@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)

Right now, those same high-end knock-off N0kia/B1ackb3rry phones are making their way into the East African dukas. They are generally using obscure operating systems (OS) soldered together using half-hardcoded bitmaps and quirky keyboards made for Chinese. They are utterly “fragmented” and impossible to code for. As a programmer, sometimes I wonder at the question: who were the lucky anonymous code monkey team that was given such a job: make this phone work (mostly). You can just imagine the generation of Chinese OS programmers cutting their teeth, becoming experienced by solving the Operating System problems again and again for every new knock-off phone. But now, consider how easy Android is to use on arbitrary mobile hardware: one coder, in a month or so of bedroom hacking was able to bring it onto the iPhone. Just by that feat, it seems obvious that Android/OPhone is bound for the knock-offs in some substantial form.

The mobile computing revolution is happening already in rural Tanzania, in some sense. Every few days, a new teacher colleague of mine would come in with slick-looking phone with the requisite multiple SIM card support and big touch screen, but their phones didn’t enable anything. There were no apps, no stable browser. No way to make apps for that. I visited AppfricaLabs in late 2008 and talked with Ugandan @VicMiclovich about their work developing locally relevant apps for Nokia, Java midlets, and various other prevalent phone dev targets. Still, at the end of the discussion we had to admit that, for the moment, there was very limited impact opportunity in the market, outside of savvy tech users because of this unprogrammable Fake-OS problem. Maybe the OPhone can be a second chance?

Returning to one of the threads in the original article, though the Google Android App Store might not be relevant to the hundreds of millions of users in China, it may be more useful than the OPhone Store to the unmentioned millions of users of these phones as they trickle out into other Asian and African markets, if the store can be added by vendors without much trouble. The common foundation offers new possibilities.

While we are on the subject, the originally noted article was a follow up to a another Ars Technica report a month ago on Android Fragmentation. It wisely noted there that the catchy term should be used careful, it can refer to any of the panoply of versions, devices, OS repackagings, or device designers of Android.  It has been thrown around a lot and is pretty beat up:

“Because it means everything, it actually means nothing, so the term [fragmentation] is useless,” he wrote in a blog entry. “Stories on ‘fragmentation’ are dramatic and they drive traffic to pundits’ blogs, but they have little to do with reality. ‘Fragmentation’ is a bogeyman, a red herring, a story you tell to frighten junior developers. Yawn.”

There are even cleverly fake websites being created around its buzz (I won’t link to it directly but: android fragmentation dot com).

Anyway, I say bring on Android Fragmentation over the status quo, obscure, impossible to develop-for custom OSs in today’s knock-off phones. It is something to code for, a new audience to bring services to.

Tanzania, despite being admirably peaceful, has not yet achieved much in the ICT field. The reaction to the recent fiber installation has been muted. Its labor market is different too. Where only 10% of Uganda’s Makerere Computer Science graduates get jobs, Peace Corps Tanzania hasn’t been able to hire a single qualified ICT manager for its offices in six months of desperate searching. It is clear Tanzania is still scaling up its labor pool where the other countries nearby are ready to be leveraged. To me this means that Education has a lot of untapped potential. It is a very big country. Its education system was long neglected by colonialists, was always several orders of magnitude smaller than neighbors, and it is often hamstrung by bureaucracy but it is just now starting to explode.

Even through their short 2yr careers volunteer colleagues teaching A-Level have seen amazing improvements in students. Though many are failing, these are indications quality are starting to trend up. There have been challenges, like the Ministry’s poor scheduling that has resulted in empty colleges more than half the year but last week new syllabi were released which leaves me with hope that they at least realize the problems.

I intend to come back to USA for at least the next four months but after that I’m not sure. I’d like to help and work on these issues if the right opportunity appears. Judging from the relative noise on Twitter TZ vs. Twitter .UG, .KE, ICT4D members, there is so little work being done here, esp in TZ, I think my unique cultural experience and connections might enable me to foster something pretty neat.

By the way, here is one of the few neat TZ projects–NoPC, a British thin-client+cell net initiative for secondary schools instead of Teachers Colleges.