IICD Corporate Blog

Piloting and Upscaling: Both Crucial Stages in Social Innovation

Caroline Figuères — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:00:00 +0200

In the process of social innovation piloting is stage 3. Stage 4 is sustaining and stage 5 is scaling and diffusion (source: the Open Book of Social Innovation) At IICD we have been working for several years not only on piloting but also on sustaining. Since a few years IICD is also working on the scaling and diffusion part of the process (see recent results in our 2009 on-line annual report.

In that way piloting is an essential stage in the social innovation process. Supporting a lot of pilot projects is a sign that a lot is happening in the sector and this is good news. But we should not get trapped in the piloting stage.

Building a multi-stakeholder partnership

From experience we can say that scaling and diffusion are processes that need multi-stakeholder involvement. And this is where it is becoming a bit more complex than just piloting. Getting several partners engaged is neither easy nor fast (I speak from experience) and we learned a lot about what is working and what is not working. For this reason we can only stress the importance of multi-stakeholder partnership building. But this is not easy and this may be a reason for developing lots of pilots.

The issue is that pilots should only be financed when there is already an idea of how to reach sustainability and how it could be scaled-up. In an article for MDG review that will be published by mid September, I also conclude that multi-stakeholder partnerships are key to success for scaling up.

IICD is an Executive Committee member of the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP). In the near future GKP will facilitate the opportunity for members to build partnerships to scale-up, disseminate and replicate (SDR) their successful projects.

How to achieve efficiency in digital educational content production

Anne Schanz — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:07:23 +0200

Just before the resuming of classes after 3 weeks of winter holidays, Educatic invited some of the more motivated and IT-literate teachers for a 2-day workshop on digital content production. The game digitalization process I described in my post about the last workshop is taking up a lot of time and resources with high-quality, greatly localized and personalized, but hardly efficient results. Teachers have started to enquire on how to develop their own games without having to rely on the technical support by Educatic. Therefore, as opposed to the complex game development approach which involved many people during the last workshop, this time, it was all about how teachers could create their own digital learning resources.

With 8 teachers participating, some of whom had to travel for hours from remote rural villages, almost all those invited attended and thus five different “unidades educativas” (educational units, schools or educational centers of a certain level) were represented.

The tools chosen for the workshop were Jclic and HotPotatoes – both are software written in Java and allow the creation of simple educational games such as multiple choice quizzes, puzzles, riddles or association games. One of the main reasons for the selection is that they are both localized into Spanish – a requirement which is essential as, although taught at school, English is not understood by many in Bolivia.

The first day was aimed at teaching the basics of Jclic. Teachers quickly learned how to create an empty project, fill the media gallery and soon started to create their first rompecabeza (“break your head” – a Puzzle) or association games using sound, (moving) images and text. With the teacher’s computer skills varying from being able to manage a variety of software applications until just learning to hit the right spot when clicking the mouse, the instructor, Ronald, did a good job in adapting its explanations accordingly.

On the following day, HotPotatoes was introduced in order to give the teachers the opportunity to select their favourite tool. Both applications are available across platforms, allow multimedia integration and have a functionality to combine exercises to a teaching module, thereby defining secuence of exercises and levels of difficulty.

	Jclic	HotPotatoes
Licence	GNU Lesser General Public Licence	Freeware, support for paid licences ended August 2009
Types of exercises	16 tipos differentes: Associations Memory games Text exercises: displaying, fill the gap, identify/sort elements, Jumbled word exercise Cross word puzzle	Multiple choice Short-answer Jumbled-sentence Crossword Matching/ordering Gap-fill exercises
Export	Saving is only possible in the .jclic.zip format. HTML code can be created to embed the file in a website calling the jclic java applet	HTML-page SCORM (Learning Management System standard) Zip-file

After taking the seminar, the teachers came to the conclusion that they preferred using Jclic for usability reasons. HotPotatoes, they found, required many more steps to accomplish a certain function than does Jclic. They complained that HotPotatoes offered less exercise types and lacked behind Jclic both, usability-wise as well as graphic-wise. Integrating multimedia – something all teachers were very eager to learn about – seemed easier to accomplish in Jclic as well as it comes with a media library concept where all media resources are stored and can be reused across different projects. However, for creating crossword puzzles, HotPotatoes was by far easier to use.

Profesor Walter, a teacher from the municipy of Challapata, had already attended a seminar on Jclic and came for the HotPotatoe extension. He has succesfully integrated Jclic in his mathematics lessons and finds that students are having more fun learning with the computer and ironically remarks that they often listen better to the machine than to the teacher.

Meanwhile, the challenge remains: how can you succesfully and efficiently capacitate teachers with poor computer literacy in a content production software obtaining high-quality pedagogic results at the same time? How can a technology-driven result be avoided? Couldn’t the games produced be played just as well with paper and pencil?

