I was child laborer. Throughout my youth I worked in the creation of different ceramics pieces that were produced in my hometown of the rural Northern California foothills. While not child slave labor, I was paid very little if at all. It may shock you to hear this, after all this sort of thing is not supposed to happen in such a civilized country as the United States, but it does and it has.
Of course, in making that statement, it needs to be qualified with the fact that I was helping my parents' business out and it was largely by grumbling choice. My situation was different than that of children who are forced in to garment or agrarian work against their will and exploited. But, it needs to be noted that in the narrow scope of how journalists are defining "child labor" that they are accusing my parents (as well as countless others) of human rights abuses when it couldn't be further from the truth.
Remember my old chair in Abengourou, Cote d'Ivoire? It was horrible and needed replacement. Through a friend of a friend, I found Babacar. He was a nice 19 year-old fellow that was a carpenter. That's all he did for a living was make furniture and he'd been doing it since he was 12, having started as an apprentice which was yes, child labor. He had little choice though as both his parents had died and he had no relatives to take him in. Sure, he should have been going to school, but he was left supporting himself and so he learned a trade that allow him to do just that.
Now, you can view Babacar's story from two angles. The first is that of any article you find when searching "ivory coast child slave labor". The other is the angle of context wherein you see the choices that he had and how he had to survive in his environment. Don't get me wrong, there are indeed child laborers and even those who are slaves in Africa... as well as Asia, the Americas, and Europe. They're an easy group to exploit and so the truly evil of the world do so.
It's just that when it comes to Africa, journalists drop in, search far and wide to come up with their example of child labor in say, cocoa production, then they take off and write their sensationalist article. In reality, they should be looking at the surroundings and understand how and why children end up working at an early age which is often to help out their entire family to make a living and eat. Context is crucial in this understanding and it's oft ignored all in the name of a headline.
As for Babacar, he's not getting rich working as a carpenter, but he supports himself. He isn't a victim, although a North American or European journalist might choose to show those in the same situation he was in seven years ago to be that of an exploited child. A lot of it depends on how lucky one is to tell their own story, such as in my case where you can see that I was just a kid helping out my parents and not some child trafficked to produce artwork. Keep this in mind and look to the periphery when reading about "child labor" and especially "child slave labor" in Africa.
"Combien à l'Hôtel Ibis?" (How much to the Ibis Hotel?) "Où?" (Where?) the taxi driver at Abidjan airport answered back. "L'Hôtel Ibis en Plateau." (The Ibis Hotel in the Plateau district.) Despite clarification of the neighborhood, there was still a dull, thudding look on this taxi driver's face. He said 5,000CFA ($10 USD), which was a ripoff, but how it goes when coming from the airport in Abidjan.
As we got on the road, it became extremely obvious that he had no idea where this hotel was despite it existing in the rather large Plateau district and it was incredibly annoying that once we got across the lagoon, to have him asking every third person where the hotel was despite my giving him directions. Of course, no one else knew where it was, even when a mere three blocks from it. And let me emphasize that this is well-known hotel in Abidjan in addition to the fact that this taxi driver was picking up a foreigner at the airport and should already know every damned hotel in Abidjan.
One week prior to returning to Côte d'Ivoire and the joys of Ivorian taxis, I was chatting with the gang at the iHub. We got to talking about how impossible it is to find places in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. Many people are hell-bent to propagate the myth that despite the vacuous absence of proper street numbers or street name signs, people in Africa just "know" where they're going (it's a "spoken map" I suppose). Every African I've ever met from East, West, Central, and South Africa decries this as bullshit. It really is impossible for anyone to find anything and is a painful process of lengthy explanations that usually involve making multiple turns at pharmacies and ever-changing landmarks (like a guy selling mobile credit.)
I said to this group that what someone should do is to start up a GPS web-based system so that people could spit out their GPS coordinates and use those as an address instead of actual street addresses. I laughingly said that it could be called "mapfrica", but that that name was probably already taken. I was surprised to find that it wasn't and so I registered the .com and .org.
Time has progressed as it does and I've realized that I'm never going to get around to creating the initial version of this site. Basically, what I wanted to do was to embed a Google or OpenStreet Map mashup. Someone could then zoom in, plop down a pin on what was their house, or business, or general piece of knowledge (like if they wanted to list a park or landmark) and then take those coordinates to give out to people. Additionally, they could have the option of submitting the address information in to an open database that anyone could query to get the locations of everything in a town.
