To avoid confusion, let me point out that there were actually two separate instances of Ushahidi being used in the election:

• one CrowdMap set up independently by the good people at Vijana.fm, sourcing from Twitter.
• and the major cooperative, mostly SMS-short-code oriented service at Uchaguzi.or.tz (Uchaguzi means, of course, election) I helped with this one.

The 2010 Tanzanian elections represented an ideal use case in home territory for the project. Tanzania is the world’s premiere speaker of the Swahili language (with some pardon to the Mombasa coast), and so in a sense, the word Ushahidi, Testimony itself. Ushahidi in Tanzania represented the project fulfillment with all parties potentially benefiting from the software’s beam of transparency:

1. the relatively strong civil organizations, including the police in Tanzania were prepared to be trained and take crime reports and prevent major incidents and loss of life,
2. election observers were placated by getting reports from the field (filtered by volunteers like myself)
3. and the public was heard.

According to Erik Hersman‘s updates, the effort involved 2,000 TACCEO-trained Tanzanians and evidently many more who came upon the site and its shortcode. By the end, there were about 5,000 non-spam SMS messages submitted to the software according to the volunteer panel, and some 2,000 reports filed based on those.

I applied through the Google Form that I linked on my blog last week, noting that I was US (and not Tanzania-based) and noting that I could translate TZ-style Swahili to English. I did most of my approving and translating of reports during the morning East Africa Time hours, before the primary teams in Tanzania and at the iHub came fully online. I then continued to watch Uchaguzi from the internal volunteer panel and through the situation room over the following days.

I have been very impressed by Ushahidi’s inspiring conceptual work on the main project and on its offshoot, Swift River. I had never helped with a busy Ushahidi instance before–I didn’t have an insider perspective of the Tanzania Situation room, or a pure outsider view of the report map. As they stayed true to their own transparency, most of my information presented here is actually already exposed in the situation room itself. Still, perhaps it benefits from a third party presentation.

The Ushahidi software instance at Uchaguzi.or.tz, running on Beta 7 version of the PHP code, was fairly bumpy from the start. In the earliest hours of election day, there were some database glitches for volunteers. It was difficult to search messages or reports without getting a backend SQL failure. Later, after I went to bed for the USA morning, Erik reported that a database table had crashed and had to be restored from a backup. Judging from the volunteer panel several hours later when I logged in, the disruption did not seem too bad, most of the messages seemed intact, which is impressive. It seemed that many developers around the world were involved in fixing bugs as the system was stressed. I wonder what features were new that justified the beta version for Uchaguzi TZ to the team.

After things settled down, there was a bit of discussion on the Swahili Street blog about one of the facilitator organizations, Jamii Forum‘s CHADEMA party bias. While internal procedural transparency is very important and was well achieved by this year’s Uchaguzi, in the future more emphasis might be placed around relative organizing biases for full disclosure.

Uganda 2011 in February monitors on Managing News

More generally for East Africa, it will be interesting to see how the Uganda 2011 Presidential Election monitoring develops for that election on February 18th, 2011.  The monitoring website of Uganda-based DEMgroup, ugandawatch2011.org is using a different software package, Managing News from Mountbatton and Development Seed, instead of Ushahidi to accept text messages and document reports. Is there a story there? I wonder why they choose differently. Development Seed seems to be doing good work generally on the Global Development Oriented Drupal-mod OpenAtrium. How does this fit in?

Updates and links since posting (November 24)

Pernille had a reflection post from Nov 2 with some additional comments that I had missed , thanks for linking here too. Pambazuka has a widely cited article on the proceedings of these fourth Tanzania Multiparty elections.  Vijana.fm has a nice Kiswahili article cautioning watanzania about being careful to check media sources and to think about media context.

In other good news, the codebase that was beta tested in the Tanzanian elections for Ushahidi 2.0 is now final and released! So despite the bugs we experienced, the experiences from the Tanzanian elections have probably cleaned up a lot of the rough spots in that great Open Source release. It should now be more stable for the next big election.

Besides Managing News in Uganda and these particular Ushahidi instances in Tanzania, there are even more election transparency software initiative case studies from Russia, Burundi, Poland and elsewhere highlighted over at the Jackfruity blog.

Related articles

• Uchaguzi: Monitoring the Tanzania Elections (ushahidi.com)
• Photos of the elections in Njombe (blog.daraja.org)

• 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.”

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 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?