The answer is probably complex: on the one hand, technology should never be applied as a goal in itself but rather as a means to an end. On the other, the goal of the Educatic project is to integrate ICT in the school curriculum and to enrich classroom activities. Therefore, the quality of the project outcome should probably not only be measured by the quality of the content produced, but also by the skills as well as the motivation to understand acquired by teachers and students alike. What is more, I believe that each student who has begun to understood and gained interest in the vast potentials that offer ICTs is worth the effort. Soon, this student will have understood the “secrets” behind much better than his teacher. And be it for having played a crossword puzzle in his maths class.

Anne Schanz studied International Information Management at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. In her master’s thesis “Web-based communication in an intercultural learning project – analysis and development potentials of the Global Teenager Project” she investigated the effectiveness of use of online communication software within the GTP and analysed data from 258 participants in 11 countries. http://anneschanz.de/blog/tag/ict4d.

Read more about the 'ICT in Primary and Secondary Education' project which Educatic executes and IICD supports.

Digital localized content production in Bolivia - Impressions from a workshop

Anne Schanz — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:25:00 +0200

Last weekend, I was able to be part of the first capacity building workshop held by Educatic during my stay in Oruro. It was the first of a round of 5 workshops during which local teachers will go through various phases of digital content production. At the end, this will result in a number of educational flash games invented and designed by the teachers themselves and implemented by the team of Educatic.

This time, a group of 10 teachers that were very new to ICTs came – a challenge in a way, as they will have to think about how to adapt their functional game design in a way that it will be feasible to digitalize it. Unfortunately, winter holidays had just started, so that the normal group size of around 30 wasn’t reached. During this first one-day workshop, the teachers – recruited through the local branch of the Ministry of Education – were presented with the main objectives of the project and got to know their fellow teachers who will likewise design their games in the same round of workshops.

The first challenge they were presented with was to think about an educational problem from their subject in a specific age group, e.g. sorting of natural numbers or spelling of specific words. They were then asked to think about an (offline) setting which is specific to their region or cultural group. This might be a game, or simply the natural surroundings of the villages they come from. As this region has always been a mining region, one setting was the entrance of a mine with the worker encountering various co-workers as the levels of the game increase. Another setting was taken from a children’s game which is played outside, where seeds are thrown towards an object. The closest seed wins. Thanks to this contextualized approach, the students will hopefully be more inclined to identify with the games and have more fun while playing and learning.

During a well-facilitated session, all teachers were able to come up with a first idea on paper. Initial drawings of the game design supported the imagination of the course of the game and identify potential difficulties. During lunch, the shy group started chatting over the traditional “charque”-dish (dried lama meat with a hard-boiled egg, potatoes and dried corn and a piece of goat cheese).

As it is not always easy to find an address here in the maze of small streets and shops, two teachers only managed to find us when the rest had almost finished. However, they were not sent home but welcomed just as warmly and received their private introduction which ended in them producing some very nice ideas.

During the coming sessions, teachers will define their ideas more finely, adapted their drawings and explanations and finally evaluate the prototypes produced by Educatic.

I admit that this way of digital educational content production is a long process. Teachers will have to travel several times and spend their weekends working. They will have to make a great effort to get involved in a new medium they might have no experience in. However, from what I have seen and heard, I do believe that in the end, the results are very valuable. Teachers will have developed a pride in their own achievements, feel the effort they have spent and are thus more likely to adopt the games in their teaching routine. Last but not least, they will leave with the feeling that they have been listened to and were able to apply their didactic and professional knowledge.

Read more about the 'ICT in Primary and Secondary Education' project which Educatic executes and IICD supports.

e-agriculture: Top minds seek to improve impact of ICT in rural development at IAALD

dsenmartin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:20:00 +0200

The e-Agriculture community gathered some of the top minds in using ICT for rural development at a lively panel discussion during the 13th IAALD World Congress going on now in Montpellier, France. IAALD is an international association which connects agricultural information specialists worldwide.

The panel, composed of Peter Ballantyne, ILRI, Anriette Esterhuysen, APC, Ibrahim Khadar, CTA, Francois Laureys, IICD, and Michael Riggs, e-Agriculture facilitator, presented some key insight from a new initiative to expand our understanding of the impact ICT have in rural development, and how this understanding can improve the design and positive impact of ICT interventions.

Many contributions were made from the audience on points to clarify, emphasize and reinforce in this ongoing, dynamic work. Below you can see the slides from the presentation: e-Agriculture Perspectives A Conceptual Framework to Enhance the Impact of ICT in Rural Development.

View more presentations from IAALD Community.

For more on what is happening at the IAALD World Congress, follow the tag #aginfo10 and the IAALD blog at iaald.blogspot.com.

(photo credit: Denise Senmartin, IICD)

Source: e-Agriculture.

