Observations from rural Africa: An engineer involved in ICTs and critical ethnography in Macha, Zambia Gertjan van Stam Worksgroup, Macha, Zambia Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Port Elizabeth, South Africa [email protected]

This lecture summarizes lessons learned by an engineer whom lives with his family in rural sub-Saharan Africa, for more then 11 years. The journey includes observations in engineering and appropriate technologies, touches upon orality and relatio-economics, and discusses the use of ICT in rural Zambia. Switching perspectives between engineering and critical ethnography, the lecture highlights the dilemmas between stakeholders of ICTs in rural Africa and discusses possible ways of reconciling these dilemmas.

UCSB Center for Information Technology and Society Lecture series, 17 October 2012

1 Introduction This is my third lecture at UCSB, and I am grateful for your invitation and hospitality. My previous presentations were factual and focused mostly on engineering. Today, I am talking about life, from the perspective of rural Zambia. Today’s talk might seem a haphazard mix of all kinds of thinking. Actually it is, as I want to try to introduce some non-discursivity, to paint a picture. And if the picture can be recognized from both the South and the North, then my calling as a builder of bridges will be accomplished [1]. I am an engineer with a keen interest in radio transmission and long-distance communications, and since the year 2000 I have lived full time in rural Africa, two years in Zimbabwe, now almost 10 years in Zambia [2]. I live with my partner Janneke van Dijk, who is a tropical doctor. She is involved in HIV care, and established a study population of hundreds of children for a longitudinal study of HIV [3], designating the barriers of care in rural areas [4], among many other activities. We have our children Merel (11) and Elmo (9), and Beauty (12) with us in rural Macha. They are real third culture kids, and I am unsure if they are Dutch, Africans, or something in between, and that is fine with me.

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If you want to see where I live, the pictures of the recent documentary of BBC Clicks [5] or IEEE TV [1] show our community. Zambia is a large country in sub-Sahara. 752.000 square kilometres in area, Zambia roughly equals the size of Turkey in Europe. It is about 10% bigger than Texas in North America. If you question this size, I urge you to review the distortions of the worldmap through the Mercator projection. Try a worldmap in the Peters projection (Figure 1), and you will see what I mean; Africa is huge. It contains 20% of the surface area of the world, and could contain the combined landmass of the USA, Argentina, India, China, and Western Europe, with room to spare.

Fig. 1. Peter’s Worldmap

As a starter, let this sink in: 94% of Zambia’s surface is rural land [6] and the 2010 national census showed that 61% of Zambia’s population lives in rural areas [7]. In rural areas, traditional leaders are the respected custodians of the community. It is where customary law is exercised. These laws are the norms, rules of procedure, traditions and usages of a traditional community [8]. However, the rural perspective is little known, or understood. What does it mean if a clear majority of the people are aligned with customary law and practice? What is the consequence when less than 10% of the lands surface is urbanized and does not necessarily subscribe to traditional practice? So far, I have not been able to find any writing about what the opportunities and constraints of customary law means for technology in sub-Saharan Africa. Observations from Rural Zambia To talk about rural-Africa is to talk in stories. Storytelling is important [9], although it is not much practised in the discursive scientific world. Today I will

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tell only one story, which is this lecture. For an array of stories from rural Zambia, I refer to my book Placemark, which tells a story on almost every page [10]. Let me give you a list of some of the challenges I have observed: – The overall focus of engineering is mostly on technology and infrastructure, but does necessarily originate from its use, – African realities do not fit into prescriptive Western paradigms, and – of course, Africans have a self-defined reality, but are others able to comprehend its discourse?

