A cornfield in Zimbabwe shrivels under poor rainfall conditions that affected the crop nationwide. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Sam Otieno
NAIROBI, Oct 30 2017 (IPS)

Fostering and harnessing innovative technologies could significantly reduce the negative impacts from climate change, including drought, water scarcity and food insecurity in African countries.

According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) by 2025, 1.8 billion people will experience absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world will be living under water-stressed conditions. By 2050, the demand for water is expected to increase by 50 percent.Drought-prone regions also run the risk of becoming a breeding ground for insurgencies, extremism, and terrorism across borders.

Likewise, drought caused as a result of climate change, a complex global phenomenon with significant and pervasive socio-economic and environmental impacts, is causing more deaths and displacing more people than any other natural disaster.

UNCCD told IPS that extreme and erratic weather events such as droughts, flash floods, hurricanes, and typhoons increase food insecurity. For instance, droughts create food shortages. Flashfloods erode fertile soil. These phenomena degrade the land, reducing its capacity to absorb and store water, in turn, its productivity.

Therefore, the continent needs a paradigm shift that would lead to the effective mitigation and resilience to the effects of climate change.

For example, implementing early warning systems and new technologies by metrological agencies, use of cell phones to share climate information with local communities, the creation of climate maps and deployment of drones to collect climate data.

“Comprehensive early warning systems would help countries to analyze drought risk, to monitor and predict the location and intensity of an upcoming drought, to alert and communicate in time to the authorities, media and vulnerable communities and to inform affected populations what options or courses of action they can take to pre-empt or reduce the potential impact of an oncoming drought,” said UNCCD.

According to UNCCD, adopting smart tech strategies would help Africa to address the drought challenges in many ways, depending on the action strategy and the technology and its application. For herders and pastoralists in the African drylands, for example, smart techs/mobile applications would help increase the security of pastoral zones by guiding them to the nearest water resources so as to ensure year-round access to grazing and water.

Moreover, it would support them to create networks as they arrive in unfamiliar communities, helping them gather relevant information related to their livestock as well as access to emergency management and weather.

According to the Confronting Drought in Africa’s Drylands: Opportunities for Enhancing Resilience report, while drought is a global phenomenon, the impacts are more severe in developing countries where coping capacities are limited.

In sub-Saharan Africa, drought causes significant food insecurity and famine. It has crippled countries from Ethiopia to Zimbabwe and affected as many as 36 million people in the region.

Drought in sub-Saharan Africa is also associated with social unrest, local conflict, and forced migration. Drought-prone regions run the risk of becoming a breeding ground for insurgencies, extremism, and terrorism across borders.

Nicholas Sitko, Programme Coordinator, Agricultural Development Economics Divisions at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and an expert in rural development with extensive experience in Africa, told IPS that much needs to be done in Africa, where large shares of the population rely directly on agriculture production or indirectly on agriculture.

When farmers have knowledge of impending climate events, they can select more appropriate seed types or crop varieties, or can shift their investments and labor to other activities that are less prone to the climate shock.

“This is really critical for building resilience to climate change. The use of new forecasting models coupled with ICT that can link this information to policymakers and farmers provides new opportunities for adaptation than existed just a few years ago. Yet, they still remain fairly limited in scope and need to be scaled out to more users,” said Sitko.

He noted that there is already a range of on-the-shelf farm practices that can help farmers improve and stabilize yields in the context of climate change, but what is appropriate for a farmer varies considerably by climate region and their economic conditions.

FAO is working with the World Meteorological Organization to better respond to climate variability and climate change on the basis of better and more readily accessible data.

Speaking at a G7 Agriculture Ministers meeting on Oct. 14, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva noted that some 75 countries mainly in Africa, and many Small Island Developing States (SIDS), do not have the capacity to translate the weather data, including longer-term forecasts, data into information for farmers.

“There is an urgent need to take the data which is available globally and to translate it to the ground level,” he said.

Florence Atieno, a smallholder farmer from Western Kenya, would welcome technology that enabled farmers to obtain accurate scientific information on when to plant, to assess the mineral deficiencies in the soil to purchase the right fertilizers, to access knowledge about improved farming techniques and to negotiate better prices for their crop.

She told IPS not all people, systems, regions and sectors are equally vulnerable to drought, stressing that it was important to combine forecasts with detailed knowledge of how landscapes and societies respond to the lack of rain. That knowledge is then turned into an early intervention.

“Africa needs to understand who is vulnerable and why, as well as the processes that contribute to vulnerability in order to assess the risk profiles of vulnerable regions and population groups,” said Atieno.

According to an African proverb, “every woman who gives birth has one foot on her grave.” Cameroonians are attempting to make this proverb a historical fact and not a present reality through SMS technology. Credit: Mercedes Sayagues/IPS

By Ngala Killian Chimtom
YAOUNDE, Sep 23 2014 (IPS)

“You can’t measure the joy in my heart,” Marceline Duba, from Lagdo in Cameroon’s Far North Region, tells IPS as she holds her grandson in her arms.  

“I am pretty sure we could have lost this child, and perhaps my daughter, if this medical doctor hadn’t shown up,” Duba says, a smile sweeping her face.

The medic in question is Dr Patrick Okwen. He is the coordinator of M-Health, a project sponsored by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) that uses mobile technology to increase access to healthcare services to communities “when they most need it.”

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends that a nurse or doctor should see a maximum of 10 patients a day. But according to Tetanye Ekoe, the vice president of the National Order of Medical Doctors in Cameroon, “the doctor-to-patient ratio in Cameroon stands at one doctor per 40,000 inhabitants, and in remote areas such as the Far North and Eastern Regions, the ratio is closer to one doctor per 50,000 inhabitants.”

Okwen was in Lagdo testing out the SMS system, which was just implemented a few months back, when Duba’s daughter, Sally Aishatou, went into labour.

Okwen and the medical staff at the Lagdo District Hospital received an SMS from Aishatou. She had been in labour for 48 hours with no signs that the baby was about to come.