The creation of a new Barefootguide writers collective

Martine Koopman — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 09:42:26 +0000

We were located 2 hours from Capetown in the small town of Kleinmond. We stayed in a holiday home in small bungalows in a beautiful, inspiring landscape with mountains in front of us and the Atlantic Ocean behind us. What better place could you have to start a writing collective. The idea was not to write just another guidebook, but to bring in the vast experiences of the participating NGO’s to bring theory and practice together in combination with an action research next year in 20 Southern NGO’s to bring the guide as a tool for transforming organizations and Social change into practice.

To develop this we needed to know each other much better, but also to develop our own writing voice. One of the exercises we used for this is the technique of freewriting. In freewriting your pen, rather than your mind decides what to write; the hand leads and the mind follows. As simple as it sounds, it’s no easy exercise and takes real discipline to stick to this simple premise. We did several exercises with a start sentence and 4 minutes of writing. Afterward you had to underline the key sentences and share this with a small group to make a poem out of it. That sounds a bit weird, but actually the poems were quit powerful.

Another method that we used was it always powerful storytelling. With the freewriting exercises we also had described two of our key learning moments. You could share the stories with one of the others, pick one and shared that story with the whole group. During the whole week we told these stories and distilled the general lessons out of these stories to use that to describe inside-out how we have gone through our own learning journeys. These general insights were stored on colored papers on the whole: a big collection of thoughts at the end of the week.

To look outside-in to organisational learning the core group of the writers collective on organisational learning, which we discussed to see what was most inspirational, fascinating but also to define areas for deeper research, missing parts and remaining questions.

On day three we were on a quest for our vision. At 07.00 sharp we climbed in silence the mountain in front of were we stayed. At the top (a 30 minutes climb, through a beautiful landscape, one of the most diverse worldwide in terms of number of plans) we wrote our how we thought the Barefootguide would be used in the world in 5 years time as a free writing exercise. After a lovely walk down through a different path we brought all these stories together in small groups to design the leading image through a very creative drawing process. These three leading images were than shared and brought together into one picture with symbols, metaphors and key words.

The last day was the process that will lead to the development if the barefootguide. The next write workshop will be in May in Egmond (the Netherlands).

Before that time a needs assessment with some of the partners that will participate in the action research will take place (not at IICD partners) and a similar assessment about current learning practices should also be carried out under the organisations of the writers collective. In the next two weeks it will be more clear what that will mean for IICD. The action research for next year was also designed, but the key question for the next two year were the research areas which needed more deeper research. Also adding the voice of the south more. All of us will contribute more case studies like our thematic learning briefs, our Learn-Work trajectory and country learning reports. We concluded with a mood image of the whole week which was again an creative exercise to trigger your right brain. All in all a very inspirational, intensive and challenging workshop. Looking forward to continue this process in May.

Gender Matters on the Table

Judith Veldhuizen — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:40:00 +0000

On February 23 last, I took part in the symposium Genderjustice.nu, organised by WO=MEN (pronounced women equals men). This Dutch Gender Platform is a network association of almost 70 organisations and individuals who have committed themselves to working towards equal participation of women and men worldwide; to global gender justice.

Goal of the day was to discus if progress has been made towards gender equality (fifteen years into the Beijing Platform for Action) and to present information, experiences, questions, dilemma’s and practices from the field to inspire. It further discussed what development organisations are doing to promote gender equality.

The day started with the Chicks for Change, 4 students who took part in the Millennium Battle 2009 with a proposal for involving women in water management in Malawi. (Unfortunately they didn’t win.)

Next the opening panel, themed: The gender matters on the table, was on. Facilitated by Evelijne Bruning ((The Hunger Project) panel members Sylvia Borren (World Connectors), Özden Yalim (WO=MEN), Jeanette Kloosterman(Oxfam Novib) and I answered questions like: What progress has been achieved with regard to reaching gender equality up to date? How far have the agreements made in Beijing been implemented? What gender issues do you run into in your own work practice? What is happening in our ‘gender kitchens’, which good practices can we share? Where do we encounter problems, but especially: where lie the opportunities?

The rest of the morning the audience could choose from 4 parallel workshops, all of course dealing with gender in one way or another.

Lunch break was optimally used for either watching the movie ‘Password Women’ (on how ICT can be put to work to advance the position of women) or for networking.

In the afternoon I was part of the workshop “reporting, connecting & documenting gender / innovative practices.” The other presenters in this workshop were Mina Saadadi (Shahrzad News), Doris Alfafara (Stichting Damayan) and Lin McDevitt-Pugh (NetSheila).
In my presentation I focussed on how the use of ICT can strengthen gender related activities, show cased by examples from IICD projects.

