By

Y. Z. Ya’u

08056180208

This week the MarArthur Foundation in conjunction with the Harvard University (yes, that same Harvard that our Governors wanted to go for capacity building) and the Digital Bridge Institute (DBI) held a workshop on Enhancing Civil Society Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Nigeria… The aim of the workshop which held at the DBI Abuja campus was to sensitize NGOs in Nigeria of new ICTs tools that they could use to enhance the work they are doing.

There is no doubt that new media technologies are facilitating social activism and enhancing the effectiveness of civil society organizations in the work they do. Over the years there have been many successful examples of civil society organizing using ICTs to achieve great results. Some of the notable ones in this class include the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) during its 1999 ministerial meeting, the defeat of the coup against Boris Yesin in 1991 which was foiled largely due to the civil society organizations efforts at sending out numerous emails which facilitated mobilization of opposition against the coup, the ouster of Milosovic in former Yugoslavia and more recently the demonstrations that rocked Iran following its presidential election. Of course we all remember how Obama tapped into social networking using internet to raise campaign funds and drive his presidential election campaign to the grassroots to startling success.

In Nigeria, the use of ICTs for social activism is isolated and episodic, still at its infancy, and largely driven by donor organizations and not embedded in the day to day organizing, campaign and strategic engagements of the civil society organizations. The few instances that ICTs were used purposely by civil society included the 2002 boycotts of the services of GSM companies that was organized against poor GSM services, the effort by the Freedom of Information Bill (FOI) coalition that kept bombarding members of the National Assembly with email and text messages in an attempt to get them to support the bill as well as the fight against the third term project which same productive use of both internet and mobile phone.

In the main however, most civil society organizations in Nigeria use the internet only to send and receive email and hardly use the mobile technology beyond making calls and sending text messages as reminders. A few have attempted to use the internet to promote their organizational visibility while still fewer have attempted to use it as a platform for both education and advocacy.

Unlike in some African countries such as Uganda, South Africa, etc where civil society organizations are harnessing the potentials of mobile technology in their work, here in Nigeria they are yet to seize the potentials of this technology. In Uganda for example Text to Change, a civil society organization sends SMS text to the population to improve awareness of HIV Aids treatment and prevention.  It has resulted in a high level of people turning up for testing. Similarly in Rwanda, TRACNet, a mobile phone-based system that allows tracking the use of anti-AIDS drugs through text messaging is being successfully used with good results. South Africa has developed the SIMpill, which is a SIM card attached to a prescription bottle is used to remind patients to take their medication.

Why is it that our civil society organizations are yet to leverage this technology even as we have extensive history of the use of broadcast technology for public enlightenment and advocacy? Still it is ironic that Nigeria which has one of the world’s fastest growth rates of mobile phone penetration is far behind in the realization of the full potentials of mobile technology as a tool for social work.

Part of the explanation for this paradox lies in the peculiarity of the ICT industry in the country. Nigeria has one of the least reliable GSM services while at the same time we have comparatively high tariffs. Such high tariffs with lots of user frustration discourage people from experimenting and exploring the full range of what they could get from their service providers. We are content to put up with repeated failed and dropped calls and undelivered text messages. How do you hope to run an effective text-based campaign if you are not sure that the message are being delivered? This is besides the high cost of doing so.

There is also the fact that unlike in those other African country, telecommunication companies in Nigeria hardly partner with civil society organizations to support social causes. In fact in Nigeria telecommunication companies do not channel their cooperate social responsibility funds into technology initiatives that would as a matter of fact add value to their business but rather look for where media visibility would quickly be reaped. Thus they go so sports and supporting politicians in their constituency projects, the latter no doubt to ensure that their infractions of the laws are hardly given a nod. Without such partners, it would be difficult to do the necessary exploration and experimentation that would lead to the creative use of ICTs for socials activism.

That the telecommunication companies do not channel part of the social cooperate responsibility to technology causes may itself be partly due to the funding mental framework of most the civil society organizations in Nigeria. For many, they think of funding only from foreign donor organizations and not about building partnerships with various stakeholders that can contribute different inputs (not necessary money) to a project.

