Document(s) 4 of 11

Introduction

This chapter introduces a youth volunteer program for information and communication technologies (ICTs) for communities in Africa. The program, known as the Youth Leadership Program for Information and Communication Technologies and Community Development in Africa (ALPID), derives its impetus from the realization that information gaps and lack of access to existing informatics will further marginalize Africa as we enter the 21st century. The serious dichotomies between urban and rural areas and between formal and informal sectors delineate where the needs are greatest and the likely constituency for this program.

This program will bring together youth from participating countries of Africa, Europe, and North America. We can rely on youth, who are usually agents of change, to act as harbingers of the Information Age, bringing existing and emerging technologies into communities, activities, or sectors where lack of access to information has undermined and constrained development efforts. In connection with this program, the term community refers to a group of people residing, working, or associating together in a given location and linked functionally or residentially. Such communities could be residential, occupational, educational, or health-, production-, or service-oriented. In sectors such as health, microenterprises, and environmental management, information can contribute to optimal outcomes, and the program we articulate below pays special attention to these areas of great importance to Africa.

Underlying principles

Our proposal is based on the following fundamental principles:

That youth have been critical to the propagation of community knowledge and have a big influence on their parents and other adults in their communities;
That through youth-to-youth and youth-to-community education programs, the youth have (even at a tender age) succeeded in helping to improve the quality of life in Africa where others have failed;
That status and other problems tend to constrain adult-to-adult education programs, whereas youth-to-adult education programs do not have such problems;
That the youth have shown leadership in acquiring the skills needed to use ICTs and that most adults are already learning these skills from young members of the community (we need to structure and organize this transfer of skills at the community level);
That the youth, as agents of ICTs, would have a unique opportunity to give back to society a bit of what society has given them in terms of their care and education;
That most youth in Africa have been systematically alienated from their communities through education and that through such community-based programs they can be reintegrated into their communities and be given an opportunity to engage in community development;
That for community-based programs to succeed, they must recognize, respect, and reciprocate with community systems of knowledge, power, and production;
That the national youth service programs of various governments have laid the foundations for the integration of the youth into their communities and that a youth-to-community education program for information-technology (IT) literacy would add a greater value to the role of youth in community development; and
That “information poverty” is at the core of Africa’s slow recovery and stagnation and that equipping youth with IT skills and proper methodologies to transfer such skills to adults involved in production and services can go a long way toward spearheading Africa’s entry into the global information society.

Objectives of the program

The main objective of the program is to use skilled youth volunteers to train and popularize the use and absorption of ICTs in various producer, service, and administrative communities in Africa. We will attain this objective by placing the youth at the centre of this development process.

Specific objectives

The project seeks to achieve the following:

To enable communities to improve their capacity for decision-making on development issues by increasing their capacity to use the new ICTs;
To enable the youth to participate in community development;
To provide an opportunity for communities to use the new ICTs to upgrade their indigenous systems and knowledge in the areas of health and production;
To provide an opportunity for communities to use the new ICTs to upgrade their traditional information systems and networks; and
To create information packages and databases of indigenous knowledge and systems of production, environmental management, and indigenous technologies.

The problematique and its justification

The conventional view of knowledge transfer is that knowledge is best transferred from adults to youth or from adults to adults. Even liberal educators who attempt to use participatory, or Socratic, methods of learning have jealously guarded the elderly image of the teacher. Even in peer tutoring, older or smarter youths have been used as substitutes for teachers. Only in evangelical preaching have youth been easily accepted as capable of transferring their knowledge without impersonating their elders. But even here, youth who preach are assumed to be gifted.

Societal prejudices have sustained these conservative views on the capabilities of youth. In most communities, young people are assumed to be unsure of what they want, short-tempered, lacking in coping skills, immature, restless, unsettled, and unable to handle stress. Because of these prejudices, youth have not been given more responsibility or a chance to use their potential to the maximum.

