/Culture/ Blogging from the bush
10/02/2010 | Filed under Discover > Culture
In rural Zambia, the internet is more accessible than clean water. Adam Oxford joined a UK charity using that fact to get its message across
At the end of the rainy season, the Zambian bush is at its thickest. Walking through it, we’re surrounded by tall grass, trees and silence. The nearest road is several kilometres away and even the birds have given up singing in the mid-morning heat. There is wildlife somewhere nearby, though. A herd of 50 or so elephants has been sighted here recently. George Matantilo, the headmaster of a local school, is worried for the safety of the five young pupils who are walking with us.
I’m here to join Saviour, Irene, Valencia, Alex and Sharon on their daily walk to school, along with George and Steve Heyes, the founder of educational charity LearnAsOne. It’s a 14km, five-hour round trip that they complete in the blistering heat of the dry months and the torrential downpours of the rainy season alike. Three of the children are barefoot.
George works at Simakakata community school. He doesn’t usually chaperone his pupils; today he’s here to act as a guide and interpreter for Steve and me. When he heard about the elephants, he says, all he could do to help was encourage the children to stay together for their own protection.
Irene, the youngest and boldest of the group, offers me a bunch of berries she’s just picked from a tree. I’m hesitant to accept them; in Zambia, two-thirds of the population live on less than the equivalent of a dollar a day and the fruit Irene’s collected is all she’ll eat until 6pm.
I flip open my mobile phone and tell followers of @LearnAsOne about the pachyderm problem. Even though there’s no access to either water or electricity at the school, the EDGE network around here is ludicrously fast.
Armed with a cheap Asus Eee PC and a smartphone, we’re able to upload photos to our blogs and stay in touch with potential UK donors from the school grounds. The purpose of today’s walk is to post a real-time discussion of the journey these kids undertake every day, sharing the experience with people back home.
Broadband in the sticks
Zambia is typical of sub-Saharan African countries: poor, not profiting from its natural riches, ravaged by HIV/AIDS and with a state-of-the-art cellular network covering 80 per cent of the population.
People in the townships of South Africa, for example, were banking online from their mobiles back when even non-Apple users in the UK still thought MMS was a pretty cool thing to do. In Kenya, health workers use mobiles to gather demographic information in rural areas and to ensure new mothers receive information about vaccinations and nutrition.
In Zambia, demand for mobile data is driven by multinational mining corporations operating in the mineral-rich Copperbelt. As a result, every mast run by MTN, the country’s second largest operator, is EDGE enabled, with a faster 3G rollout planned for next year.
While the multinationals keep the data side of the business profitable, ordinary people benefit from the high levels of access. In the better-off areas, many people use their phones for email and web surfing; it’s often better quality and cheaper than the service in internet cafes, and broadband at home is still a luxury few can afford. For poorer, rural communities such as Simakakata, though, handsets are still a shared resource, topped up with 15p credit tokens for emergency use only.
LearnAsOne is one of a new generation of non-profit organisations using this ubiquitous connectivity to get its message across. Dubbed ‘social entrepreneurs’, it’s using online platforms to sell its cause and stimulate grassroots involvement.
There are huge cost savings and efficiencies gained by using new media to contact potential donors. More importantly, followers feel more connected to the stories the charity brings back – which can help encourage giving.
“What we’re doing isn’t about technological voyeurism,” Steve explains. “It’s about showing that the schools we work with are staffed by ordinary people and attended by ordinary kids who just need a bit of help to get them on the path to a self-sustaining cycle of development.”
The key, Steve says, is to give the community a platform to tell its own stories, which are more powerful, engaging and honest than the ‘poor, black and starving’ clichés many fundraisers use.
Perhaps the key benefit is that working like this fosters trust between donors and recipients. By keeping overheads to a minimum and enabling donors to see where every penny has gone, small charities are attracting a lot of backers away from bigger organisations. It’s more rewarding to see exactly where your money has been spent – and possibly even get a personalised thank you from the people it’s helping – than to write a cheque that will disappear largely into administrative costs.
Reporting live
Working with LearnAsOne in Zambia felt more like being on location for a news organisation than a charity. Steve’s a passionate believer in self-help. He wants to find out everything about a community to identify the needs it can’t fulfil itself, then report them in the most human way possible. So rather than gap year students who are handy with a trowel, he recruits journalists, film-makers and photographers, plus freelance web designers who can help craft content and delivery mechanisms.
I spent most of my time trying to gather as many stories as possible, and the rest of it crouched over the Eee PC, writing and uploading them. Working in an online medium is great, but it demands a constant stream of quality content to stay noticed. We’ve held back stories so that the site can be updated regularly later in the year, too.
Keeping those streams up proved harder than we expected. The biggest problem was the LAO server back home. While I was able to upload photos to my blog, the LAO site didn’t like the slow connection. Often, it took over an hour to get a single photo uploaded. (On the other hand, we originally thought we’d need a satellite modem to get online at all.)
One problem we didn’t overcome was deciding which application was best for demonstrating ‘the internet’ to primary school children who’ve never seen a computer before. If you immediately thought ‘Google Maps’, you, like us, would be wrong. Being able to zoom from a small school near Kalomo to a bird’s eye view of Bath may have wowed us when it first became possible, but it’s too abstract a concept. This school can’t afford a globe and watching the Earth spin in response to mouse movements means nothing to these kids. Use a webcam so the 30 faces peering over your shoulder can see themselves on screen, though, and the squeals of delight are overwhelming.
We asked all the children to write what they want to be when they grow up for a photo story on the site. The classes in Simakakata are full of would-be teachers, doctors and nurses, and even a want-to-be president. My hope is that there’ll soon be a few web developers there, too.
Bookmark with:
Comments
mavis / 11/02/2010 / 21:16 / http://hellomarshmallow.tumblr.com/
interesting feature story!
Warmiboa / 13/02/2010 / 15:12 / http://warmiboa.com
Very intresting project...
We are in the Amazonía, the other side of the world, in a similar plan....
But here internet is almost imposible. One of our main issues is communication between communities, besides of transport... We can only use telephone, and it is more expensive to call from on communitie to another than to call to a mobile in USA....
Onother important thing about connecting doners with people is that the people themselves can get organize: here they develop sustainable projects, receive donations to start them, but work for mainaining them. Donners can follow that process.
Anna Green / 17/02/2010 / 16:35 / http://www.crearedesign.co.uk
This is a great project, its ironic that the internet is in abundance when items like water and food are not. The internet is not a resource to be sniffed at though, im sure that the children and teachers are very grateful for the internet and the information and connections it can provide. I think a campage to try and get water by email could work quite well. Im sure there is a play on words there somewhere, if anyone wants to think of one.
