Category — Personal

The positive. The negative. The upbeat. The downbeat. The optimistic. The pessimistic. The African view. The Western view. The good. The bad. The “half full”. The “half empty”.

The two faces of African literature?

I’m something of a walker. During my time at Stanford University my battered old trainers got me to and from most places, as they did in San Francisco and as they continue to do today in London, Cambridge and anywhere else life takes me. Walking – accompanied by my trusty iPod – is the only time I really ever get these days to think and contemplate. Classic downtime, I guess.

So it should come as no surprise to hear that three years ago I was planning the mother of all walks – across the African continent. It was a bold (and perhaps crazy) idea, and a ‘Plan B’ at that. ‘Plan A’ was to get a Fellowship at Stanford University and, as much to my surprise as anyone else’s, it came off. Stanford was the start of a real acceleration in kiwanja’s work, and since arriving there one sunny September back in 2006, things haven’t really stopped for me.

But there’s still the little matter of that walk…

Like many people, I’ve long been fascinated in exploration, and the bygone days of early African exploration in particular. John Hanning Speke, Henry Morton Stanley, Mungo Park and, of course, David Livingstone, all embarked on some incredible journeys. For someone with a fascination for exploration and adventure, a love of walking, a strong personal attachment to the African continent and a need to do a lot of thinking, following in the footsteps of someone like David Livingstone probably doesn’t sound too crazy after all.

I hadn’t got too far in my planning before the Stanford offer came through, but I had done enough to realise that the walk was likely to take a very long time and be pretty treacherous. Looking at a map of Livingstone’s mammoth 1851 to 1856 walk from the west to east coast of Africa, following it today would take you through more than the odd trouble spot.

In my very rough mockup (pictured), the journey would start off in Luanda (Angola) and take you east through the DRC, then south into Zambia, down into Zimbabwe (just – that would be where Livingstone “discovered” Victoria Falls), onwards through Malawi into southern Tanzania, and then on through Mozambique to Quelimane, our final destination – and time for a very long, cold beer and a good bath, no doubt. (Quelimane is a little further north than Livingstone’s finishing point, but it’s close enough).

I’m not sure how many miles this walk would total, but it’s looking like somewhere in the region of 4,000 to 5,000. At a walking speed of, say, four miles per hour for ten hours per day, you’re talking about 1,000 days (or three years). Livingstone took five but he – or rather his porters – had to walk around a lot of lakes and hack through a lot of forest. There are likely to be a few more roads around today, and sadly a lot less forest.

I still harbour dreams to do a walk – maybe combined with a kiwanja Foundation fundraiser –  but maybe not this one. For me there’s something very magical about walking, and walking in Africa in particular. After all, feet are the mode of transport we used about two million years ago when the first humans emerged from the continent to colonise Asia. On many of my Africa trips, starting with Zambia in 1993 (where I stayed in Livingstone for a couple of days, funnily enough) I’ve always taken every opportunity to head off on foot, to take in the sights, sounds and smells. You see so much more when you walk, not to mention meet many more people. Many of my Mobile Gallery photos have been taken that way.

My first ever website – dating around 2001 – was called Igisi Hill, one of two small hills in Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda where I spent three months working on a conservation project in 1998. For a couple of weeks I’d take a daily walk up that hill to sit and experience the wonderful surroundings. A shimmering Lake Albert in the distance remains a highlight. Igisi Hill is the kind of place I’d like to have my ashes scattered, funnily enough.

Once I’ve taken kiwanja.net – and projects like FrontlineSMS – as far as I feel I can, I imagine the day coming when I’ll hand them over and fulfil this dream. I’ve never quite understood my fascination for Africa, but it’s had a strong grip on me for over sixteen years now. Maybe the best way to find out is to take a journey through it.

Tonight in Santa Clara, California, several thousand people will be standing on the stage with me as I collect a Tech Award for FrontlineSMS. It’s been an incredible four years – the last two in particular – and it’s amazing to think how far we’ve all come. FrontlineSMS stirs genuine enthusiasm and excitement everywhere I go, and people resonate just as much with the story as they do with the simplicity and impact of the technology.

The Tech Awards is a prestigious Silicon Valley-based international awards program that honours innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity. This is the second time FrontlineSMS has been nominated, snapping up one of three awards handed out this year in the “Equality” category. Fifteen awards in total are being given out on the night, along with one to Al Gore who’s being honoured with the “Global Humanitarian Award 2009″.