These prejudices have had dire consequences for development processes in Africa. Elders who have maintained their right to be educators have been unable to update themselves in various areas. Most of their views and skills have remained static. The youth, on the contrary, have been acquiring knowledge and skills that they have had difficulty transferring to their elders and their communities. As a result, communities have failed to be transformed by the educational systems and institutions around them. The youth have been relevant to all other institutions except their communities.

A related problem is that of mutual irrelevance. Because adult skills have remained static, they have become irrelevant to the youth, and the youth have acquired some new and dynamic skills that their communities have not completely internalized, because these skills have remained in the youth sectors of society. This mutual irrelevance has widened the divide between the modern sectors and the indigenous sectors and slowed the processes of mutual enrichment. For this reason, education has continued to benefit more and more people in the modern sectors while the so-called traditional sectors have fallen further and further behind. In the past two decades, however, the myth of adult monopoly over knowledge and the mechanisms of its transfer has been shattered. Youth-to-youth schools have sprung up in Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Congo (Kinshasa), Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Youth volunteers, working with the help of teachers and other specialists, have become very effective in the areas of health, nutrition, safety, sanitation, and environmental management. In Zambia, for example, the youth have helped to popularize immunization for polio, measles, diphtheria, TB, etc. Using songs and poems composed by young people, the youth have easily changed other youths’ and the community’s attitudes toward immunization (Otaala 1986¹). In Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, youth have spearheaded community programs on clean water and sanitation, good diets and nutrition, and the prevention of diarrhea. They use songs and demonstrations, plays, dramas, paintings, drawings, games, etc. In Botswana, one also sees youth-to-youth programs on safety and survival, covering, for example, road signs, road crossing, and first-aid techniques.

In many African countries, youth-to-youth programs have developed into youth-to-community programs. In Kenya, the African Medical Relief Foundation started a pilot youth-to-youth education program in Nakuru District after people realized that the elders were going to be ineffective in health education: the health habits of the elders were already static, and the elders would not be excessively reliable in delivering health education. Initially, in 1986, the project covered 35 primary schools.

After only 3 years, a few changes were noted. First, the number of children going to clinics for the treatment of stomach upsets, parasitic infections, and similar ailments decreased by 60%, and generally the rate of pupil illness declined by 65%. Second, before the program, very few people cared about children’s hygiene. Most parents left it to the teachers and vice versa. After the program was launched, parents and teachers formed voluntary groups to repair toilets and maintain cleanliness. Third, and most important, the villagers began organizing themselves to dig pit latrines for each other, at the initiative of the youth, and when the children started earning a little money making nurseries and selling seedlings, the adults also began setting up nurseries for commercial purposes (Kinunda 1989). This is one of the many examples of how the youth have contributed to community development in Africa. Although in most countries youth-to-youth and youth-to-community programs only started in the mid-1980s, they have had a big impact on communities (Howes 1988; Tay 1989). ALPID will seek to build on the excellent work of the youth in these earlier programs.

Critical areas and needs in community development

The urban and rural poor in Africa stand a high chance of becoming even poorer if they are unable to gain access to the new ICT-driven sources of information. The causes of poverty are multiple. Africa as a continent is, in a sense, not poor, as it has a rich variety of natural resources. What is lacking are the skills to turn these resources into wealth. Therefore, at the heart of Africa’s development problem is a lack of dynamic and relevant skills and the information needed to put the available skills to optimum productive use. Critical needs that ALPID can immediately address are outlined below.

Understanding the causes of stagnation in Africa

The typical poor person in Africa is not devoid of resources, such as land or assets for use in production and distribution. Most of the poor individuals and communities in Africa lack knowledge of how to better use their natural resources, add value to their primary products, create commodities out of their materials, attract consumers from within and outside the community, etc. Most African communities, whether rural or urban, have a distance problem. Some industrial estates located in big cities are unreachable because of bad roads, personal security problems, etc. In some cases, industrial operators have had to build roads and small bridges to make their estates reachable. The rural areas are mainly accessible only by footpath and canoe. Transfer of commodities and products to and from such areas depends on human, animal, and bicycle portage. This creates a distance penalty. Anybody who wants to help reduce poverty in such areas must have a clear understanding of the role of communication infrastructure and the potential for telecommunication and information systems to reduce this distance penalty.

