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To Ghana, Uganda, and Beyond:
Fellowship students take
to the field
By Keri Hayes Troutman
“Having an opportunity to conduct research that has a significant
social impact is a dream that many of us share,” says EECS
doctoral student and Berkeley-UNIDO fellow Matthew Kam.
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Matthew Kam (left) and Tu Tran of the Uganda microfinance
team prepare for their upcoming fieldwork.
PEG SKORPINSKI PHOTO |
To that end, this summer eight Berkeley-UNIDO fellowship teams—29
students in all—departed from Berkeley, bound for destinations
from China to Uganda. Their work—underwritten with awards
of up to $25,000 per project raised by Berkeley’s Management
of Technology (MOT) program and a long list of corporate sponsors—ranged
from creating solar-powered lighting systems in rural China and
advancing cancer prevention in southern Africa to enhancing Internet
access in Ghana and extending microfinance loans in Uganda.
A short course co-taught last spring by Haas professors Andrew
Isaacs and Kristi Raube readied students for field work, offering
the nuts and bolts of field methods and data collection tools.
“It was the launch pad for their work abroad,” says
Haas faculty member Isaacs, executive director of the University’s
MOT program and program director of the Berkeley-UNIDO “Bridging
the Divide” conference held on campus last spring. Professor
Raube is executive director of the Haas Graduate Program in Health
Management.
“UNIDO has 170 member nations and field operations on the
ground in 35 different countries, but it doesn’t have large-scale
technology research programs like we have at Berkeley,”
Isaacs says.
Initiated two years ago, the fellowships emerged from discussions
between UNIDO and Berkeley’s MOT faculty—the campus’s
largest interdisciplinary program, which includes the College
of Engineering, the Haas School of Business, and the School of
Information Management and Systems (SIMS). “These fellowships
provide our students with a rare opportunity to get into the field
and make a difference in peoples’ lives,” says engineering
Dean Richard Newton.
Assessing Microfinance in Uganda:
Making IT a “best friend”
Throughout the developing world, small businesses thrive or fail
on what, to Western minds, are minute amounts of cash. When Muhammad
Yunus, economics professor at Chittagong University, Bangladesh,
observed local women in need of cash to expand their bamboo chair-building
business, he approached local banks seeking loans on their behalf,
unsuccessfully. Instead, he loaned $26 each to 42 village women,
launching a mini-economic revolution. Two decades later, the Grameen
Bank that emerged from those initial transactions has more than
a thousand branches and three million borrowers in 44,000 villages—accomplished
using IT as a “best friend,” as Yunus puts it. More
than 50 countries have since modeled their microfinance programs—granting
microloans to the poor—after the Grameen Bank.
“It is well understood, after 20 years of experience, that
microfinance can have tremendous impact, not only at the grassroots
level for communities in the developing world, but also in a macro-sense
to shift the direction of an entire country’s economy,”
says Isaacs.
In that context, the Berkeley-UNIDO Ugandan Fellowship team of
two—Matthew Kam (EECS) and Tu Tran (SIMS)—settled
into the lush green capital city Kampala and three rural outlying
districts in late August to begin formal assessments of the newly
developed Remote Transaction System. The RTS is a combination
of loan-tracking technologies and business processes developed
by the international consortium known as the Microdevelopment
Finance Team (MFT), which was convened by Hewlett-Packard. It
aims to reduce operational overhead and promote sustainability,
creating breakthroughs in the scale of microfinance operations.
A few months prior to the students’ arrival, MFT had established
a pilot program with three local microfinance institutions and
some 4,500 clients in the region, granting small loans for a one-year
trial, or two loan cycles. The MFT set up the technology and ran
the trials, while the Berkeley Fellows acted as third-party evaluators.
The timing was right for the Berkeley project in Uganda, as the
East African country recently implemented regulatory changes allowing
microfinance institutions to make savings deposits. Such institutions
usually rely on governments and donor organizations for capital
to fund loans.
“This really helps the lenders stay financially sustainable
because they can rely on their own funds rather than strictly
upon donors,” says Tran. “It helps too that Uganda
already has a pretty extensive cellular network. It’s one
place the government has invested.”
Picture this scenario: A young Ugandan woman who buys and sells
fruits and vegetables for a living needs cash to make her initial
purchases. She asks for a small loan to tide her through, travels
to the city market, then returns home to sell her produce at the
local market. En route, she stops at a roadside petrol station
to make a loan payment to the station owner, who acts as a “loan
agent” for a microfinance institution.