I explained what type of activities our organisation is involved in and presented 4 gender & ICT projects (CIDOB, Online consulting service from Casa de la Mujer, WIDNet, AMJUPRE) and briefly spoke about Coprokazan (showing the Bamanan – local language - presentation), the GINKS training for seamstresses and the Pag La Yiri radio station.

Everything I brought forward came directly from what our partner organisations have shared at the Cross Country Learning Event (CCLE) on Gender and ICT s of last December. During this meeting IICD partners discussed how ICT can contribute to addressing gender equity and women empowerment in development. I figure our partners know best what ICT has brought them, so better let them do the talking (via me).

Although time was too short to give a full overview of the activities our partners are undertaking, I did receive nice reactions from people who were enthused by the possibilities that ICTs offer – or better maybe: the opportunities that these women create for themselves by choosing and applying ICT tools in such a way that it benefits them and their cause.

Overall: met with many very interesting people and enjoyed a very stimulating, inspiring and energising day!

A Bright Future for Telemedicine and Distance Learning

Caroline Figuères — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:23:35 +0000

As the Managing Director of IICD, I participated in the end of January in the World Bank’s “ICT Sector Week: Enabling Development” in Washington. This event was organised by the World Bank’s Global Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Department for the Bank’s staff and the staff of the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group.

The purpose of the week was to engage IFC and WB staff, senior industry executives, and sector experts in discussion how to leverage ICT to scale up the development impact of the ICF and WB operations.

Strategy sessions were held on increasing the reach and impact of services in public sector management, education, health, agriculture and rural development.

IICD was involved as speaker in the ICT for Health session and contributed to the panel discussion of the agriculture and rural development session. I also presented IICD in the ICT for Education session.

Find below my personal findings on the Health and Education sessions.

Working towards innovative health services delivery

The workshop on health was very interesting and included participants with lots of experience and key positions. After a well-received presentation the participants discussed: What is e-health? What long term commitment do we need from the bank? What is the role of, amongst others, health insurance and privacy of data?

A much respected female senior advisor of the World Bank suggested that the World Bank thinks about new ways to deliver health services in developing countries. She pointed out that the WB should not be willing to finance projects that are just replicating what was done in the past in the ‘North’. From this point of view she considered that there was a bright future for telemedicine and distance learning education.

“ICT is giving the opportunity to review what is done and to explore what should be possible and what should be adapted to the context of the developing countries.”

My view and experience on this is that ICT create opportunities for institutions in developing countries to do health service delivery in an innovative way: not matching Northern traditions but to be answering institutions’ own specific challenges. IICD is working much in line with this. What IICD is doing in the health sector attracted positive attention in particular because of our integrated approach (guiding principles or what I call ‘true capacity building’). Examples of our work within health services delivery are the Teleradiology project in Mali and the Telemedicine project in Tanzania.

Moving towards smart use of ICT in Education

As is already the case in the area of health services delivery, ICT is creating opportunities for developing countries to do education delivery in an innovative way: not according to Northern approaches but responding to its own specific challenges. The World Bank staff has an advisory role to governments in developing countries and should be prepared for these opportunities.

For IICD, it is worth to think about: do we want to mainstream ICT in education (using ICT to help teachers in their traditional education approach to make their work more attractive for the students) or do we want to stand in a new education paradigm (providing opportunities for innovative approaches) and look at how ICTs can play a role for this purpose? At the moment we are involved in both ways of developing education.

The current education system is a product of the industrial revolution, from 200 years ago. How will today’s digital revolution shape the future’s education? Education should be designed to help students to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

La Luna: going THIN

aacuna — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:23:34 +0000

Earlier this year Radio La Luna in Ecuador surprised us with the great documentary “Memorias de Quito”, a very interesting proposal on recovering the collective memories marked by social and racial differences. La Luna is more than a radio station; it is a grassroots communication centre. In November, when I visited them, they were very enthusiastic to show me their computer lab, a 24-seat room based on thin client technology, NComputing. The seats are arranged in a “U” shape and in the centre a screen projector. Funds and knowledge were scarce, thus they had to use all the means available to make it happen.

Mauricio Velasco, project manager, told me they had to break down a wall between two offices to make a larger room. The furniture is simple, "we hired an electrician to set the cables, all the rest we do it by ourselves."

He said it was cheaper to buy the small black boxes (the clients) in US, so they imported them. The LCD screens, keyboards and mouse were bought locally. They couldn’t afford a real server thus they fed up a tower PC with extra RAM memory and powerful processors. Initially they had planned to run everything with open source software, the server as well as the clients. They couldn’t make the server work with Ubuntu, it seems they missed some drivers. So they switched to MS server. The clients do run Open Office, Gimp and Skype (is not open source but it is free).

Then they started the test period. Would so many seats work with the “server”? Could they Skype? Would the USB sticks work? Their approach was very empirical, they tested different scenarios and when they found problems they went to the online forums and tried to find similar problems other people had encounter and how they solved them.

