Hi Rhianna,
Thanks for your mail, to be honest with you there's not much of support from
the local leaders for two reasons.
1. They simply do not understand the big picture to ICT's and are ignorant
of any technical details relating to it. They are also not interested
in learning. Some have never even been on the Internet..not that they
cannot afford to; it's simply not a priority.
2. They are overwhelmed by "greater and more pressing issues" street kids,
power rationing, political unrest etc and do not posses enough support
staff nor the money.
The most in terms of assistance that we got is a license to operate the
information kiosks from the local administration. The administration is
always very suspicious of anything they don't understand or know little
about so the license did not also come easy.
We have a saying here that any initiative the administration does not
understand or any initiative that does not directly line their pockets is
illegal.
Secondly, the major challenge with dealing with the private sector is that
they lean too much on what is in it for them in terms of marketing; which in
itself is not a bad thing but they tend to sway the projects to adapt to
their products or services. In most cases the support we get in terms of
Computers/software are from private organization who will normally want to
brand the place and push for use of proprietary software - we somehow try
to reach a compromise with them.
In one case when we needed a highspeed link into one of the kiosks and
asked Telcom Kenya to kindly donate this digital link for free they said
that they were not an NGO. Some of the ISP's were willing to put in free
training time, set up and even free software and support but again the
strongest challenge for us was dealing with this govt. parastatal.
We have not also been able to make much headway in the rural areas due to
lack of power, telephony network, low literacy levels (this we can work
round). We need funds to move in and sensitize the rural communities as well
as get feed back so as to get something going. The task force is funded
through membership fees but definitely no kitty from the government.
We volunteer our services and seek project sponsorship from private
organizations. We need seed support.
We need all the help we can get. One area we are currently looking for
support towards, is capacity building at various levels:
Capacity building:
1. For infrastructure like ours charged with responsibility of developing
ICT/E-commerce
2. For the local administration and parliamentary representatives
3. Government
4. Training organizations
4. End user/ Consumer
We would appreciate any sponsorships to seminars/ conferences on ICT as well
as any other support towards capacity building. I am now looking to ways I
can get our Members of parliament together for an education forum geared
towards ICT and ultimately E-governance ; any ideas towards this will be
appreciated.
Lastly Rhianna, this Women ICT workshop is definitely something that I would
be interested in; any way I get in touch with Mr. Muliro while he is here?
rgds
rosemary
On 13 March, Rhianna Thyson wrote:
>
>Government support, indeed, is a vital element to the success of ICTs as a
>tool for development and empowerment. However, in much of my reading on
>the use of technology as such a tool, privatization is continuously being
>trumpeted as the savior to those on the "have not" side of the "digital
>divide." I am having a hard time trying to find opposing views to these
>privatization cheerleaders... does anybody know of reports or studies or
>even opinions on the effect of privatization in the ICT sector?
>
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