, ,

How social media can bring trust to Guinea’s 2011 elections

The following post is the response given to oAfrica by Francoise Stovall, Interactive Communications Manager at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI). Guinea’s legislative elections are to be held on 11/27/2011. How can Nigeria’s experience with crowdsourcing apply to Guinea, a nation where social media is less prominent and fact often gets tangled with fiction?

NDIIn support of open & accountable democratic institutions around the globe {NDI}

Question:  What’s your take on how mobile or social media can facilitate trust & communication in the upcoming #Guinea elections?
Answer:  NDI’s Technology team, drawing upon its regional and global experience in this realm, has the following response:
Social media provides a way for election officials to share information about what’s going on, communicate it to an engaged audience, and build public trust in the electoral process. For example, in the 2011 Nigerian elections, Nigeria’s Independent National Election Commission (INEC) did a wonderful job of communicating over twitter and other social media channels.  However, it’s important to note that this type of dialogue requires proactive engagement and interest from such organizations. It provides a way to directly engage with those organizations publicly – if people see incidents or violations, they can communicate them to the authorities who can (theoretically) themselves respond.  Using a collective hashtag on Twitter (if there is enough of an internal user base to make it viable) is a way for citizens to self-aggregate and share information. Eg, if the tag is #guinea11 then people can use it in their tweets to connect to all the folks communicating on the topic.

Citizen reporting can provide an avenue for people to share stories of legal violations, as mentioned above, but can also be a way to name-and-shame electoral code of conduct violations if that has been established. If there are CSOs who are attempting to collect and manage citizen reports it can be a good way to hold officials accountable for violations. There are significant challenges with such a “crowdsourcing” program, but in the right place can be a powerful methodology.

In the Guinean context, establishing public trust in the electoral process is indeed  a challenge.  Beyond the advantages of using social media and new technology to connect citizens to government, it’s also important to recognize the flipside of this:  Social media can be the perfect way to spread pure rumor and hearsay – or worse, malicious, inflammatory information. It can prove an opportunity for the online community to work together to try to verify reports and quash misinformation.  To enhance the transparency and credibility of Guinea’s upcoming legislative elections, NDI will be working with its local partner Consortium for Domestic Election Observation (CODE) to deploy citizen observers to polling sites around the country on election day to independently and systematically collect, analyze, and report information about election-day proceedings.  As part of this effort, CODE and NDI, drawing on regional and international best practices, will explore ways to use social media, or to partner with organizations that are doing so, in order to better achieve its goals.

CODE used cell phone technology in its last observation effort (the country’s presidential elections of 2010) for improved reporting speed.  CODE’s 2000+ citizen observers covered 20% of Guinea’s polling stations, and the coalition’s calculated election results were within 1 percent of those announced by the CENI.

—

Learn more about upcoming African elections and how you can support government accountability: Connect with NDI on Facebook | Follow NDI on Twitter | Give to NDI

/by
,

ICASA collaborates with tech universities

The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) has pledged to work with higher education institutions in the country to enhance wireless technology research and collaboration, and facilitate policy development and rule making.

ICASA collaborates with local Universities (mage source: file photo)

ICASA, the regulator of South Africa’s telecommunications industry, last week announced a joint venture with the University of Pretoria, in South Africa on a spectrum research programme.

The development is part of ICASA’s Research Collaboration Programme.

“The programme was initiated by the Engineering and Technology Division of Icasa to facilitate wireless technology research and forecast, and to enhance policy development and rule making,” said ICASA spokesperson Paseka Maleka.

Last week, an ICASA delegation toured University of Pretoria, South Africa to view a research setup at the institution.

During the tour, Prof Roelf Sandenbergh, the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Pretoria reiterated Icasa’s commitment to research and interaction with academia. He explained strides made by the faculty to extend their reach to all communities.

Prof Sunil Maharaj, acting head of the Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering Department and also Director of the Sentech Research Group, presented the research output from the collaboration.