“What happens when a woman SMSes a particular number, the GPS location blinks on the server, and then the server tries to identify her location, puts it on Google maps; then tells the driver to go there. [The system] also tells the doctor to come to the hospital; tells the nurses to get ready. So everybody gets into motion,” he tells IPS.

Okwen and the ambulance driver traced Aishatou to her home. They found her lying helpless on a mat, almost passed out. By the time the ambulance returned to the hospital, the operation room was ready for her and she was taken into surgery immediately.

Eight minutes later, her 4.71 kg baby boy was born. The midwife Manou nee Djakaou tells IPS: “The joy in me is so great that I don’t even know how to express it. I am so exited; very happy. This system put in place is very efficient. But for this innovation, we stood to lose this baby and its mother.”

Two hours after surgery, Aishatou regained consciousness and named her boy after Okwen.

According to the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), out of every 100,000 live births 670 women in Cameroon die. UNICEF figures also state that for every 1,000 live births, 61 infants died in Cameroon in 2012.

“Many women are dying from child-birth related issues. Women are dying while giving life. And this is something we are really concerned about, but we also know that with the coming of mobile technology, there is hope for women in Africa,” Okwen says.

“Most of the women in Africa today have access to a telephone. It could be her own, her husband’s own, or a neighbour’s. So if we had a way in which women could reach an ambulance using a phone that would guide the ambulance, it could indeed present hope for African women,” he explains.

Okwen says the project has benefitted “close to one hundred women in terms of information, evacuation, arrangements of hospital visits, deliveries and caesarean sections.”

The project has been dubbed “Tsamounde”, which means hope in the local Fufuldé language.

Mama Abakai, the Mayor of Lagdo, says the project’s impact has been far reaching.

“A lot of our sisters, wives and mothers in rural areas lose their lives and suffer a lot, because there is a communication gap, and a problem of rapid intervention and assistance. With this system, it suffices to send an SMS or a simple beep, and all the actors involved in saving lives are mobilised…its formidable,” Abakai tells IPS.

Dr. Martina Baye of Cameroon’s Ministry of Public Health calls the project a “revolution in Cameroon’s health care delivery system.”

She says that as a majority of women in the country’s far North Region have little access to healthcare services, the M-Health Project comes as a huge relief.

According to the 2010 Population census, the Far North Region has a population of three million people, 52 percent of whom are women.

“We look forward to using this technology in other parts of the country,” she tells IPS.

Edited by: Nalisha Adams

The writer can be contacted at: https://www.facebook.com/ngala.killian

Uganda’s inadequate road infrastructure has been blamed from the increased traffic congestion in the country, especially in the capital, Kampala. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Feb 5 2014 (IPS)

There’s the good: “A slight delay of about a minute.”

The bad: “Terrible jam!!”

And the unbelievable: “No jam.” But as long as Kampala motorists and pedestrians are talking traffic, the eight Ugandan creators of new app called RoadConexion, are happy. For the time being, anyway.

“A problem we have here in Uganda is the roads, the infrastructure is terrible,” Lynn Asiimwe, the lead developer tells IPS.

“This is mainly the effect of bad governance and corruption. The effects are traffic jams, incomplete roads, and potholes everywhere.”

The 25-year-old, who is pursuing a master’s degree in inclusive innovation at the Graduate School of Business in the University of Cape Town, South Africa, works as a software developer with Access Mobile, a mobile technology company.

Asiimwe and her team worked on the app for free “out of passion”. And she hopes that the app, which won the Tech4Governance hackathon, a competition run by a local technology innovation hub called Hive Colab, will make leaders face up to these problems.

In 2010, President Yoweri Museveni promised to launch an investigation into corrupt road builders.

And in 2011 local newspaper, The Independent, stated that according to the Auditor General, money for maintaing road infrastructure was not well spent and that there were “alarming disparities in costs” as well as “shoddy standards, poor and late delivery by numerous contractors.”

But first RoadConexion needs to get people chatting.

The app lets users submit and receive real-time traffic reports on road repairs, accidents and traffic jams on almost any Kampala road featured on Google maps via the internet. Motorists and pedestrians can log into the site using Twitter and Facebook.

“We’re trying to get users engaged in the beginning,” says Asiimwe.

“If people realise that the traffic’s really bad they might start a conversation on their own and this conversation will hold these leaders accountable.

“We’re hoping that the officials will actually start doing something, start caring, actually start using the money in the right way.”

In Kampala bodabodas (motorbike taxis), matatus (mini-buses), cars, trucks and bicycles all jostle for road space.

According to local newspaper, the Monitor, there were 16,765 reported road accidents in Uganda in 2012, leaving thousands dead and hundreds maimed.

Asiimwe believes that corruption has led to “under-qualified companies taking on road works which leads to [sub-standard] work being done.”

“These roads tend to degrade in a few months leading to potholes and other forms of degradation. This degradation can’t handle the level of traffic, which results in traffic jams.”

According to a World Bank policy research document titled “Uganda’s Infrastructure: A Continental Perspective” providing the money and resource for road maintenance here “remains a challenge” with further investment needed to improve road safety.

Asiimwe adds: “These companies doing [sub-standard] road work need to be held accountable and we are trying to achieve that with RoadConexion.”

One bad example is a patch of road near Makerere University in central Kampala, where work was supposed to be completed by an international contractor by October last year but is yet to even commence.

“They already have the big banner up there saying who the contractor is, what they’re doing, how long the work is supposed to be for,” Asiimwe says.

“But when we got in touch they said ‘oh, we got into a few difficulties, funding didn’t come through on time’.

“The road is really dusty, the potholes are still there, but no one is letting the users know what’s going on.”

Currently RoadConexion receives between 50 to 100 views daily through computers and mobile phones, with most users checking in before the morning rush.

“Most people want to view, but few want to submit,” says Asiimwe.