2 Reality, from Who’s Perspective? In rural Africa, I quickly noticed that there is hardly any literature written for the direct benefit of local practitioners in the rural African context. Whatever knowledge is available, its reduction to abstractions in mostly English texts seem to have little discernible effect on the rural societies I live in. Doing a review on technology from within, for the benefit of rural Africa, is a formidable challenge. From Trompenaars I deduce that as culture is the context in which things happen; out-of-context, even technology matters lack significance [11]. Unfortunately, the non-discursiveness in academic publishing hampers Third World scholars from producing, and publishing, scholarly publications, or even accessing them [12]. And, when you live in rural Africa, you are just plain fortunate when you find a book, have usable access to the internet, or can access an academic paper without being blocked by a pay wall. Most of the time, people in rural areas, which includes me, have none of these. Literature shows that equal partnerships and inclusiveness in development of local interventions is a key requirement for long-term sustainability [13]. How does one strike such a balance in rural Africa? And, how to incorporate human values and culture [14]? And, how to explore a socio-technical approach to technology [15] [16]? It took me many years of living with people in rural Africa to get a ’handle’ on the ethical, pragmatic, and conceptual issues involved with the introduction of technologies in rural Africa. 2.1 Quantitative Findings Most of the time, Western academics have a disposition to ’let me hear the Socratic science’. Well, I am an engineer, so let me deal with some quantitative findings first. In our rural community, in the co-operative organisation Macha Works, the so-called local-heroes work according to a Macha Works’ intervention model [17], in an inclusive and collaborative manner [18]. This also involves faculty and students of this University of California since 2010. The local heroes endeavor to implement an internet network in rural Macha, and we try not to be in their

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Fig. 2. LinkNet internet network in Macha, Zambia

way, and to support wherever we can. The resulting rural internet network is quite large (Figure 2), and produces much information from which we learn. The network behaves very differently from its urban equivalents. For instance, bandwidth constraints and viruses really cause havoc [19] and Windows outgoing normalized aggregate traffic was three times worse than Linux/Mac during slow satellite connectivity [20]. We collected about 450 GB of network traffic in two months between February and April 2011. Analyses revealed that the local residents generate 90% of the network traffic [21]. 54% of the Facebook instant messages were between local users, and locally produced Facebook images generated three times more interest then those from outside the community [22]. Further, we deduced from a study of 77 out of 200 regular internet users in our rural village that 88% of respondents were able to use computers and the Internet to achieve most of their objectives, 67% of respondents use the Internet more than 3 hours a day. In our rural village, 71% of respondents have used

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the Internet for learning and 91% wished to access the Internet more frequently. Mind you, this is in deep rural Zambia, in a location where the next town is about 70 kilometres away and travel to get to that town would take about two hours at that time. I think we proved that an ICT network can be built and maintained in a rural community. Also, we proved that such a network is being used by local people for their own purposes. These findings led to great ideas and some innovative implementations: for instance there is now an upstream proxy and localization service called VillageShare [23], and all kinds of innovative settings of computer servers, and wireless boxes and technologies are tested, specifically tweaked for the distinct differences of utilization in rural Africa [19]. 2.2 A Quantitative Dilemma: Internet Connectivity Costs How do we put this all into the perspective of costs? There are some very real and hard questions that also involve the assessment of who benefits and who bears the long term consequences [24]. Although there are many and diverse constraints, let me single one out: the thorny issue of the cost of internet bandwidth. In my experience, the prices for internet connectivity for rural Zambia have changed little since I started to study these prices in 2003. On the other hand, the average web page size in 2012 is 68 times larger than the average size in 1995 (14.12kB in 1995 [25] and 968kB in 2012 [26]). Thus, the price in rural Zambia has remained almost equal for at least eight years, while the average website went up tenfold. It appears that website designers do not take satellite communications with low bandwidth and/or long return times into account. The complex mix of Committed Information Rates (CIR), contention rates, burst allowance, data caps, transmission frequencies, fair usage policies, and commercial confidentiality obscure price comparisons. Also, the performance of satellite connectivity changes over contract periods, with satellite providers changing settings or introducing new policies, often without informing the users in rural areas. In 2004, the lowest cost for uncapped 128 kbps committed information rate (CIR) downlink and 64 kbps uplink I found after a one year review was USD ($) 1,400 per month. At that time, most suppliers were asking double that price. This best case equalled $11,200 per Mbps per month, excluding the purchase of equipment, and involved a one year commitment. In 2011, I received an offering for uncapped 8:1 contended bandwidth with 512 kbps downlink and 128 kbps uplink for $1,100 per month. In the worst case, with full utilization of the links by all satellite users, this equals $17,600 per Mbps per month for a one year commitment. So, depending on one’s assumptions, the price in 2011 can be 55% higher than in 2004. Terrestrial connectivity is still rare in rural Zambia, and costs around $3,000 to $4,000 per Mbps/m for symmetric CIR, when you can get it. Minimum contract commitment is for an E1-circuit (2 Mbps). Delivery of the fixed connection