Icasa said currently the focus areas of the collaboration were benefits from emerging technologies such as cognitive radio, development techniques on spectrum management to bridge the rural-urban divide, facilitation of regional and international harmonisation in radio frequency planning, standardisation and equipment development to reduce the cost of communication.

Stewart Chabwinja

/by
, ,

The importance of having good baseline data

Information and communication is the lifeline of any disaster response. It is critical for people on the ground to convey the situation, as well as the urgent need for supplies and relief in specific locations. It helps organizations collaborate to avoid duplicative effort and gaps in assistance.

The crisis response community has long known that the use of information and communications technology (ICT) can quickly coordinate efforts, thereby making their work more targeted and effective. Recent improvements in ICT, such as availability of BGANs, WiMax and WiFi mesh networks, provide an opportunity to improve information sharing, not only within organizations but also between them.

This blog post illustrates the need for a coordinated collection of baseline data in disaster prone countries through a cross-organizational, multi-phased approach.

The humanitarian sector has the opportunity to harness technological advancements to improve information-sharing during a crisis. Technology is not the solution. But it is a significant tool that can enhance intelligent and immediate decision-making.

The State of Crisis Information Management

Numerous challenges in information management arise when responding to a major disaster or conflict, such as:

  • recording the damage to housing, infrastructure, and services
  • tracking displaced populations
  • distributing the massive influx of humanitarian supplies
  • coordinating the work in and between clusters, as well as the work of dozens of agencies outside the cluster approach

A recent survey of organizations that responded to the devastating earthquake in Haiti pointed out that one of the key issues they faced was an overall lack of baseline information about the situation in the country. For many of the UN clusters operating, it took months to get a comprehensive overview of what the situation was like before the earthquake struck, and then to start understanding what effects it had.

In Haiti the situation was particularly devastating because almost all government offices and ministries had been destroyed in the earthquake, and most of their data systems were lost. This is a common issue faced by response organizations around the world.

Baseline and post-disaster information is collected and controlled by many autonomous parties, including national authorities, many of whom may be working together for the first time. Due to the lack of a common repository of baseline data, organizations spend considerable amount of time either recreating the data or searching for it. Therefore, it is important to improve access to, and interoperability of, data collected before, during, and after an emergency. This is essential to building better response capacity.

Humanitarian response to sudden onset disasters requires:

  • rapid assessment of the spatial distribution of affected people and existing resources
  • good geographical information to plan initial response actions
  • shared knowledge of which organizations are working where (who-what-where or “3W data”) so that response can be coordinated to avoid gaps and overlaps in aid

This applies to any humanitarian response. But in a sudden onset disaster, the timeframes of information supply and demand are severely compressed. Pre-assembled information resources for the affected area may not exist. Even in areas where development projects have been present before the crisis occurred, data is often dispersed and unknown by the wider humanitarian community, or cannot be accessed and assimilated quickly enough.

Recurring data problems include:

  • Discoverable data. Data is either not made available to, or is not discoverable by, relevant organizations.
  • Available data. Data may not be immediately accessible, archived, or stored/backed up in a location outside of the devastated area.
  • Released data. Data sets may be subject to legal restrictions. Even if these restrictions are waived for humanitarian use, there may be problems with immediate authorization and redistribution.
  • Formatted data. Data may be unsuitable for direct import into a database or GIS system, and may require substantial processing.
  • Conflicting data.

Emergencies create an ever increasing number of information web portals, which is in itself a good thing. However, it can be problematic when the data is rapidly evolving. The enthusiasm to (re)publish as much information as possible can lead to confusion and inefficiencies, as users search through multiple copies of similar looking data to extract what is new or different.

The above issues are widely recognized by practitioners in humanitarian information management. Still, these problems recur in almost every sudden onset disaster emergency, in both developed and developing countries.

Each emergency brings together a unique collection of local, national and international humanitarian players. Some are experienced emergency responders, and some are not. Some are government-endorsed, whilst others are simply concerned citizens. While there will be some common elements across every emergency (government, UN agencies, major INGOs), the varying roles played by each makes it impossible to predict a ‘humanitarian blueprint’ for each new emergency. This vast range of experience, resources, and mandates, can make sharing response best practices extremely difficult.

