The Role of IT in International Development
This talk took place on 19th November 2009. Download the audio or read the transcript.
Mobile communications and the internet have the potential to empower the world's poorest people. But a lack of knowledge and reliable infrastructure has led to a "digital divide" between rich and poor.
In this session, which assumed no knowledge of the technologies involved, we looked at projects in developing countries that have both provided communities with appropriate technology and helped to spread knowledge amongst them.
Martin Burchell, who led the session, works with Aptivate - a Cambridge-based not-for-profit IT consultancy that focuses on international development. He shared his experiences of providing training to young Zambian women and helping them to set up a rural internet café, and working with Kenyan university staff to make the most of their limited internet connections.
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The audio from this talk is available in three parts in Ogg Vorbis and MP3 formats. The introduction is missing and some parts of the audio have been edited. See the transcript for details. Apologies for the background noise.
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| Part 2 | Ogg Vorbis (9MB) | MP3 (6MB) |
| Part 3 | Ogg Vorbis (4MB) | MP3 (3MB) |
Transcript
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3Part 1
The first couple of minutes are missing from the recording. Martin begins by talking about the Humanitarian Centre in Cambridge
It's actually in Fenner's Sports Centre, funnily enough. We're using some rooms donated by the University of Cambridge, who felt that they wanted to be involved with it... and the Humanitarian Centre grew out of development and relief organisations working together in Cambridge and they wanted a place where they could meet together and also make facilities available to organisations working in this area. There's about 30 participating organisations in the Humanitarian Centre and not all of them are resident. There's only about five resident organisations that are actually using the rooms on a daily basis. There's ourselves, Engineers Without Borders, Menelik Education and Kiwanja, which I'm going to mention a bit later on as well. But for the other organisations, it's somewhere where they can hold meetings, they can use the photocopier and there's a lot of other activities going on as well. There's talks in the evenings. They run international development courses. I really recommend, if you haven't looked at them then it's worth having a look at their website or maybe visiting for a talk or something like that.
So, Aptivate (the organisation I work for) is a not-for-profit IT consultancy. We're one of the largest organisations in the Humanitarian Centre and we have about seven full-time staff. But we're assisted by volunteers and all of our paid staff were once at one time a volunteer. So when I started working at Aptivate in 2007, I volunteered for three months before I joined the payroll. And a lot of people ask me where we get our funding from. Well, we do quite a lot of consultancy where, say, a charity or something like that will pay us on a daily basis a fixed rate to do some work. But... less often now... but... one of the projects I'm going to talk about, that we did in Kenya was grant funded. So we did our own fundraising with an organisation in Kenya and then... because we felt that this was something that we wanted to do and we went ahead and did it.
So, yeah what do we know already. Sometimes the person at the front of the room isn't the one who knows the most about the subject. So... I thought it would be useful just to start off with a few questions to get people talking. So... I have three questions and... maybe if we, you know if, once I've explained this, you could just get together with the person next to you and see if you can come up with some answers.
The first question is "What is IT?" Now, we asked this question when we went to Zambia for the training project that I'm going to explain later on and then we listened to fifteen presentations on the I stands for Information and the T stands for Technology. So I'll give you that as a starter. The I does stand for Information and the T does stand for Technology. But you also hear ICT mentioned, which is Information and Communication Technology and I'm going to use those interchangeably because a lot of IT is about communications and mobile phones are effectively small computers and a lot of computers are now... have now got capabilities of mobile phones.
The second question is "What is International Development?" and that's quite a broad term. There's no right or wrong answer so it would be interesting to get just some ideas about that. And maybe to help you with that one, the third question is "How is International Development Distinct from Relief Aid?".
So is that OK? I don't know, maybe five minutes? and then I'll make a big list on the flipchart.
The discussion and writing up have been edited out but here are the flipchart sheets.
So before I start talking about what Aptivate's been doing, I thought I'd talk about some of the projects that you might have heard of in the news. I don't know... first of all, has anybody heard recently on the news, any projects to do with IT and International Development? Any stories you've read? It doesn't matter if you haven't. I've got lots to share, so... I mean you might have heard of some of these things that I'm going to talk about.