I may be the one picking up the FrontlineSMS trophy, but this is very much a team effort if ever there was one. This would never have happened without the faith of donors, an incredible (and growing) user community, volunteers, partners, numerous bloggers and members of the media, academics, advisors, designers, lawyers and solicitors, photographers, competition judges, programmers, members of the public, students, techies, and friends and family. There are simply way too many to mention. Remove just one piece and it all comes crashing down.

This Award is also, more importantly, a celebration of the art of the possible. It shows what’s possible if you build tools for underserved places – where they’re often most needed – and what’s possible if you remain totally focused on your goal. It also shows what’s possible if you don’t lose sight of your users, and if you focus on building solutions and not just technology for technology’s sake. And it shows that you don’t need significant amounts of money or abundant resources to build tools which can have real impact.

The story behind social mobile tools are an important motivator to budding entrepreneurs, and I’m happy to continue sharing that story for as long as people find FrontlineSMS an appropriate, useful and relevant tool in their social change work. Thanks to everyone for making the journey as rich and exciting as it has been, and I look forward to continuing to work with you all as ours – and your – work continues. There is still much to do.

\o/

Northern Zambia, August 1993. We set off from Chilubula – where we were helping build a school – for another village a couple of hours away. They didn’t have a school. They didn’t seem to have much, in fact. As our pick-up approached, children ran out to greet us, throwing themselves onto their knees. Many of them saw us as saviours, visitors from afar who had the power to build them schools, drill them wells and change their lives in unimaginable ways.

While some people enjoyed the attention, for me it was an uncomfortable experience. It may be hard to not be the “white man in Africa” when you’re white and in Africa, but that doesn’t mean you have to behave like one. Humility is lacking in so many walks of life, yet a lack of it seemed even more misguided in the environment in which we’d found ourselves.

Since then, on my many trips – they’ve ranged from as brief as a week to as long as a year – I always grapple with visibility, the feeling that whatever we do it should never be about us. How do we facilitate the change we want to see without being so totally central to it? I remember Jerry, a colleague at a primate sanctuary in Nigeria where I worked in 2002, towing me along to meetings with government officials because “white faces opened doors”. I always went along, but insisted he did all the talking. They were his plans, his ideas, and it would have been wrong for me to take any of the credit for them.

Jerry organised an incredible environment day in Calabar that year. He’s managed to do the same every year since. The doors thankfully stayed open. Job done, perhaps.

The dilemma of visibility has been with me from the very beginning – 1993 – and I still grapple with it today. I don’t have the answer, but I do know that putting end-users first at every opportunity is the right thing for me to do. Create tools that enable other people to head off in any direction they choose increases the distance between me and their solution. That’s what they want – independence, empowerment on their terms, credit for their actions – and doing it this way gives a little of the invisibility we seek, too.

Not having intimate knowledge of every single thing FrontlineSMS users are doing with the software may be a challenge when it comes to funding and reporting, but it has everything to do with trust, respect and genuine empowerment. It’s not until you try to do something like this that you realise how difficult it is to achieve. I don’t think enough people really know how to “let go”. Too much innovation and too much noise still centres around the technology and not in the approach. Maybe it’s time we saw a little “innovation in the way we innovate”.

Development is littered with contradictions, and my work is no exception. These things still trouble me, but at least I believe we’re on the right path – not just technically, but more importantly, spiritually.

Eleven days and 8,500 miles ago I stepped on a plane to Washington DC (I’m about to do a final 3,500-odd miles back to London). It’s been a hectic but very productive few days.

To kick things off, I spent a couple of days with the Institute for Reproductive Health helping them design a prototype “standard days method” texting service using FrontlineSMS. It was exciting and interesting work, and I’m looking forward to following their future progress.

The following day saw me speak to around 150 leaders from Latin America who had gathered for a workshop at George Washington University. It was the first time I’d spoken to an exclusively foreign audience accompanied by a live translator, but at least I now know my jokes translate well. Next I headed to the west coast and spent the weekend working with an interesting bunch of computer scientists who had gathered at Berkeley. You can read my thoughts and reflections on that in a blog post here.

After spending a couple of extra days catching up in Palo Alto and San Francisco (one of my favourite places for taking photos, incidentally), I headed back to Washington DC to speak about innovation on a panel at the UN Youth Assembly. It was the first time I’d been to the UN, let alone spoke, and it looked and felt exactly as I’d expected (see photo, above). It was a great experience, and after the short talk I was totally cleaned out of \o/ badges by the delegates.

Today saw a final – and slightly random – parting event when I featured on the BBC “Test Match Special” cricket website, which had earlier in the day been discussing the demise of Tophill Joe, a championship breeding sheep. The image (below) comes from an earlier tweet of mine in the week when I saw what can only be described as a “niche” publication in a bookshop in Palo Alto, California.

