Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

African economic growth has been impeded for many decades by government-imposed restrictions on telecommunications.  This was crippling when the continent was underpopulated and competing with the U.S. and Europe.  Now that the rest of the world is communicating via Internet, the population of Africa has exploded, and the competition is with India and China, the denial of telecommunications to Africans is an even worse drag on the economies of the region.  With an increased population and a fixed amount of land, people in African can no longer remain on their farms, but when they crowd into cities such as Lagos or Nairobi, the results are not happy.

Foreign aid hasn’t worked very well.  The majority of the aid is siphoned off by officials, bureaucrats, and NGO staff who live in $5,000/month houses and maintain an upper class American lifestyle in the midst of desperate poverty.  Such aid that does get through is often counterproductive (source).

What if instead of sending aid to Africa, we sent a network of telecommunications that was priced competitively with Internet service in the rich world?  For $25 per month, any African could obtain 3 Mbits/second.  The network would be available everywhere on the continent, thus reducing the pressure on people to move into the crowded cities.  A space-based network would be the only way to achieve universal service and bypass the telecom monopolies that plague many of these nations.

With a universal network priced at $25 per month, the monopolies would be forced to cut their prices and improve their service (currently South Africa’s telecom prices transmission through their cable to London at 100X the cost of other undersea cables).  Presumably the residents of big cities would be served with faster cheaper service from DSL, fiber, or cable modems.  That would not render the satellite-based system obsolete, however, as it would be useful to people in remote areas or in countries afflicted by war.

What would it cost to do this? Iridium, an old and slow network, cost approximately $5 billion to build and launch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic promised roughly the same kind of performance that would be required to serve Africa.  It was set to cost $9 billion at the time that it was scrapped.

Total foreign aid since 1960, from all the rich countries combined, has been approximately $2.6 trillion, or 260 times the cost of building Teledesic.  Building a system like this fits in nicely with the traditional First World concept of foreign aid: we give money to a poor country, but insist that it all be spent on products built in the donor country.

Africans would actually be grateful, I think, for such a system.   All of Tanzania, 35 million people, currently share about 30 Mbits of Internet connectivity, the same amount of bandwidth that Verizon offers to American families in their homes via their FiOS service.

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I had a conversation with Carl, a business manager who was born in the U.K., but has been living and working in Africa for most of his life.  At one time he managed a SCUBA diving operation on Lake Malawi and one of his close friends was a local farmer.  He asked the guy why he didn’t water his crops.

“Every week a Toyota Land Cruiser from the UN drives by my farm. He gives me food if my crops are dying. He says if they are still dying at the end of the season, he will give me a pump to bring water 1 km from Lake Malawi. In the same circumstances, would you spend two hours a day carrying water?”

The experience of folks on the ground would seem to contradict Jeffrey Sachs’s plan to jump-start African economies by providing unlimited free food, shelter, medical care, and education. The human capacity for laziness exceeds any amount of money that might be shoveled in.

Carl said that he had read a study that determined that, prior to the recent rise of tourism, the average Zanzibar male worked 8 hours per week on subsistence farming or fishing. Carl noted that when he offers these folks a 40- or 50-hour/week job, they say “I’ve never done that. My father never did that. My grandfather never did that.” Carl conntinued: “I pay double the going wage. People work for me for four months and then one day they simply don’t show up.”

Why do people have to work harder than they used to? The number of fish and amount of land is the same, but the human population has exploded. With enough production of human babies, eventually people have to start working hard to feed them (or wait for a UN Land Cruiser to drive by).

Carl has seen virtually all foreign aid wasted and/or counterproductive in every African country where he has worked.  In every case, just as noted by James Shikwati, the aid retards economic growth and activity.  Carl’s conclusion:  “Aid is Africa’s biggest problem, not AIDS”.

[A Red Cross worker in Dar es Salaam estimated that a maximum of 20 percent of aid through her organization actually reaches people in need.  The rest is siphoned off by bureaucracy and officials.  She mentioned this in a restaurant surrounded by $2 million homes in a country that has no apparent industry.]

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I’m enjoying the A/C and faster-than-South-African Internet access here at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.  I’m would like to ask for help from the readers of this Weblog in coming up with a set of projects that will lead a master’s in Software Engineering student through all of the relevant theory and practice.

The goal is to design a program that addresses the problems identified in http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/undergrad-cs , a notable excerpt from which is the following:

All student work should have the character of an engineering project: client talks about a problem; student team prepares a written plan for solving the problem; student team discusses the plan with the client; student team builds a prototype; student team tests the prototype with the client and users; student team refines the prototype in response to the testing; student team documents its results. Everything in a standard engineering curriculum can be taught with this process. For example, students building a flight simulation game might need to refer to a Physics textbook and do some practice Physics problems in order to learn enough to build their prototype. This makes it a bit tough for the faculty, who need to be clever enough to weave such courses as Physics, Calculus, and Biology into engineering projects. The payoff is that by the time the student graduates he or she will be completely comfortable with the engineering process of listen, design, discuss, implement, test, refine, and write up.