I don't know if that means anything to anybody. This is the One Laptop Per Child Project. This is a non-profit organisation and I'll just read you their mission statement from their website... "To create educational opportunities to the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning." And the laptops are actually that colour of green. Now I have some reservations about this project. I don't think this project fits in with some of the things we've talked about earlier. I'm not sure that handing out computers, particularly to children is such a brilliant idea. Although I'm happy to discuss it with people in the question time. But this is quite a high-profile project doing things with IT in International Development.
And this is a similar project by Intel. They've got their own cheap laptop that's designed for these kinds of environments. I mean... well... Intel of course are a commercial company but they've got projects with certain governments providing classrooms with computers and I think... I don't think there's actually anything wrong with providing appropriate technology. Some of these low cost computers I think are a good thing and especially if they're adapted to the environment then that's great, but I sometimes... some of these mission statements don't fit in with my own idea of international development.
So mobile phones in developing countries. There's a lot in the news about that at the moment. There's a report that the UN published just this year, which says that in developing countries there's 48 mobile subscriptions for every 100 people and part of the reason for this is a lot of the mobiles are on pay-as-you-go. I think if there wasn't pay-as-you-go, where you pay up front for your mobile phone usage, then mobile phones wouldn't have taken off so much in developing countries and in Africa 90% of all phones are prepaid. I mean, if your phone is prepaid you don't have to produce an ID to get on a contract and that sort of thing. And handsets themselves, although they might be twenty dollars for a mobile phone handset, even if you're earning a dollar a day, a lot of people are finding it worth saving up to buy a handset. And, I mean just to give an example in Uganda... Uganda has a population of 32 million people. 85% of those people live in rural areas and a quarter of the population has a mobile phone and there's thousands of street vendors, for those people who don't have their own mobile phone, they sell the service of allowing other people to use their mobile phone and there's a lot of enterprise around this. There's a lot of people setting up their own businesses repairing phones and there's 100,000 people according to this report who are working in Uganda in the mobile phone sector. And Uganda was also the,,, it was the first African country to have more mobile phones that landlines.
So just to give you some idea of the impact of mobile phones, this is actually Samfya in Zambia, where I'm going to talk about a bit later. Now the local mobile phone operator, Zain, they offer to paint the shops for them. They go to the shop owner and say would you like to have your shop painted for free, and they say why not and they end up with their shop painted in the Zain colours, which is light blue and pink. So all the shops, regardless of whether they sell mobile phones or not... all of the shops or... so most of the shops are that colour.
Frontline SMS... this is the brainchild of a man called Ken Banks who... his organisation is called Kiwanja and he is also based at the Humanitarian Centre and his product, or one of his products is this thing called Frontline SMS and it describes itself as "A free, large-scale text messaging solution for NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations) and non-profit organisations" and it's quite simple. You have a laptop computer and you connect your mobile phone to the laptop computer and other people can send text messages to that mobile phone to get information. So, for example there's a project that's using this software in Aceh where coffee farmers, if they want to know the price of coffee, they can send a text message from their mobile phones, miles away from where this laptop is, with the word "COFFEE" maybe. The laptop, maybe it's connected to the internet, has downloaded the coffee prices overnight (or something like that) and it can send a text message back to the farmer saying what the coffee prices are. And this software has really taken off and I went to a talk by Ken Banks... and I really recommend that if you get to hear him speak, he's really an interesting person to speak to. And he says he doesn't really know what his software is being used for unless people tell him. It's up on his website. People can download the software, put it on their laptop, they just get their mobile phone, put a local SIM card in the mobile phone and people have taken this software and they've extended it to do other things. I mean, I've just got a few examples here. It's been used in Nigeria for monitoring elections. It's been used in Afghanistan for sending security alerts to people in the field. It's been used in Malawi for coordinating health care workers and collecting data out in the field.
I'll move on to the next project, which is M-PESA. Has anybody heard of M-PESA?
