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that time, now have the added pressure of competing with the next class – with a the added disadvantage of a slightly outdated and somewhat unequal education (as education should be getting better with each graduating class)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.

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.