Partnerships for Technology Access in Botswana: Martial Nogbou
It’s been great to be here in Burkina Faso for the ICT Best Practices Forum for West and Central Africa. I’ve been working in Africa and IT for over ten years now, and as a native of Ivory Coast it’s energizing and exciting to see the changes that have been taking place recently. From Nigeria to Senegal to Botswana to Tunisia and Egypt, you can now see countless examples of innovative applications of ICT for both broad economic development and individual empowerment. Governments, private companies and everyday citizens are beginning to reap the benefits that have long been the province of the developed world. Recently, I’ve been a member of Microsoft’s Partnership for Technology Access, a program dedicated to help bring the benefits of ICT to traditionally underserved populations – personally focusing on work in Africa. Every day, I am building consortiums with governments, private companies and other key third parties (such as NGOs) to create an affordable PC-based solution for key segments of a country’s population. This “front row” seat has helped me see what it takes to succeed in Africa with these types of projects – which I’m going to try and share here.
First, one must begin with a targeted or segmented approach. Long gone are the days (if they ever even existed) of a government supplying technology to anyone who met a minimum qualification – essentially delivering technology for technology’s sake. The key to avoiding this mistake is to really do the hard work and create a truly valuable offering for the end user. For example, don’t just give the agricultural worker a PC. Create a network of information (market prices, seed data, fertilizer schedules, weather forecasts, etc.) that they can access with the PC, using this information to create plans and actions. Once the technology becomes instrumental in their core activities, they will use and benefit from the technology – not just look at it in wonder. While this seems obvious, it’s the difficulty in executing this that creates challenges. It’s quite hard to get the ancillary investments made to create the solutions that make the technology valuable, to rally the training, and to create the sustainable elements that make the solution successful for years—not just weeks.
The second element I see as critical is access. And, I like to define access broadly- for me, access includes not only the obvious connectivity, but also the access to training, support, and fulfillment that make a program successful. It’s very important to create or leverage local partners in the countries we work in. They know the supply chains, the lead times, the needs of the people. And bringing them in creates the synergies these programs need.
Finally, the solutions must be affordable. By this, I mean not just the “low cost” that most people think when they hear affordable, but also the other elements that make something affordable – credit, ease of use, connected to other key expenditures or investments. In all of our work with PTA, we always bring in some elements to make the purchase of a PC more affordable. This could be through a retail partner, or even the bank. Sometimes we can get really creative here—such as the work we do with communities of overseas workers and their remittance payments.
Recently, I’ve been working with the government of Botswana on a PTA deal for civil servants and unemployed IT graduates – a solution that puts the purchase of a PC within reach of those two populations. We brought in several private companies, the Ministries of IT, Youth and Finance and Microsoft to create the solution and help the government fulfill its objectives of making the right investments for the future of the country. To learn more about the work we’ve been doing with the Botswana program, you can watch a video here, or just contact me directly at mnogbou@microsoft.com. And for more information about PTA solutions and Microsoft, just visit www.microsoft.com/PTA.
Cheers –
Martial
