STUTTGART, Germany,Dec 14, 2010 — Dr. Steven Livingston, professor for Political Communication and International Affairs at George Washington University, briefed staff members of U.S. Africa Command on emerging communication technology in Africa, December 14, 2010.
The presentation was based on a research project Livingston conducted for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies on "Africa's Evolving Infosystems: A Pathway to Security and Stability." His work is in support of U.S. Africa Command Commander's Strategic Research Program--dedicated to researching understudied topics that have long-term command implications. The researcher's goal is to prepare the command for sudden change and facilitate decision-making, long-term planning, strategic partnerships, and joint research projects.
MODERATOR: This is a rare and unique opportunity for us to listen and learn as we talk about with Africa Command. I just want to give you a little bit of background about how this project got started. And hopefully, you'll all take a booklet that is actually the paper that Dr. Livingston produced.
We are very honored to welcome Dr. Steven Livingston. He told me not to say Dr. Livingston because it evokes images of somebody else in Africa, but I will do it anyway because I think it's important. And he is a very eminent professor, researcher, who is at George Washington University. And his title is associate professor for political communication and international affairs, School and Media and Public Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs.
And he's been there since 1999? Oh, 20 years -- 20 years he's been there. And I asked him how he wanted to be introduced and he said, I want to be introduced as Steven Livingston. I am a political scientist at George Washington for 20 years. He started out in the U.S. Army as a soldier. And if he has some time back here, he'll talk a little bit about that and some of the personalities he met while he was in the Army as a battalion commander's driver. So he has a very unique background.
One of the things that he and I talked this morning that I thought was very unique and unusual is, as he did this research all around Africa, I think that he is the Indiana Jones -- not the one in the movies, but he is the real Indiana Jones. And he'll tell you a little bit about the places he went and how he got there and some of the adventures he's had. I think we could make it into a movie.
But just to give you a little bit of background, back in 2009, in the spring of the year, the intelligence knowledge development directorate was soliciting for research topics. And they came around and they asked, is anybody interested in a particular subject? And I had the idea -- I came from Korea, where I understood the political and the media and the communications environment very well, but I did not understand it at all in Africa -- 1 billion people, 54 countries, very diverse populations.
And so I didn't understand how people got their information. How did the media communicate? How is the emerging technologies affecting the way people get their information? And so I came up with this idea and I proposed it as a topic. And fortunately, General Ward selected it as one of the top 10. And we had Dr. Livingston come out here and we talked about what we wanted to do.
And one of the ideas I had is, I said this is probably one of those untapped research topics that a lot of people think about, but nobody has actually done intensive research on. And I think Dr. Livingston will tell you that as he has finished his paper, he's found that, that is actually accurate. People are actually asking him to come and speak to them about these technologies and about what's going on in Africa. And I think the more that his paper is circulated, we'll find that to be the case. So without any further ado, I want to turn the floor over to Dr. Steven Livingston for his presentation. Thank you very much for coming. (Applause.)
STEVEN LIVINGSTON: Good morning. It's a pleasure and honor for me to return to Kelley Barracks. It's true, I used to visit the barracks in, oh my gosh, 1978, when I was with the 1st of the 81st Field Artillery in Ulm. It was a Pershing missile unit, so that dates me. How long ago that was.
It's been an honor for me to have this opportunity to learn and, now, to share some of my findings with all of you. I went to seven or eight different African countries earlier this year. It ended up being two separate trips. I had some time in Kandahar and Kabul in Afghanistan between the two legs of my Africa research. So I did go, at one point, from Kabul to Kinshasa, which was an interesting experience.
Let me get started with my presentation, if I could have you advance, please. One of the things that Colonel Childress and I talked about when I visited Kelley Barracks earlier this year was to try to answer the question, well, what about the legacy media in Africa? Where can we turn in Africa to understand and examine how messages, how information is provided to audiences across the continent?
Of course, the diversity and the complexity of the continent means that the answer to that question varies from place to place. But on the aggregate, in the whole, there are indicators provided by various media watchdog organizations that suggest that, in terms of the legacy media -- radio, newspaper, magazines, TV -- the indicators are going in the wrong way.
You can see that, according to one study just within the last year, from 2009 to 2010, of the 178 different countries around the world that this particular news watchdog organization examined, you can see that the bottom 50 countries, in terms of press freedom, a number of those places, including the last place position with Eritrea, is well-represented by African countries, whereas the top 50 countries in the world for press freedom, for a mature press, for a functioning press, has African countries.
So there's an imbalance, an asymmetry, between top performers and poor performers, in terms of some of these basic indicators of legacy media. And as we find overall with, for instance, Freedom House does an analysis that found significant declines in the level of press professionalism and freedom across Africa. So this is with Freedom House, and you can see that no African country in the southern half of Africa rates as having a free press, according to Freedom House -- one of the basic indicators.
One of the reasons for this has to do with some of the structural conditions that are necessary in any society to support newspapers, magazines -- the legacy sort of media. These usually presuppose a high literacy rate, a fairly well-developed infrastructure. If you have newspapers, you need to be able to distribute the newspapers through road systems, et cetera, that have some degree of efficiency involved.
You need a relatively available supply of reliant electricity, et cetera. And this is so often missing -- (inaudible) -- in Africa. So one of the challenges of traditional media in Africa has always been this high transaction cost. A transaction cost has to do with the cost of doing business. How much does it cost us to actually achieve some business goal and objective?
There are also systemic governance failures that really are a liability for legacy media. And by systemic governance failures, anything that has to do with the understanding on the part of government officials as to what the role of journalism is and the understanding of journalists as to what their role is.
So if you think back to the American experience or the European experience, so much of the daily press, so much of the daily news coverage, has to do with legitimate and clearly understood interactions between spokespersons of the United States government or some other government, and with reporters who have a sensitivity to accuracy, timeliness, et cetera.
That sort of thing is so often missing around the world, just not in Africa. So when we speak of systemic failures of governance, I mean it's the understanding that I, as a government official, have a responsibility of having press conferences, of offering press releases and being timely with my information, of embracing the idea of transparency. And that is, again, something that is crucial, but often missing.
In my own experience, a few years ago I was asked to help install a press spokesperson system in a government in a country in southern Africa. I made sure it was televised live over the three or four days -- televised in the one city where television was found. I was able to get the agreement of the information minister as to the implementation of certain reforms as to how the government responded and worked with journalists.
And at the end of the day, even though I had all of these positive developments, the prime minister pulled the plug simply because he didn't want somebody else speaking on his behalf, and what he saw as usurping his ability to speak to the press when he wanted to in the manner that he wanted to. So these are the kinds of systemic governance failures that so often impede our efforts at working with the legacy media in Africa, and quite frankly, elsewhere in the world.
So we can also consider that other possibilities is just simply that they're understaffed or overstretched. That is to say, the American and European media as well. If we were to turn and say, well, can we work with that particular contingent of journalists, what we find is that with the American and European media in Africa, their attention to Africa is fickle. It's simply not sustained. It almost often has to do with coups, earthquakes, contested elections, diseases, but no sustained, positive attention. It's episodic.
So when we come to that conclusion, the indigenous media have all of these systemic problems. The foreign media are fickle in their attention to African affairs, paying attention to some kinds of events, but generally not paying sustained attention to Africa, we come to the conclusion that so often, when we look at legacy media, it tends to be fickle and inefficient.
