Out of the way

Maputo, Mozambique, is a lot warmer at this time of year than Baku Azerbaijan. And it doesn't have the same kind of connectivity.

In Maputo I bought a SIM card. Good idea - although like many people I made the mistake of using SMS. At a cost of about 2 meticais / message it is massively more expensive than using a web-based service like twitter, even with images (the cost per byte of SMS varies between one thousand and ten thousand times more, depending how much of the SMS you fill).

So I was disappointed to see that the W3C workshop was so heavily slanted towards SMS-based systems. And at that, systems which generally don't provide any way of sharing their data. I don't know if there are more "save the rhino" projects than there are Rhinos (although I can believe it), but I do know that the FAO has identified more than 400 seperate agricultural information projects in Africa. And most of them are "pilot projects", which are "dealing with the real problems on the ground" using an approach that is "grass-roots based and demand driven".

All of these are Good Things™. Unfortunately, the lack of much architectural or structural vision, the absence of any realistic scalability model, the fierce competition for scarce donor resources rather than conentrating on a sustaiability model that assumes the service will be valuable enough to support itself, the inability to share data between projects which are supposedly for the common good, and the reliance on an outdated and overpriced technology without considering how to migrate to cheaper and more modern platforms are all bad things. Very bad things, because they are spending the scarce educational resources on effectively locking people into systems which will virtually ensure that they are held behind the rest of the world.

We need to keep this in perspective. SMS is available to most people in Africa. Web is availabe to a few percent. However, that latter figure is very rapidly changing, and there are good reasons to promote the change. SMS technology works now, and therefore it makes sense to make services that can use SMS as both an input and output channel. However SMS systems are expensive for users, and very limited in what they can offer. Therefore it also makes sense to design the underlying services with a vision a little further than just the closest grass roots, making sure that it will be possible to access the same services (in an enhanced manner, since it is cheaper) through the real web, and through voice systems and the like.

The Web is not the answer to all problems. But nor is SMS, and the current focus seems to me too backwards-looking, without recognising that the future is here (if somewhat unevenly distributed) for us to look at. Developing Africa doesn't need iPhones much (in fact for various reasons they would be a bad choice) or even Samsung Omnias, but it does need to build a migration path from the simplest technology that was picked off the western scrap-heap to the future that they have the potential capacity to be building for themselves and the rest of us. Scavenging the scrapheap as the only source is not a good way to build up to that potential.

A few things I appreciated a lot in Africa. The ability to send credit in the form of minutes, as a normal part of a phone service, is streets ahead of what the developed world has available. A very few countries have a very limited ability to do something similar, but Africa here is really showing the world how mobile commerce could be done. (The famous M-Pesa bank was really a big comany jumping on an existing bandwagon...)

Low bandwidth mode for email was a life-saver. The first time I downloaded mail, restricting messages to a few kb download each, it took over an hour. Fortunately for me I had enabled the low-bandwidth - collecting a 13MB package of photos someone had sent me, or a few 1/2MB - 2MB attachments, would have left me unable to get my mail in real time at all.

Likewise Opera Turbo and Mini on desktop were useful, enabling me to make the most of what was not a high backhaul capacity. This was really handy.

And like most developing countries and very few developed countries, the fruit in Mozambique is good. (The rest of the food is good too, actually, but that happens in other places too). And Laurentina Preta is a superb beer. Muito obrigado, Moçambique.