One also needs to see how to use existing telecommunication infrastructure to improve access to information on health, social services, environmental management, and industrial production and services. In the majority of cases, people still make only social use of telephones, where these are available. More often than not, they use telephones to reduce their need to physically go and see someone, rather than for accessing information on social services, production, distribution, or governance. ALPID will address the need for communities to change their outlook on ICTs.

Empowering individuals and communities to help themselves

Education, health, and extension services have so far clung to classroom settings, dependent as they are on space, human resources, materials, etc. Health services have made the ill the “object,” not the “subject,” of health support systems. And, in industry and agriculture, extension services have had to depend on scarce extension officers, who are mostly not even eager to remain in certain areas. As the public service shrinks, moreover, it may either fail to reach the majority of producers or come to a complete standstill.

ICTs can help fill the widening gap between emerging needs and available resources. With a single, simple communication and information centre (CIC), many producers — unreached or unreachable by extension officers — can access information at a low cost. Those who cannot reach doctors for medical advice can easily access information to decide whether, when, and where to see a medical practitioner. Most important is that existing educational systems, social services, and extension support structures fail to address all the information and skills needs of various communities. CICs, if properly equipped, can provide for the needs of individuals and communities and widen their choices and opportunities.

Managing the cultural dimensions of information domains

Communication problems in the delivery of social services, health services, and conscientization² programs have not received due attention. In the treatment of bilharzia, diabetes, and similar diseases, medical personnel have had immense problems getting people to bring stool or urine samples in for examination. More serious problems have surfaced in dealing with issues of sexuality and sexual behaviour. For most people, such things belong to a private information domain. Public-health information campaigns on TB and AIDS have achieved mixed results. The success of these programs depends, in many cases, on the extent to which program workers understand the divide between private and public information in African communities, particularly rural communities.

What is clear is that the private information domain is wider than the public one in many African communities. If one asks a typical African parent directly how many children he or she has, the answer may not be instantaneous. If asked how many children have died in the family, she or he may give no answer. Similarly, a typical African business person will not instantaneously answer questions about volumes of production, amounts of money, or rates of loss.

Indigenous communication packages have a lot of rites, rituals, fictions, and taboos. Communication mechanisms are songs, poems, jokes, stories, riddles, jests, etc., most of which are indirect. People using modern mass media have tried to incorporate songs, poems, and other such mechanisms into the delivery of messages, but in most cases these efforts have failed because of the mass nature of these media. In training, one should carefully ensure that information is packaged to take account of the various status systems based on age, gender, rank, title, etc. Putting women of all ages together and showing them a video may fail to convey information because this strategy fails to account for the fact that the information needs of certain groups may be private or different. Similarly, enrolling young and old people together in a class and giving them a course or showing them a video on issues of sexuality or reproductive duties and responsibilities may cause problems in many African communities.

The new ICTs carry great potential to bridge the existing information gaps. Community-based telecentres can give individuals the privacy they need to access information systems and databases. Health information systems can also be designed to help people who believe that their health is very private to access information on the symptoms of various diseases, on ways to cope with these symptoms, and on when to seek medical advice or treatment.

Packaging and repackaging information

Africa is currently a net consumer of information packaged by other societies. Although access to such information packages may help improve productivity, we also need to package our own relevant information on indigenous systems of production and services and make it accessible to African entrepreneurs and other producers. We must develop local-area networks (LANs) and local databases on trading, manufacturing, ecology, environmental management, health facilities, etc.

We also need to disaggregate information needs by social group. Conventional mass and social media, extension services, etc., have traditionally marginalized women and their areas of specialization in agriculture, small-scale production, and trading. In rural production, most of the available information and extension support systems have focused on cash crops and livestock. They have neglected food crops and small farm animals, which are the domains of most rural women and have remained an exotic interest of some gender-conscious researchers or those doing food-security research. These areas have not had enough extension or other support. Extension officers are simply not equipped to serve such producers. Organized information databases are urgently needed to provide people in marginalized areas with information on agriculture, aquaculture, and silviculture. Retraining programs are needed for extension officers to enable them to reach out to marginalized people and focus on their activities.