So when I went to Africa, I was looking at some other alternatives. Where do we turn for some sort of information conveyance, some sort of information-sharing mechanism that doesn't rely on the legacy media? And my attention turned to a series of nested technologies. I'm using the notion of nested, meaning that it's not just one single technology that is of interest to me, but rather how multiple technologies work together to leapfrog some of the legacy systems to reach into some of the most remarkable places in Africa to bring information either to locals or to get information out from these distant locations to the cities and to the outside world.
So by nested technologies, I mean several things -- mobile telephony, cell phones, remote sensing satellites, geographical information systems paired with GPS, with positioning satellite systems. And what I want to do in the time that I have to talk with you this morning is to really tell a story about how these new technologies are filling that vacuum, filling that space that is so often failed by the legacy media. Next, please.
The first place to begin is with the realization of the reach of mobile telephony in Africa and elsewhere around the world. It's a staggering figure. And this is a screenshot from the BBC from just a couple of months ago. There are 5 billion mobile cell phone subscriptions around the globe -- 5 billion. Now, what that exactly means is sort of hard to determine because, does that mean -- you know, if you go to some places in North America, a single person may have two or three cell phones, particularly if you are an AT&T customer in Washington, D.C., but we won't talk about that. (Laughter.)
Or it means, in Africa, that perhaps an entire family has one cell phone that they share, or an entire community may have one or two cell phones. So to speak of 5 billion subscriptions is not to speak of exactly a 1-to-1 correlation, that there are 5 billion people using cell phones. It varies on both sides of that equation. But 5 billion cell phones are now in existence around the globe. And this can be represented in other ways.
What we have here -- this is from the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva -- the green line that you can see is representative of the growth of mobile telephony around the globe. This particular graph has to do with global indicators, global trends. Look at the growth rate of mobile telephony around the globe, just from 1998 to 2009. It's interesting, just a few months later, the same organization had to correct its figures. It went from 4.6 billion to 5 billion just in a matter of a few months.
If you look comparatively at the red line, for instance, this is the growth rate of Internet users over that same timeframe. So you can see, comparatively, how much more rapidly mobile telephony is reaching into communities around the world than is the Internet. And then if you look at other, similar growth rates, here is fixed telephone lines. It remains flat, which isn't a surprise. If you have such rapid growth rate in mobile telephony, fixed lines are not going to see any significant growth.
In not only my travels with regards to this report, but also other research that I've done elsewhere in the world, I've seen this. And I think the best way for me to illustrate the point is just to share a couple of photos that I've taken. This was about a year ago. I was in a very remote area in India. There is no electricity. This room -- this is a community of tea pickers in a rural community in Northern India not far from Darjeeling. The only source of electricity came from a little Honda generator just outside of the building and there's a single light bulb. So that's why you have this sort of view of this particular room.
But I asked everyone, okay, so hold up your cell phones. How many of you have cell phones? And you can see with even this very impoverished community in a very rural area, almost all of them had mobile phones. A little further north in Sikkim -- this is just below Tibet. This is in the foothills of the Himalayas.
You can see that these Buddhist monks not only have mobile devices that they're playing with, but they also have a solar panel. This is a fairly prominent monastery in Sikkim so that, you know, the level of technology isn't terribly surprising, but what was surprising to me is just how remote this place was, but still, they were tied into a global grid, a global information platform -- a mobile network.
This particular graph illustrates more specifically these growth trends in Africa. This has to do with mobile telephony growth in Africa alone -- again, the figures from 1998 to 2008. And you can see that the growth rate of mobile telephony is just absolutely -- for me, anyway -- astounding, as are the other ways in which we can illustrate these trend lines. Please.
This -- I took this picture in, I'm not sure if it was Kenya or Tanzania. The divide between the two countries gets a little lost when you ride in a four-wheel drive vehicle for about four or five hours, hop on a motor scooter for another two hours and then walk for a couple of hours to get back into a Masai community. But you can see that this is a very traditional village that I was in.
And the fellow is dressed in a very traditional manner, but one of the accoutrements that he has that's off our screen here -- our technology is not quite meeting the need here -- but he has a cell phone in his hand. And the reach of cellular telephony is found even way back up into these remote communities, these remote areas. This is not that far from the other photograph, but again, it's an illustration of the same point.
This is in North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, just a little north of Goma, where I was. And this is actually not too far from the village -- just a little south of the village that experienced the sexual violence over a several-day period here not long ago. That particular village doesn't have mobile telephony available to it. This village does. And what you see here -- you may be asking, well, why is it stuck on a bamboo stick?
Well, a couple of things: The cell phone -- they found that sweet spot in the village. You know, right there on the hillside right there, you get a good signal. So they put the bamboo stick there. And then if you own an iPhone 4, you know that Steve Jobs told us, you don't hold it in a particular way. Well, they discovered if you just don't hold the thing and you put it on a post and turn on the speaker phone and you're going to maximize your connectivity.
So this is the way, in this particular location, the mobile phone was used to communicate to the outside world. I'll talk in a moment as to the kinds of things that this mobile network, really -- it's sort of like a local area network made up of cellular nodes, of cell phones. That very much is what I have in mind in my research and what I'm thinking about here. Please. The other indicator that you see for the new reach of mobile telephony all across Africa is found in the branding wars that have broken out amongst the various cell phone providers.
This photograph I took in Goma -- a very common sight for one of these wooden pushcarts that you see people in the Congo and Rwanda use. They craft them by hand and push various commodities around with them. But the reason for the photograph has to do with what I'm capturing in the background, almost every available surface is covered by one kind or another of mobile cell phone provider. So Vodacom is an example.
Before we move on Ã? actually, if you could back that up Ã? Mo Ibrahim is one of the entrepreneurs that has led the charge, led the way in providing mobile telephony throughout Africa. And this quote that I offer over on the side, I think, captures well the idea that I'm sharing with you. He said that really what I was interested in, what we were interested in is realizing that Africa required connectivity.
It required mobile telephony. It was a commercial enterprise that I was pursuing and it ended up being a political one, meaning that when you have an information environment that's richer, that has connectivity, you end up having a political effect. And it's the political effect that's interesting to me, and I think, hopefully, to all of you.
More examples -- Zain is another case-in-point. Again, this is in Goma. It's surprising, almost every available surface seems to be painted in one or the other of the two or three or four different, competing cell phone providers here in the Congo, Rwanda, et cetera. Tigo is another one. So mobile telephony is a part of the equation, but so, too, is radio. Radio is an important medium, and will remain so.
And what is fascinating to me is to see how these two things work together. This is one of the first examples of the nesting that I'm talking about here. Mobile telephony works with radio. And in the report, I explain, for example, that one of the things that we find in very remote villages -- radio listening is a community project. A single handset is used for a group of people to come together, listen to the programming, whether it's a dramatic portrayal, music or information needed for the community.
Then the people in that community will -- I need my prop. I need my own cell phone. It's over there -- will get that handset out, call the radio station. They've actually formed community radio listening groups that will call the radio station and provide additional information. That program today you provided was really great, but have you considered doing X, Y and Z? Or in other instances, people with cell phones will call the radio station and say, you know, we've just seen some suspicious-looking men over here; we might want to let our community know about this.
