On being broke, being poor, and being glad that I have the luxury of saving

I hate the end of the year in Benin. Everybody turns into a liar. “I’ll pay you tomorrow.” “I’ll call you this evening.” “Stop by at the end of the week.” “Let’s make an appointment for 4:00.” Nobody calls, and we constantly show up to empty offices. It’s more socially acceptable (and easier) to lie than it is to simply admit that they don’t have the money.

Manipulating and manging people you owe money to is an essential part of Beninese culture. You can’t cut someone off unless you have a face-to-face meeting, and if miraculously the face-to-face meeting never occurs, well, it’s your debtor’s lucky day. “Il nous gere.” we say to one another, and sigh.

The biggest spender in Benin is the government, who ran out of money in May. Since then, they’ve been begging, borrowing, and stealing (oh yes) just to pay salaries. Contracts finished in 2008 rest unpaid, and look to stay that way until at least April 2010. If the government can’t pay its large contractors, large contractors can’t pay medium sized contractors, who can’t pay the small businesses they work with, and at the end of the day, somebody’s salary’s not getting paid.

People Online works with small businesses. A lot of people owe us money. It’s easy to say, “Cut off their hosting! Stop doing work for them!” But if we do that, then we lose any change of recouping our losses when everyone finally does get paid in April 2010. And of course, you can’t squeeze water from a stone. We’re well aware that our clients are broke broke broke. It’s not like it’s their fault. Their clients aren’t honoring their contracts either.

Neighbors who can’t pay their rent. Friends who’ve had their electricity cut off. Colleagues who can no longer afford their Internet connection. Small businesses that can no longer pay salaries. This is the precarity of the middle class.

What do you do when a friend comes to borrow $20, and for the first time it’s a choice between helping your friend and paying your water bill? When your brother, who’s always been able to rely on you in a pinch, needs twice as much as usual, but you only have half as much as usual? When your niece’s family can’t afford her school fees, and you no longer have enough to make up the difference?

In normal times, you wouldn’t hesitate to put yourself in a position of slight difficulty to help out your family. You know that when you’re in trouble, your neighbors and family will be there for you too. Everybody’s always broke, and the the easy give-and-take of favors often means the difference between being broke and being poor. Today, the friendly process of social loans has stopped working, and it’s breaking apart the fabric of society.

Everyone knows the end of the year is difficult. Smart businesses (like People Online) prepare a cushion. Normally, this process starts right about now. Mid-November. The gov’t closes the its coffers, and everyone begins the waiting game until February, when some bills will start to get paid, or April, if you’re a small business owed by the government.

This year, the government stopped paying its bills in September, which means that funds were cut off before anyone finished establishing their cushion. Call it corruption, call it the financial crisis, call it utterly irresponsible government spending, call it what you will. The country’s run out of money, and for Benin’s middle class, the difference between being broke and being poor gets just a little bit more blurrier every day.

 
Posted in Development | 4 Comments

Did you know the sky is blue? Obvious and less-obvious in ICT4D conversations

I have a confession to make.

I’m not a development worker.

I work with ICTs in the developing world, but I am driven by profit. This is both a luxury and a burden. It’s cool that people think I have something to say about ICT4D. I don’t. I have a lot to say about ICTs in the developing world, but much less to say about ICTs in a development context. Because I don’t know a bloody thing about development. My world view is skewed towards profits and markets.

In my line of work, ROI is very clear. Either the project makes (or saves!) my client a lot of money, or it doesn’t. Either it increases exposure by X number of readers a month or it doesn’t. Either it brings in advertising revenue, or it doesn’t. Either it brings in new clients, or it doesn’t. Either it fills a market need or it doesn’t.

Our clients are not poor. Broke, sure, that’s normal for small businesses everywhere in the world. But not poor. Their clients are rarely poor either. We don’t work with the BoP.

We don’t have to worry about quality of life.  We don’t have to worry about development indicators. We don’t even have to worry about government buy-in. While we do worry about ethics, we don’t have to worry about negative externalities that will make life worse for a large number of people. Our projects just don’t work that way (and thank goodness for that).

On the other hand, because our clients are paying for the tools we build, I don’t have the luxury of choosing an expensive tool that may or may not work. I can only choose tools that work. Otherwise, I lose clients. Not taking end-users needs and wants into consideration results in failed projects lessoned learned. “Lessons learned” = “very expensive mistake” for clients with limited cash flow.