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into Macha took over one year. It involved co-ordination of many suppliers and communication network carriers, and included long periods with efforts to receive equipment from abroad. What are the ethics of introducing internet in rural Africa and seeing thousands of dollars flowing out of a rural community every month, for a bandwidth that the developed world considers peanuts? Or how empowering is it to sit in rural Africa and read academic papers stating ”the average retail price for basic broadband in sub-Saharan Africa is $190 per Mbps/m, compared to between $6 and $40 in India and between $12 and $40 in Europe” ( [27] quoted by [28])? Although not explicitly mentioned, no doubt, such data is derived from information from urban Africa only. As mentioned earlier, Africa is really large, and one cannot put all information in one spreadsheet and average it out. I would expect prices in many of the 15 land locked countries in Africa to be very high. Of course, with these kind of prices, the issue of financial sustainability flies right out of the window. However, these are real issues, as we live in a shrinking world. In our rural community we have got internet, and people know that in Kansas, USA, one can get a 1 Gbps internet connection for $70 per month. What are the ethics of those with the least income paying hundred times more for thousand times less bandwidth? Last year, all ISPs in Zambia were connected with at total bandwidth of about 200 Mbps and even today the whole of Zambia might not receive a total of 1 Gbps into the country. 2.3 The Morals What are the consequences for the divides in the world? It is clear that the disparities of wealth and resources keep increasing (cf. [29]).

Fig. 3. Differences in national income equality around the world as measured by the national Gini coefficient [30].

I take the critical stance that the implementation of technology is crucial to staying connected and is used to amplify the intent of human beings. However, it also keeps the colonial narrative in tact, where the rationality and order flows

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from the center to the periphery and money and raw materials flow from the periphery inward [31]. While living as an engineer in rural Africa, these issues hit home hard, and one’s values, ethics, and state of mind is severely challenged. That is why I became interested in studying the culture and context in earnest, in order to make sense of it all. Even as a technologist, I must struggle with the issues of social innovation, that, – avoid the rhetoric of center and periphery – engage with people on their own terms – recognize the historical and colonial specificities of sites of technology production and use – seek solutions that resolve local details without translating everything into the global – embrace diversity and multiple perspectives [31]. In the quest to find answers to these involved questions, and to direct my drive to see rural Africa connected to the Internet, I needed to understand my rural African environment thoroughly. So, I observed what people actually do as I participated in the environment where I live. Rural Africa constitutes a non-discursive, oral society. Its predominant culture is called Ubuntu, and its economics are something else. Nothing in my education had prepared me for such an environment. To get going, the only ethical approach I could imagine would be to live together, and when invited, to mentor. In an assimilation effort, I tried to ensure that any (inter)action is holistic and transdisciplinary. Between 2000 and 2002 in rural Zimbabwe, and 2003 and 2008 in rural Zambia, I did not publish any observations. I just worked along side local people and tried to figure out their reality and derive at abstract models. Through daily interactions and discussions I started to create community deposits of my observations, and in 2008, after five years in Zambia, I started using the internet for written deposits for the first time. Only later I found out that the banner of ’Critical Ethnography’ covers this approach. It was nice to find, at last, a branch of the scientific tree to sit on.

3 Journey of Ethnographic Discovery So far, I have made the case that although quantitative engineering aspects play a role, a multitude of qualitative issues feature prominently when dealing with engineering in rural Africa. These issues involve environmental, skills, and cultural constraints [32]. However, most ICT research approaches from a quantitative, technological perspective and uses conventional wisdom [33]. Most work lacks long term contextual evidence [34]. Challenges affecting rural areas include shortage of local research participation and the availability of evidence and substantive knowledge. Lack of long term research on the use of ICT in rural areas of

