Kevin RehakJournal #1
To be honest, I was slightly sceptical of the Millennium Villages Project when I took this internship in Ghana. During my Peace Corps service, I saw so many rusted signs featuring the word “Project” in front of an abandoned building that I became invariably wary about the word. And there is so much buzz about the Millennium Villages that I figured some of it must be hype. On the other hand, Dr. Sachs is one of the leading intellectual lights in international development, so maybe he'd really figured out how to break out of the poverty cycle. Seeing this with my own eyes was one of the reasons I took this internship (in addition to helping Ghanaian entrepreneurs start computer businesses, and establishing a network of billboards for communicating market prices between towns and villages, of course).
As soon as we (Nelson, a SIPA student, my co-intern/roommate) landed in Accra on Tuesday, June 9th, we caught a connecting flight to Kumasi, Ghana’s second city, where we met George, a driver for the Millennium Villages Project (MVP). George took us around town before we headed to Manso-Nkwanta, our home for the next 11 weeks.
After a pleasant, hour-long drive south, we arrived at the MVP office in Manso-Nkwanta in the mid-afternoon. George dropped us there, briefly introduced us to the rest of the staff, and then headed back to Kumasi. I expected that we’d meet our new colleagues, been given some background information to read, and been told, “You must be exhausted from the trip. Go and rest, and we’ll see you first thing in the morning.” Wrong. Patrina, the program assistant just said, “So nice to meet you. You can start your work in the conference room.”
I was perplexed to find that there was no Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) or Small Business coordinators. These were the two people I was supposed to work with, according to my terms of reference. The ICT coordinator died before I got here, and no one bothered to tell me. The Small Biz coordinator quit a year ago, and they haven't hired a new one yet due to the UNDP bureaucracy. Furthermore, the 3G cell phone towers that provide internet access to our villages (and thus provide a revenue stream for the entrepreneurs) which were supposed to be finished last year are still holes in the ground. Actually, I'm not perplexed that these things happened. I am, however, perplexed that I wasn't told about them. It was a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing.
Wednesday and Thursday had a bit more structure. Each day we drove to the cluster of villages we’re working with (for logistical reasons, the main office is located in Manso-Nkwanta). It is an hour drive along the muddiest, most pot-holed, butt-busting-est roads I’ve ever been on to reach the first village, and another hour to reach the last. In between, there are 30 other villages, ranging in population from a few hundred to a couple thousand, legal and illegal gold mines, towering teak trees and oceans of palms, all permeated by the sickly-sweet smell of drying cacao seed. We spent the days interviewing teachers, health workers and community members about how they use – and could use – mobile phones and the internet to trade commodities and work more efficiently. Then we returned to town for a quick dinner of mysterious-chicken-part-in-palm-nut-oil stew and banku (boiled, mashed, fermented maize meal that, having eaten it every day for a week, makes me miss posho) before going back to the office till 10 p.m. to analyze our day’s findings and prepare for tomorrow.
So it surprised us on Friday when the office was dead by noon. None of the MVP staff live in Manso-Nkwanta, so they all take off for their hometowns on the weekends. I took the opportunity to go back to Kumasi and start sourcing supplies for the mobile web kiosks we’ll be building in the villages.
The next Monday, our project leader finally came back, and our roles here started to make a little more sense. We’d been asking questions the whole time and the answer was often, “I think Dr. Samuel is having that information. You go and ask him when he gets back.” So once we had things figured out, we were ready to march into the field and do some work, right? Wrong. It rained all day Tuesday, and made the roads impassable for the rest of the week. The rainstorm also knocked out our internet satellite dish. So I designed my focus group sessions, surveys and excel models all week, and barring more massive rain, will collect data this week and have a much better idea of how people want to use mobile phones to share pricing information. Assuming the demand is there, (and based on similar work in Rwanda and Liberia, it will be), we will use the info I gather next week to develop a commodities exchange billboard in the various villages, so they can know where particular goods are fetching the highest prices. Here’s an example from Liberia: http://whiteafrican.com/page/3/ (scroll down to “The Blackboard Blogger of Monrovia.”). His is a bit different, but you get the idea.
On Friday, I took off to Kumasi in search of internet so I could download files from my boss in New York, then continued north to Wa to visit my friend Sarah who’s wrapping up her Peace Corps service as a deaf-education arts teacher.
Journal #2
Who fixes a gas leak with a chunk of concrete?
Who builds a veritable Gold's Gym out of old maize grinding equipment?
Who repairs the ripped undercarriage of a Toyota pick-up with string, a jack and a rock?
Ghanaians, that's who.
I guess I got soft in my four years in the States after COS'ing from Peace Corps. When our gas cylinder was leaking, I just bought a new regulator. When it leaked with the new regulator, I figured the tank was shot. I told the folks at the office about it, and they just sent someone to put a couple of chunks of old concrete on it to weigh the regulator down and force a seal. Been working fine ever since.
