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Dear friends,

Please note the following announcement – the next TAD Consortium meeting has

been moved to the 28th April, 1999, and will take place between 09.00 and

13.00 at the CSIR Conference Centre in Pretoria. A full agenda and

directions will follow closer to the time. Please enter the date in your

diaries now!!

Attached please find the latest collection of resources for your perusal.

Regards,

Neil Butcher

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NEWS

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Report on Selected Technologies

by Paul West

EDUCATION

One often hears about the ever-increasing gap between the "haves" and

"have-nots". In a developed country such as the USA, schools are able to get

discounts rates to access the Internet at http://eratehotline.org while in

developing countries, people must frequently pay exorbitant rates for

telephone calls and Internet access. Politicians in developing countries

need to focus their minds on the problems of cost and availability of access

to telecommunications and cut back on predatory pricing that inhibits their

development.

One possible solution for educational institutions is to set-up their own

satellite access to an Internet service provider. Many countries still have

archaic bans on linking to satellites - this too needs quick action on the

part of policy-makers to enable their countries to have a better chance at

international competitiveness. JDL Technologies http://www.k-12world.com/

has negotiated discount rates for schools in North America, which can help

significantly to gain high-speed Internet access. JTL provides a range of

links to resources to help educators find what they are looking for.

Applying for entrance to colleges may become easier with the trend in many

countries of having central registration offices. One such example now in

operation is CollegeEdge, which has links to 6 000 schools, including

information on financial aid and other requirements

Resources are something academics never seem to have enough of. Another

collection of annotated links to resources on higher education may be found

at http://www.collegis.org/crilinks1.nsf by the Collegis Research

Institute. It is aimed at serving the needs of university staff.

The project titled: Information for Development in the 21st Century features

a collection of digests on some of the latest social and economic research

studies at http://www.id21.org/. The database provides access to short

digests that are topic searchable on development research. The problem of

plagiarism is said to have increased with the widening use of the Internet.

A service called IntegriGuard is being developed that will allow lecturers

to have papers scanned for possible misuse of others' writings. The idea is

that lecturers will submit student's papers electronically for checking

against a database. These then receive a pass or fail grade based on

comparisons with other papers in the database. The database will grow from

all papers submitted. The developers hope that the deterrent factor will

encourage students not to copy other peoples' work.

The well known AT&T telecommunications company has started its own virtual

university called the AT&T Learning Network

centralised resource of online courses is designed to "help educators

effectively integrate technology into their curriculum, while updating their

professional credentials in their terms, "anytime, anywhere". Courses are

offered in collaboration with partners of the Western Governors University

Network in the USA.

The term "distance education" is being used more and more frequently to

describe a wide range of flexible learning options open to lifelong

learners. One wonders how often senior executives who recommend distance

education as a means to upgrade their staffs' skills really understand the

meaning of the term. Charles Johnson of the Utah State Board of Regents is

said to have registered for a course titled "Comparative World

Civilisations" offered by a university more than 100 km from his home. The

course, offered entirely via the Internet will give him a real-life

introduction to the technology he has been told will help bring further

education to thousands of people. It will also give him a first hand

impressions of what it is like to be a distant education student!

Once more senior and top executives get out of the habit of asking

supporting staff to read (and print!) their e-mails for them and get on with

running their offices more efficiently, the more likely will be able to

operate efficiently and accomplish more. Direct access by staff becomes

simplified because there are fewer gatekeepers in the bureaucracy!

Possibly those wanting to return to their studies after many years would

want to look at the available resources on the Internet to prepare for their

re-entry. Oklahoma State University has developed a university preparatory

site for new and returning students at http://collegeprep.okstate.edu/.

The race is on for the biggest and best digital libraries in the world. A

recent contender is the California State Digital Library. The library is

said to be the home of thousands of digital records, databases, documents

and photographs. The head of the library is confident that they are building

one of the best research libraries in the world. Relating this back to the

ongoing plight of developing countries, if libraries of this size open their

virtual doors to those in poorer countries at reasonable rates, they could

help reduce the widening gap between the information rich and information

poor societies.

VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES

Walt Disney and Infoseek Corp. have launched a new virtual community's

portal Internet site http://www.go.com/. This is set to become a major

draw card for frequent visitors who are looking for news, e-mail, community

groups, shopping and search facilities. If you do not have your own personal

webpage on the Internet, you can develop one there - free!

Virtual communities are becoming the Internet's answer to people who like to

share common interests with other people. You may be interested in a

relatively unknown topic but be able to find hundreds of people throughout

the world who share your hobby. There is a growing number of these sites and

you may want to look around if you find that the first one does not offer

you the interaction you are looking for.

Watch this space for emerging forms of education too. Disney has already

begun to move into the education arena and by combining its virtual

communities and skills in entertaining people, they could have quite a

winning formula for traditional tertiary education!

