L'ecole nomade?

 e-Learning Africa's newsportal has an interview with Philippe Steger, founder of WapEduc, a platform delivering learning resources to the mobile phones of secondary students in France and, as of this year, in Dakar, Senegal. (Heads up: The interview is in French.)

My quick run-through of the WapEduc site suggests that its resources focus on test preparation, which is to say on drill, static content, and comprehension/memorization/performance-style follow-up questions. WapEduc content duplicates or complements the presentation-based classroom and its textbook-format resources. It's a tool that supports learning outside of school in ways that are cognate with traditional pedagogy. 

The service is free in Dakar, however users need to pay airtime charges plus data costs. Obviously, kids need to have phones or access to phones as well.

(On the heavily plus side:  WAP--or Wireless Application Protocol--as I understand it, means that kids don't need to have smart phones [phones capable of reading html and other 'normal' Web protocols. WAP displays on your street-bought Nokia 2200 just fine.)

There are several questions that pop to mind: 

• WapEduc focuses on getting students through tests (and so through school). Is there a problem with that?
• How significant are the costs in Senegal? What  regulatory or policy steps can be taken to ensure that all kids with phones don't face cost barriers?
• WapEduc is running a 100-student pilot in Dakar, to be followed by a roll-out to 1,000-2,000 students if the results are good. What kinds of results would be considered "good"? (Using the phone? More time studying? Better scores on tests?)
• The need for WAPified learning resources in effect creates a gate around kids' exploration (WAP don't do porn). For most teachers and most parents--in developing or developed countries--this is not a bad thing. But the content has to be text based. What are the pros and cons?

Finally, and most interesting, the WapEduc catchphrase ("I learn when I want and where I want") corresponds to the mobile (or some might say "ADHD-compatible" or even "twitchy") lifestyles to which many youth aspire. What are the costs and what are the benefits, in terms of learning and cognitive development, of enabling greater mobility and more multitasking in the pursuit of higher levels of secondary-school completion? 

(Is, in other words, the vision of WapEduc something like a Senegalese kid skating a ramp in downtown Dakar, or bounding through some Parcours routine, stopping to catch his breath, and dialing up an algebra problem on his phone?)

More on WapEduc in a while....

IBM chases stimulus spending on rural broadband

Two articles in the business section of the NY Times discuss rural broadband. In one:

..., I.B.M. piped up to say that it is working with rural electric cooperatives to offer high-speed Internet service, delivered over power lines. Technology to send broadband over power lines has been around for several years, but it typically hasn’t been able to offer enough capacity at a low enough price to beat service from cable and phone companies. But with government subsidies, the approach is starting to be deployed in areas that don’t have access to other forms of broadband. 

IBM will be partnering with rural electric cooperatives to gear up rural power lines because, first, there's "pent-up demand" in states such as Alabama, Indiana, Michigan and Virginia, and second, there's $7 billion in stimulus funding coming out of Washington pretty soon. 

But what will high-speed Internet do for those rural economies?

Not much, according to th

 

Raul Katz, a Columbia Business School professor, admitted the difficulty in counting jobs, but he nonetheless presented a paper that tried to quantify the effect of the broadband stimulus program on employment.

“We know construction will generate jobs,” Mr. Katz said. By his count, the stimulus bill will create 128, 000 jobs designing, building and administering the broadband networks. That figure also includes a multiplier effect that assumes that every 10 people directly hired by these projects will spend enough money to create 8 more jobs in other sectors.

Beyond the construction, things get more than a little fuzzy. There is some research that shows that spending on networks will create new applications — be it “telemedicine” or e-commerce — that will spur more employment. Over the next four years, Mr. Katz allocates 378,000 jobs to these sources.

(snip)

Then there is the John Henry Effect (my term refering to the railroad-building legend who raced against a steam hammer). Technology that helps fewer people get more work done may be good for the economy in the long run, but it makes extra workers redundant. Mr. Katz says bringing broadband to rural areas will eliminate 266,000 jobs.

