Digital Migration - What You Need To Know.

Consumer Federation of Kenya (COFEK) has gone to court to stop the planned Digital Switchover in Nairobi at the end of this month. This is most unfortunate considering the fact that the current analogue broadcast has been the most discriminating. Majority of Kenyans have not seen the level of communication that Digital offers (this is what the constitution demands). In the new platform we have seen more vernacular channels delivering news in a language that people understand and relate to. It therefore surprises me when an organization such as COFEK moves to court to protect an elitist broadcast platform.

Further, every one new channel creates more than thirty new jobs. There are more than one hundred and fifty new applications awaiting clearance to start digital broadcast. Twenty of these are already on air. If we get two hundred new broadcasters, we shall have achieved our quest for having a pluralistic and diversified broadcast environment. In whose interest is COFEK advancing the agenda of maintaining monopolistic practices in Kenyan Media? Does COFEK really understands the seriousness of unemployment in Kenya?

The cost of not migrating will be far too greater if we don't bite the bullet now and enable frequency spectrum to be used in more productive and inclusive manner. The benefits of mobile operators moving from 2G to 3G are glaring. We need to scale up to 4G and create a robust last mile that will reduce the rural-urban digital divide; that will create an enabling playing field when we start delivering new local content to schools country-wide.

Most of the world has migrated and they fully understand why we need to free up spectrum. EAC member states agreed on the December 31st deadline. Tanzania, for example, has committed itself to this agreed deadline despite not having completed the national roll-out of the digital signal. In Kenya, we have adopted a phased plan starting from Nairobi. Technology changes every six months and Kenya must remain at the technological edge in order to remain the true hub of Africa. We seem to be exercising freedom without any responsibility.

Developing a Knowledge Economy

Yes there are four different Transnational Operators wanting to be in Mombasa. It could be related to the interest in building mega data centers here. These are possibly trying to entice content aggregators to have their point of presence here. There will be some positive to this considering the fact that we get the opportunity to develop capacity (improved real employment opportunities), significantly develop our energy sector and possibly drastically reduce cost of connectivity.

My frustration has been how we get our people to begin working on local content. We do not need cloud for content like Sesame Street when we can create local edutainment from local resources. Remember the local content you develop here is good for any African Country. If we automated our Government records, we shall have the chance to replicate the processes in 50 other countries. We shall get to my bet subject of intra-Africa Trade.

Check this blog and know where the future lies:

http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/africas-mics

After my trip to IGF in Baku, I passed through London at the invitation of the John D. and Catherine T. MacAthur Foundation to join a multidisciplinary Research Network of thinkers and doers on "Opening Government" to analyze and realize the potential impact of technology on democratic institutions, specifically how we can use technology to create more collaborative ways of governing to solve the world's hardest problems.

Making Sense of our Development Agenda

Page 19 of the Star of Thursday, October 11th, carried a story on Water Hyacinth titled “Water hyacinth project threatened by court order”. This is apparently a donor funded project in its phase two under Lake Victoria Environmental Management Project (LVEMP).

LVEMP II is an eight-year US$254 million (Ksh. 2.1 billion) old regional project being implemented in the five East African Community partner states says the article. Objectives of the project include: improving “collaborative management of trans-boundary natural resources of Lake Victoria basin” as well as “reduce environmental stress in the targeted pollution hot-spots and selected degraded sub-catchment areas as a way of improving the livelihoods of communities who depend on the lake basin’s resources”.

One will hope that the project is supposed to physically remove water hyacinth from the lake to enable the people access the resources from the lake. However, in the past eight years the spread of this water menace has more than tripled and this is what prompted me we to re-examine the objectives as stated. If these objectives were to be re-stated in simplified English, the real meaning could be to help citizens of East Africa understand how to collaborate and manage their resources as well as reduce their stress. The project therefore has nothing to do with water hyacinth and hence the reason why the people are fighting over it.

If the donor language were to be simpler, they would have thought about project sustainability in which case we did not need all the resources that is at the disposal of the fighting citizens. In my view we needed only US$50 (US$10 million for each country) to set up an organic fertilizer factory. Hyacinth has been found to be a good ingredient for organic fertilizer. Just recently I wrote a blog how soil nutrients have been depleted in densely populated districts with excessive land sub-divisions. Studies also show productivity levels dropping significantly that our food security and safety is at its worst threat.

Further, chemical fertilizer may be poisoning our ground water and may be likely the cause of increased cancer cases in the region. There is greater urgency than ever before that we exploit every opportunity for developing organic fertilizer like hyacinth that would improve on productivity, ensure sustainable development and reduce its impact on our water resources. Our problems would only be solved by us and as such foreign interventions will not always be a universal remedy to our predicament.

