ICTworks by Inveneo

The Grameen Foundation Center launched a comprehensive Android phone-based project for Ugandan farmers recently, that could significantly improve farming processes, but how sustainable is the initiative?

The project is a high-tech response to fundamental challenges in agriculture, including unclear pricing structures and markets, unreliable weather forecasts, and a myriad of inefficient or absent extension services about when and how to plant crops. Each Android phone has an open-source data-collection app that feeds into Salesforce.com.

The Grameen innovation counters the electrical challenges in the East-African country, that would otherwise doom projects dependent on electrical power, by utilizing rechargeable batteries which solar energy can sustain. (PC World reports on this in detail)

The project is organized around 400 select farmers, known as "community knowledge workers", who own Android phones - and 3 in 4 of all their peers value their high-tech extension services. But an Android phone costs US$600 plus upkeep costs, nearly twice the per capita income in Uganda. So, how do these smart phone owning farmers acquire them legitimately? The project offers select farmers loans to purchase the phones. On the surface, this approach suggests a level of sustainability, but I have a two questions:

1. Are the benefits of using a smart phone, compared to a regular phone, so great that a farmer ought to take a loan and bear upkeep costs (combined) twice his/her country’s per capita income simply to access information? Of course, information is important, but it is only one variable among many that must be resolved to result in improved earnings for the farmers.
2. Even if in the long-term ‘community knowledge workers’ charge for the services they offer, and even pay a fee to the platform providers, how long will it be before they can recoup and repay their loans? What is the interest rate on these ‘Android loans’?

These are critical questions that ought to be answered in order for us to truly grapple with the potential economic impact of deploying this sophisticated technology.

(Are you excited about ICT4Ag and in Washington DC? Then RSVP for Enriching rural coffee farmers with iPads, a Technology Salon on September 15th)

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

Is TMS Rue right? Does Uganda really have faster and better Internet connectivity than Kenya? That is hard for me to imagine.

Kenya has both TEAMS and Seacom fibre optic sea cables and a highly dynamic and competitive telecommunications industry. It certainly has the most Internet users, and yet here is Mr. Ruge saying that Uganda has better ISP pricing and service.

Is he crazy or am I too assuming?

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.

“A Primer of Oil Well drilling” by Ron Baker, screamed the headline of the book that a middle aged man was reading on a flight from Johannesburgh to Entebbe. Right behind him was another equally middle aged man reading another book on Oil. A chat with them revealed that they were Ugandans working for one of the oil prospecting companies.

My mind raced and I quickly began asking myself how Oil can help promote the growth and use of ICT in Uganda. Off the cuff, the two seem unconnected. On pondering further, I realised that actually the exploitation of oil in Uganda can have a very positive impact on ICT. How?

Our president has repeatedly said that Oil revenues will not be used for consumption expenditure but instead to develop our infrastructure. For the layman, infrastructure may be limited to roads, rail and buildings. However, ICT Infrastructure too has a place here. While we are currently struggling to build a national fibre data backbone with the help of a Chinese grant, once we start earning petro dollars, the country can setup a more detailed fault tolerant ICT infrastructure that can allow for continued communication even under the most challenging conditions like war. We can borrow a leaf from the likes of Great Britain that had to quickly setup a secure fault tolerant communication network during World War II when the German military arsenal targeted whatever infrastructure that was available especially in London.

The current design of the national fibre backbone for example is devoid of failover mechanisms and its implementation too leaves a lot to be desired. The shallowness of the trenches can even allow for village thieves armed with mere hoes to disrupt such a critical national resource.

Apart from the much needed improvements in the hardware infrastructure, there is also need to improve on the soft infrastructure. E-Government is critical if as a nation we are going to be comptitive in the region and also reduce on the pains our populace goes through when obtaining services from the Government.

For long the Government has been using the grants received to improve on ICT by acquiring solutions from abroad. Sometimes they are not to blame due to the pre-conditions some donors give. As of today, Uganda is endowed with highly skilled ICT professionals who can form the bedrock of the ICT revolution. From software programmers to website and database designers, not forgetting the solution implementers. With our own funding, the Government can take a pro-active step towards developing solutions that are ideal to our local situation.

This Oil money is likely to attract more investors into this economy in various fields and these same investors will certainly need more efficient communication systems to transact well internationally.

Uganda could also lead the way in pioneering the launch of a regional communications satellite in cohort with other East African countries. If one analyses the money spent as a region on International satellite based communication, then it starts making sense to keep this money from going to foreign capitals. Our regional based private companies can also use this very infrastructure for service provision.

I can see someone thinking aloud about the rationale of Uganda investing in satellite technology when infant mortality, malaria, HIV/AIDS are yet to be effectively addressed. For an answer, I refer you to my father. Ask him where his rationale was when he chose to pay for his children to study in top notch expensive schools like St. Mary's College Kisubi, Mt. St. Mary's Namagunga and Namilyango College School yet he was having a hard time dressing himself let alone feeding us at home.

As I join others in welcoming the oil boom to Uganda, I urge the next president not to overlook ICT Infrastructure Investment.

This post was originally published as Will Oil Help Improve ICT in Uganda?