone) on April 22nd with introductions, then move into the discussion, using the #ICT4D hashtag in Twitter. Be sure to RSVP here.

You may want to use TweetChat as your Twitter client for this chat - we've found it to be worthy.

Our hope is to learn from each other and find ways we can increase Internet business opportunity and entrepreneurship across Africa.

Be sure to follow ICTworks on Twitter and RSVP today!

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