The structure supporting such transactions, as designed by the
MFT, uses a combination of cellular communication, point-of-sale
(PoS) devices, and new business processes. Agents for the microfinance
institutions use the PoS devices—equipped with smartcard
readers, printing, and cellular networking capabilities—to
avoid manually recording loan and payment details. Transaction
information travels wirelessly, either in real time or in batches
when connectivity isn’t present, from the PoS devices to
servers at each microfinance institution.
The Berkeley-UNIDO fellows timed their arrival to coincide with
the middle of the first loan cycle, giving them an opportunity
to gather feedback and propose changes to the technology design
and business practices for the remainder of the trial. They set
up interviews and focus groups at the MFT and participating microfinance
institution headquarters in Kampala and the three rural pilot
sites, and talked at length with stakeholders, program administrators,
microloan agents, the microfinance branch office administrators,
even local microloan clients.
“We observed the social interaction of agents and clients
and watched clients making their payments, and agents disbursing
funds to see what problems users encountered interacting with
the technology, to see how the RTS is working,” says Tran.
“If it’s successful, this pilot project will show
other microfinance institutions that the RTS solution is viable
and can be deployed in other parts of the world,” adds Kam.
Testing enhanced Internet access in Ghana’s capital city
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“This is exactly the work I’ve been waiting to
do for the past five or six years,” says Honicky, who
transferred to Berkeley for his doctorate to be part of the
ICT4B project.
PEG SKORPINSKI PHOTO |
Accra, the seaside capital city of Ghana has a largely well-educated,
English-speaking population and is a vibrant mixture of modern
and Third World culture. Ambassadors, students, travelers, and
locals stroll the city’s streets and open-air markets among
tin-roofed concrete structures, open sewers, and red dust clouds.
Internet cafes are a common sight, filled with Ghanaians and foreigners
checking e-mail and surfing the Web.
Like many Western visitors, Berkeley CS doctoral student R.J.
Honicky frequented these cafes in his earlier trips to Ghana—a
region he knows well, as his wife lived there as a child.
Relative to many other African locales, Ghana has a developed
Internet infrastructure—the first West African nation to
dial up in 1994. Yet slow connection times and high usage fees
still make Internet access prohibitive for many. Accra’s
Internet cafe patrons pay about 25 cents for 10 minutes of online
time. Compare that to a Ghanaian’s median income of $1 per
day and those minutes are simply unaffordable. When users log
on, limited bandwidth often results in slow and erratic connections.
Honicky, who scoped out fieldwork options in Accra, EECS doctoral
student Omar Bakr, and Haas students Aaron Chatterji and Samir
Mehta journeyed to Ghana, computer hardware in tow, last May to
set up a computer system designed to increase Internet availability
and usability.
Ghana has been making clear strides over the past 10 years adopting
technologies for economic development. “It seemed like the
right fit for this project,” says Honicky. “We were
able to hit the ground running.”
The team geared their work to Internet users with an interest
in digital libraries—students, professors, researchers,
and small business owners, setting up at the University of Ghana,
where users were paying per-minute for access at the campus’s
Internet cafes. While there, Berkeley’s fellows provided
users free access privileges.
To bypass the bandwidth and connectivity issues there, the team
used a Distributed Searchable Cache (DiSC) system that makes frequently
viewed Internet content available offline. Rather than accessing
the Internet for each search query, a user can retrieve content
from the offline cache at speeds much faster than any dialup connection.
DiSC uses an algorithm similar to peer-to-peer file sharing networks
to stage popular content on a local network.
“It’s possible that the search results we’re
getting from the cache could become better than those you’d
get from sites like Google,” says Honicky, “By downloading
what’s relevant to them, users personalize the data.”
To improve the system, the team also “primed” the
cache for a particular deployment, for example, when the users
are software developers at a contracting firm. For them, the DiSC
system could be loaded up with technical articles and papers relevant
to software engineering.
The team took six computers to Ghana to build the local network
in the university library. They also installed a few smaller DiSC
systems at Internet cafes in Accra, where they gathered preliminary
usage data and user feedback. Now they can collect traces on Internet
usage patterns for as long as necessary.
“Ultimately, I’d like to make the reality of a slow,
intermittent, or expensive connection as transparent as possible
so that people in developing countries can use the Internet at
dramatically reduced costs and in a much more interactive way
than they do now,” says Honicky.
Berkeley-based freelance writer Keri Hayes Troutman
writes for the East Bay Express, Alameda Magazine, and
TechTarget.com. She is co-author of Going Mobile: Building
the Real-Time Enterprise with Mobile Applications that Work.
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