In industrial production, an exchange of information on local and international markets, import and export regulations, and quality-control techniques is needed. An exchange of information would also help develop local-area trade networks on inventory and procurement systems to promote intersectoral linkages between firms of various size and specializations. ALPID will seek to build this capability, determine the relevant needs (through baseline surveys on various activities), and develop appropriate information packages to meet those needs.

Creating an information society in Africa

Africa’s indigenous information systems and networks are rapidly disappearing. Rapid urbanization and destruction of rural systems of production, coupled with the skills drain from rural to urban areas, have substantially contributed to the ossification of indigenous information systems that originally developed inside indigenous production systems and services, ecological and environmental management, and religious beliefs. Myths, rituals, rites, totems, taboos, songs, drama, art, etc., are the major means of information packaging and communication in indigenous knowledge systems. As the social, political, and ecological bases of these systems disappear, so too do the systems. ALPID will seek to build on what remains of these systems to create a wider and richer information and communication culture. ALPID will enable African communities to borrow from others to strengthen themselves as members of the global information society.

Priority areas for intervention

To have the maximum impact, the program will concentrate on providing support in three main areas: health; small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs); and land use and environmental management (including research on indigenous systems of production and biotechnology).

Health

The health system in Africa is at crossroads. In the early 1970s, most countries on the continent modernized their health sectors, setting up rural and urban clinics, health centres, and even mobile clinics. African countries made medical facilities available and increased the number of hospital beds.

During the economic crisis, which became more acute in the early 1980s, these facilities began to deteriorate. Clinics were empty for lack of medicine; there were too few beds; and sterilization facilities were inadequate. Health centres began turning into death centres. In some cases, diseases such as yellow fever, cholera, leprosy, smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis, which everyone thought were on the decline, began to resurface. New deadly diseases, such as Lassa fever, Ebola, and meningitis, also began to surface, with serious consequences. Some of these diseases broke out in areas with poor sanitation and high concentrations of population, such as slums, illegal mining areas, refugee camps, and collectives.

In the background of all these developments was the return to superstition, insecurity, and fear and distrust of conventional medicine. The number of traditional healers, herbalists, and fortune-tellers increased in both rural and urban areas. Health-care delivery systems failed to adjust to these developments. Public-health programs continued to rely on “visual literacy” (Western forms of literacy), ignoring African oral traditions and systems of “audio” (informal, person-to-person) communication. Health campaigns that rely on visual literacy seem to imply a power relationship, which has made them less effective. They are seen as propaganda, owing to the assumed superiority of the demonstrator or teacher. This power relationship creates a distance between the teacher and the learner. The impact of “physical vision” (what people see and touch) in all public communications is reduced by the failure to capture “mental vision” (what people think).

In African culture, mental vision develops through personal contact. In public-health education, for example, home visits that start with greetings and conversation and end with counseling are more effective than public meetings. Oral and audio communication is very effective, both in health education and in healing, because it takes place in a narrow space; puts the learner, patient, or client at the centre; allows the learner to listen to his or her own voice and the voice of others; and permits the learner to construct, reconstruct, and deconstruct mental visions of the problem and the solution.

