Document(s) 7 of 11

Introduction

Africa is at a crossroads. Fifteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have become multiparty democracies, and nearly 75% of African countries are opening up their political systems. Recent studies also suggest that policy reform and support for agricultural research are leading to rapid growth in the agricultural sector, the sector in which most African households, especially the poorest, earn a large share of their income.

Yet, the SSA nations still have the lowest levels of development in the world, as a result of formidable constraints: fragile environmental and natural-resource bases, the fastest growing populations in the world, a high incidence of AIDS and other debilitating diseases, low levels of education, extensive illiteracy, weak public institutions, poor infrastructure, and limited private sectors.

One factor differentiating the SSA nations from the developing countries of Asia and Latin America is the low level of private investment. In particular, direct foreign investment sometimes has been diverted from Africa because communications there are so difficult. A city like Manhattan has more telephone lines than all of Africa. Vast areas and low population densities make universal service expensive, and rural areas are typically negligibly served, if at all.

The Ugandan case

Dramatic political transitions, combined with the foundations for economic and social development now in place, offer a window of opportunity for accelerating the pace of development. Nonetheless, recent accomplishments can easily be reversed if progress is not deepened and broadened.

Satisfying an acknowledged indigenous demand for information and communication technologies (ICTs) is constrained by a number of factors. Prohibitive pricing combines with other public practices and procedures to create a disabling policy environment that discourages private-sector investment in the provision of value-added ICTs. In addition, without rural telephone service more than 70% of the population is eliminated from the pool of potential users. Slow economic growth tends to further channel demand away from new technologies, which are in ant case poorly understood by local populations.

Recent World Bank economic studies have documented the correlation between information, communication, and economic growth. The economic and social utility of electronic networks is becoming more evident in a multiplicity of sectors and development endeavours. However, many factors inhibit the proliferation of networks in Uganda, including the poor state of the telecommunications infrastructure, lack of technical skills among personnel, poverty, and an overly restrictive regulatory framework resulting from the monopolistic production of information technology (IT) infrastructure.

How can ICTs and their development help the country? Ready access to global market information can promote broad-based, sustainable development in Africa by supporting the twin pillars of African economies: smallholder agriculture and small businesses. Improved electronic access to international investment would help African economies diversify through an expanding private sector. A growing private sector would provide off-farm employment, deepen the roles of the middle class, generate indigenous resources, and boost revenues for governments to invest in education, health, and environmental management.

ICT development prospects

Uganda has seen a vibrant, grass-roots evolution of electronic networking during the 1990s. Sending and receiving e-mail are possible from almost every country on the continent, often through FidoNet. Information can be exchanged between FidoNet and the Internet, the de facto standard network and the backbone of growing communication systems. Not one place, the Internet is, instead, a web of thousands of interconnected computer networks formed by wire, fibre optics, and even wireless links, such as radio frequencies and microwaves. Routes that sit on local networks electronically check data packets, accepting those with local addresses and forwarding those destined for other networks.

However, FidoNet uses a different protocol than the Internet. Fido is a batch-based, store-and-forward system, whereas the Internet operates in real time. As a result, Fido technology cannot offer access to the growing array of information services available on the information and communication systems of the region. Increasingly, African nations are establishing alternative connections to the Internet. Already, a few SSA countries have public access to full Internet connectivity. Planning is under way to bring Internet connectivity to other nations in Africa, with more than 20 million United States dollars (USD) in international assistance having been made available for ICT infrastructure and training.

The sustainability of ICT investment in Africa rests on the private sector’s ability to provide rural areas with Internet services and on there being a user base broad enough to make service commercially feasible. Uganda has both. Because operators have not had public subsidies for electronic communications, indigenous service providers have had to establish themselves with cost-recovery strategies in place from inception, building a solid foundation for future development.

ICTs and the need for information

The problem of poor telecommunication infrastructure affects Uganda at every level and across every sector, from the senior policymaker to the small-scale rural farmer. The effects are so pervasive because, without reliable means of communication, Africans lack the information they need to make decisions and exercise some control over events.