Common problems with baseline data can – and must – be resolved for each emergency. For example:

  • During the initial days of an emergency, the main coordinating agencies agree at a national or local level which administration boundaries and P-code datasets should be used for coordination. It is critical that this decision is communicated to everyone involved in the disaster response.
  • Humanitarian assessment templates and base map data should be standardized and made compatible.
  • The supply of baseline data should be driven by the information needs of the humanitarian response. Priorities differ from emergency to emergency, and this presents a constant challenge in using limited resources to meet urgent information needs at each stage of the response.
  • The information needed by the affected community is not necessarily the same as the information demanded by large humanitarian agencies.

A well-coordinated humanitarian response will use multiple datasets, created by different personnel in different agencies, describing a highly dynamic and multi-faceted situation. To make these datasets interoperable and manageable imposes a higher overhead cost. But to create a data model that is planned strategically versus reactively will minimize that cost.

Moving forward

A multi-agency effort is essential to improve the availability and accessibility to baseline and crisis information. This needs to be a collaborative effort of the entire humanitarian response community with support and involvement of the private and academic sectors. The now no longer existing IASC Task Force on Information Management did a good job by defining what the Core and Fundamental Operational Datasets (COD/FOD) are that we need to collect for each country, but the difficult part is to actually ensure they are available for each country and that those that have been collected are actually kept up to date.

We at NetHope are looking at new and innovative ways to address this and are looking for organizations who are interested in working with us on this. If you want to work with us on this, feel free to reach out to me for further information.

/by
, ,

Is Virtual Education Worth the Money? The Case of Syria

In an effort to bring education to the most remote corners of Syria, and to allow those in rural areas who cannot leave their families behind, the Syrian Ministry of Education started the Syrian Virtual University in 2002, the first of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).  SVU offers various degrees, including a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology.

Though, admittedly, SVU degrees may not be as highly esteemed as traditional degrees, they are certified by Edexel and other many universities have recognized their validity.  For example, the University of Greenwich awards SVU graduates with Honors Degrees from their own university.  These partnerships are crucial in order for the SVU alumni to qualify for international jobs and bring economic growth and investment back to Syria’s economy.

Photo: AMEinfo

Other nations have followed Syria’s example; Tunisia, Libya and Egypt’s ministries of Education have established distance-based learning options for their citizens.  In summary, hundreds of thousands of citizens have enrolled in courses and received diplomas.

The question to be answered is to what extent does increased educational achievement through virtual universities bring increased human development to these nations?  The citizens are more educated, more connected to the global landscape, and less ignorant.  Perhaps, their increased literacy and knowledge capacity was in part a leading cause in the Arab spring uprisings.  Or, at the very least, the increased educational achievement ushered in heightened political awareness to the region.

What isn’t clear, though, is whether these virtual universities have led to any increase in economic growth or life expectancy.  Difficult laws to start businesses, or government corruption and bureaucracies to open organization, slows entrepreneurship and business uptake in the region, making economic growth much more difficult.  I can’t help but wonder how many citizens the Syrian government educated only to lose their increased human capital to foreign businesses, since the job market is too scarce within Syria.  In order to these nations to capitalize on their investments in virtual education, they will have to ease business restrictions on startups, allow for more tolerance for failed businesses, and subsidize the expenditures of local business owners.

 

/by
, ,

Starting from the end

Over the last two years we have had endless discussions about how crowd sourced information is going to change the way we do crisis information management. Some people go as far to say as the regular humanitarian information management is dead and that the time of crowd has come. But one thing that we have yet to show is that all this crowd sourced information actually provides the humanitarian response community with actionable information. We have a few anecdotes of individual reports being helpful, but no overall study of the effectiveness.

I have lately been talking to a number of colleagues from the humanitarian community and one of the best hint at how to solve this came from Lars Peter Nissen from ACAPS. He pointed out that when they are planning needs assessments they start by defining what decisions they want to try to affect by the needs assessment. Then they work their way backwards and design an assessment that helps provide the answers needed to make that decisions.