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sub-Saharan Africa in particular, affects the knowledge base. Especially in engineering, projects do seldomly extend over multiple years, or beyond the project implementation phase. Current literature focuses on short-term trends, broad general theory and macro-economic models, while omitting cultural particulars like, for instance, African relationship economics [35], African management [36], or nondiscursive realities [12]. From 12 years full time in rural Africa, there is a long list of interesting findings to report on. However, I want to highlight three major issues that are so much removed from the Santa Barbara environment we are in right now. These are the issues of: 1. Orality 2. Ubuntu 3. Relatio 3.1 Orality As I have mentioned, rural Zambia is a society based on oral discourse. Community members regard verbal interaction as instant. Among others, orality offers the unique ability to assess comprehension and effect instantly. Orality ensures the social cohesion of the African civilization [28]. Orality influences everything, and I have noticed the community only regards issues as substantial when they have been discussed in person. The vernacular language, as part of the Bantu group of languages, transmits information on interactions, not items. It deals with the World of Humans instead of the World of Things. Through verbalization, the community describes the (degree of) interaction with items and developments. This in itself constitutes a means of identification with the development. For observers from other cultures inherent to language and cultural barriers, this difference in nature and subject of communications is not directly obvious [37]. The preference for orality has many consequences. For instance, written DoIt-Yourself manuals do not work. Only on a few occasions has someone offered me a written document in response to an information request. Fewer still were occasions of documentation being used to search for, or reference, information, whether or not documents were available in the vicinity. Studies at Macha benefited from interactions that are aligned within oralculture formats. The discursive expressions of scientific knowledge, reduced to abstractions in English texts, seem to have little discernible effect on, even prohibiting the inclusion of the oral societies. Actually, when not properly and continuously explained, the foreign academic appropriation of local information for private or foreign profit, lingers in the local community as being approached as objects only, and possibly being exploited [37]. There appears little research into the possible benefits of using oral characteristics in engineering and research. Findings in primary oral cultures could be relevant to the second orality now gripping the youth in the West. This second

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orality is fuelled by pervasive computing, omnipresent telephones and emerging video cultures. Of course, there are real advantages and disadvantages of orality. For instance, there is real complexity of processes. However, my experience is that applicability of results and ethical alignment are considerably enhanced by appropriate use of orality in rural Africa. 3.2 Ubuntu Culture In line with Hall’s classification, the so-called Ubuntu culture in rural communities in Zambia is high-context [38]. The culture is relational, collectivist, intuitive, and contemplative. This means that people emphasize interpersonal relationships, group harmony and consensus over individual achievement. The emphasis of conversation is on the past and present and not so much the future. Like orality, words are not as important as context, which might include the speakers tone of voice, facial expression, gestures, posture and even the person’s family history and status. Sub-Saharan African culture is based on Ubuntu. The South African scholar Khoza explains Ubuntu as an epistemology and humanistic philosophy, a metaphor embodying the significance of group solidarity [36]. The Ubuntu culture is key to all African values, involving collective person-hood and collective morality. Tutu writes ”[Ubuntu] also means my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in theirs. We belong in a bundle of life” [39]. He contrasts western philosophy and Ubuntu through: it is not I think therefore I am. It says rather: I am human because I belong. There are other definitions; for instance from radical humanism paradigms. The American anthropologist, Colson, spent many years studying the Tonga people amongst which I live. She notes that the role of beliefs is especially strong in rural African culture, and in her work she gives much insight into the sheer complexity of the arena of religiosity. Despite it being the cultural expression of hundreds of millions of people, literature on Ubuntu is often regarded as idiosyncratic. Practical implications for organizations, including change theories, have been explored in literature, albeit sparsely. With only a few bookshops in mainstream Africa, books are difficult to access anyway. The study of Ubuntu and engineering appears also to be a virgin area. From my rural African desk I only could only find epistles of Van Binsbergens titled ”Can ICT belong in Africa, or is ICT owned by North Atlantic region?” [40], or Zakours ”Cultural Differences and Information Technology Acceptance” [41]. 3.3 Relatio Economics and Oral Budgeting In Macha we found and published findings that two parallel systems exist, each addressing the basic questions of choice and resource management. One is a traditional rational Western system, the other a relational African system. We came up with a system description which we dubbed Relatio [35].