Whatever the case, as you can see, there are a lot of details in this, but given the fact there are more and more phones with GPS ability and location-based services are really the way of the future, I can't see how this isn't one big win for everyone as long as the same standards are being used. To that end, anyone who feels like taking this on, I'm more than happy to point either of the domains I've got in your direction if you come up with a solid proof of concept, help out with hosting if the idea really takes off. All I know is that I don't want to fumble my way around African cities anymore, guided by the lights of pharmacies and mobile phone stores when a vastly superior system is floating above all our heads in a geosynchronous orbit.
Best wishes from 37.788370,-122.415200
By now, the news that Steve Jobs has vehemently renounced Flash is not any kind of news. While I find it annoying that people will take the word of one person as gospel, it's really the case that it wasn't Jobs alone speaking at Flash's funeral. In web development circles, we've hated the technology for years.
As an accent, widget or some other non-critical piece of a website, Flash is fine. For video, it's even better. But, for a site to be completely built in Flash is inane. First there is the issue with Google in theory not being able to index it. Then there is also the issue that unless designed incredibly well, Flash site take a long time to load. In low bandwidth situations, they often never load.
Above and beyond serving information to the world, there is also the business side of things. I just finished launching a redesign of a site for a client who had had a previous site that was not even completely Flash, but just Flash heavy. Once that previous site had launched, online sales dropped by a whopping 50%. That's scary and it's the reason that the new site has not single lick of Flash in it, except for a flickr embed widget, which for some reason isn't compatible with IE8 or Opera and that's seriously weird.
So, like I said, while Jobs wasn't saying anything that any of us hadn't said before, he said it and acted in such a way that it woke up a great many people we geeks hadn't reached. Now for myself and everyone else I know in web development people tell us that they have no interest in supporting IE6 and are happy having no Flash. Ah the difference a keynote can make.
A page dedicated to pulling together all the World Cup links on Maneno as well as elsewhere. A handy reference for those looking in to what's happening with the Cup once it's starts up next week.
At some point, I really need start using a tag whenever the Balkans and Africa have some kind of crossover. It happens rarely, but in the case of this add-it-to-the-pile URL shortener mzan.si (a popular word to call South Africa) it just so happens that they made use of the Slovenian country code domain for the .si portion. I guess Balkrica is about as decent a name as I can think of for these odd instances because really, they're always odd.
Finally, an article saying a lot of the same things that I try to keep driving home about all the praise constantly heaped on to the African mobile market. It's a good read and it brings up points that I hadn't even thought about yet.
You don't hear too much about it due to Northern neighbor, Kenya grabbing gobbling up all the press for their connectivity. But, rest assured, Tanzania, like Uganda and other countries in the east is rapidly getting connected and changing the face of broadband in Africa.
With the simple changing of a word to another word (no matter how similar it may seem), you can completely change expectations and results. Naturally this seems as if it would be obvious, but it is amazing how often mistakes are made in this area that lead to long term confusion.
I mention this because of Avenue Afrique. This is an energized, happening French project that is working to create African blogging communities in various countries. They've had overall good success with most of the sub-project "avenues" have taken off. But, others have faltered. A large part of the reason to this is that the countries where they are focusing on at the moment: Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal, are unfamiliar with blogging and it is an uphill endeavor to let people know about it. This is of course partially hampered in part by their using WordPress (which is slow even on my rather fast DSL connection in Côte d'Ivoire), but more importantly, it's due to how they are projecting the image of blogging.
Take a look at this article announcing an upcoming "blogcamp" in Dakar, Senegal. While it's in French, any English speaker can easily pick out "recrute des correspondants" which means, "recruit correspondents". The word, "correspondents" as well as "journalists" (which they use freely on their site as well) are very loaded words. One may think, "Pfft, whatever. Bloggers, journalists, they're all the same this day and age." and one would be a bit wrong. The key difference in journalist/correspondent vs. blogger is that a journalist is part of a larger news organization and is a paid staff member within a staff hierarchy where an editor approves or changes what it is that they write. A blogger on the other hand can be paid, but is typically not and writes whatever it is that they want, free of the burdens of approval and potential censorship. This is the beauty of blogging in that it allows a free exchange of information, which can be incredibly important in societies where the dissemination of news is contained within government control, such as a number of African countries.
We humans are funny creatures in that to understand something new, we try to understand it within the bounds of what we already know. So to quote Three Amigos, if I walk in to a bar, ask for a beer and they tell me that they only have tequila, but it's kinda like beer, then I'm going to equate tequila as being beer. The problem that so many of these blog promotion organizations are creating is that by using the words "correspondent" or "journalist" when they mean "blogger", people then relate to blogging in the terms of a news organization because they're new to blogging. Traditional news is beer and blogging is tequila. While both of the same genus, I assume that anyone can see the problem there when one gets confused with the other. I know that it sucks to explain to each and every person you meet what exactly a "blogger" is, but that's a responsibility you've chosen to accept if you want to truly promote blogging in areas where it has yet to be picked up to any large degree.