It was a nice way to end a fun and productive – if not tiring – eleven days on the road and in the air. Next stop Cambridge, i.e. home.

The San Francisco Bay Area. Open your eyes to a world of [photo] opportunities…

More images on kiwanja’s Flickr pages. Mobile-related images are available in the Mobile Gallery.

A recent tweet by good friend Juliana Rotich on street/graffiti artist Banksy reminded me of another image he put together a couple of years ago. On display in Los Angeles for a limited time as part of an exhibition on global poverty and injustice, this was an incredible piece of “live art” which made it stand out from many of the other ‘works of art’ he has become famous for.

Banksy created the image to drive home how widely world poverty is ignored, and I used it during my first talk at Stanford University in late 2006 to describe my first visit to the African continent in 1993. It was during this trip – to help build a school in northern Zambia – that I first noticed the elephant.

When was the first time you saw it?

All great journalists immediately put you at ease. Clark Boyd, someone I’ve been extremely fortunate to have spoken to on a number of occasions, is one of them. Interviews feel more like chats over cups of coffee in the dentists waiting room than recorded interviews set to go out over the airways in the US (and beyond).

Clark recently got in touch and asked if I’d be interested in giving a little careers advice – not to him but to people interested in mobile, technology, Africa and so on. Never one to turn down the opportunity, we recently sat down for coffee at my village dentist and chatted over coffee. Since these are the kinds of questions I regularly get asked by students and others interested in my work, it seemed sensible to re-post it. So, here you go. Apologies for Clark’s choice of picture. The original post is here.

Ken Banks: Cell Phones on the Frontlines

I’ve done stories on a number of Ken’s efforts in the past few years. The one that really grabbed my attention is a project Ken’s been working on called FrontlineSMS. So, for this Wide Angle Podcast, I begin by asking Ken to describe FrontlineSMS in his own words:

(Picture comes courtesy of Ken’s friend, another guy with a cool tech job, Erik Hersman)

“Few companies innovate with the intensity and frequency of those working in mobile, and today’s present is a future that only a handful of people would have predicted just a few short years ago. While most of us happily soak up rampant innovation as mere consumers, a handful of people in the hallowed corridors of mobile R&D labs are already working on the next big thing – the phones we’ll be carrying around in our back pockets in 2012 and beyond”

Check out my latest PC World column for a few off-beat, random, fun thoughts on the future of mobile.

It’s been another landmark day in the short history of FrontlineSMS:Medic. For those of you who don’t know, today saw the launch of their latest initiative – Hope Phones – which, generally speaking, encourages people to dig out their old phones and give them a new lease of life in the hands of a community health care worker (CHW) in a developing country.

Hope Phones will make use of the nearly 450,000 cell phones discarded every day in the United States, and allows donors to print a free shipping label and send their old phone in to The Wireless Source, a global leader in wireless device recycling. The phone’s value allows FrontlineSMS:Medic to purchase usable, recycled cell phones for  health care workers. According to Josh Nesbit:

Hope Phones lets you give your old cell phone new life on the frontline of global health. That’s powerful. Just one, old Blackberry will allow us to purchase three to five cell phones for health care workers, bringing another 250 families onto the health grid via SMS. Old phones can help save lives

Why it’s not about the phones

What really excites me isn’t the simplicity of the idea, or the great execution, or the branding (more kudos to our good friends at Wieden+Kennedy), wonderful as all those things are. It’s not even the number of retired phones this could rejuvenate, or the impact that all of this could have on the ground, incredible as it promises to be.

No. It’s all about mobilisation. To take and adapt a phrase:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed students can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has

FrontlineSMS:Medic, and Hope Phones, has come out of nowhere, and it’s challenging our perceptions of what’s possible. Sure, global health is a seriously big beast to deal with, and few of us – if any – will ever have the muscle needed to tackle that particular monster. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything. Indeed, there is a lot we can do.

Talk is cheap

While large multinational donors and governments battle it out, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, people need help. Every day. These people can’t wait. And people like Josh, who have spent time on the ground understanding how rural hospitals tick, know all-too-well the impact that a simple cellphone can have in the hands of a committed CHW. With little more than passion, drive and an amazing ability to mobilise and motivate, Josh has pulled together an incredible team of equally committed individuals – students – from universities all across the United States. While adults generally critique and find reasons not to do things, they’ve gone out and done.

We all know what we can’t change. The real challenge therefore is not only figuring out what we can, but acting on it. Talk, like politics, is cheap. Lives are not.

It’s about time we challenged old models. And that time is now.