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We deduced that the rural community allocates resource in macro-economic terms, by satisfying relationship equivalents of banking, markets, and regulation. The majority of micro-economic actions undertaken by the actor of the Relatio mindset are working towards long-run stability. The African experience - through the instability of environmental, political, medical, and other factors - has demonstrated the utter unpredictability of the short-run, while security in the long-run is limited only by the aggregate life-span of every member of the community to whom the individual is connected. In practice, the contrasting paradigms result encouragement of competition in one system, and discouragement of individualism in the other. Of course, the Western economic conventions and Relatio-based economics are not mutually exclusive; both dimensions of behavior are undeniably present in all human activity worldwide. However, the dominance of one over the other, and the awareness of the intricacies of each system vary widely cross-culturally. The primary mode or dimension of resource allocation in the local context must be fully understood. Without that understanding, development managed exclusively through a Western understanding of economic rationality will make only limited progress. It took me many years to start understanding this, and it was only recently that I started to understand that the preferred and normal budgeting practice in rural areas is one of ’oral budgeting’. An oral budget contains a lump sum monetary amount or an amount of produce, emerging from experience only. It include the history, whether individual or communal, and information from memory, not taking into account constructs like interest or inflation [42]. Without an active membership in the the Relatio economic model, that is to say, the community at large, the effectiveness of even financially sound projects will be severely limited. We found that without making efforts to display character and actively invest in the social market, the take-up rates and acceptability of the best researched projects was cut short; without the submission to and respect for social hierarchy the most promising developments will be restrained. 3.4 To be Documented There is still a lot to report on, and much of it is counter-intuitive for a Westerntrained mind. For instance, the term ’legal entity’ means little in rural areas where there was no industrial revolution needing scale and thus the emergence of legal entities. Then there is the whole issue of resource redistribution when the person recognized as carrying the vision dies, severely affecting long term stability of activities. Or the significant challenges that surface when technology (is perceived to result) in an accumulation of surplus which could be used for personal gain, which can be detrimental to ones relational success.

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4 The Heap of Theories Now after the journey into some aspects of rural African society, let’s contrast these with a Western-centric approach. With that approach one dissects, quantifies, analyzes by reduction, and so on. It is clear that living in rural Africa results in significant conflicts with the Western-centric doctrines trained through engineering education. My formative years consisted of a singular technical, science based, engineering-oriented curriculum. But this training proved completely inadequate to deal with observations in the real world of rural Africa. It was enlightening to learn of theories in social science, and feministic theories, theories in anthropology, political science, media studies, as so on. Thinkers such as Freire, Fannon and Polanyi helped me to connect some of the dots, however, many I had to connect by just living the life. Whatever the theory, in rural Africa I found them wanting. The processes of reduction, quantification, and determinism just seem not to cut-it in rural Africa. They do limit the view of reality, and basically frames all experience into a mold of uniformity, very much unaligned with, or even displacing, local convention. When moulding according to reductive representation, it felt like I was dissecting the community and serving it for filleting by the economic powerful in the global economy. Again, paying thousands of dollars a month for an internet connection, preparing and presenting research with little chance of remuneration, and many other such issues just feel unjust. There is much more needed, such as a way to assure leadership capability and bolster resilience to assure preservation and fruitful derivatives of indigenous heritage. 4.1 Amplifying Cultural Diversity Actually, from a low contextual vantage point, it can look easy. It is just a world full of antonyms. The ones I note between a Western culture and Ubuntu based culture are contained in Table 1. Also a list of antonyms can be made for the academic realm. The ones I witness between African and Western academics are in Table 2. Although these tables inform nicely, when presenting these findings to a western audience, one can meet incredulity, and often alienation and separation. I suspect this is due to a history of intellectual tradition and global relationships that are Western-centric. The particular dynamics of historical and geographical specifics and the current particular configuration of power, technology and representation, draw from a long western-centric legacy. This legacy goes deep, and is sometimes even mythical. Inherited from the colonial ethnology and maintained by ignorance and lack of interest, the prejudices about Africa run rampant ( [43] cited in [28]). There remain real questions as to one’s value system and attitudes when one constitutes relationships outside one’s own culture. And with the hegemony of the West, who is there to put such intrusive questions to the conquerors [44] [45]?

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Van Stam Ubuntu Culture Relatio Who Community Responsibilities Relationships Character Member History Long Term Scarcity Orality Authority Proven Elaborate Reactive Paradox Existence

Western Culture Ratio What Individual Rights Goods Credentials Actor Future Short Term Abundance Literacy Power Emerging Concise Proactive Consistency Essential

Table 1. Cultural Antonyms, as witnessed in practice African Science Limited Data Discursive Communities People Focus Stigmatised Foreign language Deprived Foreign to Greek thinking Seeking mediation/unity Big Picture Unnoticed Non-authoritative Aims at relationship Respects boundaries Respects teachers low quality 1st, 2nd education

Western Science Abundant Data Non-discursive Institutions Text Focus Proud Own language Funded Assimilated Greek thinking Seeking criticism Specialisation Respected Authoritive Aims at growth No boundaries Respects scientists high quality 1st, 2nd education

Table 2. Science Antonyms, as witnessed in practice

4.2 Dilemma’s Recently, during a conference in this country, a researcher presented a paper on how people collected water in a township in Africa, showing the validity of a new technology. The researcher was on home turf, while in his audience there were some people from the country under review. One of the findings was that people