When deciding to do a crowd sourced project for a disaster or crisis response, we must do the same. We must first define what decisions we are trying to affect. Once we know what decisions we want to try to affect, we need to define what information we would use as the basis for making these decisions. Once we know what information we would use as basis, we should look at what is the best way to visualize that information to optimize the decision making. In the age of crowd sourcing we have focused a bit too much on the power of geospatial visualization, but often graphs, trends or tables can help us make a better decision.

Once we know what decisions we want to help facilitate and how we want to visualize them, then we can start thinking of how we can get data from the crowd and through data processing and data analysis turn that data into this information. This may lead us to ask the crowds for more controlled questions or for our media monitoring teams to monitor reports of certain data instead of trying to capture all the available data out there. We can then look at ways of either automatically process the data or use a mechanical turk to utilize a “crowd” to do that processing. Same applies to taking that processed data and analyzing it. This can either be automatic or done via a crowd of people.

So before the next major disaster happens and we activate the digital volunteers lets sit down and define the end product first and then work our way back. This way we can really ensure that all this digital volunteer effort is utilized to the max.

/by
, , , , ,

India to use mobile phones to track millions of immunizations

Child being given vaccination. Photo Credit: getty images

India’s health minister announced earlier this month a new initiative designed to boost the country’s rate of immunizing newborns by collecting mobile phone numbers of all pregnant mothers to monitor their babies’ vaccinations over time.

Ghulam Nabi Azad, the health minister, told a World Health Organization meeting in New Delhi that his ministry has been supervising the collection of about 26 million mobile numbers of pregnant women in India since January and plans to finish the job by December.

The women whose numbers are collected will be tracked via the mobile phones in the future by the Indian government to ensure the women’s babies receive the proper immunizations at the proper times. Babies in India are supposed to be immunized against tuberculosis, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whopping cough and measles, health experts say.

According to Mr. Azad, the campaign will “enable us to monitor our immunization service at a national level. In addition, the central government will be able to check on the accuracy of data collected locally, which is often in doubt.”

The impetus for this program manifested due to a decentralized and deficient public health system, poor monitoring methods and sub standard vaccination coverage.

Photo Credit: wisdomblog.com

In 2010, only 72% of Indian babies received the three doses of the DPT vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough, an accepted indicator of a successful vaccination program, according to a joint estimate United Nations Children’s Fund and the WHO. That compares poorly with Bangladesh at 95% and Indonesia at 83%, according to the same joint estimate.

An inherent problem with the monitoring of vaccinations in India is that once babies are vaccinated, there tends to be no physical record of that baby being vaccinated. It is up to the guardians of the child to remember which vaccination was administered at which time. Also, the district levels governments may report erroneous numbers when reporting on the number of children vaccinated.

This initiative will give the central government the ability to contact the new mothers to confirm their babies’ immunization. “We’ll know the capacity of each state so they can’t fool us,” said Mr. Azad, reflecting widespread frustration.

Such an encompassing initiative is bound to face obstacles. Mr. Azad already encountered problems when he tried calling ten numbers from a list gathered back in February. “In front of all of the ministers, I picked up the phone and dialed the first 10 numbers. Only six of them were accurate numbers. Knowing we were going to be checking these numbers, our health workers still collected 40% faulty numbers—that is very bad” he said.

Mr. Azad declined to detail the cost of the program or how many numbers have been entered into the government’s system so far. But he said that tracking 26 million babies “is not an easy job.”

This is an ambitious project to say the least. Mobile phones after all aren’t permanent tools. A family could potentially report one number and procure a new phone with a new number. Also keep in mind, the Indian government is talking about a series of vaccinations that will span over a number of years for families living in rural areas. There could be a high turnover issue of mobile numbers. Families could also report a false phone number for fear of government intrusion – there is no way of double checking for that. Don’t forget, not all mothers will have a mobile phone to begin with.