Someone in the audience suggested it might be something to do with money.
Yes, did you just interpret that from the name? So this was another Cambridge company actually called Sagentia who developed this for Vodafone and they received sponsorship by DFID (the Department for International Development). And it was first used in Kenya. And, as you say it's a banking system but without any banks and what happens is... if, say I'm working away remotely and I want to send some money to Brian, I go to my local M-PESA agent, give him the cash, or her, and my M-PESA account is then credited with some virtual money and then I receive a text message and the agent receives a text message to say that that's happened. And then for me to make my transfer to Brian, I enter Brian's phone number on my phone, the amount I want to send him and a PIN and, then I receive a text message.
A minute or so of the recording was lost here while the tapes were changed but Martin went on to explain the rest of the transfer process, which is described on the Safaricom website
Part 2
I'm going to start by talking about some of the projects we've been doing at Aptivate and this is the first project that we did with Camfed, a girls' education charity. And Camfed's main work has been sponsoring girls through their education - raising funds for them, paying for their school uniform, books and so on. And they came to us because they wanted to measure the impact of their work. They had been supporting girls in certain areas of four African countries and they wanted to know if they were having an effect and what sort of effect they were having. So, they wanted to survey a number of people - the students that they were supporting, the parents, teachers and also representatives from their local networks, their local alumni networks. And they came to us saying well, we want to use these things - they're palmtop computers. They're quite similar to mobile phones and nowadays a lot of palmtop computers can make phone calls and a lot of mobile phones are palmtop computers. They're also called PDAs.
And, they said "We want to use these for our surveys" and we said "Well, why don't you just use paper. Isn't that better?" because although we're a technology organisation, we don't want to just use technology for technology's sake. And, they said well... we actually... if we were to use paper then it would involve this much. And 2000 surveys - that's the amount of paper they would be using. instead of using... well... several of these. I think we produced a field kit with a laptop computer, and six of these and we programmed up these small computers with the surveys, with all the questions they were going to ask. And the questions, I mean they're quite sensible questions - things like trying to work out if girls are missing classes at school, if they're caring for anybody at home, asking questions about HIV/AIDS awareness and so on. And we also... well they provided translations in African languages and we programmed the palmtop computers so that all the surveys were in the local languages.
So this is in Tanzania, the field trial of this system and as well as doing the work of programming the palmtop computers we also trained some local trainers so that they could both do the surveys themselves and then further train other trainers themselves.
And I mean you can see there there's a sort of a thing like a pen there that you can use to write on the computer screen and you can... a lot of the questions were sort of just multiple choice where it was a matter of ticking boxes and I mean occasionally they'd need to write something - you've got a little keyboard on there that you can use.
And one thing we hadn't really thought about that came about was actually... I mean there's the obvious advantages of storing your information on the computer in that it's a lot easier to collate your data and process it at the end. So that you can get your statistics, put it into a form that's easily then processed for evaluation and so on... Also the computer software, it allows you to do things like... you can follow the logic of a survey so if for example the survey says if you answered "a" then go to question 20 or whatever, the computer's doing that for you and the person asking the questions isn't sort of ruffling through their bit of paper and trying to work out where to go next. And it also, where questions have to be answered, it'll warn you if you haven't filled in a question and that kind of thing. And one thing that we hadn't really anticipated... because the computer screen is quite small, it means that the person asking the questions has a lot more eye contact with the person they're talking to. So that was a sort of happy side effect, I suppose.