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sourced water from a polluted source, although safe alternatives were available. The questions from academics were revealing. The westerners asked questions about the methodology and the validity of the data while the academics from the country in which the study took place asked the researcher what he did about the people that went to the polluted source. The academic was comfortable with the first ones, but visibly shaking and at a loss with the second category. A rift occurred, with the African researchers visibly upset that the researcher had found a disturbing fact, but did not act. They concluded that the mind and heart connection had been missing, and thus considered the work flawed. Notwithstanding the validity of what has been mentioned up to now, I propose there is a way through: a way that allows us to face these issues as dilemmas, or paradoxes if you like. Dilemmas are real, they depict a double proposition. A situation offering two possibilities, which are mutually exclusive or neither of which might be practically acceptable. In my view, balancing dilemmas is a crucial exercise in rural Africa. It necessitates an inclusive and transdisciplinary approach. Within the Macha Works organisation we created a strategy map (Figure 4). Although it proved worthwhile as a visionary benchmark, in daily practice, however, we found it of limited use. We learned that strategies encounter dilemmas that are mostly unknown in a multi-cultural environment. Propositions are substantial different when viewed from alternative cultural perspectives. Since the local envirionment is ’where the action is’, when local propositions are not fully understood or omitted, strategies are set up to fail.

Fig. 4. Macha Works Strategy Map

We discerned dilemma’s in the pentagon of five stakeholders: the local community, the government, the local talent, the resource providers, and the catalyst.

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The ten golden dilemmas that we noted from an interventionistic/catalyst point of view are noted in Table 3. Who versus Who Community vs Local Hero Community vs Government Community vs Donor Community vs Catalyst Government vs Local Hero Government vs Resource Provider Government vs Catalyst Local Hero vs Resource Provider Local Hero vs Catalyst Resource Provider vs Catalyst

Dilemma Collective or Individual Depth or Width Sharing or Entitling Retaining or Changing Credibility or Capacity Long Term or Short Term Consistency or Focus Learning or Controlling Customized or Standard Driving or Adapting

Table 3. 10 Golden Dilemmas from rural Zambia

To assure an executable vision one must incorporate cultural input from the start. Such input addresses the dilemmas that involve values and competenties, and necessitate transcultural competence. A deliberate effort of dilemma reconciliation strengthens the vision and inform strategies that address real issues, a view that is not supported by current single-culture stakeholder theories [46]. Result is sustainable progress [47]. Identifying the dilemmas and guiding its reconciliation is ongoing ethnographic work. We have got a Macha Works approach [17] and various other papers published and many others in the pipeline, for instance an integral development model that calls for that the sequence of thinking and living the life through collaborative practice resulting in progress as defined in the local value system [48]. All these papers highlight a holistic approach and call for level playing fields with explicit emancipation of ’the other’.

5 So, what is the benefit of all this? Why would we go through all this trouble? Why not all stay in our own environment, and work the way we have been working for ages? Actually, I have heard a lot of that kind of advice out there. In my view, there are important aspects missing in engineering that hamper the ability of the West and rural Africa to work together smoothly. Of course, the obvious conclusion is that we need more education. But that conclusion is valid for both sides of the cultural divide. The West seems to be at ease and able to tell what ’those in Africa’ must all learn. But in the West, there is also much to learn from colleagues in Africa. As an engineer I have been going through a steep learning curve, now 12 years full time, and I am learning more every day. I had to learn how to focus on stories, tensions, symbols, traditional systems, and other performances and how

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they produce the existing structures, patterns and technologies. It is the same for both sides of our divided world. I did learn that we miss culturally appropriate technology. For example, we should learn how technology can support and be part of our reportoire of life; How it can support the community cohesion, like Community Radio does in our rural community [28] [49]. We need an integral development process that stages learning, practice and progress [48]. We have to understand how technology satisfies relationships, how to deal with contrasts of priorities between rationality and relationality. Kenneth Kaunda, the first President of Zambia, once said: ”Westerners have aggressive problem-solving minds; Africans experience people”. His wise observation reveals two complementary priority structures. In the past, emphasis has been placed solely on the development of Africa on Western terms. However, we must begin to experience people. The process to achieve sustainable progress is an exchange not only of physical capital and currency, but also of values and culture. Development must be conducted in terms of those being developed. This process requires a shift of priority from front-loaded, formula-obsessed, pre-packaged development tactics toward more creative, long-term, flexible programs that invest genuinely, not merely on a financial level, but on a relationship level as well. By integrating knowledge of the context and culture, my experience is that the vibrant complexity of human behaviour can be released from the shackles of traditional rationality, and appreciated as an unrestrained force of culture, development, and true sustainability.

