from the horizon

There were a number of interesting sessions during the conference. Although there were a great deal of speakers who talked about a variety of development/poverty/aid topics, these are the session which I attended AND remember 3 weeks on from the conference:

Stephen Haslett, a statistician, gave an interesting talk on small scale estimation of poverty. The principle is to use find a relationship between specific variables which are measured in small scale survey, and variables in a large scale census. If a good relationship is found, you can estimate the survey results in another location, based on the census results for that location. All very quantitative. After his talk, I asked him what he thought of quantitative vs. qualitative survey/analysis. He told me that it was often important to do the qualitative survey first, in order to know what to measure in the quantitative survey, which I found very interesting.

There were four speakers on Information, Communication and Technology (ICT). None of them were IT experts so the topics weren’t very technical, but fortunately there was a gaggle of development geeks who attended the sessions and added to lively debate!

Pramila Devi, presented research on the Video Broadcast Courses offered by the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. Lectures were broadcast live from the main university in Suva, to centers on a number of remote islands. Students could also participate in live voice discussion with each other, and submit work remotely. The university had its own satellite for these internet connections.
I didn’t understand why the lecture had to be live (real time) broadcasts. Apparently there were problems with the sound and image quality (as can be expected in any live broadcast). I think it would have been a lot better if they prerecorded the lecture and transmitted the whole lecture over a longer time, before playing it at the remote location – this be easier, better quality, probably cheaper and have the same benefits for the students!

Stephanie Rolfe, had a interesting presentation on the use and attitudes toward ICT for development in the South Pacific. Although there is generally a positive attitude towards it, there were a number of issues, such as:

• Sustainability of projects. Foreign consultant come in and set up ICT projects, but don’t give sufficient training and capacity building for the projects to be used and maintained after they leave. (I worry that I may have been guilty of this)
• Off-the-Shelf remedies. Using solutions which were designed for a different context, and may not be suitable for use in a development environment.
• Unsuitable donated equipment. Donated equipment, which is old, comes without software, incompatible with other equipment, hard to find spare parts for etc.

There were 2 other speakers who spoke about IT in India. Ward Friesen, talked about the ICT Diaspora, where there is a huge IT industry in India, yet also a huge number of migrating IT professionals. I reckon, that India should look at the migrating professional as ambassadors for Indian IT, although they’re working overseas, they probably contribute to the Indian economy by sending work back home (out sourcing from the USA). I think New Zealand needs to look at its brain drain in a similar way.
Another speaker (?) talked about some research on a massive project to set up internet kiosks to villages all over India. Although there were a lot of impressive numbers, the project seems to be lacking on tangible results. I worry that it has possibly gone the way of many large scale IT projects: over-budget, over-complicated and potentially unfeasible.