My work has gone in fits and starts. We finally set up our first computer lab a couple weeks ago, only to find that the solar power system that was installed before I got here "lacks fire." After plugging in 6 computers and turning them on, they slowly went out one by one, until just one was left. And what did people do with that one machine? Play Blackjack, of course.
This experience has made me question the efficacy of the technological leapfrog strategy that seems to be in vogue in international development. I don't care if people play Blackjack, but why do it on a $500 computer? Most rural Ghanaians can't really take advantage of all the things a computer can do (obviously, we hope to change that, but bear with this rant momentarily). Take typing. Even my university-educated colleagues hunt-and-peck. They marvel at my ability to look at a handwritten document and transcribe it without ever looking at the screen. No thought was given to how the computers will actually be used. Based on my casual observations in internet cafes (which carry more viruses than the mosquitoes here), the computers will be used for checking the vital signs of European football players. There's gotta be a warehouse full of old typewriters somewhere in the US that would be a tax-write off for someone. Wouldn't it be a lot more cost-effective to donate those, train some typing instructors, and then bring the computers in? Furthermore, the solar system has absolutely no supply chain to support it. It was designed by a professor at the university in Kumasi that's 4 hours away, and he doesn't have time to come and fix it when it breaks—nor does he have the budget for, or access to, the spare parts.
Of course, you can argue "if you build it, they will come" and claim that access to computers is the first step to "bridging the digital divide," as the Millennium Development Goals put it. However, when I sit down and talk with communities and simply say, "What do you want? The answer is never "Computer labs." Instead, they say "roads, electricity, and better cell phone service." I'm sure I if could conjure up those three things, the next thing they'd want is "potable water."
I reckon one of the underlying reasons for this bass-ackwards approach to development is because pictures of rural Ghanaian school children sitting in front of computers attracts donors, while pictures of those same children pumping water from a borehole bores them.
So what solutions do I offer? Think carefully before writing a check to a foundation that sponsors projects in Africa. Ask about the sustainability. Buy fair trade goods that put money in the pockets of rural Africans so they can earn an income and create a local tax base that will fund infrastructure like roads, and decide for themselves what they want. Elect leaders who will dismantle our crop subsidies to make African commodities more competitive on the world market. Vote for Ron Paul so he pulls us out of the UN (funny how doing the most left-wing “hippiest” of internships turns me into even more of a libertarian).
Journal #3
So despite a rocky start, my summer internship experience was a net positive. A lot came together in the last week, when Matt, my supervisor from New York came down. Finally, we were able to sort out some of the “left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing” issues that plagued me the entire time. In retrospect, I probably would have been more effective had Matt come at the beginning of the internship, so we could have set off on the right foot, rather than my trying to figure out what foot that should be.
To me, the most exciting part of the last week was the trial run of our SMS-based pharmaceutical inventory tracking system. In the long run, we want to use this as an RFID substitute by assigning tracking numbers to doses of restricted drugs, like Misoprostol (life-saving when properly used to treat post-partum hemoraging; life-threatening when misused as a late-term abortion drug). The reason is so the Ghana Health Service can track the location of doses from the national drug stores in Accra, to the district medical center and all the way down to rural clinics and even individual patients. More importantly, this system enables real-time insight into the turnover and procurement of drugs. With the vast amount of data we collect from the drug use patterns, we can plan more efficiently and prevent stock-outs of drugs, correlate patterns of pharmaceutical use with other medical records to identify trends in health care and possibly predict future outbreaks. For instance, if we see that one particular health worker is giving out lots of oral rehydration salts (ORS), a diarrhea treatment, we can quickly spot a potential Cholera outbreak and work to contain it.
As I thought more about health care, and the potential for business solutions to address public health problems, I realized something rather frightening.
The first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) is to "eradicate extreme poverty and hunger." That sounds well and good until you consider what happened at two other junctions in human history when humanity reached a similar goal: the agricultural and industrial revolutions. In both instances, the food supply dramatically increased and population soared.
If the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) can treble crop yields per acre, as the most hopeful advocates predict, it's reasonable to assume that a population boom will follow.
However, once the population increases, this food will not be enough, and villagers will have to slash and burn more rainforest to keep up with the growing population. Destroying more rainforest would further damage weather patterns, making rainfall even more unpredictable. Eventually, this would lead to erosion which will produce poorer yields per acre. Thus, a population boom would eventually bring the MVP’s back to where they started: extreme poverty and hunger.
population growth. That certainly won't be easy, since the desire to copulate is one of humanity's most hard-wired desires. Additionally, in sub-Saharan Africa, having large families is linchpin of the culture, thus compounding the difficulty.
Yet it is precisely because it is not easy that we must realize how essential it is.
Critics will say that the West was allowed to procreate freely, why can't Africa? And there is a certain appeal to fairness in that argument. Yet the macroeconomic and ecological circumstances of 10,000
BC and 1750 AD differ markedly from those of 2009 AD. We in the West got to grow in-sustainably because we did it first. If sub-Saharan Africa wants to thrive three generations from now, it must curb its population growth rate.
Surely, Africa can learn from the lessons of history as it builds its future.