In the agricultural sector, lack of information acts as a constraint on growth because it limits factor productivity. Better information about markets in other countries could lead to a larger base of demand and a higher volume of sales for individual farmers. Improved access to information could increase efficiency and productivity by enabling farmers to better plan response farming (farming choices based on trends in demand), crop choices, and inventories. At the regional level, better information and improved channels of communication could promote market integration, giving Ugandans access to a consumer pool large enough to generate economies of scale, which would enable this sector to compete internationally. In addition, better access to information from researchers and extension agents could lead farmers to adopt improved agricultural technologies and processes.

Information would play a central role in the completion of relief activities, for instance. Efforts to cost-effectively coordinate, manage, and anticipate emergency relief efforts in the country are hampered by the lack of reliable, readily accessible information on existing and potential food needs and supplies. Access to ICTs could provide a new means to improve the efficiency of relief efforts. For example, during the last few years, the World Food Programme (WFP), one of the largest movers of international food aid, has begun to electronically exchange donor food-aid delivery schedules. WFP has also begun to electronically send shipping instructions and standardized pipeline-analysis reports to concerned users. ICTs have made these developments possible.

Other knowledge-based service providers, such as teachers and medical workers, are constrained in their efforts to deliver up-to-date services to their clients because of Uganda’s poor access to current research findings. The implementation of new technologies like distance learning and teleconsulting may enable knowledge workers in Uganda to overcome the constraints of their geographic isolation. By the same token, Uganda’s planners, policymakers, and managers would be better able to collect or use information to improve their decision-making and, in turn, their country’s ability to compete for the world’s scarce resources.

The productivity of human-capital investments in Uganda is also seriously constrained by poor access to information. Researchers and scientists become isolated from current developments in their fields. Without reasonable communications, researchers lose the kind of interchange with their peers they enjoyed during their training abroad.

The extent of information systems in Uganda

An information system comprises social structures employing various technologies to acquire, process, and disseminate information. A particular technology consists of a specific technique and the corresponding knowledge and social support required to take advantage of it.

ICTs are an important part of the enabling environment of any economy: for example, loan officers seek accurate data on rural business activities to judge the merits of business proposals; traders seek timely data on prices to know where to send buying agents; and commercial enterprises in distant towns need to hear news of tenders to keep pace with their urban competitors. All make extensive use of ITs, although perhaps not the most sophisticated ones. As there is often confusion about what ICTs actually cover, it is useful to illustrate the range of systems commonly found in Africa in general and in Uganda in particular.

Consider the system commonly used by business people of means in the fast-evolving private sector of Uganda. Sophisticated networks of commercial vehicle drivers and trusted agents visually inspect prices in remote markets and question the producers directly, then report this news to the traders (typically via mobile cellular phone), who then process the information and determine where to send their container fleets.

The traders could save time by making better use of electronic communications. A trader might use a telephone to contact a trusted colleague for remote price information. The structure of the trader’s network adjusts slightly, thus obviating the need for data transmission through commercial vehicle drivers. This reduction in the number of hands through which the information must pass on its way from farm gate to trader presumably enhances its reliability, arguably improving the information system, at least from the trader’s perspective.

The next step might be to have a government service in place to broadcast news of prices and supplies as observed by extension agents. This would drastically alter the nature of the information system. Traders would then rely less on their private networks of associates, but only to the extent that the public service addressed their specific needs.

The introduction of technologies to retrieve electronic information, such as Internet applications, places control of electronic information in the traders’ hands, once again, and in a form with significant economies of transmission and scale. As well, libraries of information could be developed for a broad audience, queried, and selectively transmitted to traders in a useful form.