So rather similarly to the way we use mobile telephony back in Washington and New York and elsewhere in the United States, or here in Stuttgart, to say, you know, I'm driving on the I-10 and there's an accident here -- might want to let people know -- similar sorts of early-warning uses put to mobile telephony in some of these villages, et cetera. So this is one of the community radio stations that's found just outside of Goma in the Congo that you saw a lot of that sort of use of radio.
Well, we're going to go from community radio to something a bit more esoteric. I wanted to share with you another important element of the technology in Africa. What you're seeing here is an illustration of a commercial, high-resolution remote sensing satellite. Now, you're going to ask yourself, what in the world does this have to do with me and with Africa and this study?
It has to do with this: Since September of 1999, becoming operational in January of 2000, there's a small fleet of high-resolution, commercial remote sensing satellite imagery that's available -- GeoWise -- (inaudible) -- DigitalGlobe, et cetera Ã? that's creating high-resolution, geo-rectified Ã? that is to say, very precise, geographically referenced information that all of us use, as well as people in Africa are using, to facilitate new kinds of activities that would have been inconceivable in the absence of data of the sort collected by these kinds of satellites.
These satellites create the possibility of digital maps. Google Earth is an example. Certainly, I've seen in my work in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of the American military geographical information systems. Well, geographical information systems are used in the civilian world, including in Africa, to produce information that's used in combination with other technologies to facilitate programming of various types that I'm going to illustrate and describe as we go along.
Digital maps can represent anything. It's up to the motivation. It's up to you. It's up to the user to determine what you want to have represented on that digital map. What one needs to represent something in a geospatial information environment is a source of data. And the data comes from mobile telephony. It comes from mobile phones. Let's start combining these things together.
So again, we've got a series of nested technologies that are now available in Africa and anywhere else in the world. What this produces is the possibility of new kinds of pursuits, new kinds of goals to be achieved using technology. I'm going to stop for a second here and just pause for a second to actually step back and think about the nature of distributions of various types -- this is going to be a little political science-y and a little professorial here for a second.
But usually, what we think of when we think of the distribution of something, like record sales, newspapers, public opinion -- so, we think of a bell-shaped curve. That has dominated our thinking about the world and life for the longest time -- for at least the last 100 years or so when working in mass markets of anything. What's the average consumer taste on any given product?
It presupposes information scarcity. It presupposes an inability to know something beyond a sample and beyond a given mean. What we find when we move into a world of 5 billion cell phones, when we move into a world of not information scarcity, but information abundance -- when you can combine information from platforms in space and cell phones in pockets -- you end up with new possibilities for how you understand the distribution of anything.
This is sometimes called a power-law distribution. You, today, probably work in something like this all the time. If you go to the next slide, I'll tell you how. Here's a larger representation of that. This is sometimes called the long tail, in that the distribution of information, of firms, is -- we often think of it as being over here and then we tended to ignore the distribution of information over here.
Bear with me. This is going to become clear to you with one more example of this because with distributed networks, there is low or zero transaction cost to collect, store and distribute the information along this tail. What I mean by this is, if you work, for instance -- if you've ever used eBay or iTunes or anything that's networked, you're working with the long tail. This has to do with the distribution of information that can be tagged, understood, managed, collected into new kinds of aggregations and put to new purposes.
This makes organizing without formal organizations possible. Let me pause for a second and just think about this in terms of selling music or selling any sort of commodity. This is the area where you have a limited number or limited availability of products, services, ideas -- whatever it is you're trying to share. This is the area of information scarcity. As long as you are unable to say anything intelligent, collect information or knowledge about the things that exist along the further distribution of this sort of power graph, you end up not being able to utilize this information at all.
With the advent of cell phones; with the advent of geographical information technology; with the advent of information that can allow us to speak to what's along this further distribution of the information grid, you're able to organize activities here that would have otherwise been unattended to, ignored or left unattended to. Let's continue on.
Examples of long-tail distribution technologies would be Facebook, Craigslist, Skype, iTunes -- anything that utilizes information about niche markets, niche ideas, niche activities along this distribution. One of the things that is evident to anyone who's spending any time in Africa is how niche environments are; how distributed communities are; how sparsely populated some areas are; how difficult it would be, outside of the availability of cell phones and other ways of marking the existence of some need, some community, some idea. It would be simply impossible to create any sort of formal organization that would try to accommodate these distributed communities.
The infrastructure simply doesn't support the creation of formal organizational structures. Go ahead. In very remote areas, such as I was visiting here in Central Africa, the only reach that you have is the possibility of utilizing cell phones and supported nesting technologies that would allow you to reach in and to aggregate these communities in new and in different ways. And this is what we have. We have new kinds of organizations.
This is an NGO equivalent of the same sort of technology that utilizes long-tail distribution power dynamics to create, in this instance, a new kind of banking service. What this particular NGO does is, takes cell phones, distributes them to communities that are very poor, very distributed, very remote locations, and uses the power to identify where they are, to identify the fact that they have a mobile phone in hand to provide banking services for an otherwise scattered community that would not ever hope to have banking services available to it.
The same is true of an organization called FrontlineSMS. It's interesting here that Frontline and the other kinds of organizations that are made possible because of mobile telephony, are the same as eBay. Well, actually, eBay -- you can find it. So often the case, the organizations that you see that are around the world that are utilizing networks that utilize information technology have no physical presence. They have no address. They have no brick-and-mortar building.
FrontlineSMS exists only as a platform on the website. It distributes the technology that can be used by people who have nothing but cell phones so that they can do things like monitor the availability of mosquito netting, monitor elections, make sure that drugs and various kinds of medical supplies are distributed to clinics around Africa. They do that only with the availability of cell phones, an Internet platform and the ability to bring together these disparate spots in remote areas around Africa and report them in an aggregate fashion.
The Grameen Foundation is working, actually, with the Gates Foundation in a number of ways. One has to do, again, with mobile financial services. Another way in which the Grameen Foundation is working with the Gates Foundation is to use mobile telephony to bring together farming communities in very remote locations to provide them with information about daily commodity prices or to provide information to experts in agricultural extension services about the emergence of various kinds of diseases with crops found on the farms in remote areas.
So what one finds is that mobile financial services or information sharing have to do with agricultural practices utilize mobile telephony, disparately distributed individuals found in remote areas, brings that information -- that data -- together that, otherwise, would have been absent altogether. There would be no capability of monitoring crops. You couldn't put together an organization that had the manpower, the structure in order to monitor crops in remote areas in the absence of the mobile telephony.
So here again is another example of an organization that exists only because of the availability of networked platforms. MPASA is an example of banking. In this instance, this is in Kenya. MPASA is also found elsewhere, as is MTN Money. Imagine you're living in a community that doesn't have a bank. It doesn't have financial services available. How do you pay your bills? How do you maintain any sort of accumulation of wealth in the absence of banking services?
What MPASA, MTN Money and other kinds of banking services are doing is use cell phones in order to store credits Ã? essentially, store currency, store value on the phone that is then used in transactions with local merchants or to pay utility bills, to pay for whatever commodity it is you need. If you, yourself, lack the money, perhaps a son or a daughter living elsewhere, living outside of the community, can actually store wealth on your cell phone so that Mom or Dad's utility bill can be paid simply through the availability of credits stored on an MPASA-empowered cell phone.
So again, the idea here is illustrating the notion that networks empower the kinds of organizations, such as MPASA, that would not exist in the absence of mobile telephony. Probably the kind of network-based organizational initiative that is most well-known, at least in the United States and in Europe, is called Ushahidi, a Swahili word that means "witness," or "testimony."
