July

At the end of the ICT Best Practice Forum in Ouagadougou the Vice-President of Microsoft Africa can finally hold his speech. He takes plenty of time to tell how philanthropically his company will approach Africa in the coming years. Almost moved to tears he tells about his visit to a college in Ouagadougou, and how he was shocked about the poor (ICT) conditions that these pupils had to cope with. And about the ICT-design awards that he was asked to hand out as part of a Microsoft sponsored contest to a number of teachers in Burkina Faso who managed to distinguish themselves in the field of ICT. And about how proud he was on the fact that these teachers had been able to develop themselves thanks to the Microsoft Partners in Learning (PIL) programme.

Unfortunately the good man was misinformed by the local representative of PIL. The PIL-programme of Microsoft is operating in Burkina Faso since 2004 – or better said: it is barely operating. Since the start, 40 teachers at the most have been trained, and barely anything is noticed of a systematic roll out by the government. Of the ten thousands of computers that Microsoft would ship to Burkina Faso is nothing ever heard anymore. Than again, the government never bought large numbers of Microsoft licences as was agreed upon in the deal between Burkina Faso and Microsoft.

None of the 12 teachers who won a price in the contest supported by Microsoft ever took part in the PIL-programme: the first two awards have been handed out to teachers who took part in the 1-year post-graduate multimedia programme of the French Campus Numérique. And the other 8 award winners are trained as part of an educational training programme provided by our local partner ZCP and supported by us.

The circus of large international conferences on ICT for development keeps going on. Since someone first used the words ‘digital divide’ in the late nineties, more than one  thousand gatherings world-wide were organised to discuss this reputed problem. You can ask yourself how many projects could have been set up to bridge the divide with the millions of euros that is spent on these conferences. I agree with the coordinator of our National ICT for Development network, Sylvestre Ouédroago in Burkina Faso, who made the following remark in his book ‘L’ordinateur et le Djembé’ in the chapter ‘The modern griot’: ‘I travelled around attending several conferences and singing the extreme poverty of Africa. With a stern look, neatly dressed in a suit, and carrying my portable computer and my cell phone, I went to every place for which I received an invitation letter. (…) I made so many trips that I hardly worked, and when I did, it was often on the plane or at the airport while waiting for a plane. Have I become a new griot, or a praise singer of modern times? Was I preaching a message of hope or disaster in order to design new juicy projects that would bring benefits only to their designers who are always eager to experiment new salvation approaches? In fact, many heads of State that I criticize have the same approach!” At all these conferences you meet the same people and hear the same stories and in these past ten years very little has changed in the countries concerned.

The Microsoft Unlimited Potential programme (‘Connections, Communities, Partnerships’ – they know how to sell the programme with nice slogans) is a new version of the human side of Microsoft; the company is putting an enormous effort into promoting this programme amongst others in Africa. One of the ways to do this are the ICT Best Practice Forums that Microsoft, together with ECA and national governments, this year organises on West, North and East and South-East Africa. The first edition takes place in June in Ouagadougou, and as an important player in Burkina Faso I am supposed to represent IICD. When I read the programme the first thing that gains my interest is the absolute lack of best practices of Burkina Faso itself and that while Burkina Faso is hosting the event… and a number of by IICD supported projects in Education and Agriculture are nice examples of how you can use ICT for local needs. Were this projects not good enough compared to those of best practices of other countries? Did Microsoft/CEA miss out on them? Did the local government not put them forward? The Minister of ICT is capable enough doing so out of disrespect for the civil society. .. However it may be, we have to deal with best practices of countries like South-Africa, Tunisia, Egypt and Nigeria – and there are a few interesting presentations to attend. Are the best practices applicable in Burkina Faso? I doubt it. All these countries are miles ahead with regard to governance, economic situation and infrastructure compared to Burkina Faso. And why do we always have to look at best practices? A Forum addressing worst practices would probably be more educative!

The project “District computerization Kinondoni” is to bring about good governance in the Kinondoni District (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania) by harnessing information for decision-making through the use of ICT. The project has been in implementation for some time now and has been using IICD's Monitoring and Evaluation system since 2003. This time around, a new approach was taken during the Focus Group Meeting.

On the 20th of April, 30 ICT users from various levels and departments of the Kinondoni municipality and four ICT staff members assembled in a Focus Group meeting to discuss the results of the questionnaires that were collected last year among the end users of the project. An important conclusion from the data coming out of these questionnaires was that generally, users viewed quite an impact of the project in their organisation, in terms of empowerment of the users working with ICT and the impact ICT was having on the organisation when it came to productivity and efficient reporting. The results also showed that improvements could be made to improve satisfaction, mainly where training of the users and technical assistance by the ICT staff was concerned.

In order to address the challenges, role play was used to facilitate the dialogue. One group of end users and one group consisting of ICT staff members were both asked to prepare a small play on the issues concerning technical assistance. Each group had to address positive and negative aspects of the technical assistance and in both plays end users and ICT staff members had to be acted out. This motivated the participants to step in each other shoes and to take both points of view into consideration. Two other groups, both consisting of end users, made plays concerning organisational efficiency: Does ICT really make the workplace more efficient?

The plays (in Kiswahili) resulted in a lot of laughter and sounds of approval; many participants recognised the situations in the scenes that for instance showed a member of the ICT staff using very technical language with puzzled-looking users or a secretary without appropriate training, trying to help out her boss who was too busy to deal with the computer.

After all plays, the participants made a list of concrete points of action. Interesting was that this action was expected not only from the ICT staff members, but also from the management and all users. Ideas that came up had to do with lessening the pressure on the ICT staff by on the one hand training and aiding users to better cope with problems themselves. The ICT staff could for instance make notes with very basic trouble shooting issues, so the users do not need to call upon the ICT staff for relatively simple problems. On the other hand, the ICT staff can be trained to better and simpler communicate with their end users. They can also be helped to develop a way that allows the staff to better deal with the limited time that they have: which problems have priority above others and what can users expect from them in terms of promptness of the assistance?

The meeting was enthusiastically reflected upon. As one of the ICT staff members put it: ”It would be really good if we could do this again next time. I feel that people now understand more about the ICT staff, that we are busy too, and that we understand them better. And everybody enjoyed it!”

Microsoft needs to re-conquer Africa one way or another. From Bill Gates’ perspective his company loses millions of dollars each day, only because almost every user on the African continent works with a pirated copy of Windows. The average African, and the average African organisation does not see why he should pay for a product that he can get for free from his neighbour. Those Microsoft licenses are pretty expensive, especially compared to African standards: who is willing to pay an average of 2 or even 3 monthly salary for Office suite? So Gates & co. will have to think of another way to conquer the hearts of the African people. Various high-profile community programmes were launched by Microsoft: Partners in Learning for example offers governments an opportunity to purchase (expired) Microsoft licenses for education and to make use of the education CD-roms of Microsoft. In exchange Microsoft can ask the government to fight with pirated copying. These so called community investment programmes are used to the utmost advantage by Microsoft: if a government is allowed to buy 20,000 Microsoft licences for say5 euros each while the normal price is about 50 euros, then Microsoft donates 20,000 X 45 euros= 900,000 euros to that country! Of course that looks really good in a press release. Only a shame that most African countries who signed, never bought those licences.