The biggest question mark, in Mr. Katz’s analysis, is how zippy Internet lines connect the farmers and their families into the global economy where jobs are increasingly outsourced to wherever they can be performed cheapest. Some people may benefit by working for companies like Jet Blue, that hire people to work answering the telephone in their homes. On the other hand, when the general store has broadband, it can send its tax returns to India rather than hiring the corner C.P.A. Mr. Katz published several scenarios that range from a loss of 110,000 jobs to the creation of 164,000 jobs.

Obviously, inquiry needs to focus on factors other than the sheer number of jobs created. What are the relative wages? Are people who are currently unemployable--due to disability, remoteness, whatever--able to get work?

I question, also, to what extent job creation is the appropriate metric for measuring the value of rural broadband. Are there other social benefits, triple-bottom-line kinds of benefits, that result from less miles driven, fewer rural-road accidents, and such? And what are the local factors, the differences between a town in rural Virginia and one in rural Alabama, that come into play in relation to improved social and economic well-being?

The end of aid, again?

NY Times magazine profiles the economist Dambisa Moyo, a native of Zambia by way of Harvard and Oxford. Her upcoming book, "Dead Aid," calls (apparently) for an end to overseas development assistance, such as that provided by USAID, DfID, the World Bank, and so on, within five years. Ms. Moyo argues that China, which has received small amounts of aid over the past 40 years, has far outstripped African countries during that period based on hard work, and lots of it.

Think about it this way — China has 1.3 billion people, only 300 million of whom live like us, if you will, with Western living standards. There are a billion Chinese who are living in substandard conditions. Do you know anybody who feels sorry for China? Nobody.

Foreign aid, on the other hand, fosters a do-nothing culture that de-emphasizes entrepreneurialism and self-reliance while encouraging corruption on the part of political leaders and bureaucrats. 

Who could argue with her premises?

(I was driving south in Rwanda once, along the eastern shore of Lake Kivu heading down to the border of Congo. The road was semi-bad, we were traveling about 20 km/hr. In one town, kids lined the street and chanted from their French primers, "Donnez-moi un biscuit, donnez-moi un biscuit." The driver, Felix, stopped our vehicle and said to the children, "You have learned a bad lesson.")

William Easterly of course has pushed similar thinking for the past decade or so, citing evidence that only direct foreign investment--not aid--has been linked to improvements in per-capita GDP. And as I've written elsewhere, governments in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia are less than willing to accept World Bank funding--at least, this was the case in summer of 2008--preferring to look for ways to access the Bank's specialists' expertise and that of Bank consultants rather than assuming debt and the strings attached to it.

Does the convergence of these events and opinions signal that we might be reaching an inflection point in our relationship to overseas assistance?

Sure, yeah, maybe. In the U.S., microfinance (don't think large-scale, such as FINCA and Grameen, think micro-donor-driven kiva.org) is still wildly popular, in part because it's more in line with Americans' self-images and bootstrap ethic. But Easterly, IIRC, also demonstrates that micro-finance doesn't lead to economic development. Individuals benefit, but there's no dissemination of the entrepreneurial spirit and, of much greater importance, no significant increase in the money supply. The micro-entrepreneurs make out (although less clearly and less often than is touted by Grameen), but it's at the expense of other, less-well-capitalized or less-well-run local businesses and individuals.

So, per Easterly and per Moyo, the goal is DFI, direct foreign investment. But it's difficult to imagine that a competition among kleptocratic governments in African and Asian countries and multi-national corporations in rich ones, plus China, is the most effective way to generate real benefits for rural and urban poor. The phrase "Race to the bottom" doesn't adequately encapsulate the environmental, cultural and economic costs of this free-for-all.

(I've seen the tailings that flow out of the Freeport-McMoRan coppermines in Timika, West Papua, still. I've been told that the majority Indonesia shareholder in that mine is a single anonymous individual (nee Suharto). The copper, gold and revenues have unimpeded transit out of Papua. Sure, perhaps there's a trickle-over effect when mine-derived capital is reinvested in an Indonesian mobile-phone company, but the local costs clearly exceed the local benefits.)

