ICTworks by Inveneo

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

When it comes to ICTs, Government's role is to create and sustain a conducive environment through regulation and legislation.

In addition, a sound government strategy should also consider making strategic investments (aka stimulus plans in the financial and economics world), promoting home grown ICT private sector and addressing appropriate skills development in the education and training sector.

Lastly, any government strategy or intervention should recognize and address the critical facets of the ICT eco-system which I would roughly categorize as infrastructure, content and applications and services.

Government ICT Seriousness Ranking

This leads me then to craft my own ICT "seriousness" criteria (if you want a more scientific set of criteria, then consider the Networked Readiness Index or other related indices) we can use to roughly and unscientifically judge how "serious" a government is about ICTs:

1. Enabling regulatory environment and legislation that takes into consideration all the major facets of the ICT eco-system
2. Clear strategic investments that address all facets of the ICT eco-system
3. promoting home grown ICT sector
4. addressing skills development and relevance of the education system.

How do African countries measure up against these ICT seriousness criteria?

Open competition - AccessKenya Fibre ad in Nairobi Kenya

A cursory review would reveal that most (but certainly not all) African countries have taken steps to enact conducive ICT legislation and provide an enabling ICT regulatory regime, promoting open and somewhat fair competition and private sector participation. Witness the mobile phone growth phenomenon in Africa, liberal telecommunication licensing regimes or the fact that many countries are exempting taxes on ICT hardware and software.

Many countries in Africa are also making some strategic investments in infrastructure in the form of national backbone networks partly thanks to Chinese money. But few are actually taking active steps to promote and invest in local content, applications and services even though the rhetoric at major ICT conferences often centers on promoting local content and languages so as to avoid "digital neo-colonization".

Even fewer are actively promoting the local ICT private sector as far as I know. And while ICT skills development is increasingly on the lips of many African education officials, few countries are walking the talk.

Kenya is distinguishing its self by "walking the talk" on many of these issues.

Minister Kenyatta putting ICT in the budget

Take infrastructure investments- not only has the country invested in a national fiber backbone, it went one further with its own submarine fiber (TEAMS). Talk of promoting the local ICT private sector and consider that the government is subsidizing satellite connectivity for the BPO sector until prices come down with fiber roll out and providing other subsidies for office space and training. There are challenges to be sure but at least the government is taking active measures.

The recent announcement by the government to stimulate the local content and application development is most likely ground breaking in the region.

On the skills development front, the government is taking active measures: the 300 computers for schools in every Kenyan constituency in the recent budget, the one million laptops programme initially targeting university students and various skills development programmes underway in the country.

The government is also moving to tackle "anti-competition" issues in the ICT sector in a bid to open up the sector for more players. A recent comparative review of ICT uptake in Kenya and Tanzania in balancing-act Africa also reveals quite clearly why Kenya is ahead of its peers.

eGovernment investment

One factor, not included in my seriousness criteria above, by which I usually judge a countries' seriousness about ICT is the extent to which the government itself is adopting ICTs- aka e-government. After all, charity should begin at home.

I believe that Kenya is taking e-government seriously:

• All government ministries have fairly well staffed ICT departments courtesy of the e-government directorate in the office of the president set up to coordinate e-government issues
• Local area networks have been upgraded
• Most ministries now have website which are regularly updated
• Key services are increasingly being digitized
• Mobile phone services are being integrated into the e-government strategy
• Even more importantly, concrete investment in the necessary infrastructure and applications is being and continues to be made.

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Other notable ICT aware countries

Rolling out fiber networks in Rwanda

If we look around sub-Saharan African, another country in the region that would score quite highly on these "seriousness" criteria would be Rwanda which shouldn't be surprising since its development strategy hinges on ICTs.

To be fair, other countries in Africa outside North Africa, Mauritius and South Africa are making some strides. The other East African Community members Uganda and Tanzania have liberalized their telecommunications sectors and investments in national high speed backbones are underway in both countries.

But active measures to promote local content and services or even local private sector and measures to address skills development seem to be limited. The Nigerian government is also beginning to make the right noises and to put its money where its mouth is. So is Mozambique and Senegal.

I get the sense that the many other countries, including the other southern African countries, do say the right things but have yet to show serious commitments to ICTs according to my seriousness criteria above. But then again, every country has it own development strategy and ICTs (except for the mobile phone sub sector) are not necessarily a priority for many.

Evidence of this can be gleamed by perusing the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) for the least developed African countries which include most sub Saharan African countries. While many of the PRSPs make some mention of "developing the ICT sector" and/or recognize the ICT sector as a "growth" sector, only a handful including those for Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda and Mozambique and to some extent Ghana, Tanzania, Malawi and Ethiopia seem to pay particular emphasis to ICTs in their core strategies.

One hopes that the trend towards greater integration of Africa means that countries are watching out for what their peers are doing right (and wrong) and that over the short term (1-5 years), there will be dramatic positive developments in the ICT sphere across Africa.