Whatever the case, this conference would have provided the civil society organizations not only with information and experiences on the use of ICTs for social activism but also the necessary space for them to strategize on how they would leverage new media technologies in their work. If any thing, it should spur them to join the advocacy to have holistic, participatory and inclusive review of the National Information Technology Policy which has been going on for the past six or so months within the circles of government bureaucracy and IT professionals. The pervasiveness and the centrality of ICTs in the shaping and making of today’s world is such that we can not leave discussion and decision making on its policy framework to only a few people. It is time that civil society and other stakeholders contest the content and directions of this important policy.

By

Y. Z. Ya’u

08056180208

It was a one-table exhibition, arranged at the foyer of the Bola Ige Information Technology Centre, National Women Centre, Abuja. The date was Tuesday, 10^th March, 2009. On display were baby cots, baby bag, basket, various types of perfumes, soaps, chocolates, curie, pomade and many other household needs. These items were products of women who were trained on Information Technology skills at the Prof. Iya Abubakar Community Centre, Bauchi under the Microsoft Corporation social corporate responsibility flagship programme, the Unlimited Potential. Under the programme at the Bauchi centre, 50 women living on purdah (seclusion) were trained on basic IT skills and entrepreneurship. Noting that Bauchi is a centre of tourism, the programme planners had thought to add value to this by targeting women who already had some handcraft skills.

The result was an astonishing torrent of creativity that has produced these products which are of very high international standards, yet all made from locally available materials. If you run into customs officials at either the airport or the border with these items, you will have hard time explaining to them that these are local products, and not imported ones. Does this not tell us that industry lies in the empowerment of the people?

The secret as revealed by Yusuf Mahmoud, a staff of the Iya Abubaka Community Centre who conducted people round the exhibition was that the women were able to leverage their newly acquired IT skills, browsing through relevant websites, downloading designs and recipes which they then adopted and used local materials to produce their items. Their furniture making mini-factory in Bauchi is an elite must.

Internet has allowed them to research and experiment with various formulas, they were able for instance to discover that the reason for theharshness of most locally produced toilet was the wrong mixed of chemicals and used this knowledge to produce a soap that is soft to the skin and adopted to the local weather conditions.

Today many of these women who are secluded and therefore living from homes, have found an outlet for their creativity through the internet. They are economically empowered and fully engaged. They have also found an outlet for these products through online marketing.

For the country, Jummai Umar-Ajibola, the Citizenship Manager of Microsoft, said the contribution of the women is that by uploading their recipes to the internet so that other people can download and use, they are re-branding the image of the country from one that is associated with the cyber crime to a potentially enrich networking engagement of global benefit. There is of course also the fact that by helping them to be on their own, the value added by the IT training on them has created jobs which are generating incomes directly for the beneficiaries and indirectly adding to the wealth of the country.

The event at which the exhibition was presented was the kick off of the third phase of the Unlimited Potential Programme of Microsoft which also provided an opportunity to review the achievement of the first and second phase of the programme. No doubt form the exhibition and tales from others, there is something to celebrate of the programme.

The Unlimited Potential Programme was started two years ago with a grant of $90,000 to the Bola Ige Information Technology Centre and five of its partners to extend access to ICT skills to disadvantaged and marginalized people, who will otherwise not have access to such training. It is targeted at delivering relevant, accessible and affordable solutions in three interrelated areas that are crucial to developing economic opportunity, namely transforming education, fostering local innovation and enabling jobs and opportunities.

Since the inception of the programme, over 4000 people, men and women have been reached across all the six zones of the country. In summing up the achievement, Dr. Many Emechata, the Director of the BIITC and Coordinator of the Project said it had been a resounding success. It has opened up new windows of opportunity for the beneficiaries and enables them to increase their market scope with exposure to a wider community of people engaged or interested in their skills.