I’ve come up with some project ideas but would like to get more from other folks.  Here are some as a starting point for discussion:

1. Set up server, RDBMS, and HTTP server
2. Build Web-interface/database-backed personal information manager (like MSFT Outlook) for a businesswoman, providing more limited access to her husband, children, secretary, including capabilities such as spamming a subset of the contacts to invite to a party (touches on data modeling, security, human-computer interaction and interface design)
3. Collaboration environment for computer science literature, where a paper can be represented locally as a PDF or HTML in the database. Build full-text index of papers in the database. Support registration of multiple users and discussion of each paper. Add a way to mark up or annotate or discuss specific paragraphs (hard for PDF, maybe not too tough for HTML). Example of completed student project in this area: http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/gallery/spring2002/chip/ (touches on full-text indexing for first time)
4. Web site for a department or a research group within the university. http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/gallery/spring2002/cwnonline/ (touches on collaborative content management)
5. Web site for uploaded geo-coded photos and videos, mostly from mobile phone cameras, a bit similar to http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/gallery/spring2000/poa/ but with phone browser, MMS interfaces in addition to standard Web interface. Also integrate with Google Maps and other services to enable browsing by location.
6. Web site for a small local business that also wants to be able to serve customers via Web/mail. (touches on ecommerce for the first time; security becomes a more serious concern if credit card numbers are processed).

Some additional smaller projects that don’t require an external client:

1. Build own simple HTTP server (maybe in Java, which eliminates the need to implement threads), implementing CGI but not username/password authentication. Also leave out advanced features such as keep-alive. This is an assignment that students at other schools are generally able to do within 10-20 hours, but if we insist on strict implementation of the HTTP standard, it could take a full week.
2. Build a load tester for Web sites that they can then use on their own servers. This should be built in Perl, Ruby, or some other scripting language with powerful libraries for requesting Web pages. The load tester should be capable of fetching SSL-encrypted pages and also following links that require filling out forms (so that it can simulate a user accomplishing a task). This should be a one-week project (full time).

Thoughts?

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I share the exit row with the daughter of a Ugandan member of parliament. She showed me how to play Sudoku and told me of her plans to go to university in South Africa, study business, and then return to “build [her] country”, which concretely means working in a bank for awhile. She has had friends and relatives die of AIDS, but sees the positive side of this with the family coming together and demonstrating how much they care for the soon-to-depart. She has had malaria many times.

We approach over Lake Victoria, celebrated by evolutionary biologists for its rapid radiation of Cichlid species after the lake dried out 15,000 years ago and mourned by environmentalists for its recent destruction accompanied by mass extinction of those Cichlids. The old terminal area has been taken over by the U.N. and other relief agencies for a fleet of high-wing turboprops that they presumably use to fly food into Sudan and other trouble spots. This old terminal is where Palestinians held Jewish passengers of an Air France plane hostage in 1976. The Lords of Poverty are represented by a Gulfstream G-V on the ramp.

The university computer science department’s driver welcomes me and we drive to Kampala over an astonishingly busy road. It after dark, but the sides of the roads are crowded with people walking in front of shops. Several billboards exhort young women to reject “sugar daddies” and “cross-generational sex”, noting that material possessions are not worth the risk of HIV infection.

My driver, Godfrey, comes from a village in the western part of Uganda. A lot of people live in the village, but there is no electricity. Many people have mobile phones and the service is reliable in the region, but charging them is a challenge. His wife is in the government hospital following a car accident. His opinion of the health care system is that it is basically worthless, but if you give money to a doctor privately your loved one will at least have someone looking in every day.

All of the hotels in town are booked by the Aga Khan, who is visiting with an entourage of more than 500. Part of the purpose of the visit is to discuss a large hydroelectric project that the Aga Khan is funding. I end up at the university’s guest house: no Internet, room the size of a monk’s cell, soft/saggy bed, no A/C, mosquito net. The TV in the cafe was showing a Mexican soap opera, dubbed into English, punctuated by commercials cautioning against cross-generational sex.

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The newspapers here in Africa are covering a dispute between Eritrea and the United States.  We are accusing Eritrea of sponsoring Islamic terrorism in Somalia and other nearby countries.  Those of us who have lived in Cambridge for a long time will recall Eritrean independence as a cause celebre from the early 1990s.  Now they are independent and we apparently hate them.

What’s the punchline?  The total GDP of Eritrea is $1.2 billion (source: CIA Factbook).  Our new enemy has an entire economy smaller than what we spend every day on our military (King Bush II has requested a military budget of around $550 billion per year; source).

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I finally found something that Windows Vista does better than XP.  At the University of the Western Cape, fetching SSL-encrypted Web pages requires configuring a proxy server.  Folks with XP laptops were having to ask for assistance and get hostnames and ports.  My Vista laptop managed to figure it out for itself after I asked Windows to “diagnose the problem with the network”.

Sadly, MSIE could not let go of those proxy settings.  When I later connected to an open wireless network, which had a different SSID from the university’s, MSIE still insisted on using the proxy and couldn’t get any Web pages at all, encrypted or otherwise.  I had to go deep into the Internet Options menu to disable automatic configuration to get it to work.