Today, Uganda already has a fairly complete range of ICTs. It is the recent introduction of Internet technologies that has attracted particular attention. Uganda is now a continental leader in advanced Internet-compatible ICTs, with a competitive market providing some of the lowest prices on the continent for access to the Internet. Only the problem of the “last mile” between service providers and information consumers constrains Uganda’s further progress. This last-mile problem is more than just a result of poor telephone lines: it’s also a matter of telephone penetration, which ultimately has to do with poverty.

Internet technologies are, of course, only part of what will likely be a more comprehensive information system. Which system-related technology is “more effective”? This depends entirely on the context. Other things being equal, the World Wide Web is arguably a more attractive technology than hand-carried notes. Other things rarely being equal, traders might continue to find value in an information system that relies on portable paper.

Generally, introducing the web in a setting where there are no computers, telephones, or even electricity probably makes little sense. Where computers are already in place, however, or where they are already being acquired for other purposes, the addition of Internet technologies to enhance the speed and reliability of information transmission systems is a logical next step.

A number of options would be suitable for activities where information is quite valuable or where the costs can be distributed over a large number of users.

Very small aperture terminal (VSAT) satellite systems offer the possibility of reasonably high bandwidth service (allowing more traffic along telecommunication systems, greater access to the Internet). Local Internet service providers in Kampala use VSAT systems. A satellite system installed in a remote rural town can easily provide the entire town with telephone and Internet access. Starcom, a local telecoms service provider in Uganda, for example, has introduced Internet service in Jinja. Equipment can cost as much as 100 000 USD per site, but it can serve a large number of customers. The continued feasibility of the Internet service, with retail prices set quite low by African standards, suggests that one can recover costs by distributing them over a sufficiently large number of customers (about 200 people) and make the service affordable.

Uganda is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the new technologies that marry Internet communication protocols with high-frequency radio data communications. Such groups as Bushnet and WFP have developed and used this technology. The promise is low-cost access to e-mail in remote rural locations without electricity or telephone infrastructure, and it appears that the technology delivers on this promise. The cost per site for equipment, in addition to that of a computer and electrical power supply, is about 8 000 USD. The message cost is nil. The commercial feasibility of the system is still to be documented. Should it prove to be a self-sustaining venture, it may be offered to private entrepreneurs who could offer services to users in rural locations.

An emphasis is being placed on the role of the private sector and private entrepreneurs as providers of information services. This approach is inherently sustainable from the market perspective. It is ultimately more sustainable than other approaches, such as an emphasis on project-funded service providers, because a strong and competitive local service-provider industry tends to lower unit costs. The relatively low recurring costs for information services are simply integrated into the ordinary operating expenses of the organizations that use the services, just as the costs for telephones and electricity are.

Problems outside Kampala

Typical examples of information problems in towns outside Kampala include the following:

Businesses fail to receive timely news of tenders offered in Kampala;
Firms seeking capital fail to hear of visits by investors or are unavailable to present their portfolios when requests are received by agencies in Kampala;
Banks are unable to secure timely information about funds available from central accounts in Kampala;
Traders and other small companies are simply out of the loop for developing strategic business relationships, which are found more frequently in Kampala; and
Project coordinators are unable to monitor activities in these towns, and their staff are unable to remain as long as they might if they were able to use e-mail to remotely manage a portion of their affairs at their Kampala offices.

YOCO–ICT: a hypothetical coordination centre in East Africa

Understanding the concept

The underlying principles of the Youth Leadership Program for Information and Communication Technologies and Community Development in Africa (ALPID) are appropriate for the design of a meaningful field-practice program in East Africa. Youth are idealistic, motivated, and responsive to challenges. Furthermore, as a result of fund scarcity and the need to avoid duplication of effort, ICT-based and information activities that require support must now address specific objectives on a project-by-project basis. Strategy is of the essence, and an increasingly important ingredient will be the participation of youth in the implementation and consolidation of these plans. ALPID’s approach needs to match the realities within the donor agencies or funding countries, which are reluctant to finance core and administrative activities. Even though there are manifestations of donor fatigue and few tangible results, there is an appreciation within the donor community of the value added to these projects by youth.

