ICTworks by Inveneo

Made in Africa: Africa's first handheld tablet, developed by Verone Mankou of the Republic of Congo, went on sale in Brazzaville and Pointe Noire yesterday (January 30). The "Way-C," or "light of the stars" in local dialect, sells for about US$300 and features integrated Wi-Fi and 4GB of memory. It will soon be marketed in 10 West African countries as well as France, Belgium, and India. There is some question as to whether the tablet is truly an African made project, as it is being assembled in China for the simple reason that Congo has no high tech factories. Stay tuned to ICT_Works for further discussion – the ICT4D world will soon be buzzing. In the meantime, congratulations to Africa and Mr. Mankou!

Mobile Tech in Mongolia: This is a part of the world that is often forgotten by the international development community. Yet this highly literate, sparsely populated, largely nomadic region of the world is poised for an ICT4D explosion, with considerations for improving access to higher education at the forefront. Blogger Michael Sean Gallagher explores various questions about "how to harness the knowledge potential of a literate society with good pedagogical frameworks and, if the situation demands, a pinch of ICT."

India: Increased Use of ICT for Education: From mapping to educational content delivery to data collection, from teacher recruitment to quality monitoring, the Indian state of Gujarat really knows how to effectively use ICTs for education. Read all about it

Girls in ICT Day! The UN's ITU agency has created the Girls in ICT Portal, a site for helping girls get involved in ICT studies and careers. They've even declared a "Girls in ICT Day" the fourth Tuesday of every April, when girls are invited into companies and governments agencies (globally) to meet ICT professionals and see what life is like on the job. "Girls in ICT Day" was only launched in 2011, so if you are an ICT professional please do your part and invite the girls in your life to learn about your work this April 24, 2012!

And now for some light reading… Information Technology and Educational Management in the Knowledge Society is an essential reference for both academic and professional researchers in the field of information technology and educational management. The papers presented in this volume are the result of an international call for papers addressing the challenges faced by the information technology and education management (ITEM) field in a society where knowledge management is becoming a major issue both in educational and business systems. This state-of-the-art volume presents the proceedings of the 6th International Working Conference on Information Technology in Educational Management. The price – $145 – is steep, to say the least, but for serious scholars and researchers of ICT, this is a must-read.

To get these links faster, follow me on Twitter: @SabinaBehague

Last year, the Canadian/Indian company Datawind, announced the $35 Aakash Android tablet computer as an ICT solution for education. While I still believe that the Aakash will fail education like OLPC did, do not take that as a mark of complete failure. The Aakash Ubislate 7 should be viewed as consumer electronics, and as such, it will be a roaring success.

Free Internet access

Just look at Datawind's core technology, which is all about squeezing waste from Internet data transfers to make even 2G bandwidth feel fast and snappy on a weak chipset.

Its Internet compression technology (18 patents issued & approved) reduces network load, and speeds delivery of content by factors of 10X to 30X. Like the Amazon Silk browser, Datawind offloads much of the browser computation to servers, so just the pertinent web content downloads to the device, not all the webpage bloat that now consumes most browsing bandwidth

During a talk at the World Bank, the Datawind CEO Suneet Singh Tuli revealed that his goal was to use this technology to make the bandwidth usage so cheap that it became ad-supported. In effect, free to the end user. This is the modern killer app - free Internet.

Today, Internet access costs us all significantly more than hardware or software, more than electricity even. Even Intel says that bandwidth costs are the single largest barrier to ICT adoption. And Datawind has cracked that nut.

Just look at the numbers

Now a $47 tablet is exciting. I know a number of geeks who got all lustful for it, who don't even live in India. And in India... Well, let us read what the Wall Street Journal has to say:

On December 14... the Aakash [went one sale] on sale for the absurd price of 2500 rupees, or around $47, hoping to move 100,000 units over the course of 2012. That figure was seen as staggeringly optimistic, since it represented 40 percent of India’s total market for tablet computers. But as soon as the announcement went all, their call center was jammed with calls, and their website started crashing due to excess traffic, to the point where their Internet provider warned them they might be experiencing a malicious hack attack. Their initial inventory of 30,000 units sold out in three days. Within two weeks, they’d built up a backlog of 1.4 million preorders. According to CEO Suneet Tuli, that reservation pool is now over 2 million - and still going strong.

Just wait till the word gets out that $47 is close to the total cost of ownership in India! If the Ubislate 7 uses the Datawind servers when it connects to the Internet from Africa or America, expect this revolution in Internet access to spread faster than Facebook and Twitter combined!

I am Pritam Kabe and I just spent the past 3 months in India looking at the education system and how ICT could play a role in improving student outcomes.

After countless discussions with local scholars, school visits, teacher interviews, and conversations with students and parents (both in rural and urban India), I’ve come to the conclusion that lack of technology is not the reason for the abysmal quality of basic education in India. There is already great wastage in ICT4E in India and $35 tablets will not improve the situation.