This has been a whole learning experience, at the beginning they didn’t know much about thin client technology. But the whole process of selecting the equipment (choosing for the L-series that allows audio in/out and a USB port), designing the space u-shape in place of rows, installing the system and testing the performance, contacting the technicians from the national network (InfoDesarrollo) or searching in the web for answers. All this process, including the frustrations, generates ownership and embedding.

Not all is solved and a consultancy from the local NComputing provider will check on the setting and look at some bugs. But this is a minor thing.

Congratulations Radio La Luna!

Creating a low cost interactive whiteboard

Alfonso Acuna — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:39:12 +0000

Bringing life to presentations with interactive whiteboards has been out of reach for our partners because of the high costs involved. Since Johnny Lee hacked the Wii remote control in 2007 an alternative market for low cost interactive boards has developed. When i saw the video in YouTube I feel I had to try it and I did it!

Johnny Lee (YouTube 2007, at TED) discovered that the remote control of the Wii is in fact a very sensitive infra-red camera. And if we have a infrared pen, the camera will register the movements of this. Based on this simple concept he develop a software to track the movements of the infrared pen and voila, a low cost interactive whiteboard was born.

Reading literature, I got convinced that it was something doable for low-tech people like me. All you need is:

a Wii remote control (known as Wiimote)
an infrared pen
a Bluetooth connection between your PC and the Wii
the software to track the infrared pen movements

There were many stories on how to transform a felt-marker into a infrared pen using an old TV remote control but i was looking for a shortcut. Something very annoying from infrared light is that it is not visible to the naked eye. The risk that things won't work because the improvised pen was not emitting light at all was too much risk.

I started Googling to know if somebody had already post a product in the market and with great delight I found that indeed there was a market dedicated to Wiimote based whiteboards, they sell not only the pen (some are even pressure sensitive) but sophisticated software and grips for the Wii remote. Of course all for a price, but it is still low costs.

I ordered a pen from a Dutch maker (Penciil 11 euros) and bought a Wiimote for 39 euros. Downloaded a evaluation version of the software Smoothboard (license 30 USD) and i was ready to test it.

Wiimote are not made for pairing with PCs and that was my nightmare yesterday night. Somewhere i found that Wiimote works better with Microsoft BlueTooth and therefore by replacing the proprietary HP driver the problem was solved.

Being a PS3 fan, i was very ignorant of how a Wiimote works (like, how do I know when is on?). But after a short while things became clear. Because i didn't want to wait until the next day i starting testing with my laptop screen acting as a whiteboard, I pointed the Wii to my screen and and calibrating the "screen", it worked!

Today, i teated with a real beamer and it works great. The infrared pen act as a mouse for pointing and clicking or can be used as a marker (red, blue or white) or as a highlighting marker, etc.

This interactive whiteboard can be used in schools and training facilities and it can improve the quality of presentations for a little investment and easy appropriation.

Sillicon Valley in the Andes

aacuna — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:42:22 +0000

Quito, is nestled in a long, narrow valley between Volcano Pichincha to the west and the precipitous canyon of the river Machángara to the east. From this contrasting river ManchagaraSoft borrowed its name to create a technological park in the heart of the Andes.

MachangaraSoft (www.machangarasoft.com) is a technological park, created by the initiative of a small group of people some 7 years ago. Through their history they have counted an average of 10 enterprises each with 3 to 12 people, totaling 90. Some of them depart, and new ones come continuing with an organic flux. Where resides the success of this umbrella organization? It is hard to pin-point a single success factor but I can mention some attitudes that certainly are important. First of all their independence, they decided to go the hard way, and build up their prestige on the basis of their professional performance. In the long run this has become key to their sustainability. Another key element was its diversity; each company masters a different technology and all of these companies are certified in their field of expertise (Java, Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, Red Hat, etc.). Their expertise goes hand to hand with their innovative spirit, MachangaraSoft came into being by de-facto in an incubator experience, where coaching was given horizontally, peer-to-peer. And last but not least, their solidarian spirit, on one hand by taking into account the economy of scales, saving by sharing. But it is not only a matter of economy; it is the ideal of being a real collective.

This combination of diversity and togetherness has many advantages; among them the possibility to cover with the help of their sister companies the whole production chain, from infrastructure to software development, project management and training. Togetherness, diversity AND commitment towards development are conscious components when they look for new partners.

Among their latest success we can mention rolling out the whole IT component of the National Assembly in Open Source. A new project is the digitalization of the payroll system for the whole Ecuadorian public administration. Since the government requested the use of the Open Source in the government agencies, they have develop a successfully approach on migrating, for example, to Open Office. At the present they are working with universities and the government in different fields. And their services are been exported to other countries. In order to improve their chances they are piloting certification in a new methodology of developing software. Traditional methodologies (like the Waterfall) are too heavy for the economy of developing countries. Beside all this, they have contributed with Libre Software products, mostly in document management and project management tools.

