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What Africa Can Do for Technology

By charlotte.hawkins.17, on 29 January 2018

The Economist recently published an article called ‘what technology can do for Africa’. The article covers key discussions around the potential of technological development in sub-Saharan Africa, but falls into pitfalls common to the subject. Determinism is evident in emphatic statements like: “countries are on the cusp of a tech-driven transformation that is already beginning to make people healthier, wealthier and better educated at a pace that only recently seemed unimaginable”. Mobile phones are top of the list, said to have made ‘leaps’ possible. This pervasive image of Africa ‘leapfrogging’ stages of ‘Western development’ with mobile phones in order to improve health, education, communication and business is certainly compelling. But in reality, many digital development practitioners are increasingly skeptical of this utopian ideal, said to be Western-centric (Suchman, 2002, 2011; Tunstall, 2013; Nussbaum, 2010) and to result in unsustainable ‘pilots’ (Holeman, 2017; Huang et al, 2017) which can leave new gaps in their wake.

The Economist article attempts to acknowledge this critique by countering optimism with evidence that the region’s infrastructure is increasingly “sluggish”. The below map of Africa is entitled merely ‘Ill-equipped’, and shows limited access to electricity and mobile phones across much of the continent; in Uganda, 25% and 41% respectively. Besides a few tech hubs, technological advancement and education are unfavourably contrasted with that of Silicon Valley and “the rich world”, from which “Africa risks falling even further behind”; implying a sense of failure, and of technology as a global race.

Through 16-months ethnography in Kampala, I hope to find a different middle ground with a more considered optimism towards ‘what technology can do for Africa’, or instead, ‘what Africa can do for technology’. In the article, Liberian medic Dougbeh Chris Nyan is poignantly quoted to say: “We are forced to be inventive to become masters of our destitution”. In line with Katrien Pype’s exploration of the meaning of technological inventiveness in Kinshasa, ‘smart’ solutions are built around constraints and ‘from below’ (2017). For example, mobile money, “the bank account in your pocket”, a pertinent example of technology adapted to African requirements.

How do people in Uganda appropriate mobile phones and mHealth to accommodate their preferences and needs? During my fieldwork, this question will direct an enquiry into the active role people take as users of technology. As evident in the pilots which do scale and survive, initiatives must begin and meet with sociocultural realities.

– Charlotte Hawkins

References:

  • Holeman, I. (2017) Human-Centered Design for Global Health Equity.
  • Huang, F., Blaschke, S., Lucas, H., 2017. Beyond pilotitis: taking digital health interventions to the national level in China and Uganda. Glob. Health 13.
  • Suchman, L., 2011. Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 40, 1–18.
  • Suchman, L.A., 2002. Practice-Based Design of Information Systems: Notes from the Hyperdeveloped World. Inf. Soc. 18, 139–144.
  • Pype, K. (2017) ‘Smartness from Below’, in What do Science, Tehcnology and Innovation mean from Africa? eds Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga. MIT Press
  • Tunstall, E. ‘Decolonizing Design innovation: Design Anthropology, Critical Anthropology and Indigenous Knowledge’. In Gunn, W. Otto, T. Smith, R. (2013) Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice. Bloomsbury Publishing, London.

Second Life

By Daniel Miller, on 11 July 2017

We had intended to only start blogging in October when our project actually starts. But the inclusion of a special section in this week’s The Economist (8/7/2017) on the `young old’ is too great a temptation to resist. There are three main components to our forthcoming project. The ethnography of the smartphone and the development of mHealth are two foci. But our foundation is in re-thinking the experience of age for those who can no longer be designated at either young or elderly, i.e. those between the ages of 45 and 70. For me, an interest in how older populations appropriate technology had grown partly from previous projects. When Facebook started to become ubiquitous I was arguing that in the long-term I could see this as more of an older person’s than a younger person’s innovation. My logic was that this was in essence a platform for social communication, and in most societies studied by anthropologists the traditional ‘burden’ of active social communication had been that of older women rather than younger men, especially when it came to keeping up with what is happening in families. Our Why We Post project has shown how in many regions of the world, this kind of intra-family communication is the core to Facebook usage. When I first suggested this alignment, people thought I was insane since Facebook was assumed to exist only for teenagers. But in The Economist the same point is now being taken seriously.

The Economist is mainly concerned with the economic implications of longevity, but for our project there is a real intellectual challenge in researching how living longer than previous generations changes peoples’ understanding of themselves, but also ultimately of the meaning and purpose of their lives. We want to get involved in the practical implications, as in the rise of mHealth, but first we want to compare the experience and meaning of ageing for this demographic across our 12 fieldsites.

The Economist also has a leader asking for a new category or label for this age group. Their own proposal of ‘pre-tired’ is fun, but is probably not intended to ‘stick,’ to the degree that a category such as ‘teenagers’ has. In a preliminary discussion with the team I had proposed the term ‘Second Life’. I know this was the name of a popular computer game but that seems to have faded somewhat and I think it is possible to re-use the term. The reason for this choice is that it seems clear that many people in their fifties and sixties actually want to stay in work, but not necessarily in the work they have done so far. Many would like to return to education, but to study something different. Those who were working when they were parents and were therefore unable to spend as much time with their children as they had wanted to are more likely to want to be active grandparents. Whereas perhaps those who were full-time parents are less likely to be as involved in grand-parenting. In other words, people realise in their fifties that they may have done thirty years of work, but then may have another thirty active years to do something else. So the idea of Second Life, suggests that people now have the opportunity to, as it were, start again, based on the experience and the mistakes of life so far.