“I’m realising that in Uganda we’re used to consuming, we’re not used to this mentality of sourcing,” Asiimwe says.

The development of RoadConexion follows the 2012 launch of Ma3Route, an app for Kenyan users. The mobile, web and SMS platform crowd-sources transport data and provides Nairobi road users with information on traffic, directions and driving reports.

“My desire to build a tool to help commuters in developing countries was further strengthened after I bought my first car once I got my first job and witnessed first-hand all the hours drivers waste in sometimes avoidable traffic due to lack of information,” creator Laban Okune tells IPS.

Okune, who grew up in Butere, a town in Kenya’s Western Province and went to Nairobi to study computer engineering, resolved to build a “triple threat tool” addressing traffic, directions, and reckless driving challenges faced by commuters in developing countries.

“The final straw was the road carnage witnessed in Kenya. Public transport vehicles traverse the roads, stuffed with people, swerve and overlap recklessly, causing them to roll off the road and spill passengers onto the ground.

“We lose so many lives.”

At least 2,000 in the space of nine months alone, according to one newspaper report.

Ma3Route users can receive directions and alerts on specific roads, report bad driving and even search number plates before they board a bus to check a driver’s track record.

Okune hopes to expand to other parts of Kenya. Ma3Route also has its sights set on Kampala and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

Fexlix Odongkara, director of the Automobile Association of Uganda, believes that traffic apps could be a good alternative to traffic reports on the morning and evening radio stations.

“Traffic jams in Uganda are getting worse. I’ve lived in this city for more than 30 years and every year it gets worse,” he tells IPS.

“The roads are not expanding in relation to the [increased number of] cars and the people. Apart from the small matatus and the bodabodas, there’s no public transport. Families bring all the cars into town.”

He said the only shortcoming of apps like RoadConexion will be that many people don’t have access to the internet at home or even in their offices. And if they do, some may not want to report traffic conditions because they may have already reported accidents to the police and are treated like suspects.

The World Bank has forecast traffic-related deaths will increase by 80 percent by 2020.

Odongkara says the biggest problem when it comes to Uganda’s roads is that too many people don’t know how to drive properly.

Participants in a panel on “Pedagogy, territories and resistance” at the World Education Forum in the Brazilian city of Canoas. Credit: Clarinha Glock/IPS

By Clarinha Glock
CANOAS, Brazil, Jan 24 2014 (IPS)

The challenges of the digital age call for schools to develop an alternative model of education, with teachers who incorporate new technology and employ a more critical pedagogy, participants said at the Fórum Mundial de Educaçao (World Education Forum) in this southern Brazilian city.

Guadalupe Jover, a Spanish education expert, told IPS that information and communication technologies (ICT) must be used as a tool for building collective knowledge through pedagogical renewal, and not to perpetuate the worst aspects of the prevailing educational system.

“We are talking here about the offensive strategies of the markets aimed at those who want to be involved in education, that is, sales through ICT,” said Jover, the coordinator of Spain’s Platform of Citizens for Public Schools in Spain, at the forum held Jan. 21-23 in Canoas, 19 km from Porto Alegre, the state capital of Rio Grande do Sul.

In suffocatingly hot weather, more than 4,000 participants from 13 countries debated the forum’s central theme: “Pedagogy, Metropolitan Regions and Peripheries,” holding three plenary meetings and working groups on six sub-themes.

Porto Alegre was the cradle of the World Social Forum, an alternative movement which first met in 2001 under the slogan “Another World Is Possible.” Thousands of social organisations and movements from all over the world participate in its meetings, which are held in different regions of the developing South.

Jover was a panellist at the meeting on “Pedagogy, Territories and Resistance,” which discussed the problems posed by present-day curricula and the prevailing neoliberal concept that students should be trained to satisfy the needs of the market.

Jaume Martínez Bonafé of the University of Valencia, Spain, told IPS that “pedagogy continues to be autistic, obsolete, because previously the whole world was explained in classrooms, whereas now the focus is on the major commercial hubs.”

His concern, he said, is that ICT “will only change the tools without altering educational content.”

According to educators from different regions, ideally curricula should contribute to the growth of persons and their emancipation, as proposed by Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire (1921-1997), one of the most innovative educational theorists of the 20th century, who did for education what Liberation Theology did for the Catholic Church.

His influential ideas heralded alternative education, through unorthodox formulas of learning based on freedom, and through his concern for promoting equality through education and increasing access to schooling for the oppressed.

Two Argentine educators inspired by Freire, Carla Azul Cassineiro and Laura Mombelli, travelled a long distance from their country to participate in the forum. Cassineiro teaches physical education and and Mombelli accounting. They are both popular educators in La Cava, Argentina’s second largest shanty town, in Buenos Aires.

Their students have access to the digital world, but many of their families see their devices and want them to buy food and get jobs, creating conflict and violence, they told IPS.

Cassineiro said the government Universal Child Allowance programme, which over the past five years has paid Argentine families with incomes of less than the minimum wage 31 dollars a month for each child, on condition that they attend school, has “helped integration and social containment.”

While Latin America is the second most urbanised world region, in Africa the school population is 60 percent rural, Aidil de Carvalho Borges, project manager for educational reform in Cape Verde, told IPS.

“This accentuates every kind of inequality, especially in relation to technology, which is only available in the cities,” she said. This hinders what ought to be a priority in education, that is, “for all children to have the same rights, no matter where they live.”

“Needs and demands are growing constantly,” said the Cape Verde education ministry official. “In some countries there may be one or two politicians who want to change the situation, but I think only radical social movements can bring about changes, or at least concessions, in education.”

Moacir Gadotti, the head of the Paulo Freire Institute, said that “schools need to discuss the kind of country they want, the kind of neighbourhood they want; there must be no fear of being free.”

He talked about the new Brazilian phenomenon of “rolezinhos”, in which large groups of young people from disadvantaged or peripheral areas occupy leisure spaces, especially shopping malls, after some of them, mostly Afro-Brazilian and poor, were expelled from one of these malls in São Paulo in late 2013.

