Janet Haven: Infrastructure, Part II: Getting Things Done in Africa

Just back from Uganda, I'm pondering a common complaint of Westerners visiting the continent: "It takes so long to get anything done in Africa." It's not revolutionary to point to Africa's infrastructure, but having just lost a day of work to infrastructure issues, it's interesting to illustrate the small but thwarting fall-out of poor roads, irregular power and limited connectivity.

I've had the past week mostly off from my trusty IBM x40 because bandwidth at Africa Source II was very, very scarce. The inimitable Tomas Krag of wire.less.dk led a team which expertly managed our 3 GB VSAT download cap and our ad-hoc wireless infrastructure, but with 140 people on that system for a week, resources were inevitably stretched; priority was given to teaching needs necessary for the success of the workshops at the camp. Still, as I planned my departure from Kalangala on Sunday night, I noted that my laptop's battery was nearly empty. Back in my room, I plugged my computer into the single wall socket as I packed, and then noticed that in fact, it wasn't charging. A flip of the light switch revealed that the electricity was off again, and the proprietor of my little hotel was nowhere to be found. I thought of leaving the laptop plugged in overnight, in the hopes that the power would come back on, but because the wall socket had obviously been roughed up over its lifetime (probably a case of multiple re-use in multiple buildings), my plug didn't fit firmly into the socket...and so I would have had to keep a toe on the plug overnight to make sure it stayed in contact with the current. But as the electricity hadn't come back on previous nights, the nocturnal gymnastics seemed optimistic at best. (Note to travelers: you'll never regret having a small roll of duct tape on hand.)

So I gave up: I would travel back from Uganda without my laptop charged. This may sound unproblematic, but as someone who spends a good amount of time on planes and in airports, I look forward to the uninterrupted time travel opens for reading emails and writing more thoughtfully than a day at the office might allow. So it was inconvenient -- email responses would be later, fewer of the backlog of Africa Source II blog posts would be written, etc.

Instead, I turned my attention to the pile of printed reading I had hauled to Uganda in my backpack. Hoping that I'd have a chance to charge my laptop at the airport in Kampala or Nairobi, I thought I could use the seven-hour trip we took from the island to the airport for getting through this pile of reading. Of course, I wasn't thinking about the road. And indeed, when driving down a road like the one between Kalangala and Kampala, one can't do much beyond gazing out the window: it's far too bouncy to read, too loud to talk to your companions in any meaningful way, and in some ways, too bombastic an experience to even think very clearly. Further, you emerge from a drive like that tired and dusty (if somewhat exhilarated), certainly not in the most propitious mood to read case studies of ICT use in civil society groups.

Once in Kampala, we arrived at the offices of WOUGNET, our local host. They had also had their power cut. Dorothy Okello, WOUGNET's executive director, told us with a familiar mix of good humor and frustration that she had been trying since Friday both to sort out the mix-up with their power bill and to think of things for her office staff to do without their computers. Dorothy herself was working off a dial-up line on her laptop, which she had been charging at home every night. Of course, laptops are a rarity in African offices, and the rest of her staff were working on refurbished desktop PCs. Part of WOUGNET's ramping-up plan, she said as an aside, was setting aside funds to buy a generator so that future power cuts wouldn't cause their work to grind to a halt.

Obviously, many other factors figure into the difficulty of working in Africa –petty corruption and health problems are two other big issues that ordinary people face regularly. But infrastructure problems continue to thwart many on the most prosaic, day-to-day level. Hats off to those, like WOUGNET, who plan for the inevitable and keep on going.

Janet Haven

Infrastructure, Part II: Getting Things Done in Africa

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