Nick Wadhams

Top-Down Aid in Africa

Writing this story for Time about a guy in Florida who wanted to donate a million t-shirts to Africa gave me a great intro into the subject of misguided good intentions and bad aid. It is just so interesting to see how anachronistic people's notions of Africa are _ especially the idea that it needs saving.

The big takeaway from the story, as foreign-aid critics repeat endlessly, is that people who want to do good must not come up with some whiz-bang idea based on what they need (or need to get rid of) at home, and what they think Africans might need. And now that I'm looking out for such terribly misguided projects, which are often more about promoting the person behind the idea than doing good for others, they seem to be cropping up everywhere.

Latest example: The founder of Kayak.com, Paul English, wants to provide free wireless internet access to all of Africa. This is such a colossally bad idea. For one thing, his free service could undercut the many local Internet service providers who make money selling internet access (though he claims he will work with local for-profit companies). For another, most Africans don't have computers (or electricity, for that matter), and have far more pressing needs.

If Paul English wants to help Africa, he should ask Africans what they want. Not "Do you want free wireless?" (people's response will probably be "Hey, neato, sure.") but "What do you need?" More importantly, why does Paul English think that Africans really want his help? It's such a terribly outdated idea.

Reversing the equation shows the silliness in all this. After 9/11, some Maasai decided to donate 14 cows to the United States. It's an instructive example of bad aid. The Maasai just wanted to "do good," and "show their solidarity." So they donated some cows that America didn't need, and which the American government had to deal with. Not a big distraction, to be sure, but the cows ended up being more of a headache than they were worth. The same can be said for many, many of the big projects that westerners impose on Africa and justify by saying they just want to do the right thing. To America, the cows were quaint. To Africans, similarly useless multi-million-dollar projects can do real harm.

We Americans might scoff, or shake our heads, or think, "Oh, those Maasai, how quaint they are." Lots of Africans are doing the same thing at us. 

    

New OLPC design

 

The One Laptop Per Child program has come up with a new concept _ a cool-looking tablet. I am still not entirely clear on why kids in poor countries need laptops (or tablets) but there's no denying that this is pretty cool.

Does Africa need a cheap laptop?

White African reports on the advent of a $99 laptop dubbed "Africa" being marketed to developing countries. As Hash notes, one of the big questions will be delivery _ how will people get the darned things? Cheap laptops will sell in Africa only if there's a place down the street for people to buy them.

 

The other question for me is how much demand there will really be. People over here can be just as obsessed with technology as folks back in the US, and many, many people I talk to say how much they want a laptop, but will they follow through? 

Piracy Musings Part 2

I often wonder about video piracy in Kenya, and particularly the fact that at Nairobi's many, many movie rental stores, the videos are always pirated. I have always assumed that the market is simply too small for anyone in international law enforcement to care that entrepreneurs here rent floor space and open businesses that advertise the fact that they are trafficking in pirated goods.

Suddenly, how odd! A video store now exists in Nairobi that rents out only legitimate movies. So people dying to see the new Transformers movie can get it at lots of places, but patrons of Mo Moviez (vision statement: "Quality Entertainment on your Desktop and at your Door Step; Original DVDS and Bluerays") will have to wait.

Customer Care Insanity -- the wrapup

After nearly six weeks, our Internet service has been restored. In the end, our provider, Swift Global, switched its ur-provider from Kenya Data Networks to Access Kenya, a process which took about five minutes.

The reason things got fixed so suddenly is pretty simple. We share internet with Mario, an insane older Italian guy who lives upstairs. He'd been away for most of the first month of our Internet blackout, and when he returned, he called Swift Global and blew his stack. When they failed to correct the problem, he blew his stack about 50 more times.Then they corrected the problem, probably just to keep him from blowing his stack again.

I have long resisted using the shouting tactic because it strikes me as brutish and disrespectful. But my approach -- lots of cajolery, efforts to make Swift Global feel guilty, trying to build friendships and foster sympathy -- just relegated me to the low-priority list.

Customer Care Insanity

I have been wrestling with our internet service provider because we have not actually been receiving any internet service for a month. The problem seems to be that someone is illegally interfering with the microwave radio signal that is beamed to a receiver on the roof of our apartment building.

Customer care can be a notoriously tricky thing in a place where there is no real competition for the particular service on offer. So it is with the Internet. We had a great deal _ unlimited and reasonably fast internet at $80 a month. The other options were extremely limited. Unfortunately, our service provider, Swift Global, knows this fact.

I had been operating under the principle that if I made myself as annoying as possible, Swift Global's representatives would work to resolve the problem with our Internet simply so they could stop having to take my calls. So far it hasn't worked.

Stock Market Madness

Tomorrow's IPO of East Africa's largest mobile-phone service provider, Safaricom, has triggered a gold-rush-style frenzy. Kenya's newspapers are full of ads -- 11 in today's Daily Nation -- for banks and other companies offering loans so people can afford to buy some Safaricom stock.

Even Safaricom is getting in on the action, as this ad shows. The small print reads "... in your future. Open a CDS account early with your preferred Stock Broker. To save time we encourage you to apply online... A CDS account enables you to trade your shares in the stock exchange. With changing technology a CDS account will enable you to buy shares in future IPO's with ease."

Gee, thanks, Safaricom!

The Daily Nation has a special section devoted to the IPO. In a slightly encouraging sign, the lead article's headline is: "Taking a loan to buy stocks not good idea."

Piracy Musings

I've been trying to figure out the economics of  video piracy in Kenya and I'm nowhere near close.

_ People tell tales of visiting China and buying all eight seasons of The Sopranos in stunning HDTV picture quality for something like $10. In Kenya, you can buy legitimate copies of movies and television series at prices a bit higher than in the United States, and you can rent (somewhat) high-quality but clearly pirated discs from many video stores. It is also possible to buy (somewhat) high-quality pirated movies for about 800 shillings at apparently legitimate shops. Things decline precipitously after that. You can buy several movies on one disc with very poor quality. And you can buy a season of your favorite TV shows, all episodes packed onto one disc and stripped of their sound and video quality. Why is it so hard to get consistently high-quality pirated stuff?

Safaricom Part II

Just got a call from Peres at Safaricom. She apologized profusely for the fact that the company has erroneously not been billing me for the last several months, and assured me that the charge had now gone through. Victory, I guess.

Safaricom's Woe

Safaricom is the leading mobile-phone service provider in Kenya. This is the scene every day at pretty much every Safaricom customer service center in Nairobi.

Off the right side of the picture, the line bends sharply to the right and keeps going. This is a very bad sign. Safaricom is growing fast, but its customer service is bad (though the staff is always friendly). I have been trying to pay my Safaricom bill for about six months. Safaricom has my credit card on file and its representatives have called me three times asking if they can charge my card. I say yes. They never do. At some point soon, they will cut me off, and I too will have to brave the line.