The office is a drab orange and brown with a scattering of dusty armchairs and two threadbare carpets. The PC on a desk in the corner is making unhealthy noises. There are piles of paper on the second desk, one of which is threatening to meet the carpet at any moment. The curtains are drawn but the air’s still warm. There’s a faint smell of industrial cleaner.
Tom and I are here for coffee with the Minister of Telecommunications in one of the rambling ill-kempt government buildings of the rambling ill-kempt Ethiopian government. It’s the third attempt at the appointment and our fixer (and his fixer) are also with us.
Some of our friends have been working hard for the past fortnight building a computer room and network for the (only) medical university. The British Medical Journal will now be online for free and medical training information can be shared for the first time.
But the lack of access to knowledge scares me. Even in the best teaching hospitals no one can afford the journals that cram shelves in the smallest of universities at home. The hospital building is dauntingly empty, and the lack of money is everywhere.; Cupboards empty of instruments, peeling paint in the medical rooms, corridors closed because there’s no electricity for the lighting. Addis Ababa has come a long way since the famines and wars wrecked this proud mountain kingdom, but it has a depressingly long way to go still.
And I guess that’s why Tom, Ev, Elizabeth and I have taken a couple of weeks out. To see if we can help in a small way. Elizabeth has just finished writing a book about street children, based on the life of a young orphan she befriended a few years back. She has some amazing news for him: his share of the royalties will make him a millionaire and that means he no longer has to sleep in the steel innards of a forgotten shipping container in the yard of an orphanage. The challenge will be how to give it to him, how to set up a trust, and who to trust to set it up. He’s well and beams when he sees us. More staggering, he’s saved up some money to put himself through a computing course.
Ev and Tom are ex-British Council – among a host of other things – and the entire group, including the rest of the team back home, are educational directors past and present. I earned my place through knowing a little about online and charity work, our fixers earn theirs through the sort of accidents that happen when expats get sent over for short projects and get seduced into spending a lifetime.
Back in the office the coffee arrives.
We’re working on some projects to raise university teaching standards. The theory’s simple; the practice painful, but technical leapfrog could be a critical way out. Ethiopia needs trade, foreign money, stronger agriculture and better healthcare. To get any of this it needs better education (100 kids cram into a primary class with one stretched teacher and no books). Education is inseparable to English, the national language and medium of instruction after primary school. English teaching has some way to go, but no resources to get there. Our contributions are some new materials, a plan to use the web to sneak access to resources for free, and a way of plugging in email as a teacher training support tool. Help the teacher trainers and everything cascades down.
But it’s a long way to the ground and everything is broken. Nothing will cascade anywhere because nothing is in place. The NGOs of Addis are littered with good intentions that just broke along the way. Yesterday was a perfect example
US-AID is shipping dozens of state-of-the-art Dells to classrooms with leaking roofs and glassless windows. Currency is hard to trade and seems impossible outside Sudan or Eritrea. In the Ministry of Education there’s a volunteer teacher from London (just one by the way) writing the new (first?) national curriculum. She’s in high spirits but the task is daunting. Power is so unstable that I’m yet to have electricity, water and the telephone simultaneously working at home in the heart of the show-piece embassy district of Addis. The country is so poor there’s not even any rubbish on the streets.
We could have planned an easier vacation.
And then there’s the bureaucracy; the staggering bureaucracy that pushes back against just about anything NGOs try. It’s not even corruption (Ethiopia is unique here for Africa); it’s just institutionalised inefficiency to the point of poke-your-eyes-out-with-your-pencil-exasperation.
Fifteen minutes into coffee and we hit a classic example: we need a web address to host the information about the service for the development team and the pilot group.
The government controls the internet (and really, they do) so we have to ask the Minister if he’ll let us register a website, which he would, if there was a process in place to do so, which there isn’t, because there’s so little demand, presumably because there is no process in place. After five minutes of a somewhat cyclical argument, we finally reach the core of the problem; no registration form.
Given that it’s the web, you might think we could just log on to a nice old .com site. But the connections into and out of the country are painful. The Minister is proud that there quintroupling the bandwidth next month (read next year), but the national link is currently only eight times the size of the pipe from my home back in London, a home that right now seems so very, very far away..
Working in these places is painful, unravel one part of the string and the lights go out and you have to search for your piddly piece of string again. I’ll try till I go blind.
