|
In order to say anything about where computers are likely to go, we need to talk about where they are. Gambia has at least one computer in each of its eighteen senior secondary schools. Fourteen of the schools have a computer lab but fewer have full time capable staff of teachers. Schools have been building computer labs independently and doing their best to retain competent teachers. Currently, the greatest problem facing schools is dealing with the constant turnover of staff. There is always a deficit of good teachers, and this affects computer teachers the most (because they can earn a lot more money by working for private training centers and businesses). Today, schools depend heavily on Peace Corps for maintenance. This may entail anything from a PCV regularly answering computer questions over the phone to a PCV that gets roped into fixing all the problems without a member of the staff assisting. Maintenance (both fixing computers and preventing their eventual breakdown) is a major problem in schools. This is due to the harsh environment and damaging voltage fluctuations of NAWEC (the power company), but it also caused by a dearth of trained computer people. Currently (2001), the material resources greatly exceed the human resources available to use and maintain them. The existing computer labs are sufficient in size to educate the masses in basic computer literacy, but the shortage of Gambian computer teachers hinders efforts. No one can foretell the future. Most people make lots of money writing books on the subject. In September of 2000, Eleven African Peace Corps countries met in The Gambia to discuss the future of IT in Africa. After all, you need an idea of what you are working towards before you can get there. Have you really thought about where you think IT will be in Africa in ten years? Think about it. Information Technology will probably have progressed at some frenetic pace to some inconceivable level of complexity in the West. Today, Africa is already behind. But will Africa close the gap this decade? If so, how much? I want to offer some insights from those Peace Corps leaders who attended the 2000 IT Workshop in The Gambia. Technology is just like any other commodity. There has to be demand before you can expect people to pay for it. If no one is willing to pay for IT , then there will be no IT. Although IT might not be the most important thing right now for Africa (more on that later), just about everyone seems to agree that Africa will suffer even greater dependency on the West in the future if it misses the IT revolution now. So how do you increase the demand, so that people will support growing IT in Africa? You need to give people something they need . It's fun to surf the web for news and porn, but that service does not give people anything they need . Even almighty email isn't a service people need because they can live without communicating with people in the outside world. I've often heard IT proponents offer the hypothetical example of an African villager using the web to get whether forecasts and crop disease literature. This example is not realistic, and you know it. First, you would need a much greater investment in computer hardware than the farmer makes in a year; second, even if the computer was free, the cost of surfing would have to be outweighed by the increase in profits when the farmer sells his now disease-protected millet; third, the farmer would need to be literate (computer and book literate); fourth, the farmer would need to be told that the answers are there on the web; and fifth, the farmer would need extensive training in how to apply written information in the field (no pun intended). While no one can really do anything about points one and two above, points three through five offer one valuable insight into the future of IT. If there was a person attached to each Internet computer who knew how to use it, was familiar with web search tools, and knew how to translate web information into the local languages in such a way that it was helpful and practical to the farmer, then IT might become necessary. That person once had a name and was absolutely essential in a culture long gone: a scribe . Yes, because information is now free and universally available to those who know how to access it, a caste of scribes may soon rise out of the local African population to disseminate (or exploit) it. The simple act of translating an email to the Alkalo of a village from English into Wolof can keep an entrepreneurial boy of eighteen well paid. With further studies, this scribe may eventually be elevated to the status of "oracle" when he starts deciphering crop and disease advice from the web. I honestly don't know what sort of information will allow IT to become an essential part of society here, but I firmly believe that it will require the use of "scribes" in its early stages. And that is a prediction for which you can prepare. As a Peace Corps volunteer, you have a rare opportunity to nurture the birth of the Internet Scribe. Training programs you design will give upstart youths the skills to make a living off their computer knowledge. Maybe you have a dream of computer literacy for all, but before that can even be conceivable, there has to be a goal of computer literacy for a few. This brings me to the second point. Today, people see computer training as a means to a good paying job. Almost all those jobs involve teaching other people to use computers. At some point, the market for computer teachers will be flooded. What then? Then the hard work begins. The hard part is finding ways to have your computer students earn a living using computer skills. It will require creativity, ingenuity, and business savvy. You might, in effect, be creating jobs for your protégés in much the same way that volunteers advise entrepreneurs in the Small Enterprise Development sector. Some examples of computer jobs are the following: Electronics gurus could sell repaired computer parts in the market (items such as speakers and mice, along with television and stereo parts). Some computer people might offer to send and receive email for a fee, earning a living with their good dictation and translation skills. Others might invariably get secretarial jobs. And still others might become traveling computer repairmen. While descriptions of future computer jobs are purely speculative at this point, every job will need to have a benefit that outweighs the cost. So in everything you do, consider ways of making computer services profitable to the entrepreneur, but also useful and affordable to the customer. It sounds to me like we're just sort of making up jobs for people because we think Africa needs some computers. That's not the goal, as least I hope not. The reason I am still a proponent for IT despite HIV/AIDS being ten times more serious is because the information that will eventually be made available to Africans could close the gap between Africa and the West faster than any other technology to date. For a long time Africa has been told that education is the key to triumphing over poverty. That education has been slow to achieve results. However, if students in Africa had the same access to information as students in the US, then perhaps education would improve and start affecting the nation building process. The vision of the future of IT in Africa would not be complete without considering counter arguments. Many believe that Peace Corps, UN, and the World Bank are misdirecting resources in addressing IT now. How can you say that The Gambia would be best served by World Bank Internet Training when people here live on $1 a day and can't even read? Why throw millions of dollars at IT when millions are already dying of AIDS? Those are valid arguments, and I haven't got a good answer. I just hope that IT will bring with it access to information that will empower people to address the real problems. Hopefully, the communication it enables will have far reaching effects on people's capacity for progress. Sustainability – the act of making all aspects of a development project work through the local people and their resources – is a difficult but worthwhile objective. If there is nothing else that you learn in ten weeks of training, let your one lesson be that sustainability matters ! Volunteers almost all think that sustainability is a minor issue when they start service, and almost all think that it is the most important issue by the end of service. "Come to the people. Live among them. Work with what they know. Build from what they have. And when the work is finished, they will say, 'We have done this ourselves'". –Sun Tzu. As new IT volunteers, you have the opportunity to mold the job in such a way that it encourages your counterparts learn from you. If people learn from you, they will have your skills and can work independently. Non-reliance on Peace Corps is a measure of success. Your success in the field will be measured in people trained, not computers fixed. Make every broken computer an opportunity to teach someone logic and the scientific method, and ultimately repair and maintenance. If you take the skills transfer aspect of your job seriously, you will find the long-term effects immeasurable. Past volunteers have sometimes fallen into the trap of just filling a position. Many Math and Science teachers filled positions in the seriously understaffed schools but couldn't pass on their good teaching skills to coworkers. While they had a lasting and immeasurable impact on a generation of students, schools are still understaffed and under-trained today. This shortcoming is most apparent in schools where a PCV is the only science teacher, and skills transfer to another science teacher is impossible. As a trainer of computer users and teachers , you should frame your job so that others are always learning beside you. Allow me to digress into a lengthy metaphor before discussing the next aspect of sustainability. Consider the bush taxi. Bush taxis are an overwhelming success in Africa. They are completely sustainable, provide a necessary and affordable service, and have no shortage of people willing to continue the trade because driving bush taxis is a highly profitable business. Who would of thought that? After all, cars are difficult to get here and break down a lot. Driving a stick ain't easy. But people do. And a whole caste of people developed who could improvise car repairs from scrap metal and plastic hoses and thus keep those cars on the road with limited resources. Now imagine back 40 years ago when bush taxis were just being introduced to Africa. What if a development agency, in its attempts to modernize public transportation, decided to donate a bunch of nice new buses? The buses would be good at first as the government ran them, but who is getting rich? Not the ordinary people. Then, as those buses break down, who fixes them? Outside experts contracted by the government. What if those buses don't go to the right villages? It's another problem which is not easily solved. If a private vehicle breaks down, who fixes it? No one locally, because those mechanics never had a reason to develop any skills because some NGO "solved" the problem but left a lot of loose ends. No one ever talks about donating bush taxis to The Gambia. So why computers? Under this scenario, every problem seems to require an external solution. Donated buses and imported mechanics make this problem a permanent one. It is not sustainable. However, that is not the case today. Through our inaction, automotive transportation corrected itself in a sustainable way. It did so because cars provide a better service than horse carts, and the service is profitable but affordable. Because everyone has become dependent on cars, there exists a group of mechanics that can fix anything with almost no materials. Why I've seen a guy clean a carburetor with just gasoline, spit, and his mouth for tools! I've seen axles tied together with rope. Thus I am confident that mechanics here can do it all without any further training from Peace Corps. When the IT sector finishes working in The Gambia and the last volunteer steps onto that plane, there should be a computer industry just as sustainable as the transportation industry you see today. By addressing the aspects of the problem (problems of need, profitability, and affordability) which enable it to become self-sufficient, you work yourself out of a job. But notice I did not include resources among the problems. Here's why: eace Corps is not the organization for STUFF. We are the organization for People. We don't have the money to bring materials into this country, and even if we did, we shouldn't because blank check donating does more harm than good. Past projects which centered around the import of equipment or resources have not been very sustainable. They have created a culture of dependency, hampered innovation, trampled efforts at self-reliance, and instilled a mindset of helplessness. The net result is that people are now less able to fend for themselves than they were to start with. But how can that be? Isn't the problem lack of resources? Aren't people just starving all over Africa? Many philanthropists across the ocean say, "If I could just touch one life, I will have made a difference." But they are still in America, and you're not. You're actually here to develop a nation to fend for itself. It's actually comforting to think that these people are only stifled by the lack of a resource; that if the people of village X had a widget, they could life happily ever after. But the story is much more complicated than that. People lack resources, and for 40 years governments and International Non-Government Organizations (INGOs) have done their best to provide. They provided vaccines, money, fencing materials, and even computers. And they also provided training. You are here to teach by your example, just as INGOs have taught by their example for the past 40 years. Although there weren't any actual trainers on the ground, INGOs taught the people a lesson which has permeated society and ingrained itself. USAID and the INGOs came to the people. They said to them, "Tell us what you need, and we will provide it." And so the people started asking for stuff. They asked for farm equipment, cement, food, fencing, and even for people. Well the INGOs sent over the stuff, but they said they were sorry to inform the villagers that no people are coming, because the budget doesn't allow for that sort of thing. People do what you condition them to. The people of the Gambia have been conditioned to ask for something when they need it. Each time they asked for stuff in the past, they were rewarded by having it provided. But with each donation, Pavlov's classical conditioning took an even stronger hold. People stopped trying to get stuff themselves. They stopped worrying about what would happen if the tractor broke down, because "the toubabs will buy us a new one." Some people even took it a step further. They realized that asking for stuff was a great way to make money. If you ask for a tractor and then sell it on the black market, you just made a years' supply of dough. "And the INGOs are not really watching us anyway," Lamin thought. And so the next thing you know, INGOs are providing a classroom for people to learn corruption too. It's a sad sight to look at years of well-meaning development projects and see dependency. But if you train people only in how to ask for stuff and give them as much as you can with no accountability, they will do exactly what you tell them to. They will ask for stuff, get their reward, and make the conditioned attitude of dependency even stronger. It is paternalism of the worst type. It is racism of some vague variety, for it continues to repress the black man in Africa by convincing him that he has no need to compete. It is an evolutionary debacle, for it decreases the African's ability to fend for himself and thus completely subject to the whims of Westerners. And if Africa is ever to become a global competitor on equal footing with the rest of the world, it has to end. There is a lesson in all of this. To update a wise saying I would say this: If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime. If you give a man a crate of fish and your phone number, he will come to you whenever he needs fish. This is going to end because you have a chance to change things. You are going to succeed where others have failed because you are not going to be a distributor of stuff - you are going to be a trainer of people. All those people who think that lack of resources is a problem are ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. But they are treating the illness with the wrong medicine. There is a serious lack of human resources . You are the tool, the facilitator, the computer expert that can transfer your skills to someone else and thus increase the capacity for your Gambian counterparts to work in your absence. In effect, you make IT sustainable. If you train people and teach them how to do stuff, you condition them to ask questions and seek out knowledge. There isn't a better habit you could impart in the whole world than the habit of insatiable learning. Peace Corps is NOT the organization for STUFF. It is unique among development agencies because they don't bring in STUFF; they bring in people. It is the organization best positioned for the next 40 years: Its goal is to transfer your skills to the local people so that they can continue the work. It is the hardest thing to do. It is much harder give a village one replacement for you than to give it a thousand widgets. That is really why it is "The Toughest Job You'll Ever Love." But the ads for Peace Corps don't say another crucial thing: Peace Corps is the organization for results. (Former IT specialist/strategist for Peace Corps in Washington): PCVs and those they work with need to do their professional best to maximize the chances for sustainability, i.e. not only helping folks get the hardware and software that they need and teaching them how to use it but also helping them learn the management and marketing skills necessary to help make it a profitable or cost-recovering enterprise. However, this is not the whole picture. Africans in all countries are very creative folk who will want to take IT and mold it to their own needs in ways that we do not imagine in advance. We need to be flexible enough to accept this and help them make happen what *they* want. It's what I call the "serendipity" factor. Therefore, we need to be ready to adjust our definition of "success" and "sustainability." What if an NGO telecenter or youth CyberCafe is not financially sustainable after a few years and "fails," but its presence spawned a proliferation of copy-cat microenterprises that are profitable? Examples: either a free-standing "phone shop" or one attached to a boutique or chop bar or repair shop or whatever that adds a fax machine and a computer with Internet access? Or someone who sets up a computer training center that also provides fee-based services to the public, including Internet access, wordprocessing, spreadsheets for business, etc.? In my opinion, the telecenter was a rip-roaring success. In strict project terms, however, it may be considered to have "failed" unless we consider unintended consequences when evaluating projects from the beginning. Bottom line: what is our purpose: a sustainable telecenter only if run by an NGO, or the greatest computer and Internet access for the greatest number of folks at the most affordable cost? I vote for the latter. Whichever scenario works for a particular community - non-profit, for-profit, governmental - is fine with me if the folks can break free from external subsidies and use access to ICTs as one of the means to help improve their lives. Information and Communications Technologies for Development E-mail: KJMorris@CPCUG.org 11710 Emack Road, Beltsville, MD 20705-1546 USA Tel: (1) 301.937.3725 Fax: (1) 301.931.8771 "Donor Defaulting" - Clara Soh So what is the moral of this story? The attitude of donor dependency has become so ingrained into the mindset of some Gambians that they are not even willing to take responsibility for the welfare of their own children. Part of the responsibility for the formation of this attitude rests on the donors, who were not responsible in the way they initially spread their good will. We hope this same situation will not happen in the IT field, as IT is so new to The Gambia that this attitude has not really had a chance to become ingrained.
|
|