The programme was domiciled in six centers across the country, each with its specific focus. The north east zone which was handled by the Iya Abubakar Community centre focused on secluded women in the first year and widows in the second year. In the South West, located at the Community Computer Centre, Abeokuta the targets were on women focusing on tie and dye business. The Calaber Zone tackled fishermen and women while Kaduna Zone trained women traders and farmers.

The BIITC which handled the North Central in addition to being the coordinator of the project had a more challenging engagement. It trained disabled people in the first year focusing on those with impaired vision, hard hearing and the physically challenged. For the second year, it targeted HIV positive people. The experience in both cases was rewarding as it not only provided these people with new skills and knowledge but also facilitated their integration into the mainstream society which tend to stigmatize such people.

This year the programme added three addition organizations to reach out to wider geographical spread of the country as well as target other groups of people. Paradigm Initiative Nigeria (PIN) in Lagos will now take over the implementation in the South West and will be focusing on training youths. In South East, Women Aid Collective (WACOL) will step in with special emphasis on widows while in the North West, the Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) will take over and focus on youths and journalists as well as creating an interface between the trained people and their governments.

So far, Microsoft has put over $220,000 into the project. Of course for the world software giant, this could be a small amount, but then if all other companies operating in the IT sector could do the same, we would certainly be getting nearer to the goal of universal IT literacy for all, which the United Nations hopes would be achieved globally by 2015. But there is even more to getting social corporate responsibility. Governments in the country would have to realize that the dream for a better economy cannot come through without investment in education which today is IT-driven.

By

Y. Z. Ya’u

08056180208

On Tuesday 24^th February this year, I attended a small and brief ceremony at which the Nigeria Communication Commission (NCC) presented three laptops to the Kano-based Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) as part of its support for the annul ICT quiz programme for secondary school students that CITAD has been organizing. It was also a double occasion as CITAD itself at the venue immediately handed over one of the laptops to Government Girls Science Technical College, Kofar Nassarawa, Kano as the overall winners of the 2008 edition of the quiz which held in November last year. They had beaten 29 other schools from four states to emerge top in the keenly competed event.

This is of course is only one of the many instances in which the telecommunications regulatory body has been assisting schools with computer. A number of secondary schools in different parts of the country have benefited from its digital study centre donation in which beneficiary schools were given a 100-computer terminal laboratory. Many universities have also benefited form the donation of computers and VSAT equipment as well as payment of bandwidth for internet access. There is of course the even more ambitious programme of the Universal Access Provision Fund (USPF) which is establishing a community communication centre in all the senate districts of the country.

In making the presentation, the NCC Executive Vice Chairman, Engr. Ernest Ndukwe, who was presented by the Zonal Controller of the Kano Zone of the NCC, Alhaji Adamu Amshi said that NCC was supporting with the event because it would help in the attainment of its vision, which was to facilitate the creation of an information rich society that is comparable globally in quality of telecommunication service provision. He reasoned that such an information rich society cannot be built without digital literacy. It requires achieving national universal computer proficiency, which itself is only possible when every child has access to computer with which to learn.

Digital literacy is the ability of people to work and interact effectively with information technology mediated and dependent world of today. There is no doubt that things have dramatically changed, including they ways we do things. The landscape of literacy itself has so changed that our definition of functional literacy must not limited to just reading and writing but must also include ability to use digital machines such as the computer and GSM phones.

What struck me during the presentation ceremony was the fact that while we all agree that every body must be computer literate, we are making very little effort to ensure that our children do actually have the opportunity to be computer literate in schools. If we are to take count of how many of our schools, both public and private, have computers for students and pupils to learn with, we would be shocked to realize that the proportion of schools is so small in comparison with the totality of schools we have in the country.

In the last two or so years both WAEC and NECO have migrated to online registration by requiring candidates to register from their websites. JAMB has also migrated. All of these bodies also now release their results online. There is has recent indication that JAMB is even considering to start online examinations. Yet have we cared to find out how our students and school administrators are coping with the situation?