In my opinion, here are the top 3 things India needs to do for improving quality of education, and none of them involve technology directly (although technology can be a powerful tool in addressing these issues if used the right way):

1) Make the Teaching Profession Valuable:

Currently, majority of the educated youth in India choose teaching as a profession only after other options are exhausted. As a result, the wrong people are entering the teaching profession – people who are not motivated, and are really not interested in teaching. Ofcourse, India being a democracy, one cannot stop people from choosing any career they want.

But what one can do is improve the process of teacher eligibility/selection, and improve the value of a school teacher. Similar to some of the Scandinavian countries like Finland, the teaching profession needs to be made respectful in India….on par with the Engineering, Medical, Law professions. Easier said than done ofcourse, but India desperately needs to bring some fresh blood and enthusiasm in the teaching profession.

2) Address the Teacher Accountability Issue:

After the 6th Pay commission gave teacher pay and benefits a great boost, the implementation of the Right to Education Act has put heavy emphasis on the inputs to the education system – infrastructure, student enrolment rates etc. Yet, 65% of the teaching resources are wasted in India due to the combination of teacher absenteeism and teacher inactivity in school classrooms. And the main reason being the lack of accountability.

The teacher unions have become disproportionately powerful, with heavy political connections, due to which there is total lack of monitoring – the school inspections are a joke. Also, there is a huge demand and heavy shortage of teachers in India (unofficial number is 3 million), which is not helping in improving accountability. Policy makers and the people in power in India know about this issue, but are very hesitant to deal with it. But i think it’s about time, India stops shying away from it and starts addressing the teacher accountability issue.

3) Improve Quality of Demand:

One cannot blame the Indian government for all the educational problems. Equal responsibility has to be shared by the people. Talking to the locals/parents in India, i got a feeling that the people have lost faith in the public education system due to its poor quality. They have given up hope. And the fact that the educated, well-to-do population send their kids to private schools, makes it difficult to motivate them to care about India’s public education system. But that needs to change.

India needs a better quality of demand. And this starts with the educated population, motivated, helping out, and demanding a better quality of public education. The illiterate population and the locals/parents from the under-privileged communities, need to be educated about their rights, the need to be given a voice/hope, that good quality public education is their right and the government needs to deliver it. It is also critical that the disproportionate power of the teacher unions is counter-balanced by some sort of parent unions, or student unions.

Final Thoughts:

With the inputs to the education system taken care, it’s about time India starts focusing on student outcomes, and on improving the quality of education. And although technology has an important role to play, it is not the silver bullet, and should not be the focus when creating any educational strategy in India.

The focus should be the 3 things mentioned above – raising the value of the teaching profession, addressing the teacher accountability issue, and improving the quality of demand in India; and technology should be used as a tool to supplement other tools that address the social, cultural and economic realities on the ground.

This week, India's Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) announced the Aakash, a "$35" Android tablet computer they are boastfully claiming is the world's cheapest tablet for education. This claim is an ICT4Edu red herring - a deliberate attempt to divert attention from what really matters in ICT interventions in education.

The $35 price point claim

First, a cheap Android tablet is no great feat. Last year, Indian companies were showing off $35 tablet prototypes and the joke in the computer hardware industry is that with an order for 100,000 units anyone walking off a plane in China can get a cheap Android tablet.

Yet, this Indian tablet isn't actually $35. The Washington Post reports its actually about $45 each, and Engadget says its actually a $60 Ubislate 7 from Datawind. Regardless of cost, government subsidies are required to get to a $35 price point for students and teachers.

But how long will the government be able to subsidize this tablet? According to The Economic Times coverage of the Aakash, HCL Infosystems first won the tender to make the tablets, but then walked away from the deal after the company realized that it could not meet the price expectations of the government - and HCL Infosystems is India's premier hardware and ICT systems integration company.

Stop with the hardware focus

If OLPC taught us anything it was that the price of hardware is but a small percentage (5-15%) of the overall cost of a real ICT in education intervention. In their TCO study, Vital Wave Consulting found that:

Support and training are recurrent costs that constitute two of the three largest costs in the total cost of ownership model. They are greater than hardware costs and much higher than software fees.

So just on the technology side, we should not focus on the hardware or its price point, but the support that should come with any technology intervention and the training and change management that will make it a success.

Concentrate on the real success factors

Let us step back and acknowledge that we really need a three-legged stool of content, technology and people for ICT success in education. There should be equal (if not greater) focus on comprehensive teacher training and quality digital content versus the hardware and its support ecosystem.

If we look at Plan Ceibal arguably the largest and most successful ICT in education activity to date, there is an obvious concerted effort to engage the entire educational ecosystem - from teachers, to students, to parents, to administrators, to the community, and private sector, in a coordinated national program. The actual hardware played a catalytic, yet still small role.

So thanks for pushing the hardware price point envelope in India. That should be good for a few press headlines. But I'll join Michel Trucano in criticizing the often single minded focus, even obsession, on the retail price of ICT devices alone. This is a great distraction, a red herring, from more important issues.

By 2007, the Internet had radically changed the social and economic landscape in the developed world. However, the Internet was (and still is) making slow progress in the developing world. I am Rose Shuman and I wanted to bring some of the advantages of the Internet to these populations, and had a hunch that the best way to go about it would be to use already-entrenched, familiar technologies.