ALPID should build on this culture. Without playing down the importance of physical vision in health services, the program will seek to use the new ICTs to entrench the oral and audio tradition. At community telecentres, ALPID will provide information packages on sickle-cell anemia, TB, sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, hypertensive diseases, and so on. Although medicine has advanced and there are better ways of handling these diseases, information is lacking. The program will also provide information packages on dietary patterns, sanitation, hygiene, maternal and child health care, etc. Then, through home visits and other community-based interactions, the youth volunteers will attempt to change the communities’ attitude toward the use, diffusion, and absorption of this health information. Once trust is established in the CICs, these centres will likely be more effective at transferring knowledge than public-health meetings are, for the following reasons:

Public-health meetings usually occur only occasionally and take place at inconvenient times for some people. CICs will provide people with more choices and flexibility.
Public-health meetings take a “closed-menu” approach and fail to provide enough options to solve each of the problems encountered by individuals and communities. CICs will take a “boutique” approach, with a choice of packages for individuals or groups to use whenever they prefer.
Traditional public-health education systems take a “custodial” approach and target people in clinics who are either already ill or about to go into “medical custody.” CICs will adapt a “horticultural” approach, targeting individuals and their needs whether they are ill or not.
Conventional systems of public-health education ignore how wide the private information domain is in African culture. CICs will provide private spaces and increase and protect the private information domains of people in the community, regardless of gender, age, or status.
CICs will build on traditional methods of healing and diagnosis, which are based on communication between humans and invisible forces, and will build on the traditional oral means of communication. These fill the gaps left by physical vision, which has failed to create effective mental vision or to reduce fear, distrust, and superstition.

To ensure compliance with medical ethics, medical specialists should accompany youth volunteers.

CICs will provide information packages on the following topics (among others):

Common diseases and child and maternal health care;
Dietary patterns;
Oral health;
Counseling for the elderly and for those who are mentally or physically disadvantaged;
Stress, stress management, and abuse of drugs, alcohol, and other addictive substances; and
Fertility and sex education.

To maximize the benefits of these kinds of activity, ALPID will target only closed communities, such as plantations or farming estates. Such locations have common stop shops or meeting places to use as information centres. A majority of the working people have no serious after-hours activities and could therefore spend most of their leisure time at the information centres if they found the information useful and relevant to their needs and problems.

Small and medium-sized enterprises

In the past decade, many SMEs in Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda have established subcontracting and related linkages with firms from East and Southeast Asia. These initiatives have led to significant production and technological changes. However, the SMEs still lack information on choices of suppliers for technology and technology goods, on quality control, on raw materials, on markets, etc. If they had such information, they could increase their contribution to the economic growth of the region.

SMEs, especially those in the engineering sector, have contributed substantially to the development of Africa. In some of the poorest countries on the continent, SMEs are the prime movers of industrial activity. Between 1962 and 1980, for example, Rwanda established about 220 small enterprises (GOR 1994). These have, to date, remained the most prominent feature of industrial activity in Rwanda. Mali had no industrial base in 1965, when it achieved independence. By 1985, it had 118600 small enterprises, mostly in the rural areas (Capt 1992).

SMEs have played a significant role in poverty alleviation. But in Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, SMEs have gone beyond poverty alleviation: they have contributed substantially to employment, local skills formation, the supply of local demand, import substitution, and export promotion and have strengthened local entrepreneurship (ATP 1992; GOT 1993; Oyelaran-Oyeyinka 1996). SMEs’ share of engineering-product sales averaged 21% in Tanzania and Uganda before trade liberalization and 30% after; and 10% in Kenya and Nigeria before and 15% after.

The broad categories of SMEs can be broken down into six major specializations: foundries and forges, metal fabrication, vehicle assembly and automotive components, electrical and electronic components, construction materials, and end-item assembly. SMEs operate under serious information constraints. They lack information on technology suppliers, raw-materials suppliers, markets for their products, import and export regulations, local and international demand characteristics, etc. To support the information needs of SMEs, ALPID will seek to establish the following:

Local-area trade networks — Local-area databases built within LANs on production systems, order and payment procedures, volumes of production, materials, specialized products, inventory structures, etc., will be established to strengthen production management, scheduling, and quality control; to establish linkages with large-scale firms; and to reduce warehouse costs.
Electronic data-interchange linkages — Links with other producers through electronic data interchanges would improve the capacity of SMEs to choose among various technology systems and suppliers and acquire new skills related to core chores, design processes, and quality-control techniques. Current links with Chinese, Korean, Malaysian, and Taiwanese firms could improve engineering capabilities.
Internet and e-mail links — SMEs need online links with technology emitters such as technology laboratories, technology parks, and technology incubators (innovation laboratories); consultancy firms; advisory centres; markets; technology suppliers; and national, regional, and international research-and-development institutions.

