I posted this on the official GIIP blog. It’s probably the most coherent (although that’s not saying much) thing I’ve written since coming here:
Today was our fourth day of website design training with the staff of CITAD, the Centre for Information Technology and Development. It started last Thursday with a not so shocking but certainly annoying occurrence: the diesel generator that powers the office blew out and set on fire. This meant that nearly half of our planned three-hour training had to be run entirely without electricity until a new generator arrived the next day.
This is Kano. With no real infrastructure, every individual home and business is responsible for their own electricity, spending astronomical amounts of money on diesel and generator repairs for what is an entirely unpredictable power supply. Combine this with the open sewers and poverty of the old Kano city viewable from their second story balcony, the CITAD offices might seem at first glance an unlikely place for web design trainings.
But at the end of four days the staff had put together impressive and functional sites made entirely with HTML and CSS. A feat, I reminded our fearless leader Adam Thompson, took weeks for UCSC students to master in our GIIP lab course. Their enthusiasm and thirst for IT knowledge was incredibly motivating.
The amount of work that CITAD is able to accomplish in the community awe-inspiring. A large computer lab (although only qualifiable as such by Western standards by the sheer amount of monitors in one room) hosts software trainings and exams day in and day out. Outside of the office, the staff makes visits at schools, villages, and mosques, informing individuals and organizations about the importance of computer technology in the economic and political development of their local and national communities. On a wider scale, they observe elections and advocate for better governance and public participation in politics. Their gender officer, Fatima Ibrahim, focuses her efforts on the implications of ICT for women. To accomplish this all in such challenging conditions for over a decade is a testament to their commitment and strength as an organization.
The web design trainings will be followed this week by classes on office networking, managing excel databases, content management systems, and more. All of this with the intention of CITAD staff repeating the trainings with other civil society organizations in Kano. On Monday, Adam Thompson will return to the states and I will continue working with CITAD to increase their skills and capacity to include ICT in their work. I’m convinced that we learned just as much about teaching technology in Kano as the CITAD staff learned HTML and CSS. There is no doubt that the challenges of these trainings, not limited to just power and language barriers, will continue throughout the summer but I’m confident of the lasting impact this technology can bring to their work and the importance of GIIP’s partnership with organizations like CITAD.
-Scott Reed
