This post is about where I currently reside.

When I came here to Kumasi, one of the first things the people from IAESTE asked me if it's ok if I stay with a family - and it was ok, of course.

Now the family consists actually only of one member - and that is Dr. De-Graft, or Dr. D-G as I call him.

He is a young lecturer at KN University and lives in a quite big flat about 15 minutes walk from the university campus.

Me and Matthias live in the guest room of this flat. My bed is the one on the left side - on this occasion I want to thank my sister Elisabeth who supplied me with two essential devices to sleep well and safely: the sleeping bag and the mosquito net - thanks a lot!

The apartment is really nice and big - even for non-Ghanaian circumstances, the only problem is that currently there seems to be some problem with water supply and we have to bucket-shower - a new experience.

The Centro de Informatica at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique has been working with telecentres and community development for many years. Polly Gaster, the programme leader reports here about community content in their work.

Local content as an issue is definitely still important for us at CIUEM but sometimes it's hard to find a lot of evidence on the ground. Our main vehicle the last couple of years has been the Community Information and Communication Support Centre (CAICC) CAICC supports all community ICT initiatives, which primarily means telecentres, community radios and CMCs.

In terms of LOCAL content the main activity has been to encourage network members to use their community radios to disseminate local information, not just news items, etc. It's hard to know how successful that is - attempts to get it circulating through the network haven't been very successful so far. CAICC has made a big effort to improve news programming and access to National and International information through circulating material on its e-mail list and through the website.

CIUEM and CAICC's main products continue to be materials on CD-Rom, to take into account lack of connectivity. We plan to produce the website offline and distribute it if possible quarterly, through the channels of the Community Radio Forum (FORCOM). The materials produced locally are generally not stored for very long because of poor storage conditions, limited computer space or spare tapes. CAICC is looking at collecting radio programmes online via MP3 but that will be difficult since even for short programmes the files are too big for convenient downloading.

The main lessons are fairly obvious ones: the communities are interested in receiving locally produced information in their own languages; there is an enormous human resources deficit, due to a combination of poor education system that doesn't encourage people to go outside the curriculum; bright young people having to leave the district if they want to continue their education; inevitable high volunteer turnover; and the simple fact that collecting and processing local INFORMATION in terms of KNOWLEDGE takes time and money (travel, etc), and it's easier to collect NEWS.

Therefore the key (I think) remains continuous training for human resources, plus if possible a minimum of material resources. Although all CAICC training courses include sessions on use of ICT communication tools such as e-mail, blogging, Skype, Internet searching, etc., use is still quite limited, mainly due to lack of connectivity and/or high cost and poor quality. This panorama is expected to change over the next couple of years with the new undersea cables, government emphasis on rural areas, etc.

The Ministry of Science and Technology hopes to set up a knowledge management platform. We are interested in continuing/re-starting work in this area. Our next challenge will be a project for using CAICC and its networks to promote civil society issues and governance, which will mean both generating a lot of content and promoting local generation.

Measuring success is unfortunately almost impossible, other than quantitative measures such as number of news items or whatever, and qualitative in small surveys. But our ambition is to be able to feel that we have made a contribution to local communities' capacity to produce information and debate issues and be in touch with other communities, and achieve more democratic processes in their own organisations and in governance in general. Also, in practical terms, to have brought new skills into the communities that become lifelong skills for the activists and volunteers involved, but also become part of the daily fabric of information and communications and are demystified and passed from hand to hand and generation to generation.

Kiziba Camp is 10 miles away from the nearest town, Kibuye, which is where I live with Sister Isabel. I carpool into the camp with JRS staff (all are Tutsi) at 7am. It takes 1 hour because we pick up a bunch of people (max. has been 13 adults + 1 baby in 1 SUV), drop off some at the office, make another loop around town to pick up some more, and then the road up to the camp is treacherous - a narrow, rocky, dirt road that creeps along a steep cliff. The camp is more than 6,500 feet above sea level.

Refugees often walk to Kibuye and back just to use the Internet. Microsoft and Inveneo are working together to bring computers, solar power, and the Internet to the camp but there are many complications. I may cover that in another blog.

The camp was established in 1996. After the genocide in 1994, the perpetrators fled to the nearby Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), tried to re-organize themselves and rebuild their soldiers (many of whom are children) so they could finish off the Tutsis once and for all. This of course has made the DRC a very dangerous place. The refugees are almost all Tutsis from the DRC.

There are more than 18,500 refugees living in the camp. More than 10,000 are female. More than 10,000 are under the age of 18. They speak mostly Kinyarwanda and some French (they were colonized by the Belgians).