The biggest advantage of SMEs, whether rural or urban, is that they tend to be located in the same area. To create economies of scale, they also tend to cluster themselves by specialization. Foundries and metal fabricators, for example, are likely to cluster together, which makes it easy to establish a single CIC in one industrial complex, install ICTs, and allow access at a reasonable cost.

Land use and environmental management (including indigenous systems of production and biotechnology)

Most of the research on biotechnology has not successfully filtered into policy and production in Africa. The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, in Nigeria, the International Livestock Research Institute, in Ethiopia and Kenya, the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology, in Kenya, and the Southern African Centre for Cooperation in Agricultural and Natural Resources Research and Training, in Botswana, have all funded biotechnology research on tissue culture, embryo-ovule culture, embryo genesis, genetic improvement of tubers, gene-mapping, biofertilizers, biocides, etc. But most of the research findings have been inadequately disseminated. The same is true of most research conducted by national research institutes in Africa. Their findings need to be organized in databases.

Africa’s grasslands, forests, marshes, and oceans hold precious herbs, spices, fruits, oils, resins, dyes, gums, fibres, and medicinal organisms. These resources have been wantonly harvested and exported to foreign countries for small amounts of money, and many species are now near extinction. Several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and research institutes have conducted research on the plunder of Africa’s biodiversity, but their findings have not influenced environmental or trade policies. These findings also need to be organized in databases and made accessible to producers and policymakers. ALPID will give first priority to linking up with research institutions in environmental studies and establishing databases on available findings. It will seek to establish local-area databases and promote ICT links between researchers and policymakers.

In environmental management, the program will seek to team up with associations of small, informal-sector operators; vocational training institutions; and voluntary organizations involved in employment generation, poverty alleviation, and small-enterprise development. In collaboration with these partners, ALPID will design information packages and video and computer training programs to inculcate a culture of environmentally friendly production methods and services. It will develop databases on comparative practices, regulations, and management systems to promote awareness of import regulations pertaining to environmental standards, eco-scanning systems, and eco-labels in the management of international trade. ALPID will take the lead in developing such databases and designing training packages and materials but will not be involved in training activities.

ALPID’s target countries

The program will be implemented in four countries of sub-Saharan African (SSA): In East Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda have been tentatively selected; in West Africa, Nigeria has been. But the list can be expanded if resources allow.

The following criteria were used in selecting and ranking the countries:

Telecommunications infrastructure — The average teledensity in SSA is 0.46 lines per 100 inhabitants. With the exception of Tanzania, all the countries listed above have a reasonably high teledensity.
Telecommunication and information policy — These countries either have an explicit telecommunications policy (Nigeria and Uganda) or are in the process of formulating one (Kenya and Tanzania). Most of these policies include or are likely to include guidelines on ownership and control of telecommunications; supply of Internet and e-mail services; deregulation of telecommunications-equipment, computer-hardware, and computer-software imports and of sky-based information networks; tax regimes on information and communication systems; and participation in various recently launched cable and satellite systems.
Good experience in youth-to-community education — Most of these countries have had successful youth community-service programs. Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania have national youth service programs, which, through internship and attachment, have strengthened the integration of youth into their communities. Some of the most successful youth-to-community programs in Africa have been in the four target countries.
Organizational networks in the areas of health and small business — In these four countries, the organizational infrastructure for health groups (including societies for the disabled, substance abusers, children, and the elderly), producer organizations, small-business associations, etc. is very highly developed and has been on the ground for a long time.