The list of possible impediments could go on, but the bottom line is that attaining 26 million accurate and functional mobile numbers is idealistic at best. Nonetheless, this is a good start for the central government – it shows they are paying attention to the issue.

/by
,

FIVE Apps for Farmers…

Screen shot of the Agwired iPhone app

Credit: Calder Justice/ADCO

The outmoded view of agriculture, as a pre-industrial technologically obscure field, is rapidly changing. Increasingly, farmers are making use of Apps as smartphones become more accessible. I have blogged about a number of applications and ways in which non-profits and other development organizations are helping farmers to purchase these phones. But there is a growing number of new applications.

Here are five FREE agricultural apps recently reviewed by Calder Justice of AGCO, a high-tech solutions firm for farmers.

  • SoilWed – GPS based, real-time access to USDA-NRCS soil survey data, formatted for mobile devices. This application retrieves graphical summaries of soil types associated with the user’s current geographical location. Images are linked to detailed information on the named soils.
  • PureSense: Allows user to access information from underground sensors that detect moisture levels near the roots of crops.
  • Dupont Tankmix: Allows you to easily calculate the amount of product you will need to treat a specific field area, the amount of product you need to apply to a specific tank size, the amount of water you will need to treat a specific area or the amount of product you will need to get the desired volume to volume ratio.
  • AGWired: The first agricultural media app for the iPhone. The app offers one-touch access to all the latest news and information in the agribusiness and agricultural marketing world posted on Agwired.com
  • ArcGIS: ArcGIS is a great way to discover and use maps. You can query the map, search and find interesting information, measure distances and areas of interest and share maps with others.

 

/by
, ,

Can Machines Replace Teachers in Education Systems?

“Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine, should be.” – David Thornburg

Does this statement make you cringe? Squirm a bit in your chair? I’m not surprised if it does. As access to technology proliferates among schools in developing countries, a call for improved teacher training, curriculum, and methods of assessment seems vital to ensuring that the initiatives are sustainable. How else can you ensure that children are using time spent on a computer effectively and for educational purposes?

Despite this logical breakdown, research conducted in India over the past decade disputes these views. Let me preface an explanation of this research with a brief story:

yakini_comp_class.jpg
January 2011, Arusha, Tanzania : A brand new computer lab has been set up at Yakini Primary School, and all of the students are extremely excited to use a computer for the first time. Even though there are 13 computers in the room, the solar-powered generator electricity only allows 4 to be turned on at a given time. When the third year class enters the lab, 8 students huddle around each computer.Today, after spending the past few days talking about the uses of a computer and its parts, we will finally be turning the computers on and seeing them in action. The plan is to practice using a mouse by working with windows. The class assignment is to open the ‘My Documents’ folder, maximize the window, minimize it, re-maximize it, and then close it. ”Once you have completed the assignment, please do not touch the computer. Just wait for me to get around to your group.” I begin working with the group of students at the first computer.

By the time I reach the students at the last computer, I am quite surprised to find that, not only have they completed the assignment on their own, but the desktop background has also been changed from the image of green hills to a Black Labrador dog. Awestricken at these novice geniuses, I ask the students, “How did you do that?” With each student chiming in his or her own input, they navigate their way back through the steps to where they changed the image. I’m so impressed that I do not bother reprimanding for not following instructions.

This story illustrates New Dehli researcher, Sugata Mitra’s, suggestion that students using technology in unstructured, self-organized groups can help each other guide their own learning. In 1999, Mitra began experimenting with educational technology by building a PC with a high-speed internet connection into a wall in the slums of New Delhi. He then left the computer with no instructions for use or devices for language translation, planning to observe how individuals interacted with it.

Soon two children were huddled around the computer. Within minutes they had taught themselves how to point and click and were browsing the internet by the end of the day. After repeating this “Hole in the Wall” experiment throughout rural communities in India, he came to the conclusion that children, living in areas that lack adequate resources for instruction, could teach each other how to use a computer by working together in groups.