So I'm going to talk now about journals. Do people know how expensive journals are for academic institutions? Any idea? I didn't really know this until yesterday... I just looked up... and I found a... these might be slightly old but this came from an American university and I think the figures are from about 2004 so maybe a bit out of date. But it said that a year's subscription to Brain Research journal for that institution was $21,269, which is more than a new Volkswagen Beetle. They actually have a sort of little test to say which is more expensive but they're slightly loaded questions. Surface Science journal is $12,981, which is more than a plasma television. Brain Behaviour and Evolution journal $1,554, which is more than a diamond ring... in their example and the cheapest one they quote is economic theory, which is $1060, about the price of a laptop. So, I mean journals even for institutions in rich countries are expensive. And you can imagine for developing countries it's an impossibility. So the World Health Organisation set up this project called HINARI, which is to give access to institutions in developing countries, free or reduced price access to journals. And they set up this website in their spare time. And if you're from an institution in a developing country, you can go to this website and log on and then you can see which journals you have access to. Now we got involved with this because it didn't used to look like this. I don't have a "before" picture. But we found when we were on a field trip in Ghana a few years ago, we went round various institutions and watched people using this system. And although it was put together very... it was very well intentioned by the World Health Organisation it was impossible to use. People were already on very low bandwidth connections, which meant that their internet access was very slow, pages would take a long time to load, but it wouldn't actually tell them whether they were logged in to the system. It wouldn't tell them what journals they had access to. So they'd go through various pages, clicking through, find a journal article they wanted to read and then the last page would say "Sorry, you don't have access to this journal". So we improved this... I mean it's still not ideal but we improved this by adding these sort of signs here saying which journals you have access to and which ones you don't have access to. It's not... I mean this isn't a huge technological solution but it does make a difference if you're on a very slow connection.
So, moving on to Zambia and this was a project I was directly involved in this time last year and in April earlier this year. And this was another project with Camfed and it was an entrepreneurial training event run by Camfed, the idea being that they would take 150 young women, who had just left school, divide them into project groups... into fifteen project groups and the project groups were based on the area of Zambia they were living in. And the groups would then form small enterprises and they would do their own market research, see what kind of enterprises they could do and there were people leading them through the various processes of starting a business. And our job was to give them basic IT training and each group was assigned a mentor and what we were told initially was that they needed to be able to email their mentors, to keep in touch with them and so on. So all 150 of the girls were taught basic emails skills and, I mean for a lot of them this was the first time they had seen a computer and although we were sort of tasked with teaching them email, they really got to learn to use the keyboard and the mouse and the screen and so on so it was... I suppose they kind of learned those things on the way. And within each of the enterprise groups there were two of what they called ambassadors. And the ambassadors received extra IT training. And the idea would be that they could teach the other people in their group what they had learned. And on top of that, we trained four young women, a bit older than the ones who had just left school, maybe in their early twenties. We showed them how to set up and run a computer network and at the end of the course, which was... initially in December, which was three weeks, we set up a brand new resource centre in the town of Samfya and those four would then be running that resource centre and it would be open initially to the Camfed... the young women from Camfed who lived in the area and also the other... the Camfed-supported girls.
So for those of you who know Zambia, this is where we were. We were in the town of Lubwe, which is up in the... up in that corner there. Near the border with the DRC. And Samfya where we set up the resource centre, is the nearest town.
So to give you an idea of what Lubwe is like, this is the bustling town centre.
This is sort of typical of the houses in the area. When we were talking to the IT trainers about the sort of houses we lived in, they said "Do any of you have straw roofs on your houses?" and we said "Oh, only the very rich people have straw roofs on their houses." and they found that a bit strange.
So I thought I'd talk a bit more about some of the technical challenges of setting up a rural IT centre and I thought this would be another opportunity for some contributions, just to wake everyone up a bit. So can you have a guess at what some of the technical challenges might have been, in setting up a rural IT centre?
The writing up has been edited out but here is the flipchart sheet.
OK so electricity so I suppose that's one thing. That's a diesel generator. Actually in... when we were out there last December for the training, we had power probably, oh... well we were using the generator most of the time during the day, because as you say it's not just having a... some power... it's not just having all the power or no power. Sometimes you have some power or sometimes it goes off and it's very unpredictable.
So yes quite often we were having our evening meal by candlelight, which is good because you don't see all of the insects that are in the vicinity.