Virtual communities in developed countries such as the United States are

likely to receive a particular boost through the introduction of high speed

Internet access at home. One forecast estimates that 95% of the US

population will have access to the Internet by 2004 and that 25% of these

will be high-speed connections.

Developments such as those outlined above mean that companies trading

services and goods need to find new ways of moving their sales to the

Internet. Punitive government taxes Internet sales in any country are likely

to impact negatively on Internet commerce but most developed countries seem

to be moving away from the idea of taxing the online sales of goods.

THE WORK ENVIRONMENT

Work stress and burnout are among the greatest causes of low productivity

and illness according to a study conducted in 14 countries by the Cranfield

School of Management. Burned-out executives feel helpless to tackle problems

and can no longer confront their predicament. Employers need to watch for

these symptoms especially now with the change from the industrial age to the

information age taking a firm hold. Additional training, time off and added

support may be what the doctor ordered in this case.

The estimated number of regular Internet users now is 115 million. The

increasing number of households gaining Internet access compares to the

spread of the telephone from being just a tool of commerce to an every-day

utility. The individual has greater power than ever before, this being very

evident with online banking, shopping and communication access that bypasses

Businesses that are likely to transform the most, over the next 10 years

will be education, consulting, real-estate and publishing. Anyone linked to

these or allied sectors need to assess their computer and Internet literacy

and ensure they are very well trained to help stave off forced early

retirements. Businesses that let e-mails from customers lie unanswered for

days are likely to be among the hardest hit by the new breed of customer

that is no longer prepared to wait. Be warned - Fortune Magazine recently

Business continues to outstrip the university sector with IBM leading the

way with its 2 682 patent registrations in the USA. This is an increase of

40% over its 1997 figures. Second was Cannon Inc of Japan.

One way of keeping organised is to have multiple e-mail addresses and use

them for different purposes. That way you can have high priority mail

arriving at one while general news and discussions are sent to another for

later reading (on your notebook PC in bed?). That way you can keep personal

mail away from your work address too.

Computer components are set to become regular body implants to help

dysfunctional parts of the body in future. This may be particularly useful

in the satellite tracking of people with memory disorders. The long awaited

low earth orbiting satellite systems of Iridium http://www.iridium.com/

and Global Star http://www.globalstar.com/ have begun to make a difference

to telecommunications. The call rates at first may look scary but when

compared to international call rates charged by hotels in developing

countries, there relatively cheap. This will go a long way to enabling

communication for education and business in rural and under-serviced areas

of the world.

FEEDBACK

If you have a comment, request or suggestion on this report, please e-mail

it to Paul West at pgwest@pgw.org. These reports are available on the

Internet at: http://pgw.org/str

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Spain Sees Net as Universal Right

March 1, 1999

By Brett Allan King

Spain Correspondent International News Archives

http://www.internetnews.com/intl-news/article/0,1087,6_74461,00.html

[Madrid, SPAIN] Spain will join France in asking the European Union to

consider Internet access a "universal right"--like education and

healthcare--thus allowing financed access at an "accessible price."

"Spain and France--once the EU telecommunications regulatory directives are

up for revision--will present a joint proposal to introduce what we could

sum up as 'Internet as universal utility,'" said Rafael Arias Salgado,

Spain's minister of Public Works and the Economy.

A similar status is already applied to phone access.

"We think that the time has arrived, in the realm of community legislation,

that Internet access as an absolutely decisive instrument-- particularly in

sectors like education and health—must form part of what we consider

universal services," he said.

If approved, the proposal would allow Spain to finance Net access with funds

earmarked by Spain's General Telecommunications Law. This money, while "not

a subsidy," would partially finance those companies (chosen through a public

bid), "willing to extend networks to every corner of Spain."

The EU opened the telecommunications market--with its 380 million

consumers--to competition on Jan. 1, 1998. Free trade provisions of both EU

legislation and the General Telecommunications Law currently impede any type

of aid or subsidy--except for so-called "universal services."

"Defining the scope of the universal service obligation represents a

delicate balance," stated a European Commission report on

telecommunications. "Too narrow a vision of universal service and citizens

may be kept out. . .too broad a vision and the competitive forces which are

the principal driver of better services, lower prices and greater innovation

Out of a population of nearly 40 million, 2.5 million Spaniards have access

to the Internet. Of those, 1.8 million are considered habitual users. In

addition to the cost of an ISP contract, they must pay the cost of a local

phone call. Last week, the Spanish government approved a flat rate fee of

5,000 pesetas ($33) per month, to take effect at the end of March.

