The following text formed the base of Avallain's presentation at
eLearnig Africa 2009)
In the context of our so-far successful Organic Farming information system "
Infonet-Biovision", we have reached the critical phase of ensuring effective dissemination to the target audience, small scale farmers in rural Kenya.
Having witnessed a variety of discouraging "Potemkin village" ICT4D projects by NGO's and Governments (all of the best intentions) during the concept phase we came to the conclusion that only "boots on the ground", sustained local presence and collaboration with experienced activists on site can ensure that there will be a real impact and benefit beyond ambiguous statistics and project reports based more on wishful thinking than reality.
Unfortunately, extended local presence and involvement of a meaningful character are not easy to achieve for most ICT based projects. The aspects of scouting and establishing serious local partnerships should thus be embedded already in the planning phase/proposal stage.
Before discussing a few of the core insights here that might help in the said planning, we would like to make it very clear that in fact most of the observations are just as valid in any ICT project in the "developed" world.
With some aspects, there is an obvious underlying difficulty in transfer and we have to be careful with our concepts. With others, for some reason, we tend to forget even the basics of ICT deployment planning when it comes to development activities. We suspect that this is due to the fallacy No. 1 - Thinking that people are just waiting for our solutions, waiting with arms and eyes wide open.
A few insights:
1) People are not just waiting for our solutions with open arms As in any ICT project, we should not assume that just because we bring a new solution, it is automatically accepted, no matter how advanced we believe it to be. Just as a salesperson at Toyota might not like the new CRM system that headquarters have just rolled out, any local user or coordinator in a development context has his entirely own attitude to the solution proposed. Target audience acceptance is crucial and can not be taken for granted, just because we bring "free" solutions.
2) People are not just waiting for our solutions with open arms - any more Many Elephants have trampled the ground before. Many "villages in the bush" have a dusty dysfunctional Laptop, Projector or Satellite Dish lying in a shed. The people who brought it made promises that where not kept. We need to be aware of these possible experiences and make sure we don't repeat mistakes and promises.
3) Too much thinking too early from too far away is wastefulIn our case, we had elaborate plans for using mobile handsets over bluetooth. We knew that we could not count on the newest models, so we planned and discussed for the older generation of mobiles. Once on site, we had to find out within one hour (talking to the real target audience) that they are not just older but rather completely different models configured for the market. No statistics readily available had shown this.
4) What does not work here does not work there A sin shared by educationalists and technologists - if they really love an idea they will find an audience for it... Furthermore, the "wonderful" lack of existing infrastructure can turn into a trap if we are not carefully managing our temptation to finally try these beautiful ideas that we never have been able to implement in the "developed" world due to existing structures. An example: It might not be categorically wrong to try a revolutionary user interface like the OLPC (www.laptop.org) foundation did, but at the end it turned out to be a drag on the otherwise wonderfully pragmatic hardware. If nobody has managed to introduce a convincing new interface for children in the "developed" world, why burden an already difficult project for development with it?
5) Simple here is not simple there and complex here is not complex there Things that are simple from a "developed" country point of view might not be simple in the target location, and vice versa. If we send a 15 MB uncompressed PPT by mail to our partner in a bandwidth-challenged country, we are making their life and efficiency miserable. If we ask them to pick up a package at the airport, it might take them a day stuck in local traffic and put them at peril. On the other hand, pools of ingenuity, creativity and flexibility are available that have long been stifled by oversupply in the "developed" world, and almost anything can be organised and created from scratch once you have established local contact and trust.
6) Keep things in proportion to the local scale The often great disparity in financial terms between the world of the ICT specialists and the audience presents a danger in itself. This applies even to local IT specialists who are often at the upper end of the usually extremely polarised income spectrum. People in the "developed" world have a hard time at the moment understanding why investment bankers need to be paid several lifetimes worth of salary per month in order to do their job and keep the bank working. We need to be very careful to remain aware of proportions, not only on ethical but also on practical grounds. In Kenya, we found that a few Gigabytes of mobile bandwidth can cost more than a teacher earns in the month, although the pricing is not very unreasonable in European terms. We have to take these different proportions serious and be very effective per Gigabyte as to justify not rather hiring more teachers!
7) The world is flat We are lending the phrase and title from Thomas L. Friedman (www.thomaslfriedman.com), and have encountered another great example in the spirit of his anecdotes. After extensive Internet research on the best solar equipment for a specific solution to be deployed in Kenya, we had not come up with a really affordable and solid solution. Affordable in this case meaning half the price per unit of the cheapest available product in Switzerland. When we finally found it, it was in a local Nairobi shop full of interesting material. Much of it sourced from India and Russia and not easily findable on the Internet. The lesson being that locally there is a real demand for a solution that is locally affordable. And more often than not, thanks to the flattened world, someone in their very own part of “the grid” will be offering a solution already. We can win enormous efficiency by looking for these entrepreneurs rather than accidentally and unfairly competing with them with aid-funded imports.
8) Potemkin, Potemkin, Potemkin Everybody who has worked in publicly funded projects or even a sufficiently large organisation knows the effects of projects-that-can-not-fail. Those projects can not fail not because of their merits but because of the fact that everybody involved thinks their future or income or both depends on it. So, sufficiently removed from any direct harm by failure or even absence of relevance of the project, everybody involved including the target audience will say great things, write beautiful reports and smile a lot. For ICT4D projects, this seems very relevant because the pressure can come from the funding structure as well as the target audience. From a short or mid-term perspective, it can make a lot of sense for the target audience in a pilot project to claim that everything is working wonderful. The necessity for any externally funded organisation to present a picture of high success rates is evident in itself. So there are many factors, none of them necessarily evil, that promote a too rosy judgment on ideas and activities. We need to remain very alert to see through this jungle of smiles and detect the problems in order to assure a real sustained impact.
9) Believe too much or too little in government This is not to be understood in the usual sense of distrusting institutions due to the many faults they have everywhere in the world in various degrees. In our experience, it means to look carefully at what the government or generally existing institutions already have in place and what parts of that infrastructure really works, including human resources as well as technology. Only by doing this analysis we can avoid redundancy and waste or worse being an agent of eroding the citizens trust in institutions that are often striving to really improve. The examples we have encountered range from existing but defunct infrastructure over infrastructure that exists but is not made accessible to perfectly willing officials that just lack basic equipment to perform their duties. The answers are different in each case (replace, lobby, equip) but are almost always most effective when done in complement to the institutions rather than in ignorance of or opposition to them.
Find out more about our approach to facilitate development by means of education and ICT at:
www.avallain.com/e4d
In its recent newsletter UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) features the online community of Frankfurt Literacy Campaign (LitCam). Together with the UIL, Google and other partners, Avallain acts as sponsor of LitCam. The annual international conference during the worlds largest book fair offers a platform for experts to meet and draws the attention of a wider audience, publishers, politicians and the media towards the importance of Literacy. To support the growing LitCam community, Avallain launched the on-line community enabling former LitCam participants to stay in touch, present their work, share knowledge and experience.