There is even an irony on the part of both NECO and WAEC. These two examination bodies are yet to make computer studies an examinable subject in their examinations in spite of various calls by many stakeholders including IT professional associations. A relevant curriculum for secondary schools had long been prepared, yet its implementation has been bogged down by the lack of seriousness in addressing the lack of computers and computer teachers for the schools. Why will an organization that does not see the need to make computer studies examinable in its examinations insist that all students must register online?

There has been also broad agreement at the level of the National Council for Education that computer studies should compulsory, yet there is no corresponding commitment to examine the subject. Making computer studies examinable will not only make students to become computer literate before their final year but will also encourage both parents and school proprietors to invest in the provision of IT facilities in the schools.

I have seen how a few entrepreneurs make money out of desperate students wishing to beat the deadline for the various examination bodies. Since their schools do not have computers and access to internet, they have to go to commercial cyber cafes to register for these examinations. In many communities there are no internet access points and students and their principals have to travel long distances to make the registration. In the process many miss the deadlines.

By the time they reach the café, of course the students and their teachers are often not computer literate, and therefore have to rely on the café staff or some of the other ad hoc registration attendants. Students are charged huge amounts for this registration. Even mere checking of results or admissions lists to institutions of higher learning (many of which now also only published their admission list on their websites) charge as much as Five Hundred Naira.

The rationale behind the CITAD’s ICT quiz has been to use it as an advocacy tool to draw attention to these anomalies while at the same time encouraging both students and teachers to take ICT seriously by rewarding those who have excelled. Each time the event is held, it is remainder to governments and other proprietors of schools that there is need to ensure that there are computers in their schools.

The NCC gesture is meant to send two messages. At one level, it is a demonstration of NCC’s commitment to the realization its vision for Nigeria. At another level, it is a challenge and a call to other corporate organizations to consider leveraging their corporate social responsibility through the provision of computers to schools or supporting causes that would enhance the penetration of ICT in our schools. If many of these organizations follow the example of the NCC, our children will learn in the prerequisite environment that would make them to compete favorably with their peers across the world.

Y. Z. Ya’u

08056180208

As a child, one of the popular games we enjoyed was rolling over the pyramids of groundnut husks, itself a sign of a much groundnut had been harvested in the community. Of course we knew that the groundnuts left for Kano, from where they formed part of the famous Kano groundnut pyramids. These pyramids were the distinctive landscape of Kano. They adored every promotional document about Kano and became in reality the signpost of the city. We marveled at the orderly way in which they were arranged and thought there was no any other architecture that had better aesthetics with a surreal appeal.

While we took it as the sign of the prosperity of Kano, we never associated it with colonial economic architecture. We were too young for this. This could only happen years later at the university. Of course by then the pyramids had disappeared. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was the feeling that industrialization would now replace agriculture. Afterall, nationally we were experimenting with import substitution industrialization.

Thus, additional industrial layouts were opened up in Kano and many new industries and companies sprang up in the city. Trade unions became a feature of the city and it became easy to bestraddle students’ union activism with solidarity organizing for workers. Industrialization added more to the commercial activism of Kano and it was this vibrant commerce dominated economy of Kano that made the Governor of Kano State at the time, Abubakar Rimi, to initiate what for years we have been referring to in Kano as the Investment building. Originally planned to be a 14-storey building to be used as a commercial complex, this was later reduced to 10 storeys.

Soon we found that rather than enforcing the right to unionism, we had to organize to protect the jobs of the workers who were being thrown out to the streets as the boom of the 1970s gave way to the crisis that entered in the 1980s. By the time the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was introduced in 1986, the signs of the collapsed of attempted industrialization in the country were visible everywhere.

Kano of course suffered greatly for this. Thousands workers lost their jobs as many factories and companies closed down. Much of the de-industrialization of the later period had to do with the crisis of power, inconsistency in economic policies nationally and a political class that was still steeped at the level of primitive accumulation. The collapse of industrialization was further compounded by the seeming crisis of commerce based economy that has characterized Kano. One of its major strains was a set of communal conflicts that were to a large degree associated with the rise of a new ethnicity that was the product of a state that failed to justify itself following the rapacious attack on the fabrics of the welfare state in the country by SAP.