The process

Target group

Youth 20–25 years old, with a college degree (or equivalent) in a discipline relevant to ALPID, will be given the opportunity to spearhead the program. ALPID will involve youth from Africa, Europe, and North America who are selected on the basis of their commitment to community development. Through training, the program will equip them with skills to use ICTs, expose them to an appropriate view of community-based development, and inculcate in them the relevant vision and values. ALPID will give these youth an opportunity to build on existing community systems of information, communication, and education to promote the acquisition, use, and diffusion of the new ICTs. Through the program, the youth will be better integrated into their communities.

Execution of the program

ALPID will be executed in collaboration with local NGOs that have a community-based development orientation. The participating NGOs will be selected on the basis of the following criteria:

Their experience in training youth for community development;
Their experience in managing youth development programs;
Their experience in managing youth-to-youth and youth-to-adult education programs; and
Their projected budget and systems of accountability.

Youth exchange programs

Under the program, youths from one country will have an opportunity to visit youths in other countries to share experiences. European and North American youths will get an opportunity to participate in program activities in the four countries for 3 months every year. African youths will also have an opportunity to visit information centres in Europe and North America for 1 month every year.

Training strategies

The training program will train trainers (the youth) for 1 month, and these trainers will then train various actors in the community, upgrading these actors’ information skills or enabling them to use the new ICTs. The preliminary activities of the program will include the following:

Selection of community-oriented youth — ALPID will place advertisements in youth-oriented media, inviting people 20–25 years old to apply for the program. It will select 10 youths in each country and give them 1 month of intensive training and preparation at selected sites in producer, farming, and residential communities.
Identification of communities and institutions to link up with — The program will identify which communities come close to its objectives and which youth would be suitable for such communities.

Activities

ALPID will carry out some of the activities outlined below, such as setting up management structures and target groups and assessing community needs, early in the project. The remaining activities will be ongoing throughout program execution (for a schedule of activities, see Table 1):

Setting up a management and administrative structure — It is envisaged that the program will be implemented by an essentially pan-African youth volunteer group, although ALPID will also admit young volunteers from other countries, such as Canada, for up to 3 months. ALPID will admit, train, and assign the African volunteers to community organizations for 12 months. An overlap of intakes will allow volunteers already in the program to train new ones for at least 1 month. The volunteers will be given a subsistence allowance and pocket money to live and work in the communities for the period of attachment. The ALPID Secretariat will design and put into operation a management system to operationalize the program. In every country, a small project-implementation committee will be set up to help the Secretariat mobilize local resources and government support and to give direction.
Assessing community needs and identifying local resources — Having selected the communities, ALPID will assess their information needs, together with their levels of communication and information literacy. It will then identify resource persons within the communities to act as opinion leaders or those capable of influencing the absorption of the program. ALPID will assess local facilities and their potential to use ICTs, as well as assessing community attitudes, knowledge, and outlooks of traditional and new media.
Identifying target groups and designing information packages and databases — Given the pluralistic nature of most of the communities in the target countries, ALPID will have to break down groups on the basis of their needs and levels of literacy. In the areas of health and SMEs, a clustering of groups and subgroups will make training and the meeting of needs easier. Data banks of environmental research will be established in close cooperation with research institutions.
Developing databases and LANs — In some research organizations, databases and LANs already exist, such as PADIS (Pan African Documentation and Information System), AGRIS (Agricultural Information System), and the gene bank in Arusha. The ALPID Secretariat will ensure that the youth leadership program is linked to these programs. Developing databases and LANs will be one of the most tedious and demanding of activities. With the needs identified, baseline surveys will be undertaken to establish local databases on trade and investment patterns and on research findings that have so far been inadequately used. The youth volunteers will have to establish their own websites and as much as possible build in information that is relevant to health, SMEs, and the environment. However, in all cases, efforts will be made to tap local knowledge and build it into emerging information systems and packages.
Upgrading databases — Updating the databases will be a continuous activity, calculated to keep the information current and relevant.
Experimenting with and selecting information-delivery mechanisms — The nature and type of target groups will inevitably influence the choice of mechanisms and technologies to use in the various community-based information centres. Needs are not likely to be uniform, and the special needs of disabled people will also have to be taken into account. In fact, care will be taken to meet their audio and visual needs.
Training community members on the use of ICTs — Activities will be launched to train the youths to use various ICTs. Some of the technologies will be visual, and some will be audio. In both cases, training on how to access information and interpret it will be crucial. The youths will have to develop an appropriate attitude toward adult education, and strict discipline will be encouraged.
Setting up backup systems — To ensure continuity, ALPID will set up management, administrative, and technical backup systems.
Monitoring and evaluating — The ALPID Secretariat will design mechanisms for monitoring and evaluating the program. The regular monitoring will aim at identifying the achievements and maximizing their impacts, as well as identifying obstacles and eliminating them. Capacity-building will be measured constantly, and the ALPID Secretariat will design evaluation mechanisms to adequately involve the volunteers and the communities.