“These young people have aspirations, they want to participate in the new Brazil,” Gadotti said. “Young people are connected to the social networks and this is something that politicians often do not understand or pay attention to.”

Popular educator Alberto Croce, the founder and president of Fundación SES in Argentina which promotes social inclusion of young people with limited resources, believes that the “rolezinhos” are a way of defying the system, connecting the movement with protests against educational and social exclusion in countries like Chile or Colombia.

Croce said that it is true that poor people are now better off in Latin America, but it is also true that inequality has increased in this region, the most unequal in the world.

The differences between educational models in big city schools and those in the poor suburbs is, in a way, a reflection of the contradictions of that inequality, he said.

The general run of schools prioritise the neoliberal model of preparing students for the labour market, but in the shanty towns and poorer districts there is resistance to this model because it discriminates against them and makes them invisible.

“One of the keys to education is respect for diversity. When education values cultural differences, integrates and incorporates them, then we can talk of quality education,” Croce said.

“Digital inclusion is a phenomenon that is present” in society, he said. Previously, young people wanted fashionable shoes, “but now they want to buy cell phones; there has definitely been a change, because access to technology is valued.”

In his view, young people have chosen mobile phones, the most personal device, to access ICT. “Inclusion is limited, but it has without doubt created a transformation,” Croce said.

It is a transformation that education cannot turn its back on, said participants at the Canoas forum, in debates on topics such as “Education as a human right,” “Education, environment and sustainability,” “Education in the emerging paradigm,” and “Education, diversity and inclusion.”

There are thousands of miles between Chanyanya Rural Health Clinic, a basic medical centre in Zambia’s rural Kafue District with no resident doctors despite being the main centre for nearly 12,000 people, and the New York University (NYU) Teaching Hospital, one of the world’s most prestigious medical schools.

Mercy Nalwamba, the clinical officer general of Makeni clinic in Chilanga District. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

The two are worlds apart, not only when it comes to geography.

Yet when Florence* broke out in a strange rash two weeks after she began taking ARVs for HIV in 2011, the clinic, about 90 minutes from the capital Lusaka, was able to connect to a NYU infectious diseases expert on the other side of the world with just a few clicks of a computer mouse.

Through the Virtual Doctor Project (VDP), a telemedicine initiative being pioneered in Zambia linking rural clinics across the southern African country with volunteer doctors around the globe using the local broadband network, Florence was prescribed the correct medication.

Her rash had been “all over the body”, recalled Kebby Mulongo, the clinical officer who first saw her.

“It was just about two days in between [when] the doctor [in New York] was able to get back to me. The expert in New York knew what the problem was ASAP,” Mulongo, 30, told IPS.

“And that’s what I was happy about, because after that I kept on treating the patient in the ward. Within a week or so the patient improved instead of me sending the patient to the hospital.”

A smiling Mulongo added: “Medicine is about consultation. If we can consult at the click of a button like that, it’s better for us.”

The VDP, now running live in six Zambian sites, use eHealth Opinion software to submit patient files electronically. Clinical officers, trained to screen patients before they see a doctor, access this using Fizzbook laptops. The dust-proof, splash-proof, robust laptops can be easily transported and a battery backup means they can withstand Zambia’s power cuts.

The software allows the clinical officers to build a patient file which is compressed and sent to one of the VDP’s medical experts in Zambia, the UK, U.S., India, Pakistan, China, Nigeria, New Zealand or Malaysia. The file includes the patient’s basic details, medical history, prescription and the specific questions the Zambian clinical officers need answered.

All clinical officers are given a basic Samsung HD camera with which they can take photos of X-rays. These can be uploaded to the computer and included in the patient file along with lab reports. The “virtual doctor” then reviews the information they’ve received and offers diagnostic and treatment advice with another click of a button.

Operational in Zambia for six months, the VDP, set up by an eponymous charity, are due to go live at three more sites this month. They hope to have at least 12 sites live by the end of the year. They’re also looking at expanding into Tanzania in the near future, along with other African countries.

Just before Christmas four new clinical officers were trained in Zambia’s new Chilanga District.

“Effectively it’s a platform for you to be able to talk to somebody else about a patient that maybe you’re not too sure on. The idea is not to take any responsibility for ownership away from you,” project co-ordinator Heather Ashcroft told the trainees.

“You still are and you remain the first port of call, you have the final say on how you diagnose or treat a patient. The idea behind the system is that you get a bit of a sounding board.”

Mercy Nalwamba, 22, was one of two female clinical officers who attended the Dec. 23 training session. A recent graduate of Chianama College of health sciences, she is now the clinical officer general of Makeni clinic in Chilanga District and sees about 50 patients daily, the majority of them suffering from respiratory tract infection, diarrhoea and malaria.

Nalwamba said having access to the VDP experts at Makeni would mean the clinic would have to make less referrals to other centres further away for nonemergency cases, the project’s main aim. But she told IPS, “I can’t wait to hear their opinions and new ideas. It will enhance my work, I’ll gain more experience and knowledge.

“I think there will be less work and we’ll be getting more information on how to go about (treating) chronically ill patients, how to manage them and when we’re referring them we can at least make the patients a little bit stable.”

Ashcroft says the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed with Zambia’s Ministry of Health (MoH) states that VDP will provide the equipment, training and software for free for the first 12 months, giving the system time to “bed in and have a positive impact on the clinic’s referral rates”. The government is supporting them in motivating and encouraging health staff to use it.

“Following this, we will continue to support the clinical officers, however, a small surcharge will be made to ensure that the system can be upgraded and maintained in the health centres,” Ashcroft told IPS. “All equipment, and licenses for donations is provided by charitable donations, so our aim is to equip the clinics with everything they need for the service to become a self-sustaining, yet integral part of the day-to-day running of the health centres.” The charity is one of the increasing number of NGOs accepting Bitcoin donations.