Seems people still thinking, develop in West and take it to Africa who lags. Need to develop in Africa within resource & context #ICT4D

It’s a luxury to be able to work exclusively locally. Even when we deal with the government, there’s flexibility that doesn’t exist in development and aid sectors, because we’re a private sector firm being paid for our services. As a businesswoman, I cannot imagine designing a tool for local businesses without ever having set foot on the ground and spoken to the end users.

Technology is a tool that allows users to do many many things, including becoming more informed about the world around them, improve rural heath care, encourage citizen journalism, clean water, and a million other things. Tools have to be appropriate to their context.

In some ways, it’s limiting to only do work for money. There are a lot of cool projects that pass us by, including projects that could improve quality of life for a lot of people. Our work is almost exclusively small and local, which means that we rarely work on country-wide implementations. We don’t do large-scale public health projects, for example. Even when we work with development organizations, we’re very focused. We’re hired to accomplish very specific goals: build X tool that accomplishes Y within Z budget, or train X number of people to be able to accomplish Y.

Technology is easy. Issues around geography, language, culture, true empowerment and paths to adoption are challenges. #ICT4D

On the other hand, it’s liberating. My job is to look at the market and find new ways to fill market gaps, and that’s easy to measure. Either we’re profitable or we’re not.

ICT4D fills the space between “market demand” and “making lives better.” There are a million ways to improve quality of life that don’t have obvious revenue models. I like to use crisis mapping as an example of this, but there are many others (public health, education, etc). Projects like this are what government and development do best. Entrepreneurs aren’t moving into this space because we can’t figure out ways to make them profitable (yet).

It’s appalling to me that there are people who design projects without accounting for local needs. It’s appalling to me that we even need to discuss why this is important. Those who took part in yesterday’s Twitter chat are aware of this. But for me, it’s like being aware that the sky is blue. Of course it’s blue. There’s a reason it’s blue. Everybody knows it’s blue. Why are we running around talking about how blue the sky is?

#ICT4D #FAIL is corp. IT firms installing high end Cisco + Blades + CO2 fire supression in crumbling gov ministries. IT is not Magic.

The answer is, of course, that there are a large number of people involved in ICT4D who are not aware that context-appropriate solutions are the only solutions that work. Which is crazy. I actually don’t know anyone in #ict4d who isn’t having intelligent conversations about appropriate technology. I do, however, have evidence that such people exist, because Beninese ministries keep paying me to clean up their messes. Someday, I would like to meet these folks.

It’s odd to participate in conversations about development where everyone’s like, “Yeah! Local! Small! Low-tech! Sustainable!” For a businessperson, these things are so painfully obvious, they even don’t need to be said.

 
Posted in Development, IT in Africa | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

On Freedom of the Press in Benin, and the New Lack Thereof

Freedom of the press and the right to say what I want, when I want, is something I take for granted. Despite the many problems that plague American media, our right to free speech is well protected. The press, while beholden to its corporate interests, does not fear jail or sanctions for telling the truth, nor for expressing a negative opinion about the current administration.

On November 3, CAPP FM, one of Benin’s oldest and certainly one of the most respected radio stations aired a program highly critical of the administration and several politicians. The administration reacted immediately, accusing the radio host of slander and inciting violence. The state has permanently removed her right to appear on the air in Benin. CAPP FM has been suspended for a month and has publicly apologized. If they had not apologized or had defended the woman, they risked having their license permanently revoked by the state.

Mme. VALDAVE Emailia hosts a religious show on CAPP FM. The following texts are those that the High Audiovisuel Communication Authority determined problematic (quoted directly from the text of the decision against the radio*):

» Que le sang de Jésus-Christ de Nazareth coule sur tous les hommes maintenant. Coule dans tous les services de l’Etat, les institutions de la République, les institutions étrangères, les représentants diplomatiques pour purifier ce pays le Bénin de toute souillure, de toute abomination, de tout esprit humain qui ne glorifie pas le nom de Jésus Christ de Nazareth, de tout esprit contraire au plan de DIEU pour ce pays »

That blood of Jesus Christ of Nazereth runs over men. Runs in all the departments of the State, the institutions of the Republic, foreign institutions, diplomatic representatives, to purify this country, the Benin, of all sin, of all abomination, of all human spirit that doesn’t glorifiy Christ, of all spirit against the plan of God for this country.

