Monthly Archive for August, 2010

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3 Major Corporate ICT Collaborations at Each Education Level: Tanzania

Published on 2010/8/16 in Education and General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Prominent US Corporations such as Accenture, Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco have recently engaged themselves with US development initiatives to improve education in East Africa’s largest country of Tanzania. Their ICT-oriented goals are set very high for a country where 95% of finishing students have never seen a desktop computer but they follow on of the legacy of substantial successes of the PEDP and SEDP programs of the past decade.

Back before those actions, most people’s children had never been in a secondary school classroom, too few even saw inside of a primary school. As shown in the graph last week, now primary and secondary school classrooms are equitably within reach of most, but quality lessons are still longed for by students. This challenge of quality improvement sits behind all the government’s collaborations of the coming years:

Primary: 21st Century Basic Education Program (link, USAID)

A 49Mil USAID grant to be awarded (likely) to one of the major three development organizations. It is to try to revolutionize elementary/primary school education in the small mainland region of Mtwara and the islands of Unguja and Pemba on Zanzibar. The goal seems to be to create radically computerized prototypical model regions where prevalent inexpensive computers available to most primary school teachers and some students to change the way primary school–especially the lower standards (1-4) are taught. Mtwara is a southern coastal region of Tanzania that has historically had trouble developing. It is fairly small (1mil people of 42mil in TZ) but still has Teachers Colleges, making it a good region for experimentation. Unguja, the main island of Zanzibar, also, despite its glossy tourism-oriented reputation, has been challenged in improving English literacy and improving general education of its students. Pemba lacks even the veneer of tourism. All of these small but very underserved areas will have extremely varying degrees of electricity and connectivity.

The USAID office in Dar Es Salaam, along with the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT) may have come up with this plan as a prototype extension to PEDP from years past.

Highlights:

  • Focus on implementing a cohesive Education Management Information System (EMIS) (pg 35). Possibly by working with Microsoft.
  • The EMIS would help manage national school test score results, a system currently accessed by most of the TZ population and fairly challenging to use..
  • Laptops for teachers, 1:1 computer share model for students with 2hrs/wk of usage on Office software.
  • Skoool software by Intel as used by other countries such as Egypt.
  • Improving Teacher Housing and facilities using modern materials–”procurement of pre-fabricated teacher housing and classrooms made from composite panel material composed of a high quality foam core covered with Glass fiber Reinforced Resin skin (GRR) or Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) composite panel.”
Following Next: Major Secondary and Post-Secondary Initiatives in Tanzania.

Etisalat, parent of Zantel accused of enabling internet spying

Published on 2010/8/15 in General. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Etisalat is a telecommunications company in the United Arab Emirates. In Tanzania it owns and operates one of the top-four mobile operators Zantel. This week, the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has written an open letter to Verizon and other internet encryption security (SSL) key managers. They are asking the company to rescind its authorization certificate approving Etisalat’s own authority to authorize secure web sites that is stored in every internet browser–even in the the one that you are using to read this. They contend that since Etisalat has installed spyware (literally) on their customer’s Blackberry mobile phones, they are unworthy of the wide-reaching trust of the larger internet for the special certificate.

Skeleton Keys

The debate and consternation about this issue began back in March when security researchers and Wired independently published reports about how there was indirect evidence that a single private certificate holder in collaboration with a foreign government could breach the privacy of visitors of web traffic between countries (like a business traveller in UAE to Gmail). They would tap internet pipes they control, an easy operating, and then use a Man-in-the-middle attack to pretend to both the site and the traveller they are the other party. It is interesting to note that they did not find any obvious cases of spying but Wired found an specialty computer manufactured by a US company that is designed to perform these unsavory attacks. The existence of these enablers made it clear that internet users should be concerned about rogue governments and bad actors, such as, potentially, Etisalat.

Concerned internet users using Zantel and Etisalat as ISPs should consider using the latest version of Firefox or Chrome browsers which have somewhat more sophisticated alerting mechanisms for suspicious certificates coming from two different countries. If you see a certificate error on a prominent it is possible but very unlikely that something is wrong.

Ultimately users are bound by the norms of the governments of country they reside in and should be aware of the limitations of internet security. Besides internet security itself, other non-SSL-based Blackberry mobile message security are recent points of contention for the UAE government, Saudi Arabia and India. They are making their own concerns felt by banning the communication until concessions are made. With US companies hosting substantial aspects of the global citizen’s internet lives, it will be curious to hear how these kinds of international security compromises continue to develop. Also good to remember, even if we don’t hear about these agreements most of the time, it is probably fair to assume they are being made.

Update: Oh, and thanks to all this noise, a US-Government Blackberry mobile phone donation to Kenyan Election council (IIEC) before the recent election is now rumored as suspect by Kenyan Intelligence.

NetworkWorld article links to a pdf map of all the parties who can also authorize certificates. Besides Etisalat, it notably includes the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other nations’ governments.

Update 2: 31 August, 2010  Zantel distances itself from Blackberry bans.

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