Andrew Phiri from the MoH is confident the government will be able to support VDP after its first year, stressing it’s a much-needed project.

“We’ve got a lot of people living in rural areas, they have to walk long distances (to clinics). We don’t have a lot of ambulances. You find that our health facilities are not closely linked, they are huge distances apart,” Phiri told IPS.

“Through consultation you are going to give the best quality of care that the patient requires. It will be a very good outcome because, really, in medicine you need to consult, you cannot work alone.”

Women at ICT workshop in Namaingo, eastern Uganda. Credit: Susan Kinzi/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
BANGKOK, Dec 4 2013 (IPS)

Only 16 percent of Africa’s population of over a billion is online. But as Internet and mobile phone connectivity grows rapidly, the continent wants to join forces with Asian powerhouses to change its digital landscape.

While offering its vast market, Africa hopes to leverage Asia’s information and communication technology (ICT) prowess to develop sectors as diverse as banking, telemedicine, education and cyber security.

“There is a lot of opportunity for collaboration,” says Safroadu Yeboah-Amankwah, director and leader, McKinsey’s Business Technology Practice, South Africa.“North America, to be honest, is not relevant to our markets. There are very interesting opportunities in terms of South-South collaboration."

“Asia’s experience with the Internet is five or maybe 10 years ahead of Africa. A lot of the talent, skill and technology available (in Asia) may be of great use,” the Ghanaian engineer-turned-telecom strategist told IPS.

He was here to attend Telecom World 2013 organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) last month.

A large contingent of African countries led by Nigeria mounted a big roadshow at the event, both to display their growing mobile and broadband communication-oriented economies and to attract Asian investment.

“North America, to be honest, is not relevant to our markets. There are very interesting opportunities in terms of South-South collaboration, especially around banking, education and so forth, where collaborations will allow for bigger markets and therefore more innovation availability,” Yeboah-Amankwah said.

“Larger Asian and African e-commerce players could collaborate to make the opportunities even bigger. For us, integration between large African and Asian players is an exciting idea,” he added.

According to ITU statistics, more than 720 million Africans have mobile phones and some 167 million already use the Internet. And the figures are rising fast as mobile networks are built up and the cost of Internet-enabled devices falls.

But Asia is far ahead. Comparative figures show that a total of 3.5 billion out of the global 6.8 billion mobile subscriptions are from the Asia-Pacific region.

So when it comes to ICT, Africa has Asia on its mind.

“Technology is new to all of us. We are all learners. We can work together to make technology work for us,” said Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the ITU, who is from Mali.

According to ITU figures, in 2013, there are almost as many mobile subscriptions as people in the world.

Asian countries are world leaders in ICT, with South Korea heading ITUs’ global ICT development index, India known for its IT expertise, and Chinese telecom companies being the biggest global operators.

Ji-Yong Park, senior research associate at the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA), told IPS they have been helping African countries improve their Internet security. “Last year we trained over 200 government officials [from Africa],” he said.

India has assisted many African countries in upgrading their IT training facilities, among them the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT established in 2003.

Malaysia is helping set up a multimedia university in Tanzania while Thailand is launching a Thaicom satellite with a footprint over Africa to help improve communication within the continent and with Asia.

“We see Africa as the future. They have a lot of land to provide food for people around world. Their weather is the same as ours, so we can use the land of Africa, we can communicate by satellite and we can have e-agriculture and we can communicate with remote sensors,” an advisor to the Thai minister for ICT told IPS.

“African and Thai people are almost the same in terms of development and the type of people. When I go there, I feel this is a nice place, they just lack infrastructure for new kind of technology,” the advisor said.

Rebecca Okwaci, minister of telecommunications and postal services, South Sudan, told IPS, “We look towards Asia because a lot of technology we need is in Asia.”

She said China’s leading ICT firm Huawei has given a lot of technical assistance since South Sudan’s independence in 2011, as has India.

“Our ICT programme is already connected with India. Universities in India have projects with us in e-education and they are training our staff within the ministry,” she said.

Okwaci said they are also looking for assistance from Asia in telemedicine projects. “We can customise their experience for South Sudan,” she said.

African countries see the ICT partnership with Asia as a change from the old model of development assistance from the West.

“Traditionally the relationships have been in terms of grants or loans. Now we have relationships that are fuelling growth in Africa, especially in ICT,” Rwanda’s Minister of Youth and ICT Jean Philbert Nsengimana noted.

He said his country already has a good partnership going with South Korea.

“We contracted Korea Telecom to build our national broadband, which was completed in the last two years. Now we are working together to develop the last mile connections. We get assistance in cyber security. We send our people for training,” Nsengimana said.

He also said they have strong relationships with India and China in the ICT sector.

China’s Huawei has a research and development centre in South Africa and seven training centres across Africa. It employs over 5,800 people in 18 countries and its revenue from African operations was 3.42 billion dollars in 2011.

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics last month said it hopes to corner half the 20 million smart phone sales expected in Africa next year.

The future looks bright for Asia-Africa collaborations in the ICT sector.

Eu-Jun Kim, regional director for Asia-Pacific of ITU, told IPS, “The challenges are similar, namely affordable and sustainable access, especially to broadband, and in both Asia and Africa we have vast land and vast population that could benefit from the application of ICTs.”

Smartphones are a new phenomenon in trafficking; a couple of years ago the majority of crimes were being committed using desktops. Credit: Yuichi Shiraishi/cc by 2.0

By Lucy Westcott
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 28 2013 (IPS)

In the second half of June, law enforcement in Chişinău, Moldova’s capital city, received an email from a parent telling them their child had been kidnapped.

A mixed group of police and prosecutors, they had to trace the email back to the kidnapper, a skill that is becoming essential in an increasingly digital age.“Nearly every crime seems to have some kind of phone involved in it.” -- Adam Palmer of UNODC

Thankfully, it was only a training exercise. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) visited Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, at the request of authorities there, who were struggling and under-trained to deal with an increase in cybercrime and Internet-based human trafficking.