Link:

http://www.ispo.cec.be/infosoc/legreg/9673.html

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ONLINE RESOURCES

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Taken from the Drum Beat no. 13 (compiled by Warren Feek)

"What is Community Radio? - a resource guide" by AMARC Africa and The Panos

Institute Southern Africa. Contents include: a historical perspective on

community radio; forms of community participatory radio; organisational

structures; programming and producing; financial sustainability; and

responses to common problems. Contact Sophie Ly at AMARC secgen@amarc.org or

Heather Budge-Reid at Panos heatherb@panoslondon.org.uk

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Collation of training statistics from around the world

Don Clark's amazing round up of statistics and facts about training and

development from almost a dozen countries including data on numbers,

expenditure, trends and much more. Includes hyperlinks to all the varied

sources.

http://www.trainingzone.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=3000&d=1

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Africa's backyard farms boost food security

contributor(s): T.A.S Bowyer-Bower, David Smith - Department of Geography

University of Liverpool

Urban agriculture has grown rapidly in most African cities over the past ten

years. It has increased in the wake of economic reforms for it helps the

poorest citizens supplement inadequate food supplies. Government authorities

have generally responded negatively in the belief that urban agriculture

damages the environment. Yet little is known of its extent and

characteristics. In a collaborative study, researchers from the Universities

of Zimbabwe, London and Liverpool probed social, economic and environmental

impacts of illegal urban agriculture in Harare, Zimbabwe. Their report

suggests policy measures to help resolve conflicting interests.

http://www.id21.org/static/2ags1.htm

Further information:

David Smith
Department of Geography
University of Liverpool
Roxby Building
Liverpool
L69 3BX
UK
Tel: +44 (0) 151 794 2851
Fax: +44 (0) 151 794 2748
Email: mailto:dsdsds@liv.ac.uk

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The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) will be publishing its

updated policy on Gender Equality on March 8, 1999, International Women's

Day. The document will be available on CIDA's Internet site after the launch

at  http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca. To browse the comments received during

the online consultation process, you may wish to visit http://www.bellanet.org/partners/equal-egale .

For more information, please visit the two websites or contact

EQUAL_EGALE@ACDI-CIDA.GC.CA

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

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Taken from the Drum Beat no. 13 (compiled by Warren Feek)

Community Media Development Organisation (COMEdo) - Zambia - is carrying out

a survey on the state of community media in Zambia. The survey seeks to

examine and assess the political environment in relation to the development

of community media, and to review and assess the potential of local

structures to promote and support community media. Final report will be

published. Contact Elias Chitenje nmirror@zamnet.zm

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ARTICLES

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This submission addresses the basis of technology forecasting in rural

sub-Saharan Africa, and surmises that the core in that process would be the

regions' own indigenous knowledge base and its judicious blending with

knowledge from the external realm. That is, the key to a successful

technology policy in sub-Saharan Africa is knowledge. Using the indigenous

knowledge system as basis, this brief provides examples of the types of

technologies which may be critical to the region, and opines that the

cheapest means for the region to improve its technological status would be

by synthesizing its own, in collaboration with other knowledge systems, and

finding a channel to interactively diffuse the blended knowledge.

Acquisition and / or development of technology would, ideally, be based on a

nation's human resource capacity and cultural relevance of the technology in

question. It is obvious that the nature and types of technologies deployed

in sub-Saharan Africa have been impotent. It is not necessary to repaint the

image of that region and its peoples here. Technology deployment in

sub-Saharan Africa have largely been "imported" and targeted to serve 20% of

the populations, the urban middle class and higher, leaving some 70 - 80% at

a technological state which is closer to the Stone Age.

The basis of technological advances in sub-Saharan Africa should have been

its indigenous knowledge base. I take this opportunity to restate some of

the features of that knowledge system. The indigenous African Knowledge

system was conversant of agriculture's place in the progress of human

civilization, and the main activities of rural peoples in the region revolve

around the land and its ability to feed its people. For this, indigenous

African Knowledge and Ideas ensured access to land through its belief that

land was for the ancestors, the living and the future. Social support

systems, for example susu and fidodo, forms of social capital, were designed

to guarantee optimum production levels for the individual household, relying

on group strength. The mechanical and philosophical tools which were

designed for such production systems however have not responded to meet

present challenges such as rapid population growth, let alone external

factors of globalization and world trade imbalances, and erratic climatic

patterns.

The educated in Africa (policy makers) understand very little of the reality

in rural Africa. More than 80% of rural dwellers engage in agriculture and

other occupations with primitive tools, such as the hoe and the machete,

tools which were beqeathed unto them from their forebears and which have not

undergone improvement and innovation for 400 years. Rural African still mill

their grain on rocks, sharpen agricultural tools on rocks, and hunt for

mushrooms from the wild. That region is now said to be at the dawn of a New

African Renaissance?