He makes several arguments for the benefits of this type of learning in classrooms:

  1. It reduces the costs of efforts such as One Laptop per Child. While Mitra supports the design of the laptop, he believes there should be one laptop for every four children so that groups can work through their setbacks together.
  2. When children are learning technology and exploring interests in an unstructured setting, they become excited about learning and retain much more.
  3. Expecting children to work through the dilemmas on their own teaches them innovation and creative problem solving, two skills essential to any job. Instead of producing students that are able to memorize a laundry list of items, this approach produces students that know how to pinpoint where to find the same information.
  4. Having children work together in groups teaches teamwork and collaboration.

I do not doubt that there is a place for Mitra’s recommendation of self-organized group learning in ICT4Ed. It’s a great opportunity for students to explore their curiosities, learn skills in innovation and problem solving, and retain steps to a much greater extent than they can with rote memorization.

However, I do believe that it is important to discern an appropriate time and circumstance for this method of learning. For instance, providing students with an allotment of time each day to freely roam the internet together, researching topics of their own interests, could be a great opportunity to keep them excited about technology and to show them how they can find answers to pressing questions and work through problems on their own.

This, however, can not replace the role of a teacher and a curriculum. Knowing how to use the tools for gathering information is an excellent skill but will not help a student requiring computer knowledge at a time when tools are not at hand. Following a structured curriculum ensures that students have the foundation of fact-based information to make them productive even when technology is not readily available. Furthermore, it ensures that all students are participating and learning the skills that they will need.

To illustrate these points, let’s look at back at my story and point out some of the gaps:

  1. All of the students may now remember exactly how to change a desktop background. This does not mean, however, that they know how to verbalize the steps that they took without the computer screen directly in front of them. If someone were to ask one of the students to write down the steps, the student would not know the terms needed to describe the steps discernibly. Having a solid, curriculum-based foundation in educational technology and being assessed on it without a computer screen makes a student much more productive in times when technology is not available.
  2. Students may have worked together to describe their steps to me, but this does not account for the one student, towards the back of the group, that is not paying attention or contributing to the group’s input. Having teachers and providing assessments can make sure that all students are gaining knowledge, not just the ones that put forth the most effort.
  3. Changing a computer background may have been a great lesson working through computer screens to bring about a change on the computer, but it is not much of a useful skill in technology. If computer instruction consists of students roaming about the computer, exploring their interests, there will be quite of bit of pertinent information that they will likely not take the time to learn on their own. Making the desktop background look pretty is much more interesting to a student than learning the difference between RAM and ROM or how a file system works. These are skills that are important, so it is necessary to have a curriculum in place.

Taking this into consideration, while Sugata Mitra sets forth an interesting model for student learning that may have a place during a fraction of the school day, teachers, curriculums, and assessments cannot be replaced by machines and curious children.

 

/by
, , ,

Gender, Humanitarian Workers and the Drought in the Horn of Africa

Photo: Jerome Delay/AP

Two different e-learning courses on gender-based violence awareness and policy are now available for humanitarian workers thanks to the WHO, and the UNFPA and World Education Inc.  The course is particularly relevant for areas with strong gender roles, like the Horn of Africa.

The present crisis in the Horn of Africa has shifted the attention of development workers in the region to food security.  Education, healthcare, and even shelter are after-thoughts for now.  Particular cultural distinctions, including gender roles in the region, remain unknown to many humanitarian workers, as they are too busy focusing on in-the-moment food needs.  However, the experience of humanitarian agencies helping with the natural disaster in Haiti was that gender-based violence (GBV) only increased during the crisis, leading the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to issue recommendations to refugee camps regarding privacy, claims of domestic violence, etc.

In the Horn of Africa, particular gender issues are important to take into account, especially during humanitarian crisis.  Genital mutilation and domestic violence are both relevant issues, and so is the overall role of women as primary caretakers of children.

Though humanitarian workers have experience working with people of all sorts of backgrounds since they are deployed to different regions around the globe throughout their career, they often come into a new situation with relatively little knowledge about the local customs and challenges.  Such is the case for many in the Horn of Africa right now.  The best way for them to prepare for these cultural challenges before they even know where they are going to be posted next, is through awareness courses.