6 About the Presenter Gertjan van Stam (Rotterdam, 1965) studied wireless technologies at Hogeschool Utrecht, Netherlands, and worked in Swaziland in 1987. After achieving his degree in telecommunications he took on tasks in various capacities at the incumbent telecommunications operator of the Netherlands. There he participated in practice and strategies for broadcast technologies, standardization platforms, telecommunications network and service operations including mobile networks (paging and GSM), and international business development. Since 2000 Gertjan and his family have lived in rural Africa, first in Zimbabwe and, from 2003, in Zambia. He works with local talent to engender transdisciplinary practices and holistic theory building. The goal is to identify and inspire local talent and introduce appropriate technologies in order to build the necessary capacity for community-led activities to yield sustainable human development outcomes. His quest is for a logical framework for understanding dynamics of change in rural African communities and engendering leadership capable of inspiring, initiating, implementing, operating, and scaling up of sustainable progress and the use of technology in the local community. Gertjans activities in Zambia were featured in IEEE The Institute [2], and his career was documented in an award winning IEEE video at tryEngineering’ [1]. The activities in Zambia were featured worldwide though BBC Clicks [5]. He

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is part of IEEEs Ad Hoc Committee for Humanitarian Activities working on Social Innovation, involved with the University of Zambia (Lusaka, Zambia) and SIRDC (Harare, Zimbabwe) and studies at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (Port Elizabeth, South Africa). He authored the book Placemark [10], and publishes articles.

References 1. IEEE TV. Tryengineering ”Careers with Impact”: van Stam, 2010. 2. Susan Karlin. Gertjan van Stam: Macha’s Link to the World. IEEE The Institute, 2009. 3. Janneke H van Dijk, William J Moss, and Catherine G Sutcliffe. Feasibility and Challenges in Providing Antiretroviral Treatment to Children in Sub-Saharan Africa. Current Pediatric Reviews, pages 154–165, 2011. 4. Janneke H van Dijk, Catherine G Sutcliffe, Bornface Munsanje, Francis Hamangaba, Philip E Thuma, and William J Moss. Barriers to the care of HIVinfected children in rural Zambia: a cross-sectional analysis. BMC infectious diseases, 9:169, January 2009. 5. BBC Clicks. BBC Clicks - Macha Works, 2011. 6. Martin Adams. Land tenure policy and practice in Zambia: issues relating to the development of the agricultural sector. Mokoro Ltd, Oxford, 2003. 7. Central Statistics Office Zambia. 2010 Census of Population and Housing Preliminary Report, 2011. 8. Government Gazette of the Republic of Namibia. Promulgation of Council of Traditional Leaders Act. 1997. 9. Paula van Hoorik and Fred Mweetwa. Use of internet in rural areas of Zambia. In ST-Africa 2008, Windhoek, Namibia, 2008. 10. Gertjan van Stam. Placemark. Gertjan van Stam, Macha, 2011. 11. Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner. Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business. Nicholas Brealey Publishing; 2nd edition, 2011. 12. A. Suresh Canagarajah. Material Resources of Periphery Scholars, and the Politics of Knowledge Production. Written Communication, 1996. 13. InfoDev. Enhancing the Livelihood of the Rural Poor Through ICT: Tanzania Country Study. 2008. 14. Keith W. Miller and David K Larson. Agile Software Development: Human Values and Culture. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2005. 15. Bernard Amadei and William A Wallace. Engineering for Humanitarian Development. A Socio-Technical Approach. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2009. 16. Moshe Kam. Engineering as Liberal Art. In Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh, 14 Aug 2012, Edinburgh, 2012. 17. Gertjan van Stam and Gerard van Oortmerssen. Macha Works! In Frontiers of Society On-Line, Raleigh, 2010. 18. Karel Matthee, Gregory Mweemba, Adrian Pais, Gertjan van Stam, and Marijn Rijken. Bringing Internet connectivity to rural Zambia using a collaborative approach. In ICTD 2007. Ieee, 2007.