UNODC provided three days of training in basic forensic techniques, such as tracing a criminal across the Internet and finding images and other information on a locked computer.

“[It’s] old-fashioned detective work in a digital age,” Adam Palmer, a senior expert in cybercrime and emerging crimes at UNODC, told IPS.

While official figures on human trafficking are notoriously hard to come by due to the crime’s secretive nature, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that 21 million people are forced into labour around the world, including 4.5 million victims of forced sexual exploitation.

With the pressure of emerging technologies, anti-trafficking organisations as well as law enforcement need to adapt their knowledge of new techniques and devices used by criminals. Smartphones are a new phenomenon, Palmer said; a couple of years ago the majority of crimes were being committed on desktops.

“Nearly every crime seems to have some kind of phone involved in it,” Palmer said.

For authorities in Moldova, a Tier 2 ranked country in the U.S. State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report, many of the training exercises were new. Before the ubiquity of electronic devices, vital information might have been written in a notebook, accessible by simply reading the pages, Palmer said.

Now, police are more likely to have to crack codes, with information saved on password-protected devices.

But the problem of Internet-based sex trafficking, which is the use of the Web for the recruitment, advertisement and sale of people, overwhelmingly women, is not confined to Moldova. It is also an issue in developed countries like the United States.

Amy Fleischauer, director of victim services at the International Institute of Buffalo, a group that helps immigrants and refugees settle in Western New York, has found survivors of sex and labour trafficking being recruited and advertised via the Internet. The institute spends time with survivors so that they know how easily they can be tracked through Facebook, GPS on their phones and their Internet history.

It’s important to realise the inherent interrelation between sex and labour trafficking, Fleischauer told IPS. She recalls a number of cases involving agricultural workers in the United States, where brothels were established on farms to “satisfy workers”.

“Sex trafficking almost always involves labour trafficking,” Fleischauer says. “Focusing on just sex trafficking does a disservice to victims.”

Increased awareness of trafficking through the Internet has caught the attention of companies that run the Web, and whose products are being used to facilitate the crime.

“The most effective way to investigate cybercrime is… to work with private sector companies,” Palmer said, adding that these companies are willing to help as traffickers are abusing their technology.

Jacquelline Fuller, director of giving at Google, told IPS the company has a “long-standing interest” in helping to combat child exploitation and trafficking over the Internet.

“More recently, we took a deep dive to see… how we could help,” Fuller said.

Google has provided several grants, including one for 11.5 million dollars, to help three anti-trafficking organisations, Polaris Project, La Strada International and Liberty Asia, partner together to more effectively combat the crime.

In April, Google gave three million dollars to help fund the Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network, and two Internet companies, Salesforce and Palantir Technologies, provided technology that allows the organisations to share data.

“[These groups can] use technology to get ahead of the bad guys,” Fuller said.

Bradley Myles has seen first-hand the changing face of sex trafficking. The CEO of Polaris Project, a U.S.-based non-profit that works directly with survivors of human trafficking, Myles told IPS that from 2005 to 2008, Craigslist was one of the worst channels for Internet-based sex trafficking.

After Craigslist removed many of the advertisements that led to women and girls being exploited, Myles now sees similar issues with the website Backpage.

“There’s a very clear, identifiable pattern there,” Myles says. “Sometimes it’s parents calling in after seeing their child’s ad on Backpage, their 16-year-old daughter being advertised as a 19-year-old.”

Backpage has been made aware that traffickers are using their site, but Myles wonders whether protective measures put in place are enough.

“It’s a fluid crime,” Myles told IPS. “We’re in a new world of having the technology partnerships to make everything we’re doing more robust.”

The true extent of Internet-based trafficking is still unknown, Fleischauer says, but increased awareness and getting police more educated on types of cases, recruitment and strategies could help.

“I think we have no idea what’s out there,” she says.

Courtesy of Andrea Landry

By Lucy Westcott
UNITED NATIONS, May 24 2013 (IPS)

Aboriginal youth are making their mark at the two-week United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. And this year, the gathering’s twelfth, 24-year-old Angela Landry, whose Anishinaabe name is Eagle Heart Woman, is representing them.

The world is getting younger. With global population surpassing seven billion last year, more 50 percent of the people around the world are under age 30 – 3.5 billion people, according to a 2012 report by Euromonitor International. The majority of them are in developing countries."You see the love, you see the friendship, and you see the connection." -- Andrea Landry

Throughout Landry’s life, she has existed in multiple spaces at once. The youth rep is half French-Canadian and has lived in both cities and in her native community, Pays Plat First Nation, two and a half hours east of Thunder Bay, where she currently resides. Pursuing a master’s degree in communications and social justice at the University of Windsor, she defends her thesis in August.

IPS correspondent Lucy Westcott spoke to Landry, who was in Thunder Bay, Ontario on a flight layover, about the challenges facing aboriginal youth around the world, and new ways that young people can reconnect with their cultures via technology.

Q: How did you become involved in advocacy for Indigenous peoples?

A: My father was in the military, so I grew up all over the place. I went to high school in Thunder Bay, but there weren’t many aboriginal students. Every couple of weeks my mother would take me and my sisters (Landry, a twin sister and an older sister) back to our community.

My mother would also take us to Friendship Centres to help us reconnect with our history, our culture, and constantly remind us of who we are. Three years ago I started my advocacy work with the National Association of Friendship Centres (there are 119 across Canada) and became a youth executive there.

I serve on the board and have meetings with the Canadian government about issues related to the country’s Indigenous youth. I’m making sure our stories are being told first-hand, instead of by the government.

Q: Do you think Indigenous youth who move away to cities feel disconnected from their culture and find it difficult to reconnect?

I think it depends on the family, as a lot of Indigenous children are placed into foster care. (A recent news article reports that aboriginal children under the age of 14 make up over 50 percent of children in care in Canada).

