Thu 28 May 2009
Uganda: Katine Project brings villagers to blogosphere
Posted by Rebekah Heacock under Balkers
[5] Comments
Uganda’s Internet penetration rate is a little over six percent, a number that prevents large swaths of the population from joining Uganda’s blogren or accessing the global blogosphere. For one village, the Guardian and Observer’s Katine Project is working to change that.
Since October 2007, the Katine Project has tracked the impact of a dedicated £2.5 million ($4 million) AMREF development project in Katine, a rural sub-county in northeastern Uganda (virtual tour). In addition to providing general news about Uganda and tracking developments in five key project areas, the project has been training local residents to use video cameras to document their lives:
[In February], almost 20 people from Katine attended three video workshops held in the media and resource centre, now opened to villagers at the Amref office in the sub-county.
Four Flip video cameras and tripods have been left in the centre for villagers to borrow and tell their stories….
The aim of the centre is to give members of the Katine community a global platform to talk about their lives – the challenges and opportunities, their thoughts on the work being carried out by Amref – and to offer them access to information and expertise.
The resulting videos are presented in the project’s Village Voices section. In one, Katine resident John Ogalo shows viewers his homestead and attends a church service. Another video shadows bicycle taxi driver Dennis Ewalu as he repairs his bicycle, negotiates with customers and cycles nearly 80 km (50 miles) in one day.
The Village Voices section also connects readers to local residents through text. One post shares the stories of three schoolgirls who discuss their hopes for their future:
Teresa Acupo
In future, I want to study politics and become a member of parliament for my area. Members of parliament earn a lot of money and they are respected.Susan Amweso
My dream is to be a financially independent woman. I need to control my own finances, not to depend on a husband for everything.Magdalene Atai
My grandparents have been responsible for my entire upbringing and when I finish my education, I will buy them each a present. Because they may not be able to educate me up to university, I would like to train as a nurse after my secondary education. That is what most girls who cannot afford further education go for. It is also easy to get employed as a nurse. One can easily start a private clinic in the village for survival.
Katine’s 25,000 residents live entirely off of Uganda’s electricity grid. Without the Katine Project, it is unlikely that these people would ever get the chance to share their stories with the world.
Excellent post Rebekah. I always find it important to understand the curve of development in various regions of the world. Hard for Westerners to even imagine, an entire village or town “off the grid”.
And it’s also compelling how Katine residents would suddenly get exposed
to some cutting-edge technologies when they aren’t even used to turning on lights or TV. What must that be like…
There was a great segment on NPR today about cell phone use in Kenya, it’s deployment for banking transactions that aren’t even available yet in the U.S., and how cellular phone infrastructure has allowed Kenya to just leapfrog over the established nation-building block of telephone land lines.
Many Kenyans have cell phones, few have wired phones. As we mention often on B/P, technology is indeed changing, shrinking and equalizing the world.
Those are amazing personal stories at that link for the school girls! Teresa Acupo rides a bicycle to get water for her household each day, then goes off to her school. It’s very good they are getting a chance to film and let the world see how they live, and very heartening to see that there seems to be an equal chance for girls there to get educated! That is not true in some parts of the world.
This story in Uganda also reminds me of the One Laptop Per Child Project. The idea is to eventually outfit every child in the Third World, with an Internet-ready laptop.
Specially designed for functionality and durability at low cost, they are getting the latest model of the machine down to about $75.00 – maker is Quanta Computer of Taiwan.
So, run some numbers. With all the billions the First World wastes on everything, that lofty goal is probably reachable at some point if we really wanted to make it happen. This is what Bill and Melinda Gates are getting at in a more general way, with Gates Foundation (see link under B/P Favored).
That kind of broad-scale, progressive thinking married to today’s technologies – may indeed be able to change the world in profound ways, like gigantic reductions in poverty and disease. And by untold positive future contributions from those children, having had their education upgraded just because of that machine. Awesome.
See this link for the One Laptop Per Child organization -
http://laptop.org
People in the west often don’t realise how others in less well developed countries live. I think more would be done about poverty and the world’s problems if people began to understand what needs to be done. They might also start asking how their governments’ policies are affecting poorer countries.
The success of Slumdog Millionaire is a case in point. The news coverage of the lives of the child stars has highlighted the problems facing India’s poorest.
Welcome Sarah. There have been other high-profile events like the Live Aid (1985) and Live 8 (2005) world concerts, and numerous aid organizations like UNICEF and Peace Corps have been engaged for decades on the problem of course.
More recently the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative have made inroads, as well as the micro-lending programs sponsored by some multi-national banks & numerous peer-to-peer websites like Kiva.org.
But yes, citizens in the First World need to make an issue of it. And because we can connect directly now via the WWW, I think in time we’ll manage to do just that. This goes also to the B/P Maxim of Global Economy. I see a globalized economy (we’re there now), as unifying of the material interests of ordinary working people at whatever station they may be in it. In a few more decades, we’ll have collective understanding of that IMO.