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.”

A while back, Jon Gosier of Appfrica offered the telling statistic that inspired Appfrica Labs to spring from the Makerere University, long respected as one of the prime East African academic institutions, in downtown Kampala:

In Makerere’s Computer Science program they graduate about 900 kids per year. Of those 900 between 5% and 10% find full time jobs by the same time the next year. Those that don’t find jobs by that time, now have the added pressure of competing with the next class – with a the added disadvantage of a slightly outdated and somewhat unequal education (as education should be getting better with each graduating class)

This, of course, showed that there was a vast amount of untapped talent to inspire in Uganda.

From my own experience working in the education sector, Tanzania isn’t in this situation: in contrast, they’re still ramping up the post-secondary education system to meet even the tiny job market. About eight years past, Tanzania massively expanded its primary school enrollment (East Africa comparison graph) (2002, PEDP). About six years ago, leaders started building a huge number of secondary schools (SEDP) and student numbers (& some teaching standards, like A-level) have gone way up with the greater student base and intense competition. In the last year they’ve built several huge, new government universities which are starting to accept students in large numbers from these original student cohorts as they now reach adulthood. The government of TZ is also handing out many “loans” which are much like grants to a large fraction of the eligible post-secondary students who apply for them.

The challenge of today is to help these still-green Tanzanian higher-education students realize the communities of ICT online as efficiently as possible so that they have a chance to compete in the regional marketplace. An effective ICT practitioner can not keep themselves current without engaging online.  Think of all those students finishing CompSci at Makerere and getting lost in the progress. Fresh ideas exchanged through newly liberalizing labor market initiatives like the strengthened East African Community (EAC), university-affiliated silicon tech hubs, and high profile competitions like Apps4Africa are fantastic for this. I am happy to note that Tanzanian academics like Rakesh Rajani (e.g. his comments on the SEDP in 2006 & on Twitter) who led some aspects of the hugely important education expansions in Tanzania are getting behind it. Sure, iHub, Appfrica Labs and Hive Colab are big names in East African ICT today.  Tanzania, (and though I can’t speak to them so directly, even Rwanda/Burundi) have a good chance at their own ICT silicon-style hubs as the higher education terrain swiftly develops in the greater Uswahili.

Just to caution: I am not a development or economics scholar so please do correct me if you think any portrayal of a stat is inaccurate.

Update September 2010: Slightly revised versions of this article were cross-published by invitation on ICTWorks and also onto ICTAfrica.biz as a guest post.

It would have been deflatingly tricky to tap some of the Gapminder resources in discussions with teacher friends or students. This, even though it features charts that can elucidate profound life realities like the explosive 3-5% year-over-year income per person growth across the East Africa Community, the HIV epidemic across continents and time and HIV concentration.

As of last week, teachers around the world, with or without stable internet, can now use Adobe AIR-based Gapminder Desktop to show off and explore the enlighteningly bubble-based development statistics visualizer from the favorite Swede teacher-economist Hans Rosling. It should work on most kinds of computers after installing Adobe AIR (~20mb) and The Gapminder Desktop (~10mb).

Some of my most popular lectures training teachers in Tanzania took advantage of visual technologies to offer a fresh lens to my students’ world through tools like Google Earth (as a sidenote, it can cache, or store away map and terrain data to use offline). I was fortunate to have a satellite internet connection and a digital projector but as EDGE wireless cellphone internet and netbooks become the standard for teachers going abroad, there should be no reason not to grab this tool and keep it in mind when such a visual aid is needed in the moment. If you’re leaving your computer but have access to a color printer, the Gapminder PDFs of the World gap “map” is worth noting too.

So we can’t solve the broadband gap for video just yet but now there is a new tool to share some of the best insights of data.

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.

October was probably one of the most frustrating months at site just based on physical environment. I was very thankful for my cushy Zanzibar vacation weeks before. It is pretty depressing when the mountains all around are completely barren and formerly lush cropland is nothing but sand. Fortunately I got another volunteer at my college in the middle of the month. Two Wazungu volunteers (white westerners) total joined my district bringing us back up to six individuals. In October, many new birds started to pass through too though this one is pretty common all year. The Cordon Blue darts around my house eating seeds, presumably.