Ushahidi emerged after the post-election violence in Nairobi. A fellow named Erik Hersman and a group of others realized that there was the possibility of monitoring the violence that was taking place in remote regions around Kenya by using cell phones and asking people to text in, call a central number. And then the reports of the violence that was being witnessed were posted on a map with pins, very much like you will see if you go to Google Earth. If you look at a Google Earth map, you will often find pins about specific sites on that map, right?
Well, what Ushahidi has done, at least in this initial presentation, was use the power of cell phones, GIS -- geographical systems -- GPS to track and monitor events. This is called crowdsourcing or event monitoring or crisis mapping. Those are the three terms that are most often applied to this technology. What it allows for is the identification of patterns. You can see that, well, in this particular district in this location, there seems to be a propensity of arson. We must have an arsonist working here, so we will deploy our forces in a way that will address that concern, that threat of violence.
Ushahidi is an open-source platform that's been adopted and used all around the world. It was used after the earthquake in Haiti. It's being used right now, or has been used, for elections monitoring in Egypt. It's been used for a variety of purposes in North America, as well. In Russia this past summer, Ushahidi, as an open-source platform, took one step further.
It was used to track and monitor the outbreak of wildfires all across Russia, but then it went further and it said not only -- here, people were calling in and saying, yes, we have a fire that's emerged here and it's of this proportion and here's what we're trying to do, all through a posting on the Internet using the Ushahidi platform. But somebody else would say, well, I have these resources here that I can offer your efforts at fighting the wildfire.
The Russian government wasn't capable of meeting the challenge of a lot of the fires, so there was a need for resources to be brought to bear in fighting the fire. So what you actually end up having is Ushahidi emerging as a collective-action tool. People said, we have needs here; others would come online and say, well, we have those resources here; a third group would come online and say, okay, I can get your resources that you have -- the shovels, the suits, the supplies, the food, the water -- from this location to address your needs here.
So the technology or the research literature refers to it as mass collaborative action. We can just call it community building, where needs are being met collaboratively in an online environment, where collective action is being pursued between people with a need, people with resources all coordinating in real time together without the intervention of any sort of formal, hierarchical government or any other sort of institution. It's simply people utilizing a new information environment to address needs.
One of the examples of how this kind of technology -- event-mapping, crisis-mapping technology -- is used that I studies on my research travels is called Voix des Kivu. It's run in the war-plagued eastern Congo, north and south Kivu. And this takes the idea one step further. Most event-mapping initiatives simply use whatever cell phones are available in a community.
What Voix des Kivu does is actually place -- they plant, they put -- cell phones in a community to try to push further back into an environment so as to produce certain kinds of political outcomes, whether it be monitoring for human security, providing information for farmers, providing banking services for communities, providing early warning, early responses for MANUC, for the U.N. forces.
This is an effort at actually utilizing mobile telephony that is geo-rectified and this capability of saying, this is where this phone is. This is where it's happening. We can event map this thing; we can crisis map this thing actually seeding cell phones. So they refer to this not as crowdsourcing, but crowd-seeding. Part of crowd-seeding with Voix des Kivu is bringing the people that they choose to actually have the phones into a training session that's two or three days long, tell them how to use the phone, how to utilize the technology that's available; also, how to take precautions for their own personal security and safety.
If you are one of the two or three people in a village that have a cell phone with you, that puts you at a point of risk because you are the eyes and ears for that community with potential threats. So there are also precautions that need to be taken, as to what one does if you find yourself with a cell phone and the Lord's Resistance Army walks into town.
Or if the local bad guy, the local criminal realizes that you're the person who's going to snitch on him, there are ways that you need to be aware of protecting yourself. So a part of Voix des Kivu's program is actually training people how to take advantage of the technology while protecting themselves, as well.
In the study, one of the things that -- realizing, as I did, the importance of these various nested technologies, it occurred to me that one of the things that we needed to be aware of is the sources of inspiration, the sources of development that you find in Africa for these kind of technological developments. And this is one of the things that really startled me, really, sort of, was heartening, is how often it's the case that the technological initiatives and their social and political application emerges from Africa itself.
For too long, it seems to me, that so many of the development programs, so many of the security programs from Africa have come from either North America or Europe, and we've tried to sort of shoehorn them into Africa. In this instance, many of these programs, many of the technologies and their social applications emerge out of Africa itself.
This is a picture of Erik Hersman. I mentioned Erik just a moment ago. He, along with a handful of other programmers, are responsible for the development of the Ushahidi event-mapping platforms. He is also responsible for the development of something called iHub in Nairobi. It's a space that invites a very robust engineering community that's emerged in Nairobi to come in and look for ways to develop technologies for local purposes.
They're called hack-a-thons and they are sometimes done collaboratively around the world. So Nairobi, at iHub, is involved in a weekend-long project, for instance, with various other technology centers around the world in an effort to find software solutions to pressing social problems that that can be used to address and improve people's lives. So iHub is an example of that.
I found, throughout Africa, similar innovation centers in South Africa, in Johannesburg, in Uganda, in Senegal. These have all emerged within the last handful of years. And again, the key here is that they are Africans finding solutions to African problems. There's a sense of ownership, a sense of pride that really becomes important and helps, I think, organically grow and develop some of these initiatives that will improve people's lives. Thank you.
One of the things that I -- (audio break) -- this research, so far this year -- (inaudible, background noise) -- in Washington and in Michigan is that, well, these same technologies -- cell phones, geographical information systems -- can be used by bad guys, as well as good guys. You're absolutely right. This can facilitate violence, as well as it can good things. What you're seeing here is meant to illustrate the idea that these kinds of tools, the electronic information environment, is pervasive. It's all over the world.
What you're looking at here is just the United Kingdom. And these are the actual GPS signals of commercial aircraft going in and out of Heathrow Airport. This is a representation of just one hub -- London -- of the global information network -- the Internet. Five billion cell phones, all of the Internet connectivity, all of the travel and transportation that's available -- one of the things, I think, that those of us who are secured about the security of our own cities, our own families, as well as the security of people in Africa, is these tools, these technologies, aren't going away.
They're there. They're pervasive. They're not going to go away. I think the Chinese are finding it challenging to try to shut down and monitor and control this environment. The same would certainly be true anywhere in the world, particularly if you were a less-developed country in Africa. It's very expensive and difficult to try to control these technologies. Once 3G telephony is available in Africa here fairly soon, it's going to become even more challenging to control this environment.
So controlling the tools is not, in my view, a viable option. Instead, you need to address the other half of the equation. The other half of the equation has to do with motivations -- the motivations that are involved in how you use these tools.
I happened to be reading a book on my way here called "The Starfish and the Spider." It has to do with different kinds of organizations that emerge in different information environments. Metaphorically speaking, a starfish, if you cut up a starfish, what happens? More starfish. That's the point that they use to illustrate the notion of a networked environment. It's difficult to shut down a networked environment. You try to shut down one node and just, more are created. WikiLeaks -- we shut down WikiLeaks; there are 1,000 mirror sites. That's the problem with any sort of networked environment. So their point is, don't try to shut down, don't try to kill starfish, don't try to shut down networked environments.