The refugees are free to move in and out of the camp, but it´s a long walk to civilization and they are very poor. They are not allowed to farm outside of the camp, and there is very little space within the camp for them to do so. The World Food Programme (WFP) provides one food basket for each refugee every month. It includes 26 lbs of maize (the corn here is shipped in from countries like the US but is really hard like autumn decoration corn, I´m not sure why they don´t purchase corn from Rwandan farmers), 7 lbs of beans, and 1 lb of crappy vegetable oil. They used to get a protein substance called CSB but that has been cut back. This means the children don´t get porridge in the morning and they often fall asleep in class. In addition, many of the refugees have stomachs that can´t tolerate maize. But they have no choice. Refugees often sell part of their ration to buy other food to vary their diets, and buy shoes and clothes.

Inside the camp there are:

- 700 nursery school students and 20 teachers (the teachers are refugees themselves)

- 4,000 primary school students and 84 teachers

- 850 secondary school students and 26 teachers

- 47 vocational school students and 7 teachers

Every one of my students (refugee teachers) wants to get out of there. But the DRC is still unsafe and the community outside the camp, in Kibuye where I live, is very poor also. My friend Robin introduced me to a motorcycle taxi driver, Ignatious, who has become my personal chauffeur around town. He´s married and has a few children but he needs to spend 2,500 francs (about $4.50) per day to rent the motorcycle, and he often doesn´t make much on top of that. He doesn´t make enough to feed his children and it´s a huge problem. Even though they don´t tip here, I always give him an extra 50%.

I bought a huge laminated map of Africa for them and in last week´s advanced class I had one of them give me a lesson about Africa in English. He did a great job and spoke very fondly of his own country, the DRC, and the rest of the class chimed in. Apparently the DRC is beautiful and green, with lots of rivers and huge, ancient trees. They told me the current president is 33 years old, and took over when his father was murdered. He has no interest in peace. They told me there are millions of perpetrators hiding out in the DRC right now. They told me of the UN peacekeepers who trade weapons for gold and other resources. I asked them what they think the solution is. They said western countries should demand peace in order to do business. Otherwise the money breeds corruption. And of course they said their own people have to stop fighting amongst each other.

Ok... unfortunately dinner is ready and I can´t have Sister Isabel wait. More later...

The Local Content workshop in Brussels is planned for 8th and 9th October 2009. Our overall aim is identify and publicise Local Content work that is going on, to raise awareness about its importance and to try and re-energise the interest of the mainstream development community, including the larger international NGOs and donors. At the workshop:

• We want to gather and record information, stories and learning about Local Content work that is happening in Africa
• We also want to talk about how we can promote that work and how it can link into the Knowledge Sharing work of organisations working across sub-Saharan Africa.
• We are also interested in looking at the traffic of ideas from Local to Global, what happens to the ideas and relationships that sustain learning knowledge sharing at local levels when they connect to Global organisations and networks

We are linking the Local Content workshop with the larger workshop happening also in Brussels from the 6th – 8th October organised by the Knowledge Management for Development (KM4Dev) community. KM4Dev is a community of international development practitioners who are interested in knowledge management and knowledge sharing issues and approaches. The main communication channel is the KM4dev email Dgroup, which has over 850 registered members. The community began in 2000 and since then has developed together a wealth of good practice and experience, a lot of which is stored in the KM4Dev wiki. Its richest resource, though, is the people in the community, many of whom have worked together and built relationships in that time. The quality of the discussion in the group is always high, people offer advice and discuss new ideas and there is an enormous store of experience and connections to draw on for people working in the field.

We chose to link the Local Content workshop to the KM4Dev conference because we believe that people who are working with communities in Africa in local Knowledge Sharing using Local Content can contribute a lot to the discussions at the KM4Dev event. We also believe that participants from the Local Content group would learn a lot also from the people and discussions. As we gather stories on this blog about the work in Africa we are also talking to contributors about their interest in the workshops.

We felt an Earthquake in Bunia, DRC at 5:40pm (GMT+2). Not bad, about 60sec. Loud noise, no damage we noticed.

Going from Mole national park to Tamale (capital of the Northern Region in Ghana) took us 5 hours - again on unpleasant roads - so we were quite happy to arrive there. We didn't make plans for the rest of the day, just recovering from the bus ride and preparing for the following day with another 16 hours of bus riding in total.

In the evening we went to a bar and danced to contemporary Ghanaian music - highlife and hiplife. Our mates from IAESTE Ghana showed us some dance moves.