The investment building was abandoned and for years virtually everyone forget its original concept. Of course successive regimes attempted to complete the building but with no clearly defined purpose. Now this build is coming to life as the first information and communication (ICT) Park not only in Kano but also in the country. Already, the interior of the building had been redesigned to meet the new purpose for which it would now be used. World class IT infrastructure is being deployed so that companies would have access to internet and other IT facilities with speed and reliability that will match any where in the world.

The transformation of the building into an ICT Park itself is a long story. It started with the adoption of an ICT Policy for the State in 2005. In 2006, the office of the then Special Adviser to the Governor on Education and Information Technology, which was charged with the responsibility of implementing the state ICT Policy, gathered another group of ICT professionals and scholars to brainstorm of how the policy could be implemented. Out of this brainstorming, it was decided that following the footsteps of leading developing countries that have taken ICT seriously such India and Malaysia, the state government should opt for a perspective that sees ICTs more as an economic sector that can generate wealth and create jobs as well as provide access to IT products and services. This requires the establishment of ICT Parks, the types that dot India, Singapore, among others.

The ICT Park is to be commissioned soon. When in operation, it will initially house over 300 ICT business and companies of different sizes. It is also expected that within the first five years of its operation, it would create thousand of jobs. Without doubt, it is both an ambitious and challenging project, ambitious because it requires resources and commitment to pull, challenging because to make Kano a preferred destination, especially for global outsourcing would require not just proactive and aggressive marketing but also the capacity to establish and implement a regime of incentives, with a long term consistency, that can attract companies elsewhere to relocate to the park while ensuring a ready market for their products and services.

The transformation of Kano from an agricultural-based commercial city symbolized by the groundnut pyramids to an ICT enclave represented by the ICT Park, is not just symbolic. It is both structural and historical. Historically, because we are moving into the information age, which is ICT mediated and dependent. In such an era, virtually all business interactions and transactions could be conducted through the internet. While the network is thus a necessary condition to which every country must have to respond to, capitalizing on the ICT sector as an economic sector is a structural choice which many countries have taken. India today, it is reported, earns more from export of ICT services and products than Nigeria does from oil.

A single high-rise ICT park building of course cannot on the popular imagination compare with the vast grounds pyramids of the 1960s of Kano. But its potential to transform the economy of the state is enormous. If properly harnessed, Kano would be on its way to an economic renewal that would make it a major a hub of the cyber space globally.

In a highly dynamic knowledge world of today, those who make the early start are always more likely to remain at the head of the race. It is this early state that Kano State must actualize. It is possible in this little piece of land, the national may learn lessons that would inform its repositioning in the information age.

The story behind this is that there is increasing unmet demand for information and communication technology (ICT) skills in the country. While basic digital literary has become globally a necessity for all, there are simply few opportunities in Nigerian and Africa for people to acquire these skills. Because of the high demands for ICT skills, the few who could train others are quickly absolved into high paying jobs in the financial and ICT sectors leaving us with facilities but not trainers.

Globally the issue of responding to ICT skill shortage has been recognized and partnerships are being developed to meet specific requirements of different regions and countries. The demands for ICT skills certainly will be on the rise as world make progress toward realizing the targets set at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Critical among which are connecting villages with ICTs and establish community access points,  connecting universities, college, secondary schools and primary schools with ICTs and connecting public libraries, cultural centres, museums, post offices and archives with ICTs. Who would teach the people that would be connected to these nodes of the global network to use the ICTs?

Unmet skill demands are both a challenge and opportunity. It is a challenge for civil society organizations that are working to empower communities. ICT cannot only make their work more effective and impactful but would also place in the hands of the communities tools they could use to create wealth, provide jobs and improve other aspects of community lives.  For example, with ICTs, communities’ access to educational opportunities are extended and magnified. Online capacity gives them access to high quality educational platforms that would otherwise not be available.