This relation of blogging = traditional news then sets up a series of expectations. First and foremost, it has people expecting to get paid whether immediately or down the road. For instance, take Congo Blog where it's "bloggers" are each paid a very respectable sum in Congo of $50 USD per article. Combined in to that fact is that all of the bloggers were/still are professional journalists in Congo prior to their writing on this group blog. As far as I know, there was no effort made to recruit people from the general populace.
So you can see the confusion wherein anyone in Congo is going to expect to be paid to blog because they point to Congo Blog as the singular example of "blogging" in the country. Don't get me wrong, I think that getting paid to blog is fine as long as it is sustainable and warranted, but the real thrust behind blogging is the fact that it can be done for free. Who on earth in Congo is then going to want to blog for free when there are people getting paid for it? What happens when the NGO sponsoring this project has to reduce or cut off the funding? And most importantly, will the average person on the street in Kinshasa or Goma think that they personally have access to blogging when they see that it's just these professional journalists that are "blogging"?
This is a key point in the issue of perception in that making blogging sound fancy by using the terms from traditional media as opposed to the new, unfamiliar terms associated with it, it makes it appear out of reach to regular people. In societies where a title still actually means something (as opposed to the US where everyone is a "manager" these days) this is very important. With how things are shaping up in relation to African blogging, people truly think that if they aren't already a journalist, then they simply can't "blog" when nothing could be farther from the truth. So, ironically, all these initiatives to get more Africans blogging are then actually making the medium less approachable and possibly discouraging many wold be bloggers by incorrect word choice when promoting blogging.
It's probably at this point that I need to point out that while this problem exists in Anglophone spheres, it is much, much more prevalent in Francophone. I assume that the background on this is that blogging initially started with English speakers who were a lot like me (frustrated English Literature majors in college) and saw blogging as an exciting new outlet that eschewed traditional news. Whereas in France, it seems that blogging has grown out of traditional journalism to a large degree. So the line has blurred and while an under current of people in France understand blogging, the general populace does not to a large degree. This lack of knowledge is then replicated in projects outside of France and you get the blogging misunderstanding that we see in the projects.
Ultimately, all I can say is choose your words carefully when starting a blogging project and if paying, make sure it scales with the local economy and is sustainable within the bounds of the project, such as through advertising, subscriptions, contests, etc. It would be the best if blogging started as a natural event in Africa as starting a blog is free, but if people keep associating it with journalism, news, correspondents, editorials, and the like, that is never going to happen.
I have no idea the number of hotels I've stayed in in various African countries, but it's been a few. The situation is usually the same in that the hotel is owned by some non-African who realized that there was a need for accommodation in Country X and so they plunk down a hotel, maintain it as much as they have to, hire five times the local staff that they actually need to hire, and don't train them at all. The theory behind all of this is that the hotel money will continue to come in regardless and since manual labor is typically cheap, they just toss a who bunch of people at the work and assume it will get done in a "good enough" fashion with the occasional condescending yelling to push them along if it doesn't. I loathe this as when it happens in Africa, it makes it come across that the staff are unintelligent clods when in reality it's a reflection on some greedy owner who doesn't give a damn and just wants a revenue stream.
I'm sure any number of people can cite specific examples of this if they'd like and I could go on at length in a post that would serve only to rant. But, it was when I was in Mali last month that I saw that this pattern can indeed be broken; it merely takes owners that care and understand where they are creating their business. It might happen again in the future, but I think this is one of the extremely few times that I will plug a hotel, which is Comme Chez Soi in Bamako, Mali. The owners are a younger couple who have traveled around Africa and then decided to open up a small (currently six room) hotel in the Hippodrome Quarter of the town.
At this point, I'm sure most people are moving this to their, "Big Deal" list, but there are important things to note. For starters, they don't yell at the local staff that they'd hired. In fact, their staff is exceptionally good and there are very few of them as they do their work wonderfully. I have to give credit to the owners who actually took the time to a) train them well b) find people in Bamako who already had the skills needed to work in hospitality and/or c) I assume pay them a living wage. This may seem like a no-brainer type of thing, but it's not and this doesn't just apply to running a hotel in Africa, but also operating as an NGO. Finding or training qualified, reliable staff takes time and few people are willing to do it as it slows down the revenue of a hotel or growing statistics in NGO reports. Although the truth is that in the long term, it doesn't and sustainable development whether economic or aid will always outpace short term solutions.