So one of the solutions to the problems of power and also I suppose the climate, sort of... the humidity and so on was our choice of technology for the computers and we used these here, these are small computers. They're made by a company called Aleutia. And you connect the screen and the network, mouse keyboard to one of those and you get a... you get quite a slow running but still usable computer but where these really come into their own is if you connect several of these together to a server, a bigger computer more like a standard desktop and you can have one server connected to about... maybe about ten of these and that will give you a much faster experience. The advantage of these is that they have not moving parts. There's no hard drive in there so any dust that gets in there isn't going to have any effect on that. It's much easier to maintain as well because these are all running off the one big computer, if you want to upgrade the software, you just do it once on the main computer and everyone's using the same... effectively using the same computer. The power consumption of these - these are 8W, which compared to a desktop computer, I mean I think mine at home is something between 60W and 100W. So if you've got a a number of these connected together in a classroom... I think we measured our entire classroom of 18 of these, the screens that we had attached to them and the server (the main computer) and the projector (we used a projector like this for the lessons) and it all came to 1500W which is about the same as a domestic kettle. And although we did investigate this, but it wasn't going to be appropriate at the time, but you could use solar power to power that kind of classroom. And we'd certainly like to investigate that in the future.
So yes, the weather again. The rainy season in December and... according to some people this was what was causing the power to disappear because the poles that carried the power were slipping into the ground or something or falling over. There was another story that was it was because the copper mines that were consuming all the power and when the copper mines weren't doing so well in April, then we had more power. I don't quite know who was right there.
I seem to have chosen a number of photos with me in them and this wasn't deliberate, just because I wasn't on the other end of the camera so... but this small device down here... this one here... that small device there that's a satellite receiver and you can use that anywhere in the world. You just... I mean this appears quite small. You can take it out and point it at your nearest satellite and you've got internet and I think it's used by mainly journalists working in the field, that kind of thing because it's so portable and so on. It does have it's disadvantages in that it's very expensive. It costs seven dollars per megabyte, which to give you some idea of what that is. I guess a large digital photo can easily be one megabyte or maybe if you're watching a video, maybe a ten megabyte video, I mean that's seventy dollars. So it's not really practical to use this for anything long-term. And we took it out with us first in December because we were going to have some... sort of very limited internet access. And we just thought we'd give the students a flavour of the internet and that would be enough but it is very expensive.
So this is what they've actually got at the resource centre that we set up in Samfya at the end of the project. This is called a VSAT satellite dish and that's cheaper in the long term, although you're paying a monthly subscription instead of paying by what you're... the amount of information you're accessing.
I've written bumpy roads on this bit of paper, but in fact this is one of the smoother roads in fact I think that was... that was actually being... that was actually under construction at the time we were going over it.
Yeah one thing you have to be aware of when you're transporting IT equipment is it's very fragile and it might not survive the journey so what we did is we packed it into these large plastic boxes called Peli cases and they're in this really kind of tough plastic and they've got this sort of sponge interior and you can cut... you can cut holes in the sponge - it's quite good fun and sort of pull it apart to make shapes for what you want to put in there.
And I suppose this sort of demonstrates mainly our approach to setting up the lab. Really what we did was... we didn't set up anything at the start. We said... to our four IT trainers we said "OK, there's a computer in that box there. See if you can set it up". And then we went and sat down and we let them get on with it. And they were a bit reluctant to start with, saying "You have to show us" and we said "No, you have a go" and they took to it, and they figured it out, the four of them, they opened the box - a lot of them hadn't seen a computer before - and they managed to connect it together, with a bit of help. And we tried to keep that approach throughout so that they were never afraid to start... to sort of touch equipment and connect it together and experiment. I think that's very important.
We tried to get our trainers involved as well with the planning of the sessions and in December there were four of us from Aptivate and four of them. We started off initially running the classes... once we had the 150 coming in in groups of 30... we started off by running the sessions together but by the end of it they were planning and running the sessions themselves.
I don't think you can see on... maybe on the next picture but these computers actually attach to the back of the monitor and it's quite a tidy arrangement. Maybe another that's worth pointing out is Ubuntu. The computers we took out to Zambia, they run an alternative to Microsoft Windows called Ubuntu. This is free software in both senses of the word. It's free in that you don't pay licenses for it and also the code that makes up the software is freely available for people to take and modify themselves and then pass on to other people. The Ubuntu project actually has its origins in Africa and I think the project is still managed from Africa, even though there's people all round the world working on it. And this laptop here with the presentation is running Ubuntu.