The challenges for civil society are threefold. First, they need to have, like other actors, civil society organizations have to master the use of ICTs. Second, they need to have an ICT plan. This would enable them to decide what sorts of ICTs they need, for what purposes and how to obtain them. The third is that they need to have the capacity to maintain ICT systems. This last is the most difficult since maintenance of ICT systems requires much higher level of technical competence that is not readily available. As non profits, civil society organizations cannot compete with private and public sectors in recruiting and retaining such high level of technical competence in ICTs.

It is here that the unmet ICT skills demand turns into an opportunity. Using its non-commercial platform, the Unlimited Potentials, Microsoft Corporation has thought to assist civil society organizations have access to training that can build their capacity to overcome ICT skill shortage in their effort to deploy ICTs in their engagements. Recognizing that than many NGOs could be in the woods regarding ICTs Microsoft decided that the first step of responding to this skills shortage was to understand the real pressures faced by NGOs and in which areas they feel weakest. Thus as explained by the Vice President of Unlimited Potentials, the non profit platform of Microsoft, last week in Ghana, it started with consultations with civil society in last year  to look deeper into the issue. It held five round-table consultations in four countries, drawing together over 131 NGOs. It was the out of these consultations that Unlimited Potentials was able to gather information from which seeped out skill needs of the civil society organizations in Africa.

After more than year of silent work, the UP felt it was time to let the cat out and on 24th April, it organized a launching and formal presentation of the NGO Academy for ICT4D. Held at Golden Tulip Hotel Accra, Ghana, the brief ceremony brought civil society organizations, government agencies, development parts and ICT professions from both Ghana and Nigeria. From Nigeria, apart from the Microsoft team were representatives of Fantasuam Foundation, Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD), the Prof. Iya Abubakar Community Centre, Bauchi, SchoolNet Nigeria and Digital Peers International

The goal of the academy is to provide NGOs with training opportunities and practical resources that will increase their capacity to deliver services to their constituencies.  It has three key areas, namely IT support focusing on infrastructure consulting, installation and operation, skills development  in such areas as business management, entrepreneurship, community development, grassroots marketing and service delivery, and lastly E-readiness tools for use on both national and regional basis.

The academy will combine both online and face to face training methodologies. The online is to be accessed through the portal of the academy which would be launched in June this year. Structurally, the academy will be have four hubs, one located in South Africa, for the southern Africa region, one for east Africa and one each for Francophone and Anglophone West Africa. Each hub is to candidate the activities of the academy in its catchments are while assisting to deliver face to face training.

The first have to be established is the one in South Africa. Heba Ramzy, the Director for Non-Commercial Partner Development at UP said this was to allow for lesson learning before rolling out the other hubs. This did not go down well with Dr. Dorothy Gordon, the Director General of the Accra based Kofi Annan Centre for Excellence who questioned the rationale for using South Africa to mirror the rest of Africa. According to her, the peculiarities of South Africa are not replicated in the other African country and not their serve as a barometer of Africa. More than this, Gordon saw in the action the attempt to for organizations like Microsoft and other to always start from the big countries such as South and Nigeria and end up there. This last bit indicative the likely struggle that would ensue in decide which country should host the Anglophone West Africa hub of the NGO academy as the two likely candidates are Nigeria and Ghana.

What you may what ask is Microsoft’s stake in this project? There are two clear benefits to the software giant. The first is that the academy would provide an effective channel for the Microsoft to deliver on its social corporate responsibility. The second is that the work NGOs are able to use and get communities to use ICTs, the more the marker for ICT products and services will expand. That I think is would benefit the ICT companies such as Microsoft as they will sale more of their services and products.

Whatever the politics would into deciding the hubs, the fact remains that communities like Gagarawa would have an opportunity to online training resources that would be free. This would allow them to learn and opportunity the excellent facilities that have currently have but cannot use.