Instead, address the motivations as to why people use these technologies for certain ends and certain purposes. So one of their examples has to do with an organization -- an NGO that provides, I think it's banking services in Kibara refugee camp outside of Nairobi. They utilize mobile telephony in order to do this. And this is a quote from the book. They say, "This is one of the best weapons against al-Qaida. For years, the slums have been hopeless places where terrorists have easily recruited members." And what this Jamii Bora does is, it gives some possibility of hope, where the tools are used for positive motives.
Rather than joining al-Qaida, if there's hope involved -- if you can get a bank loan, if you can run a viable business because you're empowered with the information that you need to do so, you are less inclined to be violent. Instead, you will use the technologies for positive purposes to produce positive ends for your family and others. So the need is for a better understanding of this new phenomenon and how people can use it for positive motives.
One of the things that I enjoyed most in this research was the opportunity to travel to very rural areas in Africa. That's me, or a slightly longer-haired version of me at the time, after a few months of travel. But the fascination had to do with the color of my eyes. So the local children were lined up to have a look and to play with my hair. One of the things that I realized in my travels is how much hope, how much desire there is for children and for improving the lives of families.
I think that, that is what we need to tap into -- find ways of positively engaging with the motivations to improve the daily lives of people and of children. And if we can do that using these technologies, I think we starve the al-Qaidas, the criminal elements of the oxygen that they need, which is hate, which is hopelessness, which is despair. That is the reason why I take such a positive approach in the writing of this book.
You could say that it's humanitarianism -- it's do-gooderism, but it's strategic do-gooderism. You give people some sense of hope, some sense of positive motivation and you rob the opportunities for organizations like al-Qaida.
That's all I have, in terms of a formal presentation. I would be more than happy to take questions or to carry on and explain something that I failed to explain adequately in the formal part of my talk. Thank you.
(Audio break.)
Below are excerpts from the question and answer session:
Q: The information you put out -- you know, that there's growing exponential phenomenas and connectivity going on, but Africa, by your own research, is becoming less free as far as the press. I mean, there's kind of a -- is that a temporary trend, or do you -- is the connectivity going to offset? Is there a lag in the adoption of technology and the effect on the political regime?
MR. LIVINGSTON: Yeah, it's leapfrogging. I mean, the nested technologies are leapfrogging so many of the legacy press. So for example, newspapers are still going to struggle for years to come. So, too, will magazines. It's so often the case that even the newspapers that are in existence don't have the economic basis to run daily editions, either for technological reasons or lack of resources, et cetera.
So rather than relying on newspapers, though, there is an effort at creating an information environment through radio with cellular telephony that fills that information space that's left by the lack of newspapers. But television, except for a handful of locations around Africa, is not a viable alternative. So I frankly didn't spend a lot of time even looking at television, in terms of an alternative.
So my point is that these new technologies are actually leapfrogging some of the wanting capabilities that we wish were in place with newspapers, magazines, radio. Radio, though, is paired with cellular telephony in order to fill the needs, to help people understand their environment.
Q: I have a question. A lot of what you talked about -- (inaudible, off mic) -- what are your thoughts on working with professional organizations, namely government and militaries, using the same capabilities and desires that exist for -- (inaudible, off mic) -- opportunity for -- I don't know. What are your thoughts on how to approach that?
MR. LIVINGSTON: The crowdsourcing technology is being used -- in my own research where I saw it most clearly was with MANUC in Congo, with early-warning systems put in place, which are essentially crowdsourcing. In Goma or in Bukavu, they'll have listening or surveillance centers -- offices that I haven't paid attention to lately, so I don't know if they're staffed 24/7.
The intention was to staff them 24/7, where there is somebody there, ready to answer a phone call that comes from somebody in the community saying, we have a threat emerging in our area; can you do something? Another way in which these technologies are used by MANUC is by having the patrols, which are often, say, Indian soldiers who don't speak the local language, will have a mobile phone with them.
And as long as there's a mast -- as long as there's a tower and there's connectivity, when they find themselves in a circumstance where it's a good idea to speak to the local populace, but they don't speak the language, they call back in to an interpretive center that facilitates the exchange between that Indian soldier and the local populace. So this is the way in which mobile telephony is being used by militaries, but it isn't in the sense that I understood your question, where the militaries themselves are using mobile telephony for their own purposes.
That, I'm sure, exists. I'm sure that -- I mean, I've seen with other militaries around the world where cell phones are sometimes relied on in a pinch. I've spent quite a bit of time in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last few years, and I can speak to the idea that militaries there will use cell phones rather than more secure communication capabilities in order to communicate when the need arises.
Q: To what extent do you feel -- (inaudible, off mic) -- that penetration in Kenya hovers around 14 percent. Cell phones were introduced there in 1995. Ushahidi is a really good example. We have all this great information. Has there ever been a trial? I mean, a tribunal hasn't even stood up.
MR. LIVINGSTON: But the ICC is actually using Ushahidi's data set in its investigation. So the investigator has shown up, has been working in Nairobi. And one of the things that he's able to do is use that -- Ushahidi collected 43,000 different data points in those weeks immediately after the electoral violence -- 45,000. And those 45,000 data points are one of the main bodies of evidence that's being used by the ICC investigators. So I'm sorry -- I interrupted your question.
Q: No, I understand. That whole Kenya thing, it could go point by point. Obviously, the government doesn't seem very enthusiastic about ICC. Education -- the children you were showing us in the picture up here have access to cell phones. But do they have teachers? Are they used, as well as being connected? And I'm just wondering if, in some ways, we're setting up a tension between expectation and delivery.
The motive example you gave is a really good example. There is communication in these areas, but there's a real inability to respond. So you know, we can deliver and, in some ways, we have been delivering, but are we first blinding ourselves to the fact that there are still very, very real problems in Africa? And then second, are we creating expectations which are never going to be filled on the part of the Africans themselves?
MR. LIVINGSTON: Can you go back to that long slide -- the long distribution slide? (Pause.) Okay. I don't know if I explained this very well. It's not an easy concept to explain. That long tail represents people living on the margins. This represents people living in the Rift Valley. This represents people who are so marginalized -- a few people here, a small community here, a small community there -- that, you know, in a Western commercial sense, it's somebody who likes a very esoteric sort of music here and a very esoteric sort of music here.
And in the absence of a networked information environment where the iTunes of the world didn't know that you liked that kind of music and you didn't know that there was an organization called iTunes that would sell you that kind of music, your taste wouldn't be met by the Wal-Marts and the Tower Records that live and exist out here.
So it's the availability of knowledge, of information, of information richness that allows for even the possibility of somebody with really esoteric musical tastes or the possibility of somebody who has needs, but lives so far away from any of the major institutions, like schools, health clinics, et cetera, that in the absence of the information technology, they would live in absolute hopelessness. There is no chance -- no possibility-- of health care, no possibility of education because they live so far away, they're unreachable.
The reason why I was traveling around with the Masai is because I was with a young man whose job it was to ride around on a motorbike trying to find Masai children to do a report on their health and wellbeing. It took him days to travel hundreds of miles all over this region. They are now in the process of replacing him with a distributed mobile cell phone network that will provide health-care reports of children without, you know, tracing or uncovering, physically, that location.
That frees him up to spend time with individual children with education, with additional concerns about people who are at additional risk. So what happens is, this long tail represents the organization potential that wouldn't be realized in the absence of a network. That's really what it is. It is the organization of potential that is absent or impossible in the absence of a network.
