Competitiveness

Q :: When will Kenyan outsourcing companies be able to compete with Indian outsourcing?

A :: When there is comparable internet comic porn from Kenya.
(Not Safe For Work, Church, etc… usual warnings apply).

Note:

This article talks about a new commodity exchange in Kenya, but it sounds more like a cooperative to handle bulk storage of produce (which is a precursor to a stable commodity market).
Wasn’t there already a commodity exchange? I say this because its been possible to get quotes of produce from major towns in the country (though, prices fluctuate wildly on seasonal variations making speculation and hedging on future prices impossible).

Digital Village – 2

As this old news story says, the World Bank is funding the digital village project:

Call centres will start drawing financial support from the Government next month as part of a Sh78 million project supported by the World Bank.

Of course, the brain-dead editors who run the Business Daily, made a mistake in the article by reporting Ksh 78 million instead of US$ 78 million (part of a bigger funding tranche, described below).

So that took me to the World Bank website, and to this page :
World Bank Approves US$164.5 Million for Connectivity to Make Kenya, Burundi and Madagascar More Competitive

The amount approved for Kenya is US$ 114.4 million. It will be used to facilitate connectivity for the country’s emerging business process outsourcing industry, support the creation of digital villages in rural and urban areas, and upgrade the regulatory environment. It will also promote good governance and transparency through initiatives such as digitizing and indexing land and court records, and automating the filing and analysis of wealth declarations by public officers.

(All the bolding is mine)

The loan is in terms of IDA “credits”, which is an interest free loan arrangement.

On the World Bank site, there is a project description document (contains a roadmap), an implementation arrangement document, and a detailed project appraisal document (WARNING: 9MB PDF file, but worth reading for the details)

And here is a list of various documents and reports related to the project.

So why doesn’t the enfant fourbe Writer-Al simply talk in terms of the details provided in these documents (“implementation arrangement” document… ??) instead of dwelling on tired shoe-salesman cliches. And why don’t the Kenya ICT board provide the same details on their site — isn’t that the basic purpose of having a website ? Tant Pis.

Digital Village?

UPDATE, April 11th: Someone from the Kenya ICT Board clarified via the Comment box – you can read the comment by clicking here . Apparently there is not 1, but 2 digital village projects one run by the government and the other by the private sector. The one asking for Ksh 145,000 (see commentator M below) is presumably not the government backed one. The nice person from Kenya ICT Board has promised to publish more details about the project in the next couple of weeks.

I was watching a news item about a new project of the government called “Digital Villages”. The idea seems deceptively simple – fund via soft-loans, the setup by private individuals of cyber-cafes in rural areas (1680 locations to be precise).

However, execution is clearly a different matter entirely. (My problem began, when I read the sentence “conceived by the government”). A blog by someone for the Kenya ICT board has some marketing information, but not much else. The site for the Kenya ICT board does not have much either (in fact it has a lot of dead pages, and the primary news item on the home page is about South Africa). Nor does this site which seems connected in some way. I found an application form for download, which allows you to apply for training as a digital village entrepreneur, but not much else apart from this FAQ (confusion: here it talks about presenting money upfront, what about my soft loan?) in terms of information.

Why does it all look so shoddy? (A matter of important policy, turned into what looks like NGO fodder)
Where are the case studies?
Has there been a pilot done somewhere to demonstrate the concept?
How does the thing intend to sustain itself? (Subsidy…?)
What will be the period of return of investment in a village cyber-cafe?
How will electricity and band-width be provided in the areas mentioned?
What about computer software licenses and such?
How will technical support be provided if the internet link goes down or a computer blows up?
Why would people in villages want to pay and use the internet? (Porn? instant message the next village?)
Where are the e-government services that they can use? (What kind of e-government services can I access from Nairobi?)

Note: I found a presentation about outsourcing on the ICT Board website which claims that bandwidth in Kenya is actually cheaper than India! A bandwidth-support program is mentioned, presumably this is a kind of cost-of-bandwidth subsidy provided by the government (wouldn’t such a subsidy bankrupt anyone? and isn’t the subsidy really the Emperor without clothes?). Here is a cost of bandwidth comparison involving South Africa, Europe, India, Egypt etc…

Note: Its probably a better idea to invest more in ICT departments in Universities, Polytechnics and in Government.

Protecting whistle-blowers

A honest civil servant, who wants to root out and expose corruption, but is afraid to do so because of threats and victimization. What does he do? His tech-savvy wife starts a wiki documenting the corruption, and building an online network of support and well-wishers. The principle being, if more people are aware of the corruption, the better protection there is for the whistle-blower.

“We’re creating a fortress around him — a fortress of people, I wanted to inform the people that this is happening, that my husband is a whistle-blower, so that it becomes the responsibility of every citizen to protect him.”

Read the full story (not recent, but still very interesting):

In India, protecting a whistle-blower

“J. N. Jayashree did not want her husband to die the death of an Indian whistle-blower.
Mr. Vijayakumar, 51, is a bureaucrat in the southern state of Karnataka, and he has a penchant for chastising colleagues who supplement their modest salaries with bribes, kickbacks and garden-variety pilferage.

In recent months, his chastising ruffled feathers at high levels, and he began seeing the signs often directed at whistle-blowers in India: He was pushed around the civil service like a hockey puck, switching jobs seven times in the last nine months, most recently on June 26.

As her husband made powerful enemies, Ms. Jayashree began to fear for his life. And so she devised an unusual ploy to protect him: she blogged.”

This guy was a famous Kenyan whistle-blower, don’t recall him documenting his findings online. Maybe he didn’t have an internet savvy girl-friend/wife/life-partner ?

Note: Similar in concept (though a view of someone from the outside looking in, as opposed to someone from the inside looking out), this site has its heart in the right place.

Death by killer robot / urine

So a man in australia, using plans downloaded from the internet, built a killer robot, that he then programmed to shot him in the head. A novel way to commit suicide.

In my home town, there was Hugo, the last of a long line of Jewish watch-makers. Hugo was depressed. When you saw him on the street, he walked, stepping only among the shadows, and responded only to his surname.

One day Hugo went on a skiing weekend to Pamporovo (in Bulgaria) and never returned. The ski-lift, of Soviet design, broke a hinge and crashed into a crevasse carrying away Hugo, the last watch-maker’s son into its cold, swirling depths.

Hugo’s mansion was taken over by City Hall (no will, no known relatives). While arranging his meager items for auction, the bailiffs of the council discovered a giant, reeking vat in the cellar. Next to it were a calendar and a letter.

The letter was a suicide note dated well into the future. The calendar had numbers scribbled against each date, and a crude summation formula to estimate when the vat would become full (a watch-maker is always a man of precision).

The mysterious purpose of all this was soon clear. Everyday, Hugo peed into the vat. He intended to pee into the vat until it became full. On that momentous day he intended to dive into the vat, and drown in his own urine.

Thus, a badly assembled hinge made by a Gulag inmate in some desolate corner of the Soviet Union prevented the eventful demise of Hugo. A death, in the end, relegated to just a trivial ski accident.