Education and Our Future

Ken Robinson says that schools have killed creativity. From the recent Kenya Union of Teachers’ (KNUT) strike it was evident that we are lacking in creativity. Three weeks of strike threatened the effectiveness of the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC) like never before. Why is KNEC linked to KNUT?

In 2010 GCSE candidates took their exam towards the end June and the results were out by August. More than 700,000 students worldwide did mathematics and English while other subjects averaged more than 350,000 candidates. At the same time about 360,000 sat for the KCSE in the same year between October and November but the results came out at the end of February. In other words marking our exams took twice as much as it took the Pearson’s Group (a private entity) to mark GCSE.

GCSE exams are marked by retired teachers as well as other qualified people. It is a contract for which you are paid 800 pounds for the three to four weeks exercise. They heavily use IT to process the exams and some papers are marked by computers.

The company offers a variety of qualifications, including A Levels (GCEs), Edexel (which is one of England, Wales and Northern Ireland’s five main examination boards and the BTEC suit of examination qualifications. It also offers work-based learning qualifications – including BTEC Apprenticeships through Pearson Work Based Learning, awarding over 1.5 million certificates to students around the world every year.

Since we benchmark on everything, is it not time we started to benchmark on our education?

Taking Care of the Future - Part III (Open Data)

During lunch break from my meeting with HR&A on the 26th Sept, I met Prof. Beth Noveck of MIT to discuss issues relating to an upcoming conference on Open Data in November. In three minutes the prolific professor and former Obama advisor on technology had asked why we were in New York, what makes Kenya think it will be the best technology hub, why we want to build a tech city. She is driven by data and data is her life and the future in solving the many problems. I concurred with her and felt bad that we have not exploited what already is out there in the Open Data Portal.

           

At JFK, I picked Financial Times and was drawn to an article titled, "Chances of Survival are on the rise by Andrew Jack", who argues significant advances have been made by scientist in the battle against the disease but victory remains elusive. Further he says “poor quality data – in identifying cases, registering outcomes from treatment and confirming deaths from cancer – means precise figures are difficult. Yet estimates from 2008 suggest that, at least 12 million people around the world contract the desease annually, 8 million die from it and nearly 30 million are living five years after diagnosis”.

This is precisely what I had been discussing with Prof. Noveck. How do we identify a problem as well as solution by utilizing technology? Can we for example create a mobile app for Cancer patients? Can the doctors be compelled to report the data to a central data bank? How about indigenous contribution to this knowledge? What is Africa’s future with respect to both food security as well as safety?

Taking Care of the Future - Part II

On the 25 and 26th we had meetings with HR&A. These meetings were an eye opener for me since I got the insight of the American construction industry. While HR&A wanted to fully understand their mandate and also present some of the initial works, they also were making proposals on the way forward before ground breaking late October/early November. They used 3D printing to develop the Pavilion model. We were curious and wanted to know more.

In one of their works, the Barclays Centre in New York City, everything was done with the use of technology. Each part that went into building the massive center was bar coded and placed exactly how the model was developed on the computer. The roof material which had decra-like material had all the pieces barcoded 3D printed and placed where it was meant to be. There are no estimates. If you have built in Kenya you know what this method would do to efficiencies in building. There was no “Mzee Mabati haikutosha”. This is precision building.

Taking Care of the Future.

Through HR&A our Master Developer at Konza we met two agencies today in New York involved with the development of a futuristic New York that will be competitive in the next 50 years.

Hudson Yards Development Corporation was created by Mayor Bloomberg to redevelop a section of New York that was their industrial area. It covers approximately 300 acres with mostly non high rise buildings. The city now wants high rises to meet future office demands.

Here they are buying back most of the land while developing modern infrastructure including the subway. Consultants are working day and night to ensure the redeveloped area meets current and future needs.

Later we visited the New York City Development Corporation charged with NY's future competitiveness. They noted that in 1890, NY was basically a trading centre. In the 1940s, it became an Industrial City and today it is largely a financial and services city. They now want to switch gears to a more technology city.

Through a competitive process, they have put together a number of universities to deliberately steer NY into another Silicon Valley. Cornell University is paired with Israel Institute of Technology to deliberately create multi disciplinary programs in applied sciences and entrepreneurship. NY University too will partner with other global centres of excellence such as Indian Institute of Technology to also focus on innovation and entrepreneurship.

To help create a competitive future, the city will give free land and other incentives. They are demolishing one of the hospitals in order to create space for a futuristic project. Each of the different university grouping will focus in a specialized area that will be critical in the days to come. They are coming up with courses like health analytics, smart cities etc. 

This is how in future we can use data to predict our future. This is very critical and many lessons for developing countries. As we continue to do things the same way it has always been done, things remain the same and this ain't good at all. We need to leverage on what we have and do a little more.