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19. David L Johnson, Elizabeth M Belding, Kevin Almeroth, and Gertjan van Stam. Internet Usage and Performance Analysis of a Rural Wireless Network in Macha, Zambia. In ACM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions, 2010. 20. Gertjan van Stam, David L Johnson, Veljko Pejovic, Consider Mudenda, Austin Sinzala, and Darelle van Greunen. Constraints for Information and Communications Technologies implementation in rural Zambia (manuscript submitted). 21. David L Johnson, Veljko Pejovic, Elizabeth M Belding, and Gertjan van Stam. Traffic Characterization and Internet Usage in Rural Africa. In Proceedings of WWW, Hyderabad, India, 2011. 22. David L Johnson, Elizabeth M Belding, and Gertjan van Stam. Network traffic locality in a rural African village. In ICTD 2012, 2012. 23. David L Johnson, Veljko Pejovic, Elizabeth M Belding, and Gertjan van Stam. VillageShare: Facilitating content generation and sharing in rural networks. In ACM DEV 2012, 2012. 24. J D J Vandersteen, C A Baillie, and K R Hall. International Humanitarian Engineering; Who Benefits and Who Pays? IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2009. 25. J Domenech, A Pont, J Sahuquillo, and J Gil. A user-focused evaluation of web prefetching algorithms. Computer Communications, 30(10):2213–2224, 2007. 26. Steve Souders. HTTP Archive, 2012. 27. Alwyn J. Hoffman and David P. de Wet. Broadband Internet Access for Rural Africa: Finding a Viable Model. In 2nd International Conference on Applied Informatics and Computing Theory (AICT’11), pages 178–185, 2011. 28. Alexandra Dobra. The Democratic Impact of ICT in Africa. Africa Spectrum, (1):73–88, 2012. 29. Michael Woolcock. Global Poverty and Inequality: A Brief Retrospective and Prospective Analysis. Political Quarterly, 79(1):183–196, 2008. 30. CIA. The World Factbook, 2012. 31. Paul Dourish and Scott D Mainwaring. Ubicomps Colonial Impulse. In UbiComp’ 12, Pittsburg, USA, 2012. 32. Gertjan van Stam, David L Johnson, Veljko Pejovic, Consider Mudenda, Austin Sinzala, and Darelle van Greunen. Constraints for Information and Communications Technologies implementation in rural Zambia (Manuscript Submitted). 33. Ricardo Gomez and Shaun Pather. ICT Evaluation: Are We Asking The Right Questions? EJISDC, 50(5):1–14, 2012. 34. Panthea Lee. Putting Problems Before Solutions in Development, 2011. 35. Kevin Sheneberger and Gertjan van Stam. Relatio: An Examination of the Relational Dimension of Resource Allocation. Economics and Finance Review, 1(4):26 – 33, 2011. 36. Reuel Khoza. Let Africa Lead: African Transformational Leadership for 21st century Business. VezuBuntu, South Africa, 2005. 37. Gertjan van Stam. Information and Knowledge Transfer in the rural community of Macha, Zambia (in press). The Journal of Community Informatics. 38. Edward T. Hall. Beyond Culture. Anchor Books, 1976. 39. Desmond Tutu. No Future Without Forgiveness. Doubleday, New York, 1999. 40. Wim van Binsbergen and Rijk van Dijk. Situating globality: African agency in the appropriation of global culture. 2004. 41. Amel Ben Zakour. Cultural Differences and Information Technology Acceptance. Information Systems, pages 156–161, 2004. 42. Gertjan van Stam. Oral Budgeting in rural Macha, Southern Province, Zambia (manuscript submitted).

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43. Helene DAlmeida-Topor. L’Afrique. Le Cavalier Bleu, Paris, 2006. 44. Ian Morris. Why The West Rules, For Now. Profile Books, 2010. 45. Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W. W. Norton & Company, 2005. 46. Astrid Kroczek, Gertjan van Stam, and Fred Mweetwa. Stakeholder Theory and ICT in rural Macha, Zambia (Manuscript Submitted). 2012. 47. Gerard van Oortmerssen. Sustainable Progress. In CAETS, 2007. 48. Jasper Bets, Gertjan van Stam, and Anne-marie Voorhoeve. Modelling and Practice of Integral Development, Case Macha (Manuscript Submitted). 49. Gertjan van Stam and Fred Mweetwa. Community Radio Provides Elderly a Platform to Have Their Voices Heard in rural Macha, Zambia. The Journal of Community Informatics, 8(1), 2012.