Africa

Vasco Pyjama talks about community finance. The ROSCA is known as a “sou-sou” in west Africa, or at least in Nimba county, Liberia. Sousous run for a fixed term, based on the number of members. If there are 10 members and the contribution is $10, each month one of the members will get $90 (9 other members * $10 each). At the end of ten months, the sousou can either be restarted, or the membership can be renegotiated (for example, to drop people who failed to pay on time during the past sousou period). If the sousou is reconstituted with more or fewer people, it doesn’t really change anything, it just runs shorter or longer until the next restart. Sousous run best when they are between 6 and 12 people for social and economic reasons (a 5x - 11x payoff is manageable in a cash society). The order of the payouts is determined randomly at the startup meeting of the sousou. Sometimes people negotiate to trade their places in the payout order in order to assure that the sousou payout would arrive at a time that was convenient for them. ...

What are the economic effects of the repair vs replace decision? Interesting question, that. If you missed “more local employment of the blue collar type”, go read this: There is a slight diversion of purchasing strategy, repair rather than replace. This feeds a blue collar industry in the local region. It used to be, when money was loose, replace with new was the norm. If the repair was 75 percent of the cost of replacement a new motor was ordered, the old motor was scraped, and the country of origin (Mexico, China, Taiwan) benefited. These beautiful USA built, 50 year old, 200 horsepower motors, were going to the scrap heap. ...

Yay for old friends, economics, and technology! All at once! kc wrote a blog posting with her humble ideas on how to use IP address space tax. Wait… there’s a tax on address space? Yes, because it has become a scare quantity, because people are too lazy to move to IPv6, IPv4 address space is running out. The best of all bad ideas about what to do about this is to make an open market for address space, as though network addresses were some kind of useful piece of property with any kind of useful value. (BTW: When the present econolypse is over, and the next bubble starts, it will be an IPv4 address space bubble. Mark my words…) Address space is bits. We can make more bits… Look! I just made some! But because the value of a network exists in everyone who is using it, not just your implementation of the network, you can’t just add bits in your IP stack and get any benefit. So, while bits are free, and address space could conceiveably be free, because we have a network with limited space, we have a scarce asset. And, of course, what do humans do with scarce assets? We make bubbles! Yay for bubbles! ...

Tonight I am giving a talk the Old Broadcasting House at O’Reilly Ignite, UK North. Here are my slides. Update: There’s a video here.

A friend sent me this question: Speaking of healthy, when you’re in Africa, do you take malaria medication the whole time you’re there? Is 45 days too long to take it? First, taking it 45 days is no big deal. It’s taking it for months on end (9, 18, 60) that is not recommended – not because of actual risks, but because of not enough study. Second, here’s Jeff’s “cut-through-the-crap” guide to malaria meds: ...

One of the headlines that came out of my trip to Freetown was “The Skills Exist, Use Them!” First, a bit more about what I was doing there. I was on a contract with the Health Metrics Network, which is a project running under the auspices of the World Health Organization, but funded by the Gates Foundation. HMN is supposed to go around building a network, not of routers and switches, but people who understand the challenges of constructing and running health information systems. Those people should be researchers, technologists, and public health people. And those people should be a mix of those talking about it (easy to find in Geneva, they are douze pour une centime) and those doing it. The latter are a little harder to find… ...

I am back from Freetown, freezing in Leeds. I’ve spent today trying to get software working including reinstalling Chrome (which started marking all words as misspelled) and Word Press which inexplicably started hanging. I’ll write a note, maybe this weekend, about what I was doing in Freetown. It was fun, and we got a lot accomplished, so it’s a worthwhile story to tell.

Rare is the dinner in an expat restaurant in Africa which is not (politely and quietly) interrupted by a DVD-man. They have a stock of DVD’s in their backpacks, and work their way through the restaurant giving you a chance to peruse their wares. You have to see the DVDs to believe them, they are made up of several pirated Hollywood movies, with many different versions, all on one disc, enclosed in a professional-looking full color envelope. They have titles like “Segal vs Chan”… a DVD full of Steve Segal and Jackie Chan movies. Another great title is “Superhero Schoolwork”, including Spiderman, Superman, and Wonderwoman (and all the sequels thereof). The DVD’s are billed as “50 in one”, though it requires some clever counting to find 50 movies on one disc. Typically, there are more like 12 movies on a DVD – in itself an impressive achievement of DVD mastering and compression-algorithm optimization. ...

I started a two week trip to Freetown, Sierra Leone yesterday. I am here as an IT consultant for the Health Metrics Network, part of the World Health Organization. We are taking a bunch of random hardware that the government bought with a not-quite-complete architecture and putting in place a foundation for IT services related to the Health Information System. Of course, the HIS relies on lots and lots of low tech forms and paperwork “up country”, but there’s also a need for a datacenter in the capital. ...

Another reference I don’t want to lose: Innovation in Africa Tips. Also, why is it “in Africa”? What happened that Africa got so far behind, or is getting so much of the attention? Why don’t we advise people how to make a new clean water technology stick in SE Asia, or in South America anymore? Even a few years ago when I came to this world, there was much more discussion of all the poor places, and not just Africa. ...