In order to educate humanitarian workers worldwide, the UNFPA and World Education Inc partnered to produce a new e-learning course on GBV.  The e-learning nature of the course makes it possible for workers to participate in the course remotely anywhere in the world and at any time.

The WHO has also created their own e-learning course in 2010 entitled “Different Needs—Equal Opportunities: Increasing Effectiveness of Humanitarian Action for Women, Girls, Boys, and Men.”  The course helps humanitarian workers consider how gender factors into their humanitarian programs.  In a sense, it gives the worker a list of checks to evaluate how their program will impact both women and men differently, and how to guard against possible discriminations.  To watch a trailer for the course, click here.

Both of these e-learning courses are quality options for humanitarian workers.  They will be better equipped to handle those tough gender issues after receiving this education via the Internet.  What is pertinent in addition to taking the course, however, is applying the lessons learned and being held accountable.  This is an aspect of education where e-learning lacks, and for now, it will be simply up to senior humanitarian officials to hold their workers responsible for doing this course and applying the principles taught.

 

/by
,

Internet Snapshot: Equatorial Guinea

According to 2010 estimates, Equatorial Guinea generates a GDP of nearly $37,000 per capita – a sum 74 times greater than that found in Zimbabwe. Therefore, why does Equatorial Guinea, a nation with one of the highest GDP’s per capita in the world (and the highest in Africa) have some of the worst levels of Internet connectivity?

malabo equatorial guinea{Majestic Malabo Harbour. Flickr via Podknox}

For one, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, President for over 30 years and one of the wealthiest heads of state is not known for thrift. Despite the discovery of oil in 1996, relatively little of the eventual profits have found their way toward infrastructure development. Expensive press releases are utilized to bolster international reputation. Case in point: an August 23, 2011 release titled “Equatorial Guinea Excels in Infrastructure Development” touts efforts to strengthen the nation’s infrastructure by the end of the decade. A bold statement, for sure, but to Equatorial Guinea’s credit, the nation has seen major relative advancements since 2008.

In the news:

Statistics:

A 2010 supplement to Foreign Policy (PDF) provides some insight into where Equatorial Guinea is heading:

  • Minister of Transport,Technology & IT Vicente Ehate Tomi says that although EG’s telecommunications sector is still in its baby stages.
  • Further initiatives are underway such as the installation of a national backbone cable and connection to the ACE network that connects South Africa with Europe.
  • Mobile operator Hits entered the country after the 2008 telecommunications law opened the door to new operators,breaking the monopoly of the country’s single operator at the time, Getesa.
    • This competition has since seen Getesa, the country’s first operator, drop its prices at least three times and launch its first marketing campaign in 20 years.
    • Goal of Hits is 80% penetration rate in 3 years.

Equatorial Guinea has the financial resources and geographical location to have a high level of Internet penetration. The “Horizon 2020″ plan will further strengthen infrastructure, health/social services, and education. Increasing telecoms competition will help bring mobile services to the country. However, successful development hinges on an opaque government. An October 2010 video of President Obiang speaking to Equatorial Guinea’s 2020 developmental goals does little to suggest the nation will no longer be considered an emerging nation in nine years.

/by

Case Studies

Global Health: Cross-Bureau Budget Analysis

The Bureau for Global Health’s (GH’s) cross-bureau budget (CBB) allocates funds to activities that...

Read more

Economic Analysis of the Conservation & Communities Project in Madagascar

Madagascar is widely recognized as the home of some of the world’s most exceptional biodiversity...

Read more

Funding the Future: Navigating Private Finance in Education

Finance is a critical input to a country’s education system, yet partner country education systems are strained...

Read more

Contact Details

  • 1156 15th Street NW
    Suite 800
    Washington, DC 20005

  • +1.202.898.4110

  • info@integrallc.com

Quick Links

Sign up for Updates

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Copyright © 2020 Integra Government Services International LLC