Guest posted by Kara B.
Seventeen years old, halfway through my Highers, with my sights set on a psychology degree, I did not think of myself as a scientist. Nobody was more surprised than I, when I was asked to spend my summer extending the computing revolution into a remote area of rural Africa. I know nothing about agriculture, and I consider my ICT skills to be basic; what could I possibly offer? But I was told that I could be useful, and it was a great opportunity. I was to learn many lessons from the people of Ruvuma, one of them being that a weed becomes a crop when planted in the right place – and expertise is only commonplace knowledge taken into a new context. So, since the Ruvuma Project pays no expenses, I started raising the €1500 or so that I needed. Tanzania is a country of more than 30 million people, many of them dispersed across nearly a million square kilometres – much of it remote from physical infrastructures of government. It is also a country with a huge development agenda for which it has to manage extremely slim resources. As is usual in such circumstances, the efforts are concentrated on maintenance of the brain and central nervous system: the cities and other key centres, along with the communication systems which connect them. Computing exists, but like many other commodities it is polarised. In affluent pockets of the capital, Dar es Salaam, you will find facilities as advanced as anywhere in the world; only a street away, a four-function pocket calculator is unknown technology. As you move into the interior you leave behind telecommunications, electricity, and finally roads. Computers may be the essence of high technology, but the cannot go where more basic technologies do not proceed them. For most of the country, governance and development are a local matter, supported by central authority but effectively autonomous. Traditional social structures are the basis, but the infrastructure extends and brings contact with some, but not all, of the outer world. Roads are the key: once a road arrives, much else will follow it in a fairly short time. Communities reached by road must frequently make the transition from pre-industrial to globalised economy within half a generation or less, with the demands always preceding the benefits. Ruvuma, where I was to arrive as unlikely emissary of the computing revolution, is just such a community. So, what uses does a rural, subsistence agrarian community like Ruvuma have for a computer? Briefly: agricultural, educational, engineering and medical ones. Science in such an environment is still a live, vital business closely linked to survival; this is a concrete science of day to day realities, not an abstract one of theoretical bounds – but it remains quantitative, though deprived of computational resources which the first world takes for granted. It is a common mistake to believe than a pre-industrial community is less complex than an industrialised one, or is unable to make use of industrial or even post-industrial methods. Human ingenuity and determination run as strongly here as in the industrially developed North (even more so, in fact, as I was to discover) and they draw the same benefits from technological amplification. To be effective, a clinic must be housed in a durable built structure – as must a school, or a dairy cow – and a building is constructed from bricks. Bricks are made by hand, from sun-baked clay; they may therefore cost nothing in monetary terms, but they are expensive in labour. How are patterns of manufacture, quality control, and distribution to be maximised? Only by analysing an overall picture of long term cause and effect, just as in any industrial concern. Record keeping and comparison are vital; but in a climate and economy where paper is comparable to gold and less durable, record keeping is dependent upon fallible and ephemeral human memory. Computers, as storage even more than as means of computation, could make all the difference. The same is true across a range of other concerns which may not seem like “science” to our spoiled perceptions. Fish farms, carved and puddled from dry earth then filled with water carried manually for kilometres, produce an order of magnitude leap in dietary security; but also in dependency, and only accurate analysis of good records can improve the ratio of one to the other. Imposing solutions from the top downward is fatal, and to supply assistance without unintended interference is not easy. Ruvuma has a some fine minds: among them the village chairman, the nurse, the newly arrived medical officer, the teachers in the schools. The women of the ward have started a revolution by opening their own collectives, farming their own land, processing the crops into secondary market products. Perhaps most of all, agricultural extension officer Jonas Asokwe. All of them are generating immense quantities of scientific knowledge upon which the next layer of development must be built – knowledge which must not be lost to their communities, We were guests of these people: supplying a little expertise which they, not we, had requested and they, not we, had the knowledge to properly apply. It is