Conditions for program sustainability

A few factors will be very important to ALPID’s success. Some of these are outlined below:

Policy support for ICTs — Government support for the acquisition and use of ICTs will be crucial to ALPID’s success. Such support would include deregulation, lower taxes on ICT imports, and permission to use public institutions, such as hospitals, community halls, and schools, to house the CICs. In some countries, the youth and the state have had very antagonistic relations, and the use of youth in community development is viewed as an obstacle. In all these cases, continuous governmental support for the program is essential.
Modification of attitudes and perceptions — Many public-education officials are hooked on physical vision. This has to change to a reliance on mental vision, which can be better provided using ICTs. In addition, most people have to learn to appreciate the production value, rather than the status, of ICTs.
Building on community needs and strengths — Constant needs assessment is the key to success. Information systems based on the exotic dreams of volunteers or the marketing needs of suppliers cannot remain in demand for long. The needs of the communities have to be at the centre of the program.
Adequate feedback mechanisms — Regular feedback meetings will be needed to keep the interest of all stakeholders (that is, communities, community-based organizations, and relevant government departments). These meetings could be supplemented with quarterly activity reports.
Regular, sufficient, and timely financing — Realistic budgets, timely financing, adequate bookkeeping, and a system of reasonably priced user charges are needed to ensure the sustainability of the CICs. A long-term objective should be to make the centres self-financing.
Adequate management and effective accountability — An understanding of the problems involved in voluntary services and organizations is also essential. Management, human-resources development, and motivation strategies will be needed to keep the volunteers committed to the program and make them see themselves as part of it and to ensure that the communities do not feel like guinea pigs. Systems of accountability to the communities, actors, funders, and government bodies should be designed to ensure that the support for the program grows.
Equal partnership between actors and counterparts — It is hoped that local NGOs and other organizations involved in health, youth education, and production will be very enthusiastic about teaming up with ALPID and the actors involved in the program. This enthusiasm may fade if these organizations are relegated to subsidiary roles in the process. The program should ensure that close, constant, and mutual coordination and consultation are part of its operating norms and culture. Coordinating and consultation committees should be formed in the communities and relied on to ensure that program activities conform throughout to the principles of equality and partnership.
Adjustment of program strategies — Through constant monitoring and regular evaluation, the program will recognize changing needs and adjust its strategies, after consultation between the relevant actors and their program counterparts.
Systematic and progressive commercialization — In the areas of SMEs and environmental research, the program should progressively design a system to commercialize access to, and use of, this information. During the second year, ALPID should carry out a market survey to determine whether the demand for information would be adequate to meet a substantial portion of the costs in the short run and all of the costs in the long run.

References

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Kinunda, M. 1989. Kenya: health education in schools — the ECHA project. In Tay, A.K.B., ed., Child to child in Africa: towards an open learning strategy. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; United Nations Children’s Fund, Paris, France. Digest 29.

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Tay, A.K.B., ed. 1989. Child to child in Africa: towards an open learning strategy. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; United Nations Children’s Fund, Paris, France. Digest 29.

¹ Otaala, B. 1986. Child to child in southern Africa: a report of an international workshop held in Gaborone, Botswana, 25–29 August 1986. Return

² An ongoing process by which a learner moves toward critical consciousness. Return

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