So you end up with, because of mobile phones reaching into this area, the possibility of providing not the kind of service that you and I would like to provide, but at least it's beginning to address needs and hopes that would absolutely be impossible to address by formal, institutional structures of the sort that we are familiar with, right -- the health ministries or the Wal-Marts, or whatever the service that's being provided. They're all found down here.
But they only deal with a small bit of the overall need, or the overall potential that's found in an environment. I feel better about that explanation. I hope that's clearer to you -- the point of that. But your point is well-taken. My response is that in the absence of these technologies, you have no real hope of addressing those needs. So it's not a full cup, but it's getting better. There were some other hands.
Q: I'm listening to the questions. They're related to what -- you know, I'm struggling with this -- I listened to you and it seems to me you're essentially describing the phenomenon. And what I'm struggling with is to try to isolate the implications or understand the implications for us about a phenomenon.
I mean, you could be talking about the proliferation of roads in Africa 100 years ago or vaccinations and health-care systems 50 years ago, or schools, or anything that has -- that creates opportunities, but at the same time, requires an organized response to maximize it. I mean, from the perspective of government, is this an opportunity or is this a threat, or both?
MR. LIVINGSTON: It's both.
Q: Yeah, of course it's both. But I mean, fundamentally for us, it's about policy response. It's about how potential is transformed into goodness or the opposite of it. And I mean, clearly, there's an increase -- I mean, maybe you'd want use the term exponential increase -- in the pace of change, but fundamentally, it's the same thing as the roads or the schools and the vaccinations that have occurred over the past century or century-and-a-half, and for us, the challenge is precisely the same as it was for the leaders in Africa or the leaders who deal with security and governance and development 50 or 75 or 100 years ago.
MR. LIVINGSTON: Actually, the answer to your question was built into your question, or your comment -- your remark. The change is exponential and it's also global. When you built a road from Mombasa to Nairobi, you built a road between Mombasa and Nairobi, or wherever your road was, and it had an impact locally. But it was a local phenomenon. It had a local impact.
Q: But with an effect that's probably much more profound on the people affected.
MR. LIVINGSTON: Perhaps. But the number of people affected was smaller. The growth rate here is exponential and it's also part of a global phenomenon. So one of the things with any sort of network connectivity: When you grow it, you're creating a global community. So you're taking -- I mean, think about the effect of a community that's lived in relative isolation for its entire existence and then they end up having a device in their hand that puts them in connection with the ICE in New York -- the International Commodities Exchange in New York.
And they are now a part of a global phenomenon. They are global player in their local level. So the distinction between local and global is diminished, if not removed altogether, at least in this domain. So I would suggest that, number one, the change that's going on now is qualitatively different than what we've seen before because it is exponential and it is global.
The part of your remark or question that has to do with, is this -- in terms of its policy implication -- number one, one of the things I recommend in this report is that we need to study this because it's a phenomenon that's four or five years old. I mean, the growth rates of mobile telephony are that new. They're going to become even more important because the undersea cable development is going to push bandwidth up higher.
So you're going to go from G1 and G2 phones to G4 phones, at least in metropolitan areas like Nairobi, including the Kibara camps and elsewhere that are a security concern for some. So you are looking at a very different information environment that's leapfrogging generations. People who haven't had an opportunity to make phone calls or watch television all of a sudden have YouTube in their hand, have the connectivity with the globe that they wouldn't have had before.
What does that mean for security? What does it mean for possibilities for development for increased security? The point of my talk, in part, and the reason why I focus on positive change and development in the study is that I firmly believe that the tools aren't going to go away. You can't shut down the Internet -- well, you can, but there's a cost involved and it's a cost that most societies aren't willing to bear.
So if you are living in an environment that's connected, the only thing that you can change are the motivations. How do you change motivations? By leveraging the positive change that's available to you through increased health care, banking services, agricultural services. In the absence of that, that information space is going to be filled by the hate-mongers. It's going to be filled by the al-Qaida types that will take advantage of these tools to their own purposes.
So once again, as a matter of information warfare, it's a matter of filling an information space with the kind of information that's to your policy ends and goals. It comes back to that. It's just a much more complicated, fragmented information space that requires more awareness, more knowledge as to how it works, how to reach into it and how to utilize it. It's not like turning to a newspaper or a radio station during the Cold War and having a line of reasoning or a narrative injected in that single news outlet. You need to utilize this digital information space to your ends and goals.
MODERATOR: Dr. Livingston, why don't you give some concrete examples, like we talked about, about the farmer with coffee, about the blind person that's actually able to have the kid that's walking around that wouldn't have access to education. Give some examples like that.
MR. LIVINGSTON: Well, let me just underscore some examples that I raised with the slide presentation. The Grameen Foundation is an example of knowledge community workers where they are -- anybody here an agronomist? I'm not. I'm terrible with farm stuff. But there is apparently a disease that afflicts banana trees and it is just devastating. We're talking about, if it takes root and spreads in an area, it can decimate an entire region's banana crop.
And of course, in many places in Africa, that's a staple. It's important for both cash commodity, as well as consumption. The Grameen Foundation -- and this isn't just the Grameen Foundation; there are other examples of other NGOs that are utilizing this -- have distributed to the elders, to the farmers who really know their crops, really know this environment, say, you know, if you see this in your own trees, here's what you do -- report it in. Or some phones take pictures of it, right? Or there are even some sampling, I guess, capabilities where you can even do some local testing.
You send that report to the agronomists back in the cities -- back in Nairobi or wherever it is, or Kigali -- who can analyze and deploy the kinds of resources that are needed to isolate the outbreak of that disease before it spreads and becomes endemic and causes additional damage outside of the localized event.
So these are the kinds of ways in which this distributed information technology allows for an early intervention that improves the health and wellbeing of an entire community. You can replace that phenomenon -- you can replace the conversation about diseased bananas with security threats to individuals, to banking needs.
Another fascinating example that comes to mind for me has to do with one of the NGOs -- it's the first one I showed earlier on in Kivu -- that doesn't even presuppose that any individual have a cell phone. In many instances, a community will have only four or five cell phones, you know, amongst all the 80 or 90 people who live there. But what people are given is just a unique identifier number.
This is your number, right? You're 2345786. And with that number, you can then borrow someone else's phone. You call into a central site. You give that site your number and that number is attached to banking services, to any health care records, to any number of other social services that are available through the use of that number. You borrowed the phone! You don't even own the phone. So where's the incentive for somebody to lend you the phone? They were given top-off charges.
In other words, of course, cell phones in Africa are prepaid, usually, as they are in many places around the world. The person who lends you the phone is given a few cents top-off fees beyond the use of the phone itself. And then that way, they benefit. So the whole thing is benefiting both the user, in terms of the information that the person with that number is given -- plus, the person who lends the phone. And the whole process -- again, various kinds of social services are provided for. It's filling a need. It's a technology that fills needs that, in the absence of that technology, those needs would go unmet.
When you have unmet needs, you have anger and disgruntlement and you have the basis for violence. That's the key. If you can meet the needs through these technologies, you're lessening the likelihood of people becoming angry and joining violent groups seeking redress with violent means.
Q: (Inaudible, audio break) Ã? right now, the challenge is that unmet needs, as a result of this new technology. That is --
MR. LIVINGSTON: As a result of the new technology?