The initial contact of a sick rural African with a doctor is often a

visitation to an indigenous healer, and the African mother is the first to

know that a family member might be ill. Traditionally, most African women

space childbirth by two to three years and derogatory terms are used to

describe those who might give birth too frequently, for example, kpendevi

dzila, in Ewe. Following delivery of a child, specific foods are provided to

the nursing mother, for example, palm nut soup in Ghana.

Such knowledge should have formed the basis of reproductive health

counselling and post-delivery maternal care. The absence of that has

resulted in high maternal and infant deaths during perinatals, as African

women give birth anywhere - on bushpaths, at home, at commuter stations, or

in the markets, often with a traditional birth attendant as the highest

level of obstetrics. No doubt, so many African women die in childbirth.

While the majority of policy makers in Africa were born through that system,

little effort has been made to provide some form of internships to such

"midwives" or other indigenous healers to acquire better skills at their

trade or provide improved methods of diagnostic skills.

Furthermore, in the indigenous African Knowledge and Ideas system, a piece

of the forest was set aside and mythologically assigned as the place of

worship of their gods and nothing was extracted from that land. That idea,

common among the Ewes in eastern Ghana for example, which should have formed

the basis of forest conservation and reafforestation campaigns, is now under

threat due to the primordial agricultural production system and general

environmental disequilibrium.

Moreover, indigenous African Knowledge has catered to the upliftment of

other civilizations. The African's eating habits gave rise to Western

medicine's hypothesis that high fibre diets may reduce the incidence of

colon cancer in men and also to lower blood cholesterol levels. Similarly,

Western scientists have hypothesized that the barks, roots and gums of

plants which the Maasais of East Africa snack on might be responsible for

the low incidence of heart conditions among the ethnic people whose diets

are high in saturated fatty acids. The extent to which African technological

acquisitions have emphasized such indigenous knowledge systems is reflected

in the present technological state of the region, i.e., human indignity.

Communal health maintenance by indigenous structures has ensured

establishment and maintenance of public places of convenience, protecting

rivers and streams, clearing of farm roads, dispute settlement, enacting and

supervision of laws and taboos, among others. There are no village mayors,

police posts, post offices, or health clinics in many rural communities of

sub-Saharan Africa. Rural communities often are managed through the

Indigenous Governance system, a representative body whose membership is

drawn from all the village clans. The Indigenous Governance system shares

the task of policy making, security, and health, among others. The

indigenous health council, for example, would consist of traditional birth

attendants and other "medicine people" such as herbalists, and more recently

faith healers. However, health policy in sub-Saharan Africa has taken little

recognition of the region's own health knowledge system and has produced an

alien health system that serves very few well.

Yet sub-Saharan Africa can predict and model its future realistically,

technology-wise. Global Knowledge exists, which if policy makers in

sub-Saharan Africa employed as capital, would enable modelling of successful

sustainable rural communities. At this stage in human civilization, it is

feasible to determine the carrying capacity of rural lands, for example.

Knowledge about the demographics of a community, its human and environmental

resources and types of tools and cultural production systems, would enable

estimation of current production levels. This would lead to determination of

optimum production levels if solutions were provided for limiting factors,

through modernization of the knowledge system. Hypothetically, this could

translate into designs of adequate production systems to address the chronic

food shortages that have come to define Africa in global media circles.

The bedrock of any meaningful technology deployment in rural sub-Saharan

Africa would be the intellectualization of its indigenous knowledge base.

The goal would be creation of a knowledge bridge between modern practices

and the indigenous knowledge system, and finding appropriate interactive

diffusion channels to enable the synthesized knowledge to reach the majority

of Africans. That would be accomplished through equal partnerships among

local and external intellectuals, African and donor governments, and between

technologists and traditionalists.

The morbidity indices of rural Africans imply knowledge gap or the know-how

to assist in the diagnostic practices of the indigenous healer, knowledge to

constitute the active ingredients in traditional "chewing sticks" into

marketable dental products, investigation into the herbs of indigenous

medicine, formulation, packaging, and determination of optimum dosage levels

and interaction with other drugs. Knowledge is also required to design and

to cheaply manufacture devices such as solar energy-powered hand-held

motorised hoes to assist the production process as tractorization schemes

have been expensive failures. Rural Africans need knowledge to convert

household waste into organic land replenishment agents, and to sink wells on

farmlands as irrigation projects have failed to water farmers' fields. Other

dimensions would include knowledge to cultivate mushrooms from simple inputs

instead of hunting for mushrooms from the wild like diamond gems.

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Telematics for African Development Consortium

P.O. Box 31822

Braamfontein

2017

Johannesburg

South Africa

Tel: +27 +11 403-2813

Fax: +27 +11 403-2814

neilshel@icon.co.za

www.saide.org.za

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