OK, that's Penelope one of our IT trainers. And if you came to the film... the Where the Water Meets the Sky film that we showed earlier... the Camfed film, you might remember that that was about Penelope's story. And she didn't have the best start in life, I guess. She's now helping to run the resource centre in Samfya. And she's got really good ideas about what she wants to do with that centre and how she wants to take it forward so that it's helping not just the Camfed girls but it's helping the community at large. There's the computer there on the back of the screen.
Penelope also features in a video from the BBC
There's just one of the classrooms. I quite like this arrangement of having people around the edge because it got people sort of standing up and walking around and talking to each other and it wasn't like everybody in rows, which I think is more what people are used to, having quite a... sort of traditional teaching experience.
There was a question from the audience about where the training was taking place
Ah, it was a science laboratory in a school. We ran the training... in fact... OK I didn't show you this, but... can you see the skeleton in the cupboard? So yes it was Lubwe High School in the village and they... because it was their holiday so they let us use their science lab and yeah we liked the skeleton in the cupboard.
So at the end of the course... the 150 who had received the training and who were forming the enterprises... they all got certificates from Cambridge University because Cambridge Assessment helped to provide the coursework and our IT trainers said "Why don't we get certificates?" and Camfed hadn't thought to give them certificates so we made them Aptivate certificates and quickly made up some sort of qualification that they had just received so I think they were quite thrilled to have those.
And this is the resource centre that we set up in Samfya. This is another school. I think it's a basic school and, yeah there's two of my colleagues Björn and Liz on the left there. Alan, who was the other member is behind the camera and there's our IT trainers.
And... oh there I am again... and that's inside. Again, once we got to the resource centre we just said "OK, you decide how you want to set up your resource centre and set up the computers" and they did it. And I don't think we needed to help them at all.
OK now I've gone over my hour so I could talk about Kenya but I'm really aware that I've overrun so what do you want to do? Are you happy to finish there? Or shall I talk about Kenya?
I have one picture. Well, I have some animal pictures and a picture of a classroom...
Some of the discussion as to whether to continue was lost when changing tapes. It was decided to run through the slides of Kenya quickly
Part 3
And this was university administrators so something quite different from the Camfed situation. So these were people who already had quite a bit of knowledge. They were already running university computer networks but there's a big problem in universities, with well first of all with bandwidth because, I mean there's that table I just flicked past shows bandwidth is incredibly expensive I mean well let's just go back for a minute.
Someone in the audience asked for an explanation of what bandwidth was
Yes, sorry yes, so bandwidth is well what it's come to mean is sort of like the rate at which you receive information so it's measured in... it tends to be measured in either kilobits per second or megabits per second whereas actual files tend to be measured in bytes so kilobytes and megabytes. There's basically eight bits in a byte so if you can do the mathematics, you can work out how long it will take for, maybe a document to arrive on a certain connection. Now I mean my... I didn't actually know this, I looked to see what my domestic broadband connection is and it's with Virgin Media and it's actually 10 megabits per second, which is actually the same... well... OK... I mean, well for example there Strathmore University in Kenya has a 20 megabits per second connection. It has twice my domestic broadband connection. And that's for a university with 700 computers. So if you divide one by the other, you end up with a very poor internet connection per machine. That's at peak usage when everyone's on the computers, everyone's using the internet. So... I mean to summarise the internet's very slow in African universities.