Even when children are placed into care, it’s inevitable that they feel the pull of their aboriginal culture and history. It’s inside you: I feel indigenous no matter where I am and where I’m going. Friendship Centres across Canada also offer opportunities to reconnect with your communities through speaking with elders and learning the language.

In Thunder Bay, the city where I lived, there was a lot of racism toward aboriginal people, and that gives you feelings of shame. I’m mixed-race and would ask myself, “OK, what am I, am I brown or am I white?” as white girls would say, “You’re too brown” and the aboriginal girls would say, “You’re too white.”

In Canada, we have Aboriginal People Television Network (APTN) which provides media and programming for Indigenous peoples, by Indigenous peoples. We also have many Indigenous media outlets but they are underground and not well known. In mainstream media there is a high lack of representation when it comes to healthy outlooks of Indigenous peoples in Canada.

Q: Is the Internet being used as a valuable source for Indigenous youth to reconnect with their culture?

A: A lot of Anishinaabe youth are learning the language through an iPhone app. (Neechee is an Anishinaabemowin language app, with scrollable lists of pronouns and verbs to help speakers string together sentences.)

Some young people in the community will say, ‘I’m learning the language through an app,’ and the elders will say, ‘You should have come and talked to me.’ Social media and the Internet are good, but not at the expense of learning in the traditional way, from our elders, and having the language and knowledge passed down orally. Now, learning from an elder doesn’t seem as important as it should.

Q: Are there many opportunities in Canada for Indigenous youth to learn about their history and culture in schools?

A: The educational system in Canada doesn’t provide an adequate history or opportunity to learn about the country’s Indigenous cultures, or to talk about the different nations. During my Masters I didn’t review a single article dedicated towards Indigenous peoples or by Indigenous academics. I told my professors that it was important to include Indigenous culture in the dialogue and in the class.

Q: What challenges or problems do indigenous youth face across the world?

A: Indigenous youth globally suffer from low socio-economic status, high unemployment rates, low education, and isolation. Many communities, especially in the Pacific Northwest, you can only fly to, and they’re two and a half hours away from any other place.

Indigenous people also face health problems and difficulties adapting to a Western diet. Our systems weren’t designed to handle fat-laden American food. We were eating bear and moose and berries, now we’re eating McDonald’s and Burger King.

But whenever we talk about Indigenous youth, or Indigenous people, it’s always about what bad things are happening, the negatives. When I go back to my community, you see the love, you see the friendship, and you see the connection. We also have different perceptions when it comes to the idea of success. The Western idea of success, which is material and financial, is different than mine. We’re successful in our culture, our community.

Q: What does the future hold for indigenous youth?

A: Now youth are being taken seriously, allowing us to say our statements loud and proud. We’re being recognised in Western systems like the United Nations, and we as youth are being prioritised.

After my masters, I want to continue advocating for Indigenous youth and peoples. It is truly my passion. I hope this generation will keep pushing for a brighter future.

Excerpt:

Disseminating messages to local populations, especially in developing countries, is key in mobilising support for the work of the United Nations. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, May 3 2013 (IPS)

As the world continues to turn digital, so does the United Nations – slowly but steadily.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says the world body is increasingly drawing on social media tools, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr, as well as other innovative communications technologies, to broaden its reach to the world at large.

In a report to the U.N. Committee on Information, which concluded its current sessions Friday, Ban said that efforts to harness the power of social media “have yielded impressive results in terms of reaching new audiences around the world.”

The U.N. Visitor’s website, launched in 2010, received 343,679 page views while its Facebook page has increased to over 5,800 fans and its fan base on Google Plus reached over 700,000.

And as the United Nations goes “paper smart” – drastically reducing printed reports and documents in favour of electronic versions – it is also increasing the volume of digitised documents.

Currently, the U.N. archives has over 3.7 million documents, most of them waiting to go digital.

The U.N.’s primary agenda focuses on three key issues: development, human rights and peace and security, intertwined with gender empowerment, counter-terrorism and sustainable development, among others.

Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal, under-secretary-general for communications and public information, says that the U.N. libraries in New York and Geneva have processed around 340,000 documents, comprising 3.5 million pages.

“The timeline for completing the task, using current resources and methods, would be approximately 20 years,” he said.

At the same time, the United Nations has an additional 13 million official documents, mostly background reports and working papers, which are also up for digitisation.

“That might take another 60 years,” he told the Committee last week.

Still, traditional media is still the primary means of communication, especially among developing countries where internet coverage remains sparse.

Asked whether the United Nations was on the right track in harnessing social media as against traditional media, the newly-elected chair of the Committee on Information, Ambassador Lyutha Sultan Al-Mughairy of Oman, told IPS, “I believe it is, but I do not want to suggest social media is ‘against’ traditional media.”

“We need all forms of media to communicate, in the context of who our audience is and what form of communication each audience is comfortable with.”

At the session just concluded, she said, the Committee on Information has proposed that the 193-member General Assembly request the secretary-general to report to it at its next session “on the structure of the Organisation’s presence in social networks, and its strategy and guidelines for their use.

“We believe this information will be important in assessing the track we are on, and how best, as you say, to harness the power of social media”.

She said the Department of Information must tackle a number of challenges and cater to new audiences “in a worsening budgetary climate”, doing more with fast-dwindling resources.

Currently, the world body has about 63 U.N. Information Centres (UNICs) reaching out to the public at large.

Asked about the importance of UNICs in the context of the U.N.’s current austerity drive to eliminate some, or most, of these centres, Ambassador Al-Mughairy told IPS the Committee has consistently emphasised the importance of the network of UNICs in enhancing the public image of the United Nations.

And more so, in disseminating messages to local populations, especially in developing countries, bearing in mind that information in local languages has the strongest impact on local populations, and in mobilising support for the work of the United Nations at the local level.

She said her Committee has also stressed the importance of rationalising the network of UNICs, and, in this regard, requested the secretary-general to continue to make proposals, including through the redeployment of resources where necessary.