Q: Yes, because people who did not know the world was out there, that they should have these needs, now know about them. And we're going to go through a period, potentially, of increased disgruntlement and insecurity and everything else because, all of a sudden, people are seeing what the standards of living are elsewhere, or what services are.
And that's actually been shown in data -- (inaudible, off mic). But what you're fundamentally saying on that, I think, is that the speed at which these technologies, comparing let's say now with five years ago, when we were first experimenting with the kinds of things you just gave as the agricultural example -- (inaudible, background noise) costs are so much higher and the sustainability is so much higher.
As that technology evolves, what the challenge is going to be is to get the donor community to move away from investing in governments that can't move fast enough to adopt this model to figure out how they are putting their money into the NGOs and the small networks of people that actually are using this technology to begin to fill those needs. That's the big policy question. All the questions -- (inaudible, off mic) -- how do you make that happen?
MR. LIVINGSTON: I hope everyone in the back heard that remark -- terrific remark. So if I could summarize, if you didn't hear it, first of all, the downside of the technology -- of having 3G telephony, of having YouTube available, of having the sea cables come online -- is that the people who were not aware of their relative deprivation to the rest of the world will have that realization and it will actually feed -- it will actually accentuate -- the anger that otherwise was just not there. It was latent. True.
You're absolutely right. So then the question for me is, yeah, that's going to be inevitable. That's there because the technology isn't going to go away. So the challenge for people who work in the areas where all of you work is, what do you do with that reality? That is a reality. What do you do with it?
My response is that you need to find ways -- a policy response -- absolutely right, you don't necessarily feed the governments because the governments are those hierarchical organizations who are working over here on the right margin of that long curve and they haven't gotten a thing done.
They're not carrying the right kinds of supplies; they're not selling the right songs; they're not getting the mosquito netting out. They're not doing what needs to be done to take care of these populations. And in part, it's because the population and the infrastructure is a chicken-or-egg thing. The infrastructure is so challenging that it's hard to get the services to a population that's spread out over great distances.
But the NGOs, then, become the alternative. And finding the right NGOs who are effective, who are savvy, who get it, who are often working -- thanks -- who are often in part embedded into these communities -- they're not sitting back in the state capital someplace, but they're actually working in the communities -- and they are taking advantage of these new network platforms. And they are the ones that will take that opportunity and find ways of leveraging positive change.
In the absence of that, you've got the tools. The tools are there. The source of the anger and disgruntlement is going to be there because they can watch YouTube and they can watch the endless Lady Gaga videos -- it would scare the heck out of them -- (laughter) -- and all of the rest. But what do you do?
Well, you can rely -- as I think I'm hearing the last questioner's comment -- you can try to rely on these institutions that operate over here or you can work on a distributed network to try to find ways of leveraging positive change from the availability of these technologies. Great point, very good point.
Q: I have two questions. I understand the node-to-node communications, or cell phone-to-cell phone. The first question: You mentioned radio, but what are some other methods of communication used in communities on your travels to get the information from that node to the masses?
And then kind of tied to the previous point, what have been some of the reactions you've noticed -- if you have any anecdotal from your travels -- what have been the reactions to information? Are they disgruntled? Are they frustrated? Are they ambitious to try to take advantage of this new information? You know, if you could just kind of talk about these -- (inaudible, off mic) -- people on the receiving end of new information that they just haven't accessed before.
MR. LIVINGSTON: Thank you for the questions. Let me answer the second one first and then I'll step back and answer the first one. What I have seen, not only with this most recent trip to Africa -- I've been going to Africa for a long time, as well as India and all over the place -- is just a sense of exuberance -- I'm looking for the right adjective -- the sense of being empowered that I can -- you know, it's like anything else.
You use your cell phone and I use my cell phone for all kinds of purposes. But you and I have alternatives. If you wanted to find out an answer to a question, you can go online and look on Google. Well, you want to find out an answer to a question and you're a farmer and you are, for the first time, capable of getting the information you need in your hands. So the sense I get is one of empowerment, and at a level or to a degree that's hard, perhaps, at least for me, to really appreciate because I live in a world of redundant technologies.
I'm just not checking my e-mail on my handheld. I'm online. I've got all kinds of devices. But if that is your tie to the world that can help you feed your family or help keep your family and your community safe, then you have, I have found, an extraordinarily positive sense of possibility that's involved here.
It's also a community-wide effect, as well, because again, in some of these farming communities, you're talking about either family-based or organizational-based, like a cooperative-based social structure. So that technology is not just serving your individual or your family needs, but you may be a member of an agricultural cooperative somewhere in Rwanda at a coffee washing station and the information that you're getting about coffee -- about its production, about its care, about its selling, all of that -- is actually empowering the entire community. So that's my takeaway on that. It's a positive one, but it's one that I've seen.
With regards to how the information has gotten to the masses, well, that goes back, in part, to the absence of a viable, effective legacy press, with the one exception, and that's radio. Radio is still effective. And what I have seen, at least in the Congo, Rwanda, Kenya -- less in South Africa. South Africa is a different ballgame. Senegal to a bit, though I've read more -- is that radio and cell phones are working together to create a wider awareness.
So again, the example that I raised in my talk where a community is together listening to radio content -- and you have to imagine; we're talking about -- the place that I have in mind when I tell you about that is a community I visited that you walk four hours down a path to get to the community and you're absolutely dumbfounded to find that a cell phone works here and so does a local community radio station.
And those things together provide a connection between the local community radio, which is tied in with consortium of community radios all through the eastern part of the Congo, so there's some degree of association and cooperation amongst the radio stations themselves.
But then you get cell phones connecting that local populace with the radio station itself so as to improve their programming, provide quality assurance from the perspective of the locals. It is empowering that community to be able to use that cell phone to connect with the radio station that, in turn, connects with the distributed network of people who may not all have, obviously, cell phones in their pocket, right?
So it creates -- there's a guy named Ethan Zuckerman at Harvard who talks about this as creating a radio-based local area network. You know, local area networks usually don't involve radios, but in this instance, it involves radio. Good questions. Yes, sir?
Q: Could you give me the cost of the phone cell networks in different countries -- if that cost has been going down over the last couple years?
MR. LIVINGSTON: Can't say for sure -- not an engineer. My impression is that it's remaining stable or going down, simply because if you have -- you know, it's an infrastructure-development project, and it's one of the more effective ones to take root in the developing world, just not in Africa. So the care and maintenance -- the installation of cell masts, relative to roads, relative to airports, certainly relative to fixed-line phones, seems to be quite viable.
This is the reason why you've seen such an exponential growth rate in the number of phones in Afghanistan. You know, the towers -- the masts -- are there. They're just the object of political football between the Taliban and Western forces. So you see a little bit of that, also, in Africa with towers and the realization of the power of towers and the power of telephony becoming an object of political football in some places.
The creation of trunk lines -- the fiber-optic trunk lines coming out of the undersea cable that's going through Kenya, Uganda and in towards central Africa, you see a little bit of mischief there with various competitors running parallel fiber-optic lines probably cutting one another's lines just so as to get competitive advantage. That causes an increase in cost. But overall, the point of the exponential growth rate says that this is a very viable infrastructure program.
Q: Do you have any examples of either military or political leadership in Africa using these cell phone networks and using small -- (inaudible) -- successfully in getting these messages off or to organize?