» Qu’avons-nous compris? Nous avons compris que vous [YAYI Boni] n’avez pas été quelqu’un avant de devenir quelque chose dans ce pays le Bénin. Nous avons compris que depuis trois ans nous vivons au Bénin, l’épisode d’une bande d’opportunistes en aventure; nous avons compris que vous êtes, non pardon que tu es scorpion. Mais pourquoi un scorpion? Le venin du scorpion est renfermé dans sa queue donc doux au départ, tendre au début mais féroce à la fin. C’est ce que tu es. Un scorpion qui commence bien, qui trompe au début et qui montre après son vrai visage »

What have we understood? We have come to understand that you [YAYI Boni] were no one before becoming something in this country, the Benin. We have understand that, during the last three years in Benin, we have lived an episode of a band of opportunistic adventurers; we have understand that you are, without pardon, a scorpion. And why a scorpion? The venom of a scorpion is locked up in its tail, so sweet in the beginning, tender in the beginning, but ferocious at the end. That’s what you are. A scorpion that starts well, who convinces in the beginning, and shows his true face afterwards.

Incendiary? Sure. Inciting violence? Well, not exactly. Television stations have been airing relevant bits of the radio show, and the clips used by the tribunal to judge the radio host and CAPP FM. Bizarrely, the clips don’t even appear to be controversial. It is true that in many ways life in Benin is worse in 2009 than it was in 2006. It is true that business in Cotonou has boomed, but the rural poor have been largely left behind. It is true that the state is more corrupt now than it was under Kérékou.

Benin has a long tradition of intellectualism, scholarship, and freedom of expression. Even during 17 years of dictatorship, the Beninese press was allowed to criticize the administration. Elections were held in 1991, and Benin saw Africa’s first peaceful transition between communist dictatorship and functioning democracy. YAYI Boni campaigned on change. “This can change. This must change. This will change.” Le changement lit the country on fire. In 2006, free and fair elections elected the Dr. Thomas Boni YAYI to power, with 75% suffrage.

Since 2006, freedom of expression and freedom of the press has been radically inhibited in Benin. Whether jailing journalists and editors who speak out against the administration, or sanctioning television and radio stations, the administration comes down hard on those who dare criticize.

Two weeks ago, Reporters sans frontières (Reporters Without Borders) published their annual freedom of the press index. Benin has fallen from 23rd in 2006 to 72 in 2009. During the run-up to elections in 2011, I have a hard time imagining that things will get any better.

More information (in French, of course):

*Full disclosure: the Nokoue is a client.

 
Posted in Politics | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

On Internet in Benin and the lack thereof

Last Thursday, we woke up to no Internet. At 8:00, we called Benin Telecoms to signal the problem. “We’ll send a team right away,” they said. “Are you sure you need to send a team out here? We just can’t log in, so the problem’s probably on your end.” “What could you possibly know about our servers? We’ll send a team over right away,” they responded.

At 10:30, still no team. Bertrand calls again. “Yeah, we can’t send anyone because we don’t have any spare cars. The director said that we can only transport equipment in official vehicles, and all of the teams are already out.” “But we were the first ones to call this morning!” Bertrand protested. “Yeah, well, not my problem. We’ll call you right before the team leaves for your house.” “What? I have a job, you know. I can’t wait around all day.” “Well, that’s not my problem either. The team will come when it comes.”

5:30pm. You guessed it. Still no connection, still no visit from Benin Telecoms.

Eventually their technicians stopped by, only to tell us that our recharge card had expired early.” Just pay another $50 for a new one,” they said. “But we’ve got 10 days left on this one!” “Yeah, we can’t help you.” We made enough noise that the techs spent all day Friday trying to credit our account. It didn’t work (of course it didn’t work!), and we ended buying a card and getting our connection back Friday evening.

Last night, some guys selling a shady satellite connection stopped by. I guess they’re used to talking to potential clients who know nothing about the Internet, because they were pretty much assholes. Sorry to disappoint, but I’m not a dumb trophy wife, and I ask smart questions. They’ll get back to me, they said.

This morning? You guessed it. The connection’s out again.

Because we can’t get DSL in our neighborhood, there’s really only one alternative to Benin Telecoms. Unfortunately, they’re more expensive, and we had a really awful experience the last time we used them. We actually met with the Lebanese owners a few weeks ago. It was a lovely conversation and I appreciated the birds-eye view of the telecoms industry. They seemed like nice guys. However, all the nice guys in the world can’t get me enthusiastic about going back to an ISP where we were treated so terribly before. Every time I think about walking into their waiting room, my stomach clenches and I start to feel dizzy.

Yeah, that’s right. Theresa “Fuck this shit I CAN TAKE YOU” Carpenter Sondjo is afraid to walk into a Beninese ISP because they treated me so awfully the last time. What if that asshole is still there? What if he refuses to sign us up because we left them before? What if they call me a liar again? What if they lie about our contract again? What if they lie to my husband about what they promised us when he goes alone because I’m too upset to go back? What if we pay for a connection after they’ve promised to reimburse us the entire $200 installation fee if the connection sucks, and then tell us that they’ll be keeping $50 anyway? What if I end up crying in their lobby again?