Another important consideration is the need to apply meaningful parameters in measuring the relevance and impacts of ICT-based projects. Increasingly, donors are keen to ensure that their programs can adapt to changing dynamics on the ground and show flexibility and cost-effectiveness within the scope of their terms of reference. Coordinated assessment and evaluation mechanisms need to be revisited for the tasks at hand. Given that a growing proportion of today’s civil society consists of youth, it would be most undiscerning not to include them in the design and implementation of programs that will affect their lives.

To show how ALPID might take account of these considerations, this section describes a hypothetical coordination centre in East Africa, to be run by youth undergraduates and supervised by young professionals. The centre, the Youth Community for Information and Communication Technology (YOCO–ICT), would build on existing informal networks in all university settings. Its objective would be to strengthen the operational capability of selected ICT-based setups, including securing donor goodwill as part of its general long-term commitment to strengthen the links between its target countries. Its activities should be innovative and replicable, have maximum leverage, and contribute identifiable qualitative and quantitative value added — in other words, be based on youth.

Although East Africa has taken undeniably positive steps to ensure lasting links among its ICT-based associations, it still has a need for coordination of activities at all levels. These activities should also be fundamentally unifying in character, and their success should be measurable in terms of specific collaborative initiatives in agriculture, research and development, and science and technology. Although YOCO is hypothetical, it derives from an intimate knowledge of the design and implementation of two youth projects — the University Students Attachment Programme (USAP) and the Mesh Mentoring Model Programme (Mesh Mentors, for short) — described later in this chapter.

Funding and survival of YOCO

Tightened donor budgets notwithstanding, we have real reason to hope. When turned to constructive ends, YOCO-led initiatives or ones designed by intercountry teams would offer powerful incentives for intervention to develop meaningful strategies. A country such as Uganda has the required infrastructural base, as is evident from a recent Acacia study (Musisi 1997). However, the use of ICTs will respond to the reality on the ground. The beauty of the ALPID concept is that the natural charm and enthusiasm of youth will be enhanced by its person-to-person approach.

YOCO would need to create an ever-growing pool of expertise, resources, and experience to be a locus for the entrepreneurial spirit now characteristic of diversifying economic and investment trends in the region. The challenge is great. However, YOCO, in its commitment to see initiatives commence, would aim not only to outlive the transition but also to spearhead high-quality project development and support.

In this scenario, YOCO would be willing to act as guarantor of its own portfolio of projects and allow its growing track record of more or less successful initiatives to attract a wider partnership with donors already working with ICTs at the primary, secondary, or tertiary level. YOCO would undoubtedly draw together a body of donors, given its substantive focus on interests common to other donor-funded initiatives. The emerging body of sponsors and functional advisers would drive the building of that wider circle of associated concerns.

Recent funding trends as a world of opportunity

To ensure the longevity of its own impact within the region and to ensure continued funding, YOCO must have a credible potential for self-sustainability and a critical mass of appeal. YOCO’s activities and programs must indeed be relevant, but they must also fit into the donors’ “nicheing” of funds for the region.

Ideally, YOCO would be centred in Kampala or in Dar es Salaam. Gone are the days of institution strengthening. For the longevity of this activity, it would be more appropriate to consider critical issues and provide for a centralized secretariat. The strategy would be to strike a balance between satisfying the wide array of donor concerns and achieving specific targets. The assumption is that communities in developing countries are the best judge of their own needs and excesses and their own strengths and frailties, whether this is reflected directly or by proxy. YOCO would need to pay heed to the constituencies it assisted, to re-create in itself the same “regionalization” of resources and expertise. It would provide participants with a real partnership of input and real ownership of the projects and their objectives. YOCO would help coordinate and respond to these missives.

The participatory nature of YOCO’s projects points to the importance of building consensus on the applied usefulness of its activity within an accepted process of change, which would, in turn, address a critical sustainability issue. For instance, one can expect to continually witness in the next few years a considerable upsurge of gender-equity concerns voiced at all levels, with the emphasis they deserve. It is in this vein that Mesh Mentors is recommended as a possible player: in this program, girls who are preparing to enter male-dominated professions are provided with role models — young women who are already working in those professions.