Think a bit, and you can see why directly introducing the Internet would not work - in order to use the Internet, a rural villager needs to:

1. Be literate (one billion people are illiterate).
2. Read in a mainstream, international language (the web is not an interesting place if you only read Bemba language).
3. Have working electricity.
4. Have access to a computer.
5. Learn how to use the computer.
6. Have an Internet connection. (In Uganda, a basic connection can be several hundred dollars a month.)
7. Learn how to use the Internet (in English).

Only then will good things start to happen.

Question Box

There are many risks and unknowns that come along with introducing a novel technology-based service to a developing world population. We called ourselves Question Box, named after our first piece of hardware, and dove into India.

While lean, iterative trials are common course for tech start-ups, when we started this was a radically maverick approach in the bureaucratic world of international development. We assumed that our assumptions regarding user behaviors and on-the-ground realities would be wrong. We were completely correct on that front. Getting Question Box closer to right has required frequent, responsive adjustments to our offering and strategy, as well as sacrificing several sacred cows along the way.

In our first Question Box trials, we built metal boxes with a green button on them and a hacked telephone inside. We stuck the Question Boxes up on walls in two rural Indian villages. Each Question Box was set to speed dial our operator, a young woman with a mobile phone and Internet connection in her house.

Callers pushed the green button, connected to our Operator, and asked in local dialect any question they wanted. The Operator translated the question into English or Hindi, searched online, and then translated the answer back. In short, using a phone and a Box, we brought a form of the Internet to the village, even if the village honestly had no idea what the Internet was.

People loved the service - when it was working.

The first thing we learned was that Indian landlines were awful. In one village, only five lines had been allocated to serve the entire population. As such, we needed to "borrow" a village leader's rights to his landline, and then work with the phone bureaucracy in order to get his line installed at our service point. (Because landlines are unstable even in the cities, many Indian companies employ people whose only job is to deal with the government landline authority. We could have used one of those people.)

So in our next series of pilots, we moved from landline to mobile, redesigning the Question Box to run on a $30 Nokia mobile phone that had been opened up and doctored. Borrowing from the language of mobile phones, our next Question Box had a green "Call" button and a red "Hang Up" one, as our original single-button interface was not intuitive. We also moved to graphical rather than text instructions on the Boxes.

Even though we offered the same Question Boxes and the same service, each community developed its own idea about what the Question Box was used for. For example, at one school, a dignitary at the inauguration of the Box asked, "What is the population of Pune?" From then on at that location, Question Box became Population Box. In more rural areas, Question Box was primarily used to check weather and crop market prices. Farmers rely on middlemen to bring their produce to market, and are dependent on the middlemen to offer fair prices. Using Question Box, they could learn what the real prices were, and hence have better success in negotiating. Universally, people wanted to know about train schedules and children wanted help with their homework.

Question Box Evolves

In 2009, Grameen Foundation invited Question Box to Uganda. In Uganda, we faced a very different user population - widely dispersed, very rural, and lacking electrical infrastructure. In spite of having named ourselves "Question Box," we jettisoned the physical Question Boxes. Instead, we made use of a network of field agents built up by Grameen Foundation. Each agent was already assigned to an area and equipped with a mobile phone.

We rode on their network, providing each agent with a bright yellow t-shirt emblazoned with a telephone and the tagline "Ask Me." These 40 agents processed over 3,000 questions in only a few months. Some of these were the kind of trivia we in the developed world search for all the time ("Who is the richest man in the world?"), while others were essential questions relating to Ugandan agriculture ("What is the cause and control of the spotted leaf disease?") Epidemics of banana wilt disease were killing off the population's main starch staple. If infected plants were not removed and destroyed properly, villagers lost their core food supply. Our simple system saved many farmers' livelihoods, and likely kept people from starving.

Our Strategy Evolves

After Uganda, we came to a startling conclusion. Our goal is to make local language information easy and accessible in the developing world, but we'd been struggling with how to scale. After quite a lot of analysis and soul-searching, we realized that the best way to achieve that big goal was to get out of the way. There are hundreds of thousands of established community organizations around the world. They have local-language knowledge. They have sustainability, and community support.

What they lack is easy accessibility. Villagers have to wait for a field agent to show up, or else their problems go unanswered. However, mobile phones are now ubiquitous. Given the proper set up, why couldn't the villagers just call in? In short, with a little training and support, community organizations are the best way to deliver a knowledge service, not us. Our value-add is to build the tools to do so. To sustain ourselves, we plan to grow into a mixed-stream organization, relying on grants, institutional user fees, and custom consultancy.

While extremely painful from an organizational perspective, we shut down our active field operations, including the signature Question Boxes, and began building toolkits. Question Box has now evolved into a set of user manuals and desktop software that teaches local community organizations how to replicate what we have learned in the field.

By stepping out of the way, and losing a great degree of control, we now have a strategy that can achieve the original, hugely scaled vision. This evolution required a loose hold on our own rules and a tight grip on our purpose - to make knowledge accessible to people in the developing world, on their terms.

Rose Shuman is Founder & CEO of Open Mind, the developers of Question Box. She first published this post as How We Killed Our Strategy to Save Our Mission