Of course all that would never happen. The reality is that I’d just call up their Commercial Director and say, “Yo, we’re ready to try again.” And he’d be super nice and take care of all the details and no problem at all. But of course that doesn’t stop me from having completely irrational freakouts.

All this to say that for the moment we’re stuck with Benin Telecoms. And no connection. And that makes me sad.

I thought this post was published this morning but the connection must have conked out in the middle of the upload AND SO IT GOES.

 
Posted in IT in Africa | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Why is so hard to understand why Universal fucking Health Care is a GOOD THING?

I had lunch with an expat this morning, and said I that sometimes I have a hard time talking about development in Benin, as even we haven’t gotten it right yet. She looked at me with raised eyebrows and said, “We??!? *I* come from a country that has universal health care and free education up through university.”

She’s Danish.

For everyone who’s not actively involved in the battle for a public option, let me explain something. I do not have health insurance, and I want to have children some day. I can:

  1. Give birth in Benin, where, if something goes wrong, there may or may not even be any blood in the national blood bank if there’s a problem and I hemorrhage. Certainly, if my baby is born prematurely or in poor health, the odds of its survival are small.
  2. Go home and pay upwards of $10,000 to give birth in the country of my birth, where if something goes wrong, I will be paying off medical bills larger than my student loans for the rest of my life ($50,000 for a premature birth, for example).

There are those of you who will respond that it is my choice to live in Benin. What if I were simply unemployed? Would that make you more sympathetic? If I were on welfare, would you be less sympathetic? Do I have less a right to health care because I live abroad than because I live in the States? Do those without jobs have less rights to health care? Pre-natal care? Maternal care?

These days, the political has become very, very personal.

 
Posted in Development, Getting it off my chest | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

On why language is important when talking about women in tech

This is the second in a series of posts where I address technology, women in technology, and women in technology in Benin. *

Accompanying the recent spate of questions about how to find more and better women speakers for tech conferences, the general lack of women in technology, and a lot of comments about women’s capabilities and skills, has been a dreadful abuse of the English language hinting that women just don’t hack it in the technology sphere.

Why is okay to say that Mike Arrington is an asshole, but calling Sarah Lacey a princess is off limits? Why is making snarky comments about Xeni’s good looks bad, but saying that Stii is adorable okay?

In a word, privilege. What? What’s privilege, you say? It’s being the default (male) and benefiting from living in a patriarchal society that is institutionally sexist. It’s not intentional and it is not the same thing as being sexist or misogynist. If you have privilege, you can’t help it, and you can’t get rid of it. But you should realize it exists. Here’s a great list of privileges men have that women don’t. It’s worth reading the entire article, but I’m excerpting items that are particularly relevant to this discussion.

If I am male …

1. My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.

4. If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this won’t be seen as a black mark against my entire sex’s capabilities.

10. If I have children but do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity will not be called into question.

15. When I ask to see “the person in charge,” odds are I will face a person of my own sex. The higher-up in the organization the person is, the surer I can be.

24. Even if I sleep with a lot of women, there is no chance that I will be seriously labeled a “slut,” nor is there any male counterpart to “slut-bashing.”

33. My ability to make important decisions and my capability in general will never be questioned depending on what time of the month it is.

41. Magazines, billboards, television, movies, pornography, and virtually all of media is filled with images of scantily-clad women intended to appeal to me sexually. Such images of men exist, but are rarer.

42. In general, I am under much less pressure to be thin than my female counterparts are. If I am fat, I probably suffer fewer social and economic consequences for being fat than fat women do.

45. On average, I am not interrupted by women as often as women are interrupted by men.

46. I have the privilege of being unaware of my male privilege.

So what does this all mean, and how does it apply to talking about women in tech?

There are a lot of snotty jerks who think they’re smarter than everyone else in the tech sphere. There are a lot of pundits whose qualifications are doubtful at best. But singling out women as being particularly unqualified is unfair and contributes to the “boys club” feeling that tech often has. When you call a man an asshole, that man is an asshole. When you say that there are too many princesses writing about tech, you’re making a point about women, not just that woman.

In a male dominated sphere, especially one as related to show biz as the start-up scene, women get farther by being beautiful, charming, and having a larger than life personality. This is not any particular woman’s fault. It’s the fault of a patriarchal system that makes women sex objects first and entrepreneurs second.

