Web Foundation visits Kenya, sees poorest areas

Details: Category: Trends & Forecasts; 30 November 2009; 9148 views

Stephane Boyera, Programme Manager to the World Wide Web Foundation, accompanied Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Web Foundation Director Rosemary Leith on their visit to Kenya and Uganda. The journey followed on from their presentation to the 2009 Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Stephane Boyera’s account is summarised here...

Web Foundation Board Member and Director Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Rosemary Leith joined me in Kenya for four days after leaving the 2009 Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, reports Stephane Boyera.

The 2010 World Cup Football activities hit me hard! I flew on the day Egypt and Algeria were playing each other in Khartoum…and my flight was supposed to stop in Khartoum. At the end of the match, there were some troubles, and thus the airport just closed! The pilot decided to wait for the reopening, thus making us wait about three hours on the tarmac in the plane, at 11:30pm. Then two hours later we finally reached the airspace around Khartoum…but the airport was still closed. So we circled in the sky for another hour and, running out of fuel, the pilot decided to go to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. We landed without an issue but just to refuel: we stayed in Addis more than two hours.

We eventually reached Nairobi at around noon instead of 6:25am! Although the 2010 World Cup caused me a delay, on the positive side I learned, upon landing, that France had qualified for the World Cup (yoo hoo!).

Unfortunately, I missed the first half-day of meetings in Nairobi, and only joined Tim and Rosemary for lunch. The remaining three days of meetings went quite well. We met a series of very different and very interesting people from government agencies, non-governmental organisations working in the field in different domains, and the IT sector (ISPs, investors…).

Each time we met with people from the government, they came with a different journalist who knew little about Tim and the Web Foundation. So, on the first day Tim mentioned as an example Open Street Map - a particular initiative aiming to put the Web towards mapping the biggest slum in Nairobi, called Kibera. The next day the press reported that “Tim distributed a set of GPS-enabled handsets to people in Kibera.”

One of the funniest reports described Tim Berners-lee as the World Wide Web “investor” — probably a typo but a funny one. Some other funny excerpts included: “Sir Tim will help writing the Web in local languages!” The press conferences were a good opportunity to help people understand why we were there, and how the Web Foundation might be able to help in the future.

A driving force in Kenya

One impressive thing for me was the number of personal or organisational stories we heard that were made possible through the Web. Our driver during the four days, Shadrack, heard about his job offer as a driver through the Web!

We met a teacher from a Swedish university at SIDAREC who helped the radio station implement its online library using free and open-source software. The station uses the Web to contact the radio team through the Web. Now some of his students are frequently visiting Kenya and helping the radio develop its Web presence.

We visited an elephant orphanage which is saving young elephants who would otherwise die. Much of their funding comes from donations from people who are adopting orphans (virtually). Using the Web to provide information on the orphan, how the orphanage is doing and so on enables them to have closer relationships with adopters, and therefore raise more money to keep the orphanage running. A good story about how the Web can help wildlife conservation.

In my next post, I will go in more details on the different meetings with governments, NGOs, developers, educators and researchers.

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