The Committee has been assured by the Department that communications and public information needs would not suffer as a result of any realignment of UNICs or their functions.

She said the Committee has also welcomed the support of some member states, including developing countries, in offering, among other things, rent-free premises for UNICs, bearing in mind that such support should not be a substitute for the full allocation of financial resources for the information centres in the context of the programme budget of the United Nations.

Meanwhile, the secretary-general’s report also says that by the end of 2012, more than 850 institutions of higher learning and research centres worldwide, have joined Academic Impact, described as a global university initiative launched in 2010 to align such institutions with the United Nations.

Speaking of the widespread sanitation crisis, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson was quick to produce staggering numbers: of the world’s seven billion people, about six billion have mobile phones but only about 4.5 billion have access to toilets.

Indian children use a microfinanced facility in their backyard in a Bhubaneswar slum. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

“And that leaves about 2.5 billion people, mostly in rural areas, without proper sanitation,” he points out.

Ironically, the world is saturated with an abundance of cell phones but is desperately searching for non-existing toilets.

A cartoon in a World Bank 2013 calendar puts the numbers in an even more realistic but light-hearted perspective.

The sketch shows a villager in some remote corner of the world, armed with a roll of toilet paper in one hand and a smart phone on the other, trying to track down the nearest toilet on the global positioning system (GPS).

The screen on the mobile phone reads: “Nearest toilet 2 kilometres away.”

Still, he is considered fortunate, because an estimated 1.1 billion people, (out of the 2.5 billion without adequate sanitation), are forced to defecate in the open because there are no toilets anywhere, says Eliasson.

And so, the World Bank is trying to help resolve the world’s sanitation problems with digital technology and mobile phone applications (Apps).

Last week it announced three prize-winners of the Sanitation Hackathon and App Challenge, described as a yearlong project to recognise innovative and locally relevant apps that address sanitation challenges.

Manobi, a mobile and internet services firm based in Dakar, Senegal, has developed an SMS (short message service) reporting tool that enables students, parents, and teachers to monitor and report on school sanitation facilities.

Sun-Clean, developed by a team of students at the University of Indonesia, is an app designed to teach children good sanitation and hygiene practices. The app includes two games: Disposal Trash and Hand Wash for Kids.

And Taarifa, created by a team of developers based in England, Germany, the United States and Tanzania, is an open source web application that enables public officials to tag and respond to citizen complaints about the delivery of sanitation services.

Asked about the digital approach to sanitation, Joseph Pearce, technical advisor at the London-based WaterAid, told IPS: “These apps are great examples of the wealth of ICT (information and communication technologies) innovations that are being produced to improve monitoring and education around water, sanitation, and hygiene.”

He said such simple ideas have the potential to transform lives. However, there are key technical and governance challenges in translating these projects into lasting solutions.

“Apps will play an increasingly important role in informing decision-making, but there is no technical solution to using this data,” he added.

Data collection still costs money, and political will is required to finance and act upon the findings. Turning data into decisions and concrete actions to improve access to water and sanitation, he cautioned, is perhaps the hardest part.

Clarissa Brocklehurst, former chief of water, sanitation and hygiene at the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, told IPS that sanitation is such a huge and, so far, intractable problem that “we need to bring every bit of innovation to it that we can”.

This means solutions in terms of technology, institutions, behaviour change, financing and monitoring.

“The kinds of innovation the information technology (IT) community can bring are very welcome as a contribution. We clearly need more than apps and websites but they represent important new ways to tackle parts of the sanitation problem,” said Brocklehurst.

Andy Narracott, deputy chief executive officer of Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), and who leads the organisation’s Enterprises Business Unit, told IPS that technology alone cannot solve the global sanitation crisis.

“But by combining it with business experts, strategists, sociologists and engineers, then real innovation can happen.”

This is what the Sanitation Hackathon sought to achieve, and by looking at the winning solutions, this has been a hugely successful initiative, he added.

Technology-based innovations can play a key role in many sanitation-related challenges, including mapping demand for sanitation services, identifying coverage gaps, capturing customer feedback and communicating sanitation and hygiene messages to change people’s behaviour, Narracott said.

“But the critical challenge is how this information is used and acted upon,” he said.

He said the sector also needs sufficient capacity and finance to convert this information into increased access for people, especially those living in low-income areas in cities and towns across the developing world.

“The challenge has only just begun,” he cautioned.

Tools are only effective if people know how to use them were interested to see how the deployment of these tools works out, he added.

“We’d like to see this initiative now extended into a global collaborative platform, where many people can use them and iterate them collaboratively,” he noted.

Asked about the validity of the criticism that the international community is paying more attention to water than sanitation, Brocklehurst told IPS, “I think that in the past the international community has paid more attention to water, and that this is why we see such a huge difference in progress.

“We have met the water MDG (Millennium Development Goals) target, and 89 percent of the world’s population uses at least an improved source of water, even though some of that water may be of dubious quality, while only 63 percent of the world’s population has improved sanitation and over a billion still resort to open defecation.”

But that is starting to change, she said, as the impact of poor sanitation becomes clearer.

The health impacts are more generally researched and recognised, but more importantly, the economic impacts are now widely discussed.

Asked about the severity of the sanitation crisis in the run-up to the MDG deadline of 2015, Brocklehurst said, “The sanitation crisis is serious as we are a long way off from reaching the MDG target, and current estimates are that we will miss it by many millions of people.”

She said in many countries a huge acceleration in progress would be needed to reach the MDG, “and at current rates we would not reach it at a global level until 2026.”

More serious is the large proportion of people who lack improved sanitation who are actually using no sanitation at all, but resorting to the dangerous practice of open defecation – a practice that is dangerous not only for themselves, but for anyone living in their communities.

According to a press release, over 100 local partners supported the Sanitation Hackathon events.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided financial support, alongside the World Bank, and Toilet Hackers provided critical in-kind support.