So…  Vista can be networked just as long as you have 5 or 10 years of experience with computer networking….

Nit:  Transparent frames around windows are distracting and, as far as I can tell, pointless.  If Window A is on top of Window B, it is because Window A is the one currently in use.  If a user wants Window B, he or she can pull it up from the task bar at the bottom.  Why should garbage from Window B leak through into Window A?

Update:  The computer got into a state yesterday where it wouldn’t recognize certain keystrokes, e.g., the letter “m”.   A reboot fixed the problem.  MSIE crashes periodically, though the machine is fresh and not saddled with plug-ins.  The system continues to drop about 1/10th of the characters typed into a Web browser textarea.  This is very annoying indeed.

Keyboard update:  I may have been unfairly maligning Microsoft (could it be our national sport?).  I found a USB keyboard here in Kampala and plugged it into the laptop.  No more dropped keystrokes.  So perhaps the problem is simply with Toshiba’s hardware.

Power Management Update:  I plugged in the laptop, but forgot to throw the little switch next to the mains outlet, so I was actually running on battery for a couple of hours.  Windows Vista informed me that the battery was getting low by… snapping the machine off and throwing away all of my typing into a Weblog form.  Unlike XP, which popped up “your battery is getting low; please plug in the power adaptor”, Vista just shut down instantly and without warning.

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The South African newspapers are full of stories of government ministries and government-affiliated monopolies whose efficiencies and capabilities have slid downhill since the apartheid years.  According to journalists, reasonably well qualified civil servants and managers are being replaced with cronies of the president and ruling African National Congress (ANC) party.  The lack of qualifications of Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is a particular concern this week.

Why should the ANC-lead government continue to attempt the same range of programs that the apartheid government operated?  It might take decades for the ANC government, formed in 1994, to reach the standard of efficiency (perhaps not very high) set by the apartheid government.  In the meantime, why not pare back the government to the essentials and privatize as much as possible?  The government could, for example, deregulate the telecom sector and put the resources formerly deployed there into reducing crime, which is currently at a level that most Americans would find unimaginable.

One can argue the merits of reducing the role of government in the U.S., where the government usually does a mediocre job at a high price to taxpayers.  Reducing the role of government becomes much more critical in a country where the government isn’t able to handle its core responsibility of ensuring public safety.

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While in a break from a meeting at the University of the Western Cape, I purchased a ticket from Boston to Long Beach, California on JetBlue (picking up new helicopter on September 7 and flying it back to Boston).  Due to the lack of Internet bandwidth out of the university, what would have been a 3-minute task in the U.S. stretched out to longer than 30 minutes.  Frustrated, I noted to the faculty there that “If South Africans are expected to drop dead from AIDS at age 45, they at least should be able to enjoy high-speed Internet until they die.  The connection speed here is something you couldn’t be satisfied with unless you were planning to live more than 300 years.”

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Just arrived in Tanzania, sans luggage thanks to a combination of British Airways and Kenya Airways (neither of which seems likely to survive a deregulated marketplace without making huge changes).  I do still have my laptop and camera since those were in my carry-on backpack.

When checking into the fairly upscale Hotel Seacliff here in Dar es Salaam, I asked the reception clerk if there was an adaptor in the room for a U.S. power plug.  He seemed confused, so I pulled out a cell phone charger to illustrate.  He had been chatting with a woman on the other side of the counter and said “She will go up with you to show you how to make it work.”

Once up in the room, this woman displayed a charming childlike ignorance of all things 90-250V.  Her technical skills were not required in any case because the outlet next to the writing desk accepts European or American plugs directly.  What was her ordinary job function?  “I work here in the hotel for companionship and massage.”

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My 36 hours in London are drawing to a close.  Here are a few tidbits…

The National Gallery displays a painting that Britons chose as their favorite in all of the U.K.  It is a Turner showing a Royal Navy sailing warship being towed to the dock for dismantling.  The ship had become obsolete due to the advent of steam power.   A portrait of technological obsolescence is apparently the favorite image of Britons polled.

Lunch was with David Adams, Ruby on Rails expert, at the Itsu sushi chain outlet in Piccadilly where Litvinenko was poisoned by Russian spies.

The afternoon was spent with a stroll through St. James Park to gawk at an incredibly huge Russian pelican, a stop into a bike shop to look at the folding Mezzo, and a walk around the Tate Britain museum.

The evening was spent at the National Theater’s production of the Tenn. Williams play Rose Tattoo.  It may sound stupid to travel thousands of miles to see an American play, but the trip was worth it and the play is a lot less depressing than the rest of Williams’s work.

Attempts to steal wireless with the new Toshiba Windows Vista laptop have proved fruitless.  I am staying in a friend’s apartment overlooking the Thames from an unfashionable suburb of London near Heathrow.  It is dense enough that you’d expect to see 3 or 4 unsecured networks and a handful of secured ones.  All that the laptop can see are two secured networks.  Wireless Internet may not be as popular as it is in the U.S. and Londoners are less trusting of their neighbors it would seem.

Off to Tanzania next…

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