The next morning we got up at 5 again to go north - heading for the city Paga at the border to Burkina Faso.

The main reason to go to Paga - except the group picture - was that in Paga there are two crocodile ponds with friendly crocodiles which allow that you sit on them when they have eaten enough. So we bought some chickens, fed the crocodiles and everybody made a picture with a big crocodile - quite exciting.

Below, by the way, is my roommate Matthias.

On the way back south we stopped shortly in Tamale to buy me a drum - but we didn't find a seller at the market so I postponed that. There were lots of women selling grain though.

On Sunday at 9 PM we finally arrived at Kumasi.

It seems that we at Maneno weren't the only ones to take advantage of summer doldrums to do something of a look refresh. Our friends at Kabissa did a complete rebuild of their system in Drupal which gave them a new look as well as more refined functionality. MobileActive.org also launched a new site based on Drupal. The blog Jackfruity got a new look as well as 27 months and Chris Blattman. Obviously redesigns are a dime a dozen in the every changing webscape, but I brought up these examples as they generally focus on African issues.

Making things prettier is always good, but having been a web developer for over a decade now, it's interesting to see how design cycles work. We started out with static web pages, moved in to dynamic web pages, then moved in to mashups pages, then CMS pages, and now it's something of a mix of all these, but hosted in the ever-fluffed up Cloud. Don't get me wrong, The Cloud is here to stay, but in lieu of actual news due to the depressed world economy, it seems that anything 'Cloud' and anything 'Twitter' are pretty much all there is to report on in the technology scene.

Adoption Latency

Probably the most interesting thing about these rehashes of the web is how they touch the non-profit or NGO sphere in the last phase. At the start of this year I remember watching a talk where one of the speakers said, "Yeah and this system lets you create a Google Maps mashup which was totally cool in 2005." He was right when he said that because it was part of a software package targeted at non-profits in the US. I'm guessing that they had run their course in selling it to corporate customers some time earlier.

But now, what seems to be the big buzz in non-profit communities is all around Drupal. Everyone wants to have their site based in Drupal to impress I don't know who, because a properly set up Drupal site doesn't let on that it's in Drupal. But, Drupal does do what it is built to do well. It allows people to set up a content management system reasonably quickly. The real advantage though is in the case of a group like Kabissa where they wanted to have an initial CMS (Content Management System) but at the same time were able to add a great many things to the core of it. In their case it's to flesh out their directory system. I assume that it's a similar case for MobileActive, although they seem to have a greater focus on their blog, so I don't know why they went with Drupal as I've not been tremendously impressed by the blogging setups in any of the CMSs out there including Drupal.

The Rub of Being an Optimistic

The problem with any CMS whether it be Drupal, Joomla, Plone or many others is that they are not a one size fits all, one stop shop solution. Groups seem to run in to these things blindly that way and it's often done because they think it's going to be cheap, they have limited funds, and it's going to be fast.

I've worked with Drupal and Joomla before and let me tell you that there is nothing fast about getting a site going with them. Tossing up a site is indeed, easy, but tossing up a site that looks like your organization's site is not. Everyone thinks that they can avoid having to hire some guy like me to get a site going, but unfortunately for them and fortunately for me, it's still the case they need to get a geek on board and generally at quite a cost. This is one of the reasons that in the for-profit world the CMS is in decline in popularity.

How Important is your Site?

A word to the wise out there for any group getting ready to rebuild their site in a CMS: consider everything. There are many free hosted solutions out there these days and even though they will have their limits, your kilometerage will probably be a great deal more if you take a look at them. Google Sites and Yola are two that spring to mind. We're also working to build a hosted site function in to Maneno which the BarCamp Africa site is the first, very beta, version of.

But people need to site back and look at how much they have to spend on a site redo and how important the website is to their organization. If your organization is working in Africa, then the website is crucial to your operations and should be considered as important an expense as office space. Trying to cut corners will not only show, but it will hamper your activities a great deal.

Why Doth no Drupal, Maneno?

To close, a number of people initially asked us why we didn't build Maneno on Drupal or even Wordpress since we're focused on blogging. The simple answer to both of these is that Drupal and Wordpress have paltry multilingual abilities. Yes, you can create a single site in just about any language you want quite well, but having them in multiple languages within the same domain is onerous. On top of that, while Drupal can be slimmed down a good deal depending on your bandwidth needs, Wordpress, is one heavy mutha on the administrative side of things. This is why we have created Maneno anew and to honest, if we weren't doing that, what value would be really be bringing to net?