YOCO’s first step would be to build partnerships with parties (individuals and institutions) with parallel interests and activities. YOCO would then seek to attract the concerted and professional contribution of project designers, program leaders, and community leaders. Cooperation garnered from governments, businesses, and private voluntary agencies would be needed to build systems of innovative support that outlive the program’s original mandate and spread from one country to another. YOCO would be an appropriate model for developing guidelines for collaboration.

A crucial question is whether YOCO’s institutional framework would be cohesive enough to trigger, nurture, sustain, and re-create innovative models and replicate them as appropriate. ALPID’s innovative approach in using youth as critical players in the design and implementation of community-based ICT projects would be an important part of the answer to this question. YOCO’s evolution into an institute-like body would guarantee it the capacity to positively influence an ever-growing variety of community ICT workers. Granting an attendance certificate would make the process more academic, which would be attractive to youth and increase the program’s credibility among employers, provincial administrations, and government officials, thus increasing interest in the program and support for it.

No matter what else YOCO managed to accomplish, it would need to carefully safeguard the unity of the whole while maintaining an organizational base to strengthen fledgling ICT-based initiatives and help target and follow through on various funding sources outside of the main YOCO institutional objective. A multiplicity of initiatives would thus be possible without impinging on the purity and harmony of the founding spirit of YOCO.

Supporting youth development through
professional internships — the USAP model

The skills needed to run and champion these initiatives need to be constantly enhanced. A critical and highly effective method to ensure this is systematically giving the youth on-the-job training in a real work environment. This in turn, will help the youth expand their organizational skills, time- and resource-management skills, etc. An experiment conducted over 5 years at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) is a case in point. The main points are described below.

USAP is a women’s empowerment project of ICIPE Science Press. The project was established in 1993 to serve the dual purpose of providing on-the-job training and reducing the number of permanent administrative staff at the press. This program takes on university students during their vacation, for a period rarely exceeding 6 months. The aims of the program are to expose students to the production of various books, journals, newsletters, brochures, etc.; and to give students an opportunity to gain work experience and learn various skills.

Operation

USAP selects university students from various faculties who have the potential to contribute to the work at the press and places them in various departments, after intensive job training by the preceding group of “USAPers.” Thereafter, the students are involved in marketing, soliciting, distribution, production liaison, mailing, and subscription activities. USAPers prepare comprehensive procedural manuals and write notes-to-file, very useful communication channels, as they smooth the flow of work. The design of USAP allows the students to work without supervision. Weekly meetings with the manager are feedback channels on tasks assigned to each person.

All USAPers can attend professional and personal development classes, which help them develop as all-round people. At the end of a full course, they are ready to give the same course to other students, or anyone else. So far, the major outlet has been to annual rural promotion projects that are normally conducted by university students. USAPers have proved to be very resourceful and often prepare the educational materials on their own, with assistance from the professionals.

Mesh Mentors

A youth program can survive only if the ideal that forms its spine is accessible, attractive, and attainable. One such ideal is being a role model, in the sense of being a “feeling” professional. This is the thinking behind the success of Mesh Mentors as a model. This program was provoked by the need to design meaningful cocurricular activities for undergraduate women. It was generally accepted that in our public universities, women were without meaningful and substantive cocurricular activities and that undergraduate women were hard pressed to find formative activities to equip themselves with all the necessary professional skills upon graduation. One solution was to involve them centrally in the educational dynamics of high-school girls.

I have carried out considerable research regarding the feasibility of a capacitation model for women, using undergraduate or, at any rate, newly graduated women as resource persons and management trainees. Having managed a number of projects with the help of such students, I found it is possible to involve interns in a considerable number of labour-intensive initiatives, such as book fairs and rural presentations. Training is given to the girls, with the hope that they in turn will later train adolescents in communication skills, study techniques, personal hygiene, and health. An added benefit is that they relate better, given the age proximity.

In Kenya, the consortium — the Mesh Mentors — now involves more than 250 undergraduate and graduate women, at various levels of professional maturity, from all the main career areas. In Uganda, up to 154 students are involved (The Crusader 1998).

Following the Fourth World Conference on Women, it was suggested that the greatest way to empower a woman is to give her the knowledge and skills to assure herself of a significant career path. Many have stressed the need for relevant role models for women entering professional life, who, although determined to be successful, lack a point of reference and adequate moral support. The provision of role models creates meaningful communication channels, as people often emulate their senior role model. This desire to empathize is particularly strong in young people, whose natural admiration for senior role models has been the basis of the Mesh Mentors program.

This program seeks to enhance the horizontal and vertical links between professional women in influential positions and those in the making. To “mesh” is to link up in a framework that is tighter and more “commitment based” than a mere associative network. Whereas one may associate easily with one’s peers at the same level (that is, horizontally), one needs a platform from which one can positively influence one’s juniors (that is, vertically). Moreover, the crisscross of networked groups that the Kianda school has linked together introduces innovative ways of using university students as resource people to create more effective communication models in large institutions.

The Mesh Mentors program has been informally operational for the last 4 years (at the time of writing). Various groups are considering funding certain aspects of it. For instance, its potential to serve as an important backup for rural outreach programs for women farmers may be of interest to a nongovernmental organization for use with its own farmers in Western and Central provinces of Kenya.

Mesh Mentoring member groups

Senior professionals coordinate and lead all the groups participating in the Mesh Mentors program. These groups are the following:

Women in Science — The work of this group is to invite young girls to enter traditionally male careers in science. It has been particularly successful because the mentors are top undergraduate science students and near in age to that of the girls. This group has also injected vitality into science clubs in girls’ schools, and the young women in the Women in Science group have acted as technology agents to ensure that inventions developed by the girls in these clubs reach scientific and technological practicability. Women in Science also seeks to network poorer schools with ones with better facilities, to benefit the potential scientists.
Women in Management, Women in Law — Women in Management is a group of students who (with the help of professionals in the areas of economics, management, insurance, banking, capital investment, commerce, etc.) conduct basic management courses for high-school girls, give simple classes on the rudiments of bookkeeping to small-scale entrepreneurs in rural areas, and provide tuition courses for slow-learning students in poorer schools. Women in Law or law students carry out activities similar to those of their management counterparts, but with a bias toward the legal empowerment of rural women in the region. They currently provide legal advice to the other groups at the Mesh study centre.
Young Professionals — The Young Professionals group comprises the working professionals who, on graduation, have benefited in some way from any of the above activities. The Young Professionals’ main activities include professional mentoring of high-school girls, especially those studying technical or traditionally male-dominated subjects. The Young Professionals have considerably increased legal-rights awareness among women’s entrepreneurial groups. The ever-increasing alumnae from the other groups constitute a pool of willing and dynamic youth, whose contacts and continued links with their juniors guarantee fairly high standards for the professional sessions under their care. This group is the backbone of the Mesh Mentors program, as the students in this group have worked in several outreach activities and already possess considerable organizational skills. In this group, former undergraduates, on completion of their studies, form an important resource base for ex bono mentoring and voluntary professional assistance to women of every cadre. Mesh Mentors is already a replicable model and serves young women’s professional empowerment. It could also facilitate management sustainability with a format similar to that of USAP, because an important aspect of any group activity is the existing affordable, relevant, and appropriate management expertise.

References

Crusader, The. 1998. Campus girls seek change. The Crusader, 28 Jan.

Musisi, C. 1997. Acacia Uganda strategy: technology and infrastructure options for ICTs. Paper presented at the Acacia Uganda National Strategy Workshop, 8–10 Dec, Nile International Conference Centre, Kampala, Uganda. International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, ON, Canada. 33 pp.

Document(s) 7 of 11