And there are plans to... well in fact there's currently being laid cables around Africa that will hopefully improve things. Because currently African universities are relying on satellite connections to get their internet. But once they get connected to the submarine cables then they'll be able to receive a lot more information. But it might not be quite as simple as that because... I mean as you can see, the cables are going around the edge of Africa. They need to set up a whole load of other infrastructure to get the internet into the countries that aren't on the edge. You can imagine that there might be problems with cross-border agreements between certain African countries and there's quite a bit of work to do. Also it's not just enough just to have a high-bandwidth connection. You also want to be able to maintain that connection. You need people actively monitoring and managing your internet connection and that's the job of these university administrators - to somehow make the most of what they... what little bandwidth they have in their universities. And decide who can... I suppose who can use the internet at certain times. And there's various technological ways you can do that and that was part of what this course was about.
And this is Multimedia College University in... just outside of Nairobi. And... I mean in contrast to Lubwe... I mean it's quite a nice place really.
And it's right next to Nairobi National Park, which means that there are resident warthogs, baboons and monkeys.
So I have two pictures... I have two almost identical pictures of me in the same pose wearing different shirts taken on different days. So I mean there's... we'd like to have had the classroom in a slightly different arrangement but... I mean we really wanted to have the same arrangement that we had in Zambia but partly because of the shape of the room and that this was actually an IT lab already, we were sort of forced to use this kind of classroom arrangement. But we actually had another room that we used for the sort of the non-technical aspects and things and I wish I had a photo of that rather than this but this is what I have. Because I think... I mean maybe this is a good sort of summary to end on but I... a lot of the things that we do aren't to do with technology. We also spent a lot of time talking about policy because sometimes it's more effective just to have an effective policy in your institution rather than having technological ways of blocking certain people from using the internet. You can maybe have a written document that is created by everybody in the university by the staff and the students they agree to certain levels of acceptable use - sort of saying things like "I will only use the internet for research" or "I shan't be downloading films and that kind of thing... or looking at Facebook" Because for a lot of people it's not that they're being deliberately malicious by downloading films but they just don't know that downloading a film in one part of the university is stopping someone from doing research in another part of the university. And if someone comes along and taps them on the shoulder and says... and sort of explains the situation, that's sometimes enough. It's not going to stop everybody but it's a start. So... I think... I'm not quite sure whether we managed to get the message across completely to the university administrators but it's not just about technology. It's about... sort of other things as well.
So that's the end of the show.
There was a question from the audience about the response from the young women who were being trained in Zambia, on encountering IT for the first time.
Well I mean it was overwhelming really. I mean it's hard to say because I think when you're on this kind of project... well personally I do and I think some of my colleagues share this... is that you sort of see... you always see the negative things that are going on in what you are doing and thinking "Oh we could do this much better" and "Now this has gone wrong" and "Now this has happened". I think the whole concept of IT was something that was so new that it didn't really matter what we were doing with it, really. Because it had this novelty value and it was something that a lot of them hadn't seen before... I mean we gave out... you know these USB sticks - memory sticks that you can put into your computer and you can store files on them. We handed these out the second time we went out in April. We gave them all one of these. And we got a lot of singing a dancing. I have a video clip of some excited young women about getting these memory sticks that I... no I won't try and show it you. I can show it to you at some point. Yeah, and it was very difficult to get any sort of anything sort of... any critical feedback in terms of negative criticism. So I don't know, I mean maybe after a few times maybe they'll... they can start to realise some of the more frustrating elements of IT. I don't know but yeah it was a very... certainly in Zambia a very positive sort of experience.
Well it depends I mean some of them were very quick. I think a lot of them... for the 150 girls they only had ten hours of training, which isn't a lot. A lot of them hadn't really mastered the art of logging in really to their email by the end of those three weeks. And I mean part of that was due to sort of logistical problems in that some didn't come to the class at the right time and this kind of thing or there were quite a few people who were sick and so on. So I mean it really was just sort of scratching the surface but hopefully within the groups there's enough knowledge. We trained these ambassadors who have come back and we actually in April when we returned we just concentrated on training the ambassadors. So hopefully they've passed on some more knowledge to the other young women. And they've had... for those who live in Samfya or around the area, they can go into the resource centre. For others, they'll have to be relying on local internet cafés or other sort of skills training centres and that kind of thing.
There was a question about whether Martin was given a nickname in Kenya
Erm no, not in front of me, anyway.