Immersion

Nsikan, Arvind and I spent a couple of hours with Dr. Raymond Akwule, formerly a professor at George Mason, and current CEO of the Netpost, a public-private entity attempting to span Nigeria with Internet access and services by leveraging the existing postal service infrastructure. Dr. Akuwle, a very professional, ambitious and visionary man has had his hand in world affairs for many years and in ICT in developing countries during that time as well.

He spoke of early 80's when he recognized the need for national telecommunications infrastructure in Nigeria, his work in various countries helping create Internet gateways, of his work with establishing DBI, his work with the UN, The Gambia, Ghana, South Africa, and elsewhere.

Originally our team had targeted working closely with Dr. Akwule on our LMI project. During discussions, he had cooled on the idea and he gave his reasoning during our discussions. His argument was largely that the amount of time the team would be able to spend on the project would not be sufficient to produce 'real' results that would be useful to 'people like him'. I tend to agree that substantial, large-scale impact studies and research are indeed needed, there are a number of smaller and yet useful projects that can be completed in the time frame.

I would also argue that the likelyhood of success of projects such as ours are very dependent on the cooperation and assistance of people like Dr. Akwule -- that the 'immersion' process of understanding the culture, the situation on the ground, the background material -- all of that could and should begin and proceed throughout the semester culminating in the on-ground experience.

This, in fact, is what we were attempting to do early on in the semester when the original proposal was floated to do this project. One could imagine that with current field support, a small team of researchers could gain a better foundation in which to arrive in country with a well established background, ready to execute. Rather, what ended up was very little ground support with the team having to perform a lot of logistics and catchup work on the ground rather than back home. In my estimation, not the most effective use of our time.

Nonetheless, Dr. Akwule provided many insights into the evironment, some useful advice and perhaps some additional contacts that we can leverage in our reserach. His knowledge of the cyber cafe scene is fairly extensive (even going of into a discussion of C- versus Ku-band satellite capabilties) given that that is one element of the Netpost strategy. His thoughts on this topic could be very useful for our understanding of the situation and a faming of the problem sets.