In “Technology, the African women in it, and beer”, Miquel said:

For women (again in North America and Europe) the focus is usually on being some cutesy girl who does the occasional special interest piece, but who has no idea which end of a conditional statement is up. The worst of this type are the Sarah Laceys and Xeni Jardins of the world because they create a perception that if you’re a cute, sexy girl, then that’s all that matters. In other words, style and appearance far outweigh the substance of what they write.

Sure, their good looks might be what appeals to a lot of misogynist geeks, but the reality is that these women write very competently about technology. You don’t have to be a programmer to write about tech. Mike Arrington and Corey Doctorow aren’t techies, but nobody runs around questioning their right to write about technology.

Using words like “princess” and “diva” to negatively class women participating in the tech scene reinforces privilege by reinforcing the idea that a woman has to work twice as hard to prove herself, especially if she is beautiful. It’s not enough that she’s participating. Now, she has to participate in exactly the way and manner that men want her to. She has to be conscious of the image she projects, not simply for her own good, but because for many readers, she represents her entire gender.

There are many kinds of women. Happy women. Sad women. Beautiful women. Ugly women. Smart women. Technical women. Nice women. Mean women. We want more women in tech. We want more woman programmers, more woman pundits, more woman critics, more woman writers, more woman presenters, more woman everything. And that means welcoming everyone, whether you feel like you can take them out for a beer or not.

Both Africa and the West need more women in tech. Continuing to stereotype western women in tech as princesses and divas only worsens the problem, instead of fixing it. Certainly, it gives no credit to the thousands of women that spend their entire lives developing new and exciting technologies.

* Parts of this post are excerpted from an email that I sent to Miquel before picking on him in public.

 
Posted in Getting it off my chest, IT in Africa | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

On women in tech, in Benin and back home in the States

This is the first of a series of posts in which I’ll discuss technology, women in technology, and women in technology in Benin.

My clients are all businessmen. Accent on men. After over two years of developing websites and web applications in Cotonou, we have a lot of clients (what can I say, we’re good at what we do!). Of these clients, two are women.

Less than 5% of all the clients we’ve taken on in two years are women.

I taught web development at Benin’s best public business school. Less than 10% of my students were women and of these, 100% wanted to go into MIS, not programming. A shame, because the quality of the women’s work was far more consistent than that of their male counterparts. I have yet to work with a female coder.

So why aren’t there more women in tech and running tech businesses in Benin?

  • Maternity leave makes women less competitive and more expensive to hire. Despite any legal protections in place, paternity leave effectively does not exist, although most businesses allow a few days.
  • There are far fewer girls in higher education than men. Women have lower literacy rates and higher dropout rates for a number of reasons.
  • Women face strong social pressure to take on jobs that allow time off to take care of a family because day-to-day childcare is the women’s responsibility and not the man’s.
  • Women are considered more caring, more nurturing, and more illogical than their male counterparts. And the behaviors that make for successful managers are socially inacceptable for women.
  • Women are expected to get married and start a family. Until they’ve done this, they won’t be taken seriously or considered successful. After they’ve done this, they’ve got kids, which is not conducive to taking risks like starting a business or working for a start-up.
  • Paradoxically, the strong pressure on rich upwardly mobile women to not depend on their husbands for income makes choosing a risky career harder for the very women who should have it easier.
  • Women who do succeed in tech are marginalized socially for a number of reasons, including their small numbers, their perceived sexuality, and the fact that they can’t out drinking with the boys when there’s a baby at home waiting for them.
  • Men don’t like it when women initially intrude into traditionally male spheres.
  • Misogyny.

Wait a second, how many of these points are true for the States too?

There’s been a bit of talk lately about the lack of women at TechChruch50, at tech conferences, and in the technology sphere in general*. A great deal of the commentary is women responding, “Yes, of course there’s a problem,” and men responding, “What do you want from me?!?! We live in post-feminist world. Sexism is dead, okay?!?!”

As a woman who lives in the developing world, this kind of rhetoric falls particularly flat because it’s the same rhetoric that encourages sexism and misogyny here. “We let you vote, what more do you want?” “We gave you legal protection from discrimination. If you’re sexually harassed on the job, you must have been asking for it.” “Women are just naturally more nurturing. That’s why they should stay home and take care of the kids.” “Men shouldn’t have to help level the playing field. It’s not our fault women just aren’t interested in tech. Finding quality women conference speakers who can serve as examples and mentors and even tokens is hard and shouldn’t be our responsibility.”

Sound familiar to anyone else? It’s so weird that the same men who can be so open about the difficulties faced by women in emerging economies are so bloody blind when it comes to their home turf.

 
Posted in Getting it off my chest, IT in Africa | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments