Chapter 2: A Peek at the Present in The Gambia
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.
A Vision of the Future of IT in Africa
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
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:
The Problem With Stuff
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.
Guest Essays
Kelly Morris
(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.
Kelly Jon Morris, Consultant
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
Health – Everyone knows that people in developing countries face many
hardships. In The Gambia, this is especially true: the rate of maternal
mortality in The Gambia is the 2
nd
highest in West Africa (behind war torn Sierra Leone) and the third highest on
the continent. Malaria is endemic, the average life expectancy hovers around
45 years, and children die of diseases that have been eradicated in Western
nations. To combat this health crisis, the World Health Organization (WHO),
UNICEF, The CDC, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and other philanthropic
agencies have been donating millions of dollars worth of vaccines and drugs
every year. The Gambia became dependent on these vaccine donations, and in
1999, when UNICEF announced that it was no longer going to facilitate vaccine
donations, The Gambian Ministry of Health scrambled to find another agency that
would support its dependency on donations. Luckily for The Gambia, the
European Union stepped in, and announced that it would continue to supply drugs
to The Gambia, but under a new, revised "VII— Vaccine Independence
Initiative." The idea was that The Gambia had become too dependent on
donations, and in order to nudge the country towards building a sustainable
infrastructure, the EU decided that The Gambia would pay for any vaccines it
needed, and be fully reimbursed. This was the EU's idea for encouraging our
host country to take some responsibility for procuring drugs for it's own
children. Well, in response to this win-win situation, the Gambian Ministry of
Health cried foul, and coined a new term:
Donor Defaulting
. In the end, instead of coming together to decide how to gather together
funds to purchase the needed vaccines (that they would be reimbursed for), they
formed a commission on how to combat future donor defaulting.
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.