But above and beyond the staff, there's also the fact that the owners of Comme Chez Soi are working within their neighborhood to make it better. Sure, the focus will probably make their business flourish more, but again, they're actually making the effort of doing things like paving the approach to the hotel (all side roads are dirt in this area) and giving out garbage cans that lock and can't be stolen to the residents in the neighborhood to dispose of their trash, which usually piles up in the street until some kind of torrential rain washes it away.
On top of this, they're working with a fellow at Mali Health who is working on ways to recycle plastic in town as yes, Bamako, just like many large African towns has a problem with piles and piles of plastic building up. I have no idea if they'll make any headway in this as it's a massive problem, but we'll see.
But there, in the end, this spot has become an oasis off the main drag of Rue Bla Bla that visitors to Bamako can enjoy and the reason for that exists in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the environment that they are operating in and reacting accordingly. It seems so simple, but so many completely miss how this works.
I've been saying it for awhile, but in different ways that the rich mobile fields so many want to tap in Africa aren't actually all that rich after all. In fact, this article claims that they're at a saturation point, which I would agree with.
A decade ago, an African GSM license was an attractive ticket for international investors to enter a market with huge profit potential. But most regulators on the continent have found ways to raise money by licensing more GSM spectrum and fixed line operators, with the argument that competition would drive down cost of services. It has done that, but has also meant continued struggles for smaller, newer companies.
There's also the fact that if you can't cut costs any further, then you cut service and supposedly government are working to make sure that network operators maintain a quality level of service for the customers. To this I have to say, "Yeah. Right." Dropped calls and weak call quality are the norm wherever I've been in Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, and Mali. Yeah, I always have a signal wherever I go, but as to being able to actually use that signal, often is a mixed bag of results.
Some observes say that even with the sector in flux, international investments are not likely to dry up, as some have feared.
This I completely agree with. The mobile market in Africa is a tasty market for investors. They're able to outlay a smallish amount of cash for a tremendous return that just keeps coming. It is an extraction economy. You don't have to work to really build out that much (just a cell tower here and there). There is no development of a brick and mortar business selling a product, just a few splashy billboards around town. You're selling a signal and that's it. So naturally investors will still want to pour money in to African mobile projects. It's just that all that hype you hear about this work is just that and at some point very soon, the market will indeed be tapped out and investors might actually have to look for real, sustainable businesses to work with as opposed to non-essential things like mobile. I'm just glad to see that I'm not the only one saying this.
Over the last two days, beyond misplaced next generation iPhones, Apple earnings, and the Facebook f8 conference, a rather minor blip on the tech radar has been the announcement that Facebook has shut down its Lite Version. It almost seems silly to link to that given that it just redirects back to the main Facebook page. For those who never used it (which is understandable given that it wasn't marketed all that well), this was a stripped-down version of Facebook more suited for those with limited bandwidth connections. All told, the version got a mere seven months of active service before being killed, which I think was only bested by US hardware store chain, Home Depot, killing off a Spanish version of their site four months after launch. Why would a company put so much effort in to a piece of their product line to then kill it off in its infancy? A number of pundits have weighed in on this.
Bill Ray at The Register wrote:
The problem with cutting the fluff from Facebook is that it's the fluff that people want. Social networking is all very well, but for most users it's about accumulating contacts who can be impressed by your FarmVille score or the size of your castle.
Liz Gannes hit on a more important element:
One reason not to like Lite? It showed limited advertising and was disconnected from features like Facebook pages and applications. Ad Age called it “a black hole for brands.” Not a good idea to irritate the people who pay the bills.
This was also echoed by a quote in a BBC article:
"In some ways the Lite version was like using ad block [a plugin to strip ads out of websites] on their own site - it stripped the site down to the very basics," said Mike Melanson of ReadWriteWeb.
But as much as I don't like linking to TechCrunch articles are they don't like linking out, I think that MG Siegler wrote some of the best points on the issue:
And that’s why the news today that Facebook has killed off the lite version of its site is disappointing — not because it was great, but because it was better......Facebook Lite was not perfect, but I suspect that the main problem with the site was that Facebook made it hard to find. Unless you enabled a toolbar (yes, another damn toolbar) along the top of the site to easily switch back and forth, it was nearly impossible to figure out how to do so.
