@Leila C Janah of Samasource hosted an insight-filled Q&A session at Tech4Africa last month and the video is finally online. I hope she is not offended, but to me, the intro-video candid shot of her might have captured a beginning of her as a figure of African Mama scale-responsibility and stature in the Africa social entrepreneurship community. Just look into her face! In the video itself, she reflects honestly on her struggles and the details of starting a business working in Africa from a fresh Silicon Valley perspective.

For me, the presentation fondly recalls the December 2008 Appfrica‘s Facebook Developer Garage that I attended in Kampala when she had just begun her first collaborations. It was a frenetic co-demonstration with Charlie Cheever of the Facebook App Platform. The senior developer showed a hundred techie Ugandan university students how to start coding on Facebook apps in Makerere’s new technology hub building. Today, Leila is thinking about a much wider scale of social impact and has some real lessons to share. Charlie now heads Quora, a social questions startup and Facebook is a prime force in East Africa with mobile Facebook Zero (0.facebook.com) free through many carriers, substantial market penetration, and one of the very top internet brand standings.

Related articles

• Tech For (And By) Africa (techcrunch.com)
• How Quora Is Trying to Build an Ideal Society (gigaom.com)
• How Samasource Helps The World, And A Secret Tattoo Unveiled (Video) (techcrunch.com)
• Tech4Africa: Building for a Global Technology Market in Africa (downtheavenue.com)

OpenMRS Hackathon at Regenstrief Institute

OpenMRS is a powerful electronic medical records (EMR) package used at hundreds of clinics around the world in about 46 developing countries.

The Open Source project was founded in 2006. For US readers, the highest profile user is likely Partners in Health. They apply it very actively as their ICT4D/mHealth solution in most of the countries they serve including Haiti, Peru, Mexico and Rwanda.  They also employ several full time Open Source contributors to the project.

Vibrant Open Source projects often draw from an eclectic variety of contributors. Given this, it is somehow not surprising that this kind of scheme can blossom with good software so effectively. Talent attracts talent. It seemed that each of the participant categories at the hackathon was represented by rockstar programmers that also had their MD’s.

The two-day event kicked off with the weekly developers’ screencast conference call. We had contributors from at least 3 continents represented on the line and another 20 developers in the room. Some 6 major contributors worked at the main Regenstrief Institute office above our venue. Another 3 worked for Partners in Health. There was an assortment of graduate students from nearby universities. On the phone, participants from the just-completed Google Summer of Code joined in (OpenMRS is one of the program’s top largest and longest-running projects).

The conference call itself opened slowly but soon we had contributors demoing slick integrations of SMS + website patient profile up on the large screen. The developer was able load a patient’s full record, including details of their participation in various programs and send them a relevant SMS reminder from the same page seamlessly. Responses from the patient were saved back to the patients record as an instant message log.

I should have more to say about the coding event over the coming days, for now I simply leave these impressions.

Secondary: Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow (SEDP2) (pdf SEDP II overview) (home page)

This project, utilizing the business consulting expertise of Accenture, is still very much in the planning stages to discover the tools necessary to bring the next big jumpstart of quality for Tanzania’s high school/secondary education system. It may be funded by 450Mil grant similar to the SEDP from years past that drastically increased the number of secondary schools and secondary school enrollment.

Founding Ideas:

• Will work with 4,000 schools, and 1.5m secondary school students each year.
• Secondary Teachers can be more effective with laptop + inexpensive projector.
• Computers can be a platform for continuing education.
• Video and Distance eLearning might be used as a way to provide valuable, well-educated teachers with opportunities to live in desirable and well supported locales such as Dar Es Salaam but still reach the millions of rural students in remote areas with weaker infrastructure.
• Video may also allow fewer teachers to reach more students in fast-expanding areas like Dar Es Salaam.

Links:

• A more specific blog post by INGO collaborator NetHope.
• The Citizen: ICT Solution to 85,000 Dar Teacher Shortage News Release link (mirror)
• Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow Video

Post-Secondary: UDOM/University of Dodoma partners with IBM (link)

There are also beginnings parallel efforts to improve collaboration of new Tanzanian Universities with outside organizations. IBM has followed up on its initiative to send many of its Corporate Service Corps members to University of Dodoma over the last year with an agreement with Tri-Continental to help service the swiftly growing Dodoma University as it reaches for its 40,000 student goal, along with improvements which may be related to governance and the primary and secondary levels.

Speaking recently when presenting a paper at a training session in Dar es Salaam, IBM East Africa marketing and communications manager Maureen Muthua said the agreement between IBM and the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training aimed at helping realise the government’s vision of building a ‘Silicon Valley’ type of environment around Dodoma University. (link)

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• Engineering HELP in Africa: Left behind but thinking ahead (scientificamerican.com)

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.”

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.