a strict rule of the Ruvuma Project that nothing is imposed upon the people or community. The clinic had requested the microscope and a final year medical student, who flew out with me from London, accompanied it primarily to learn from the community and only secondarily to provide whatever information or advice might be asked of her. I, similarly, could only provide initial pump priming for Jonas who would apply the computer as he, not we, saw fit. We can say with certainty that vital data will derive from application of the microscope, and that the computer will be an ideal recipient; but what the data will be, and how it will be used, we should not attempt to influence. Both medicine and agriculture, but agriculture above all else at this stage, are information-led areas for development, and here Ruvuma is especially lucky in Jonas Asokwe. Born and raised in the region, he went away to a government training college; then, instead of heading for more lucrative urban employment of his education, he returned. He is incredibly perceptive and knowledge-thirsty; everything interests him. I have been told by others on the Project that in Europe he would have gone on to university and postgraduate study – and I can easily believe it. This is fortunate for the future of development here: whoever tackles it must re-invent (in indigenously appropriate ways) methods which European agriculture takes for granted. Many outside agencies seek to offer help and developmental assistance, from their first world perspective, but their good intentions can only impact the urban centres where facilities exist. Many individuals also offer their skills; Richard Verseput, of S-Matrix Corporation, for example, offered unlimited free consultancy to support informed local development; but the facilities for taking up such offers do not as yet exist. For the moment, it is more important that someone like Jonas is available to develop (from first principles and local knowledge) experimental design methods and agronomics which suit and optimise the existing patchwork of land use or ownership. He has the active trust of the population, and the understanding of the locale – we can only provide him with hardware to support those essentials. Several of his efforts to date are particularly ripe for computerised extension. An initial handful of heifers have, under his direction, expanded to a sustainable and widespread community based dairy resource; but tracking its efficiency has, in the process, become a mammoth task. He plans an expansion of the experimental fish farming ponds; but maximising efficiency will require both record keeping and a great deal of “what if?” analysis. The actual pattern of planting, maintaining and harvesting traditional crops is also an area which benefits from co-operation – and designed experimentation needs more than human computation once it gets beyond a certain point. Once a community like Ruvuma (or a member of the community, such as Jonas Asokwe) has envisaged a role for information handling technology, the problems have not ended but begun. Most of the issues which would concern an individual or corporate purchaser in an industrialised society are not so much irrelevant as meaningless. What are they to make of the phrase "total cost of ownership", for example, when a computer costs more than the gross annual domestic product of the community and any breakdown will be permanent? Other, locally evolved criteria for selection must, de facto, apply. The first constraint upon choice is the complete absence of electricity supply. The clinic has solar panels, installed by the Ruvuma Project, but they suffice only to keep the refrigerator running. The cost of installing these panels was immense, difficult to achieve even when justified by primary healthcare benefits, and the output is modest. To repeat the installation would mean switching finite resources away from other projects, such as the secondary school, effectively abandoning them. To provide the power supply for a single laptop computer, for example, would cost ten times as much as the computer itself. There are clockwork powered radios, but extending this technology to computers has so far proved impractical. [Editorial comment, 2011: this was written some years ago; clockwork computers are now not only practical but being supplied to developing communities by the One Laptop Per Child programme.] Portability, of both equipment and output, is also a major issue. A computer tied to a single location is a very inefficient resource for a whole community. Paper is a scarce and expensive commodity – local children almost rioted in their eagerness to receive a sheet each from the pack of A4 photocopier bond which I took with me. A computer, to be useful here, must be able to travel around – not only for use, but also for information storage and the dissemination of its output. And travelling around means travelling on foot – you may think that your laptop is light and robust, but when did you last walk ten kilometres with it under your arm, over unmade earth tracks? Even if paper were available in quantity, a printer demands still more electricity. Its ink, toner