I think that the real question in all of this is whether you are more of a Facebook person or more of a Twitter person. Me personally, my first introduction to Twitter was some loud, obnoxious moron in a bar in San Francisco trying to impress some girl by telling all about how amazing Twitter was back in 2007. Needless to say, I got in to Facebook more. But, as time went on, Facebook started bugging the crap out of me. They would add and take away features at random and reorder the page in ways that drove me nuts. Bit by bit, I've turned towards Twitter now as my chosen social media weapon after blogging. Facebook just serves as a tie-in to my Twitter where my updates can be echoed.
This is why the Lite version was so good for Facebook and as Siegler noted, it's why it had to go. It really was a superior Facebook. In terms of bandwidth access it was better and it's really a shame that they didn't market and deploy it properly to African users as people here are all over Facebook and it's manly to socialize or promote pages and groups. I don't see tons of interaction with applications because de facto, they don't load well with the high latency you typically have. I mean, updating my bragging page Where I've Been page is insanely painful and I can only do it late at night when the bandwidth creeps back up a notch.
But Twitter has been to date, so much simpler. It allows me to interact with people so much easier and it doesn't have all this extra crap, which of course means that it doesn't have the ads either; basically Facebook Lite with 140 characters. I'm just a little annoyed that as time goes on, Twitter gets more mushy, complicated, and for lack of a better word, doughy. For instance, last night, it was obvious that one small bit of their JavaScript was offline and I couldn't retweet, post, or view older tweets. Basically, it was dead due to a simple script error. And here I thought I missed the Fail Whale.
As much as I think that mobile is an over-hyped bubble, it appears to all come back to the mobile versions of both Facebook and Twitter. That is where both companies are putting their low bandwidth, easy to use interface money these days, which is ironic given that mobile connections often have more bandwidth than land connections. But thankfully these sites are available via the web, so if you're in a bind, you can use them on a regular machine, which sometimes I find myself doing with Twitter.
For those who don't know, sexiest-dot-com-in-the-world-at-the-moment, Twitter has relaunched their homepage.
This builds on a series of changes starting last year when we redesigned the homepage to make search and trending topics more visible and easily accessible to everyone. With that version, we brought the power of search.twitter.com to the homepage and let people explore the value of Twitter without an account.
This is all fine and good as it marks what seems to be either the third or fourth iteration of their home page, but I'm curious if perhaps it goes a bit far towards the "die Explorer die" camp? I mean, for some time now, I've noticed that for Explorer 7 & 8, Twitter works alright, but it's not nearly as good as in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera. And when it comes to Explorer 6, it's a real disaster. To a degree, I support this direction, especially as Explorer 6 is a dead horse, but at the same time, Explorer still makes up just under half of the browser market and when viewing Twitter in Explorer 8, it tosses a compatibility error mode. It's not the most amazing thing in the world and I was rather surprised to see it. I'm curious as to whether it's just a temporary bug or if Twitter thinks that somehow all these Explorer users are going to vanish in the coming months? Or maybe it's more that they seem they market divesting to the tablet/mobile side of things and they don't really care about the desktop/notebook era?
My other issue is heaviness of the home page. What I've really liked about Twitter in the relatively sans-FailWhale epoch is that it's been simple, light, and quick. This home page changes a great deal of that and depending on the time of the day I access it, it is very difficult to load. Seeing as how I am indeed a member of the site, I don't really need this home page and thus, I tend to just go straight to twitter.com/login to get to a slimmer, faster way to access my account. That works quite well to bypass all the craziness of the home page and get to the Twitter I know and love.
Ultimately, it would be nice to see a couple of things come about:
- Just a bit more attention paid to at least Explorer 8.
- Streamline the home page information as now it's almost too much.
- Lighten up the bandwidth requirements of the home page as it's running about half a meg currently.
It's been awhile since I've pulled together a round up of interesting articles that have passed my way, so I'll take a breather from lobbing complaints about Gaddafi and talking about Mali to point out what some other people are saying.
Basically the antithesis to the scare article that came out a few days ago. The article points to the fact that with four undersea cables touching down by the end of the year in Kenya, it will go from a country of minimal bandwidth, to a major player in the internet markets.
Pretty cool silos designed to irrigate Sudan. Much better than just having a tank with a pump sitting somewhere. They also portend a future design focus on renewable energy platforms as public art, much like how the parabolic trough became mainstream through using it as a set piece in the film, Gattaca. HT A Bombastic Element
The good news is that PayPal has launched in South Africa. The bad news is that like most companies doing business in Africa (even South Africa), there is a great deal of trepidation to the venture and it isn't nearly as good a setup as in North America or Europe. And then they'll claim that it was a failure due to the African market being untenable because you know, they tried. Go figure.