MachangaraSoft might join us in the Associated Trainer Program of Ecuador, I am very much optimistic that this partnership will be a rich experience.

Solar Chargers for Farming Cooperatives in Ghana

Martine Koopman — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:32:36 +0000

Davy, from SEND foundation, would pick me up on Saturday morning 1st August at 06.00 and he was there on the dot. In clean white he thought that we would only go to Salaga to visit the field office. You could see the flooding along the road. In Salaga we picked up Wumpini, the senior officer of SEND at Salaga, to visit three farmer communities who tested a solar charger for mobile phones in the ECAMIC project. In February A-Solar, a Dutch company, donated 5 solar chargers to test in Ghana in 5 farmer groups.

ECAMIC is a project where farmers have access to market information through a mixture of channels: notice boards, field staff and mobile phone. All these communities have no access to electricity, although in one community the electricity cable was passing the village! The first community was a very big community with 700 families. 25 of them participated in the SEND farm cooperative. The ECAMIC project provided them with 2 subsidized phones, but now already 20 of them have phones. Mobile phones are booming in the Kalende community, but there is no electricity. No one else has solar power and there are no phone shops where they can buy credits. They are 6 km from Salaga, where everything is available, but that consumes a lot of time and commercial charging is expensive. The solar charger was a huge success. But it was not enough to even charge the phones in the group. With sunny weather the charger could charge 3 phones a day, with clouds only 2.

They would like to charge 30 a day. Now they have seen the advantages of phones all of them would like to have one. They not only use it for accessing market information, but all their crops (yams, maize, ground nuts, vegetables, etc) are in the system. If market traders visit the village they have a better negotiating position. They also have contact with market traders in Accra and Kumasi by phone.

The phone is also used to contact people in Salaga to bring goods if they will come to the village or to contact relatives in case of a funeral. The other two communities were smaller. Sogon 1 and Bondando had groups of 20 farm families. In both groups there were 8 phones. They both would like to be able to charge 6 phones a day and more phones for the group for a subsidized rate. All three groups would like to set up a small shop to charge mobiles. They would also charge other phones in the community for a small fee for the benefit of the cooperative, though the small chargers more are meant for personal use than for commercial use. But all have seen the benefits of the mobile phone and the impact it can make on their lives.

CapDev impressions of the Zambia Country Programme

Gaël Hernández Bourlon-Buon — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 11:19:22 +0000

Back at the IICD office, it is now time to evaluate my first trip to Zambia. As the new officer for the Capacity Development Programme in Zambia I had two objectives: have a general face to face introduction with most of IICD’s project partners and also have some practical insights of the main challenges identified since I came on board.

Going to Zambia for the first time means switching from your daily office work into a more human approach, where names and roles within organisations become real people with actual needs to address. Suddenly, the project proposals you have read until now on paper and couldn't talk are now able to tell you their achievements and future steps.

I spent the first week of my trip in Lusaka. The tight agenda started early in the morning every day. Breakfast at 7:30 AM and jump into the taxi to the first meeting. On the way to the partner office, my colleague Olaf Erz and I discussed the main points of the meeting so we both knew what to expect. Once arrived, the introductions took place and discussions were initiated. My role is to, once the project is started, follow the project partners’ needs in terms of capacity building and assist them in the best way possible to realise their plans. Depending on the project goals, we use different methodologies so our partners get empowered with appropriate technical skills: technical update seminars, on-the-job training or train-the-trainer workshops are different approaches used within IICD. When the project uses tailored ICT tools that have to be developed, a partnership with other local organisations is used so the capacity is built on and for the country.

Although most of the locations I went to were in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, I also traveled to the Western province to meet with the project staff of the Home-Base Care Programme in Mongu. At this moment, staff is being trained in order to use a new information and communication technology (ICT) tool that allows them to record medical information of the patients they visit. Until now, an obsolete system based on hard-copies was used to manage their clinical history and treatments.

In the second week, Saskia Harmsen, the former Officer Capacity Development for the Zambia Country Programme joined me. We had meetings with a number of partners in Lusaka and later went to Kitwe, in the Copperbelt province where a so called ‘Train the Trainer’ workshop was taking place. This workshop provides trainers with a better level of knowledge on how to incorporate technology within their projects, so a snowball effect can take place. During four days, twenty trainers from different IICD projects shared their experience and opinions about how to perform better needs assessments and to prepare better training plans. Although Saskia and I could only assist partially on the last day, I clearly saw how useful it is for people that work on the same goals, to meet up. Sharing and discussing challenges can be so powerful and encouraging!

Back in Lusaka the Open Source Zambian Initiative, an IICD supported network had organised a social gathering, also called “Installation Party”. Some members showed live installations on several Linux systems. Discussions about Open Source Software and its applications and social networking were there that night. It is surely encouraging to find young fellows gathering and sharing the open source case...

