• There is now an Ushahidi Election Violence, Issue and Rioting Reporting Map instance up for the Tanzanian elections taking place next Sunday. You can also apply as an ushahidi voluntia translator and verifier at this Google Form. As of last week, one of four polls suggests opposition may have an edge. I do not take a position for any party in the elections but I do hope that they are carried out peacefully. I especially hope that my friends in country, Watanzania and Wamerikani alike, are safe. (As Pernille points out, UCHAGUZI is a collaborative initiative between TACCEO, Tanzania; HIVOS, Netherlands; Haki Elimu , Tanzania; the biggest Tz national ICT community Jamii Forums, Tanzania; Rakesh Rajani’s TWAWEZA , CRECO, Kenya in association with USHAHIDI and SODNET, Kenya as technology & strategy partners. Wengi wameunga kuhifadhi taifa, Jamani! vz)
• Beyond the election questions, there are other really bright people: Mtanzania Silicon Valley Diaspora Entrepreneur Mbwana Alliy has an insightful guest article covering no fewer than 5 different promising Tanzanian+Silicon Valley and Tanzanian nzima initiatives. Lete Maendelo! He suggests that the reason you don’t associate Tanzania and the modern tech scene is mostly just a lack of reporting of things south of Lake Victoria. He calls for more coverage.
• One mentioned startup was Envaya, a website to help government offices and NGOs in Tz and East Africa communicate with constituents easily on mobiles and the internet, cofounded by a returned ICT Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Pemba in 2007. Also see Kabissa.org and Maneno. Each site has similar goals but different approaches.
• Word on the ground is that Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow (touched on in this post) is looking at leveraging Moodle-based BrainHoney as a part of the software foundation for the initiative. Chisimba (+ one of their rockstar developers on twitter) also seems a good related Africa-oriented e-learning platform to follow.
• Google Baraza African oriented Question and Answer site is doing an initial community launch. You can apply for an invite here. A Ghanaian Blogger’s ideas are here, Peace Corps colleague Jon McLean here, but do not miss Google’s cute video on the service here if your modem can handle the download. Grab and answer your question for Africa as soon as possible! So far it seems to be successfully bridging East and West Africa as I’ve not seen in a website, though there is little South African participation to date. See also Majibu.com, the preexisting East African Q&A startup.
• WhiteAfrican has just posted an up to date Snapshot of mobile data rates across East Africa that follows on my own Snapshot from 2009.

As an administrative note: I have broken out my Peace Corps-relevant posts into a separate category that you can visit using the link along the top. They won’t appear on the front page but will appear in my RSS feeds. I’m gratified that my last post was picked up and republished in the Peace Corps newsletter, I hadn’t thought of that! Thanks Aron. Ultimately though, I don’t want to weaken my main practical themes on the blog.

Related articles

• Facebook Arrives in Tanzania (insidefacebook.com)
• Tanzania approves new highway across Serengeti (gadling.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.”

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.

It was just out of curiosity so I can’t remember what all I read but I remembered being startled by the class-based histories of artificial skin coloring, having expected it to be all about race. Apparently, tanning grew popular with white folks earlier in the 20th century to mark leisure and money. If you could be tan in winter, it showed that you had the resources to go to a warm climate. If you could be tan in summer, it showed that you weren’t stuck in the factories for work…That we can’t see it simply in light of race, but as a complex interplay between race, class, and geography.

Its true. I never heard any East African rail against skin whitening. It is a tempting target but probably a nonissue in a different cultural context. This clash between Indian branch of Vasoline brand and the US reminds me of another cultural chasm brought into contrast by the social internet: the Makmende meme.

Ethan Zuckerman wrote about how Wikipedians adamantly wanted to erase the article for Makmende as it didn’t seem relevant or significant. As the meme crossed Kenyan blogs it was quite notable in those circles but not reachable by the average westerner wikipedia editors.

These kinds of misunderstandings rarely reach us in the US, especially not as we sit down at our computers. They greet and grate on volunteers and international workers constantly–Pretty much whenever they walk out the door of their comfy homes.

Unsmilingly photogenic. Did you think honest portraits required smiles?

Are there any more examples of Cultural Collisions that you’ve seen recently?