Sometimes sunsets do great things with the otherwise dull brown. My counterpart Allan swings by my house to say hello on a slow afternoon without electricity. “Counterpart” is a loose Peace Corps term which indicates somebody who you like to work with in your community. You’re only suppose to have a couple but I end up throwing the term around a lot in various contexts.

Power was a big frustration this season: shortages of water mean hydroelectric plants starts to fail and our electric company was preparing for the strong rains so was taking the power down for 12 hours every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday to replace termite eaten poles in the hundred-some miles straight of non-redundant medium-capacity wires running from our regional capital, Dodoma town. They then run back down into the distant bottom of our large-ish district by another route which has a dam and reservoir. Our district sources its own power but quixotically has the most unreliable coverage from these services.

A random classroom at my college adjacent to my IT compound. Thank goodness for student teachers for watering all the plants keeping my workplace green as it was. Unfortunately this term turned out to only have six weeks of time with students around and four or five weeks of students in classes. This effectively means I saw each of my students four times in the entire term and for many, half of these times were without power. Thankfully, we have a generator which can run all ~100 computers so in at least half of the classes we generated power to teach computers (at significant expense). Almost none of the other 33 teachers colleges in Tanzania have generators so would be completely stranded by periods like this.

The problems which delay and shorten the national teachers college term are many but initially most of the problems stemmed back to the Ministry of Education which was several months late in accepting and assigning student teachers to the individual national teachers colleges. A mitigating factor: after national exams are graded many of the students are waiting to hear about university acceptances and often decline at the last possible minute. Another factor: the Ministry of Education seems to have lost a huge chunk of its funding thanks to a parliamentary gambit to shirk transparency requirements made by donor nations. In recent months this has caused mild but persistent teacher unrest due to unpaid salaries.

Secondary school students from distant Chamwino Secondary catch a breeze with me near the cell phone tower on the hill above my town. Initially they were a bit skittish about helping a Mzungu white person with his photography–you should see the smeared expression on their faces in a panorama I was trying to cut them out of. Then I explained I was a teacher and that I actually knew some of their teachers and that I was a teacher. They quickly cooled off as we chatted about their school and even smiled! I love cultural connections. Its also fortunate that teachers are one of the most culturally respected positions in Tanzania (much like doctors in America) .

I ventured up the mountain for the first time in quite a while as the first rain in some eight weeks had just plowed the dust from the skies leading to some of the best dry season vistas yet. My two other fast friends on the hill included the guards of the cell phone tower. Here they are resting in the moist air as the rain dissipated.

The guards’ adobe. I wish I had caught the contrast between it and the tower just behind the camera which has electric fences, 24 hour air conditioning and a huge modern generator. He had been working here for several months and had recently changed jobs: he used to be a guard at our nearby mountain livestock college. He hadn’t yet been through a rainy season. I’m anxious to visit him again and ask about how it has gone now that everything is green, green, green.

Above my house; Find the red flame tree in the right half of the image and look for the blue door hiding under it. That is my house. The satellite dish near the bottom-middle flame tree are my nearest neighbors houses. The sat-dish house is my counterpart Allan’s. The flame trees are typically called Christmas trees around here since their fantastic color lasts until about that time.

A hunch and little patience on the hill rewarded: Here is a very mildly High-dynamic range (HDR) shot taken from the cell tower just after a fierce twenty minute rain storm forced me into the little hut pictured above.

Rains aren’t all fun and blossoms. My poor students didn’t realize it would rain today, after all for the most part it hadn’t since they started term. Their shoes got soaked. The rain also brought out a number of sleeping critters: winged, awkwardly flight-capable termites who use it as a signal to fly into the air, get knocked down by raindrops, promptly lose their wings, mate and proliferate randomly around for maximum dispersal.

Frogs and toads seem to have caught onto this behavior and they also are awakened by this first major rain. I spotted 15 in the small green area around our ICT compound

Scorpions aren’t so much cued as forced out of their crannies by the flood. This one decided higher ground was the nook under my doorstep. Scorpions bark is much worse than their bite (granted I haven’t been bitten) but they are sure fun to play with when you have stove tongs (pictured decending).

So I admit, I chucked him into the spiders nest hoping to force a faceoff. No such luck.