Saturday afternoon through Lusaka airport we left Zambia; back to The Netherlands. Once at Schiphol among thousands of busy people, only my slippers could remind me of Zambia,... until the next trip!

Sengerema Community Browsing the Net

Miep Lenoir — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:04:51 +0000

Sengerema Telecentre, monday morning. The floor in front of the training room is covered with shoes of people taking an exam in basic computer skills. A corner of the reception is being transformed into a little shop: a young entrepreneur is going to repair, refurbish and sell computers.

I am visiting the telecentre to meet Mr Felician Ncheye, manager of the telecentre and board member of TTN, the Tanzania Telecentre Network. Since last October, the telecentre is not the only place anymore where people can browse the internet in Sengarema. IICD assisted the Tanzania Telecentre Network in piloting a shared wireless (mesh) community network in Sengerema, making internet available and affordable to a large number of people living in the rural areas around the telecentre.

October is months away and I am curious to find out how the wireless mesh network is functioning. Are the clients still connected? Are they satisfied? In what way is the internet useful to them? And, very important in terms of sustainability: are they paying their monthly fee?

According to Mr Ncheye, the mesh network is working fine and most clients are paying their monthly bills in time. There are some problems with hardware, and ignorance on internet use.

Lismas, the technician, spends a lot of time teaching customers how to browse the internet.

“A customer told me there is a problem with the internet. When I checked it, I found out he typed only two w’s instead of three to enter the World Wide Web”.

Lismas also teaches customers how to find information. All have anti-virus software installed. Viruses still cause problems though.

Later that morning I continue my way to the Teachers Resource Centre (TRC), one of the customers of the mesh network. TRC coordinator Mr Mugusi and Mr Mungo, headmaster of Sengerema Secondary School tell me that the internet is working well and used extensively by teachers of the school. Both are using the internet to study at the Open University Tanzania (www.out.ac.tz), which has a distance education programme. Mugusi is doing a Bachelor in Education and a minor in Kiswahili. He just started, and it takes four years. Mungo already studied before the teachers centre got its own connection; he is doing a Master in Education.

The teachers also use the internet to find teaching materials. Sometimes they print it to disseminate in class. They use Yahoo and Google to find materials. They also like www.answers.com. They feel that they need to catch up with the internet, as the students are picking it up much faster and are often challenging the teachers! Students sometimes come to the TRC too to use the internet but also go to the telecentre. Other teachers are still discovering the internet.

Mugusi: “To them the internet is still ‘uchawi’, witchcraft; they were amazed to see videos of Obama’s speeches online.”

Is the internet also having a negative impact? According to headmaster Mungo: “The secondary school has 20 teachers for 800 students. They used to have 36 teachers; most of them left for greener pastures. The possibility of distance-learning through internet may actually increase this brain drain”..

With Lismas I visit the Centre for Disabled People. An unstable plug prevents them from browsing, and Lismas quickly fixes it. They like to use the internet for skype and email. Their favourite Tanzanian website is www.mwananchi.co.tz, a newspaper in Kiswahili. They also have been looking online for funding for their centre.

Slowly but surely, the internet becomes a reality for the Sengerema community. In April the mesh network is going to be evaluated, providing more information on how the customers appreciate it and what kind of changes come with access to online information.

What I’ve seen in just half a day is promising. To be continued!

Cross-Country Learning Event: Computers are no longer a taboo for farmers

dsenmartin — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:51:25 +0000

November 5^th 2008, Bamako, Mali, 7 in the morning. A special day had started.

The first day of the long awaited Cross-Country Learning Event (CCLE) on Livelihood Opportunities, the event that IICD organises for project partners by theme once every few years and that in this occasion has fallen under my ‘livelihoods’ range of responsibilities. The bus to Sikasso was waiting in front of the hotel, already loaded with four translators and their technician with his equipment, two ladies introduced to me as ‘hostesses,’ Mady, the cheerful local co-organiser representative, bananas, peanuts and bottles of water and flavoured sodas, a shy boy that never revealed his role but that would smile to our greetings in poor French, and of course, the driver. The bus is to take us to Sikasso, capital city of the southern region with the same name, where many of IICD’s supported livelihoods projects in the country are located. It is my first time in Mali, as well as for 21 other participants coming from 7 different countries. They are expectant. I am expectant. We have invited them to a tri-lingual workshop in rural Mali to exchange experiences about rural content for rural lives, how farmers in the most disadvantaged areas are working with information and communication technologies (ICTs) to create and disseminate local content in ways that are meaningful for them. And in this context we are all first timers.