The answer, I'm sure, isn't telling poor-country governments to "brace up" for an end of aid and a return to private-sector primacy. Nor is it unloading millions in unwanted aid from above. More from Ms Moyo:

‘‘Dead Aid,’’ as your book is called, is particularly hard on rock stars. Have you met Bono? 
I have, yes, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year. It was at a party to raise money for Africans, and there were no Africans in the room, except for me.

I contend that the answer lies in a much more nuanced mix of aid and investment, with both types of in-flow subject to greater oversight, much more participation in decision-making by the grassroots, and with measures that balance social spending--on, say, schools and hospitals--with support for small and micro-businesses with large-scale DFI. World Bank personnel, as far as I can tell, have some idea of the problem and of solutions of this style; it's doubtful that they have the skills or mechanisms to pull together such an admixture. 

Admittedly, it's tougher than telling Bono to get stuffed.

OLPC support for small-scale projects goes ad hoc

As I mentioned earlier, the One Laptop Per Child Foundation is cutting off it's short-lived support for 100- to 1,000-computer projects in schools (otherwise known as pilots). It appears that the reason for this change is either OLPC people are way too busy to fulfill small orders or those small orders never lead to anything bigger (h/t to Wayan at OLPC News): 

"This is a program we would love to support if we had time to do everything — it has produced some lovely stories, and on rare occasions starts a process that leads to larger, lasting commitments."--SJ

Educators and others interested in small-scale purchases of OLPC's Children's Machine XO are advised to: 

• Buy one or two on eBay
• Submit a proposal to the
• Contributors Program, was started to support developers
• Post a request to the XO Exchange Registry,
• which re-cycles machines from the Contributors Program

Or as SJ says further on in the post, load the open-source Sugar operating system on a bunch of other low-cost machines. (Like, an Intel Classmate?)

The name of the cancelled program supporting small-scale projects? "Change the World." Or, I guess, don't bother. 

I've got your low-cost device right here...

According to Wikipedia, 73 million people in China access the Web using mobile phones. (I've seen figures as high as 170 million, but that would equal the total number of Internet users in China as of 2007. Seems doubtful.) 73 million is about 30 percent of China's 253 million Internet users. A just-released study by Vital Wave Consulting states manufacturers of low-cost computing devices--sub-notebooks, ultraportables, whatever--are targeting the emerging middle classes in countries such as India, China and Indonesia. There are few devices specifically designed for the majority populations of these countries--rural, poor, off-the-grid, and generally faced with choices that make access to information a luxury. 

Why is this? What about the 2 billion or so people at the bottom of the pyramid, don't they comprise a massive market for low-cost computing and Internet access?

I think, perhaps, not. 

According to Richard Fuchs of IDRC, mobile Internet access (or using a mobile phone to access the Internet) is growing faster in developing countries than desktop Internet access. (I met a guy installing 3G in Bengal in 2003. I worked on a project using GPRS in Haryana State that same year. We were "mobile Web" before we knew what it meant.) 

Putting the next nail in the coffin of consumer-oriented low-cost computing in poor countries, according to Simon Batchelor of Gamos Consulting, the introduction of 1 mobile phone into a village in Africa increases productivity 10x, while the second phone increases productivity <1x. Villagers share information. (Both of these nuggets of information have been shared with me directly, I can't find them on the Web.) 

Thus, given the growth of the mobile Web in developing countries, combined with the tendency for the information and communications provided by "first-access" devices to be shared among poor users, well-managed design, manufacturing and distribution of low-cost, low-power computers by commercial entities is not going to target the poorest of the poor, or even the generally poor. Those 2 billion poor people, as a market, can be cut down to maybe 20 million early adopters, because they'll make crucial information available to others in their villages. And even those village-based pioneers of Internet usage are going to--based on cost, based on their living circumstances--opt for mobile-Web devices not tiny laptops. 

Hell, I can update my facebook page using a free application specifically designed for my mobile phone. Which would suggest that the device that's going to crack open the Web make life-critical communications available to the world's rural poor is going to be an iClone.