MR. LIVINGSTON: You know, the best example that I have from my own research has to do with MANUC, the U.N. utilizing this capability. Less so -- maybe somebody in the audience can address your question. I'm not aware of an African government doing that. They're usually NGOs, not government. They're usually civil society undertakings, not government undertakings. Governments are often trying to catch up with the phenomenon rather than utilizing it. That may change.
Certainly in Rwanda, I can tell you, it's partly cell phone-based -- and again, speak up if anyone can answer this better than I can. But e-governance in Rwanda is a big push, connecting all the various district government offices in Rwanda via regular Internet connectivity, not just cell phone connectivity. So that's an example of a network-governance phenomenon done by government. There's government and governance. This is a case of the government doing governance using networks.
Q: When you were out in the rural areas, did you get a sense that those who owned cell phones or the presence of cell phones was somehow changing the power dynamic in the community?
MR. LIVINGSTON: Yes.
Q: Okay, please speak to that, but my follow-up question to that is, it was that same slide that showed -- you were talking about those within the communities who had the cell phones could somehow be targeted by, for example, the LRA and there was a class on how to protect themselves. Could you speak to ways -- recommended ways to protect themselves against that?
MR. LIVINGSTON: Yeah, wherever you are, knowledge is power. And so if you have a cell phone in your pocket that can be used for any imagined motivation, whether it's protection of the community or whatever, that means that you have -- it's like a totem or a talisman. You are powerful because of that. And so it changes the dynamic within the society in that regard, either positively or negatively.
I mean, this is actually a very complicated question and there isn't a single answer to it, as to whether or not you think it's positive or not, right? So let me just play that out for a second. So a woman in a Congolese community has a cell phone, and all of a sudden -- or in north Africa, wherever, you know. In a Muslim community, a woman has a cell phone. That means that she has the power to connect with the larger world to bring in allies from the NGO community, human rights community, from wherever.
That changes her relative power status within that community. Okay, now you and I may think that's great, but from the vantage point of the local community, that's a bit -- because who is she? She's a woman, right? So just thinking through it in that regard, you can see how it changes that. Also, on the flipside, as I said in my presentation, it puts people at risk. If you have the power to reveal a threat, that means that the Lord's Resistance Army or whoever, or the local criminal who's been operating freely in some community all of a sudden is vulnerable because you can snitch on him or her -- same idea.
So it changes that dynamic and all of a sudden, the elders aren't the powerful ones unless the elder happens to be the one with the cell phone, which is probably not the case. It's going to be the younger male or female in the community. So just the gender and also, the age cohort relations change, to the degree to which that cell phone changes the power dynamics of that community.
That's the reason why -- Voix des Kivu is actually a program run by Columbia University in New York, which also introduces some interesting ethical considerations. If you have a reporting mechanism about a rape that takes place, for example, in northern Kivu, but the first responder is the person who gets that report at Columbia University in New York, well, first responders have an obligation -- if you were in the United States -- if you were in New York and somebody reported a rape at a university, you have an obligation as a first responder to take certain steps.
What are the ethical obligations in a global networked environment where the first responder to a violent crime in the Congo is in New York? So this changes the dynamic. This, perhaps, goes back to some of the intention behind the ambassador's questioning having to do with policy responses. Networked environments just change governance to no end -- global governance. This is what's playing out with networked environments, such as WikiLeaks versus the intention of the State Department, the Defense Department, the military. It's networked environments confronting government on a constant basis, and working out that power dynamic. Good question.
Q: I'd like to know whether the people that are actually receiving the cell phones have access to the cell phones readily available. Are they chosen by, let's say, in Congo -- (inaudible) -- or the local leader? First part.
The second part of the question is, speaking about the Congo, and specifically North Kivu, I know that the government or the political power takes that political power and puts money in other areas, such as gas stations or their own personal property. Are there any -- do you have any knowledge about the local leaders and the political leaders -- (inaudible, off mic) -- to the public, not necessarily down, but being able to control some of this access by owning those cell phone companies?
MR. LIVINGSTON: Not in Africa, though I wouldn't be surprised to find it's there. I do know that something similar to what you're describing, I've seen in Afghanistan. But in the first part of your -- I lost the first part of your question. I'm sorry, would you say it again?
Q: The first part of the question was who's appointing the people?
MR. LIVINGSTON: Oh, okay. Well, most often, they're just self-appointed. I mean, these are just people -- with the one exception of crowd-seeding with the Voix des Kivu project, the Columbia University project in collaboration with the International Rescue Committee. That's where they are taking cell phones and encouraging, actually, the installation masts where they are needed by the local cell phone provider. And then they are putting three or four mobile phones into the hands of carefully selected individuals.
That's the only instance of where I know about crowd-seeding -- the conscious placement of the phones. The question is, what are the criteria? One phone goes to the community leader that just naturally, organically emerges -- the elder or the community leader or the chief of the area. Another goes into the hands of a woman. The other goes into the hands of a man. So they have -- Columbia is trying to get gender balance there.
So there is a distribution of this new power resource as best as possible across the community. Usually cell phones just fall into the hands of people who want to have a cell phone. And if you've spent any time in Africa, you know the knockoffs of the Nokias are really inexpensive. The cost of the phone itself is quite minimal, even, in most instances, in African urban environments, manageable for most Africans. It's the service that becomes more problematic -- the top off, the buying of the SIM cards with certain amounts of minutes.
And of course, there's various ways that Africans have devised to get around the charges -- beeping, you know, using various communication mechanisms, using a cell phone where you let it ring and it means something and you don't and -- you know, all kinds of ways of getting around the actual use of the credits involved, but still communicating messages. So it's usually just an emergence of people who want phones.
From LTC David Knellinger on 9/10/2012 2:02:03 PM "The Central Africa Region Environmental Security Symposium, hosted by the United States Africa Command Environmental Security Program and the United Nations Environmental Programme..." (Read Full Entry)
From Brigadier General Stayce Harris on 7/19/2012 8:54:32 AM "The following blog is by Brigadier General Stayce Harris, U.S. Africa Command's mobilization reserve assistant to the commander.
Over the past 2 years, I have had the..." (Read Full Entry)
Paul in UK wrote on 8/22/2012 9:16:10 AM "I was also involved in the communications training at Kisangani and share Michel Beya's comments I'm sure we met. What I saw was a very well trained battalion and hope that..." (Read Full Entry)
Mark in Fort Leavenworth wrote on 8/21/2012 10:25:29 PM "False allegations against Commander USAFRICOM appear to be in fashion. It is shameful that someone felt the need to assassinate the character of the previous commander — one ..." (Read Full Entry)
Anonymous in Unspecified wrote on 8/21/2012 10:06:10 PM "Glad to see this, and would love to see more. It's about time we start calling out publications that feel free to write whatever they want based on rumors and myths and not fac..." (Read Full Entry)
Anonymous in Unspecified wrote on 8/21/2012 10:03:43 PM "Congratulations for calling Ethiopian Review on the carpet. The contributor who stated that the clarification was not warranted is clearly very near sighted. It is exactly those so..." (Read Full Entry)
Anonymous in Unspecified wrote on 8/21/2012 3:48:08 AM "The right and accurate response,I am glad you did not give any loopholes to this lameduck, extereme and toxic elements who do not represent the sielent diaspora majority,create and..." (Read Full Entry)
The LYnC
APAN
CHIRP
Wordpress
Flickr
Facebook
YouTube
Twitter
AFRICOM History, Background