or ribbon are products of a disposable industrial society. It has moving parts vulnerable to dust, humidity and lack of maintenance. The last is also true of conventional disk drives, mice, and many other peripherals. A computer for Ruvuma. then, must be small, light, robust, unitary in design, as thoroughly solid state as possible, and capable of eking out maximum achievable life from minimum battery power. This specification doesn’t leave very much scope for choice. A palmtop, or handheld PC, obviously. Monolithic construction suggests a Palm Pilot clone, or one of the WinCE imitations of that design such as the Cassiopeia or Jornada, but other requirements pointed elsewhere. WinCE, for a start, is too inefficient an OS and these machines are ruinously hungry for power – not terminal in London or Paris, with batteries available on every street corner for the price of a coffee, but fatal in remote Ruvuma where a battery costs more than one child’s complete primary education. The Palm-format screen is, in any case, designed to exploit mental habits already used to WIMP thinking; . This left EPOC machines. Psion's 3 series machines are regarded as passé in the developed world, but for reasons which become irrelevant or even advantageous in Ruvuma. Colour screens consume power, and touch screens are hard to read in the glare of tropical sunlight; the Psion 3 series have neither. The built-in applications (database, word processor and, above all else, spreadsheet) are easy to see and use on the wide screen of these devices, and relate well to paper methods. They are an ideal introduction, imposing as little as possible in the way of new perceptual methods and accommodating readily to existing knowledge. Jonas’s excitement at receiving the machine was, in itself, more than enough reward for my trip. I showed him how to access all the different applications, and provided him with the basics of each. I had to explain that it wasn't me who was giving it to him, it was the project and the donor, but I got the thanks anyway. He couldn’t contain his eagerness to apply it; he wouldn't stop smiling. To my surprise (because a computer is an everyday thing, in my privileged world), everyone in the vicinity was very interested too, and they all wanted a go – I suspect that it will be used outside agriculture at a much earlier date than I might have expected. I left the computerwith him, and he proceeded to devour the manual. Jonas knows (better than I do) that application is more important than theory, and is assimilating functions bit by bit in relation to his plans. Before I left, the spreadsheet had already been populated with data and statistical methods of his own devising, not mine or my world’s. I understood enough of how mathematics is applied to my own subjects to advise on basic structures; but what he did with those structures was all his own. New ways to organise his existing projects were already emerging; the physical arrangement of brick stockpiles was under review; he was already working on ways to surmount the impracticality of a printer, and his medical colleagues were looking thoughtfully at the organisation patterns of antenatal care. It seems likely, in the harsh conditions, that the machine will not outlast the initial supply of batteries. When it dies, another waits in mothballs, in temperate Europe, to fly out with somebody else and take its place. But the pace of change is rapid; by that time, circumstances will have changed unimaginably. The new road may have brought mains electricity – or may not. The villagers of Ruvuma will have a much more detailed idea of what they want from a computer – and our initial best guess may not cut it. Their development plans may throw up other priorities. Newer devices, more efficient electronics and as-yet unimagined developments may produce an ideal solution not on the horizon now. Most of all, Jonas Asokwe (about to start a new round of advanced training outside the ward, as I write this) and his colleagues in the villages may have developed new demands which require new solutions that we can’t predict. But it seems unlikely that things will look back from here. I’m back in college now, pushing on with the second year of Highers, and the village already seems a distant memory – but a good one , and I’m so glad that I went. So much laughter, so many really great people, so much learnt. I really do feel lucky to have had this chance – to see things, and learn things, and give something as well, that most will never get to do. Since I returned, I have received letters from Jonas and others – seeking information, and enquiring into my opinions on matters which I have to research before answering. Sending letters is not a light undertaking; they must cross considerable distances even to enter the postal system, and then the purchase of a stamp is an investment equivalent to a year’s education for a child. I really liked the women of the village; they do everything, and I like to hope that their efforts will also, in time, benefit from the machine and seeding knowledge I had the chance to take with me. |
Kara B
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