I am back up in Lamu. A couple of colleagues are visiting Kenya to see Camara in action on the ground out here and I thought it a good idea to visit the regional hub here in Lamu. At the moment they have taken a Dhow (the local sailing boats here) out to the Mangrove forests to look at some old mysterious ruins on one of the surrounding islands and to enjoy freshly caught fish barbecued on the beach with coconut rich and chapati bread. Its a trip you must do if you are here in Lamu.
In the meantime, Farid(Camara technical director for Africa) and I have been working! We have just had lunch with the Lamu team. In one of my earlier notes I talked up the potential of these regional hubs as a model for getting technology to the very rural areas. They are certainly the way to go but I am now much more aware of some of the challenging issues required to make them work longterm.
Two exceptionally talented volunteers run the Lamu hub along with a local volunteer who has a background in accountancy (and who is also a black belt in Karate of all things - not a bad combination here:-)).They generate revenue by selling computers (at an affordable price to the schools - about €50 a machine), offering affordable training courses (€10 for a basic month long course), and by running the fastest cybercafe on the island charging 50 schillings (50 cent) an hour.
Their outgoings include their rent, their food, Internet charges and power. At the moment they are just about making ends meet and are looking at creative ways to bringing in more revenue (without compromising the core mission of Camara which is essentially to improve education in Africa using Technology). Some of the ideas include:
(a) Offering an outreach service using laptops to introduce people to technology and open source applications
(b) Offering premium services on the internet (like high speed downloads etc)
(c) Setting up a Voice Over IP service allowing tourists make international calls.
(d) Setting up an Open Source IT services organisation that helps small enterprises use technology
With the exception of the first idea, most of these ideas push the hub away from the core mission of Camara. But necessity is the mother of invention so the young volunteers are doing their absolute best to make sure the hub can sustain itself.
I have no doubt that if we can identify talented dedicated volunteers like this to run the regional hubs they can be successful but my sense now is that they probably need some capital to get them going properly and some subsidisation till they become sustainable.
Getting a balance between subsidy and sustainability is always a challenge. Subsidy can easily turn into dependency but at the end of the day we need regional hubs to support rural areas.
Perhaps one way forward is to capitalise the hubs (so they can invest in tools, training resources, more laptops etc) so that they can extend their services to bring in more revenue.
We also need to get the cluster of schools they are supporting on centralised maintenance contracts to support the regional hub. This is quite challenging as many of the schools here think that Camara provides maintenance for free!
This is a perception that comes from the volunteer program we run each year. For the first couple of years the Irish Camara volunteers trained people for free in Kenya. This has been a mistake.
I know it might sound harsh but in actual fact it is always better to charge people for training (even if its a small charge). This serves a couple of purposes. It makes the trainees committed to the training. It also minimises the dependency issue where people might not go for training unless its free and given by white people! We had incredible examples of this in Lamu where computers would remain broken and unused till the Irish volunteers arrived each summer...
It was stories like this that convinced us of the need for regional hubs run by local people.
We just have to find a way of making them sustainable....
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