Fortunately, most of the participants had arrived on time to Bamako the night before, and the two Zambians that missed their flight (for those mysterious excuses given by airlines) would be arriving later in the day. With the help and mobile phone of my colleague Bénédicte Marcilly, the connoisseur of the local logistics and my partner for the event, we were getting a transport for the two we were leaving behind to catch up with us in Sikasso. We were promised they would be picked up upon arrival. Yes of course we would pay all the extra expenses. So we departed, Sikasso there we go.

But the day had not started here. From early hours many participants, myself, and about half of the world had been watching the results of the 2008 United States Presidential Elections. “Yes we can” had replaced the greeting “Good morning” that day. The Mirabeau Hotel TVs seemed to be all connected, tuned in the same channel that showed a large picture of Barak Obama in the background, with French journalists discussing the implications of this election for us all. We had had breakfast smiling, watching the screen. Excitement was in the air, and for me, a white Latin-American woman, receiving this news surrounded by African colleagues made those mixed feelings for history, race, humanity and development come together in a very moving awakening. This was a historical moment, and we were living in it.

The 5 hour road trip on the air conditioned bus went so smoothly that left us pleasantly surprised. No incidents, neither caws nor goats blockades, they would just run away from the loud bus horn. In Sikasso, the Hotel Kaaki Palace’s receptionist was ready for us, with all the room keys spread on the counter: Pick your room! Great. Someone handed me key 306, a room which I later discovered had no working TV, no mosquito net, and was too far from internet reach (afterwards we learned only 4 rooms in the ground floor could get signal). That was ok, I somehow had the feeling that would not have time either to watch tv or worry about mosquitoes. And for the internet, that was to be solved by quietly camping outside those four ‘connected’ rooms around midnight.

Despite all the bananas and peanuts provided during the trip by the hostesses, we were hungry. So all on to the bus again through the Sikasso market to arrive to the facilities of IER (National Institute for Agricultural Research), where the 3-day workshop was to be held. The group of ‘transformatices’, women that work in the transformation of products like mangos, coconuts and potatoes, received us with music and dancing, playing drums with such a skill that even surprised local Malian men participants. This would only be a first introduction to what we would later experience of Sikasso’s music richness. We were then kindly served salad, chicken, couscous, fruit. Welcoming remarks by our hosts filled the atmosphere, which together with those women that were cooking, dancing and chanting for us, made us quickly leave behind all the trip exhaustion, doubts and challenges since deciding to plan this event in Sikasso months ago.

And the activities began, only two hours later than planned, that afternoon. Introductory remarks, ice breakers, story telling. Everybody participated actively, and people had this extra energy that we organisers recognised as reflection of the excitement and power of coming together.

We finished that day with a visit to the IICD supported Sene Kulafoni Bulon project. We toured the facilities, the computers, looked at the produce display window and got introduced to this concrete example of close collaboration between three large farmers' organizations in Sikasso (the Union of Mango producers, the Federation of Potato producers and the Federation of Women Mango Transformers) and the regional branch of Mali’s IER that focuses on the transformation chain of products.

What particularly struck me was the lecture of a poem in Bambara, written by a member of the project, and using the IICD acronym as inspiration. See the bigger and readable version of the poem.

We soon had become part of the Sene Kulafoni Bulon’s fans club, wearing their t-shirt and taking pictures with each of their team members. And as if it could not get any better, the left behind Zambian participants arrived right on time to get to sit at the dinner table.

“As you can see here, computers are not longer a taboo for farmers” were the words of Dede Togola Konde, a very charismatic and energetic women and one of the project directors, when thanking us for the visit. As everybody clapped and smiled, and started digging into their chicken plates, I wondered how many things were not longer taboos, starting today, for all of us sitting at that table and for the world. That was a very special day, from dawn to dusk. I am sure will certainly stay with many of us for years to come.

Wireless network connects community organisations in Tanzania

Bernadette Huizinga — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:19:29 +0000

On October 26, 2008, a wireless mesh network was launched in Sengerema, Tanzania, connecting 10 local organisations to the internet through the Sengerema Telecentre.

The network was built during a workshop organised by the IICD supported Tanzania Telecentre Network (TTN), supported by the International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD).

In follow up of the site survey in July, a mesh network was implemented in Sengerema, connecting 10 organisations. The purpose is to share the connectivity costs of the Sengerema Telecentre and to pilot this technology for the Tanzania Telecentre Network.

The implementation was combined with a wireless technology workshop for wireless techies in the Lake Zone of Tanzania, hoping they will apply these technologies in their own projects as well as forming the ICT support structure which will secure technical sustainability of the Sengerema infrastructure.

After all the hard work, the workshop and implementation of the network was officially closed and the new wireless network was launched by the guest of honour.

The launch was a festive happening and one of the outputs that we never thought of listing amongst the expected outputs was the Telecentre Song! The telecentre song performed at the launch by a Sengerema teacher.

Also see the other videos on the workshop and implementation.