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January, 2010:

Entrepreneurship in Uganda

Jan 14th, 2010
by melissa.
8 comments

I’ve always thought that Africa was full of entrepreneurs – thousands of people eking out a living in container stores and markets selling goods a minimal profit, so they can support their families, send their kids to school, and, in general, survive.

Now, there’s clearly a difference between the startups of Silicon Valley that get venture capital and make millions, and the small business owners that run grocery stores or laundromats, and street hawkers that sell chewing gum from baskets on top of their heads. Profit margins are one.  But everyone has to start somewhere, and not everyone has the same connections; certainly environment and geography plays a large role in the probable capacity of an individual to aspire.

So what does it take to start a formal business in Uganda? To be a small business owner?  I’ve been encouraging some of my students along these lines, and thinking about the “Coded In Country” concept.  One thing that plays a large role in the ability to build local capacity is the country’s business environment; how hard is it to start and run a company in Uganda?

After a bit of word-of-mouth consulting, and talking to some small business owners here, I turned to google, and found the Doing Business Project, which provides indicators on 10 topics in 183 economies.  While the data itself is also very useful, from a very practical standpoint the fact that they’ve documented all of the (18) steps for starting a business in Uganda, and put them on the web is totally amazing to me.  This is not formal e-governance, since the government isn’t the one putting this information on the web, and in theory, the gov’t could change the policy, making this document out of date. However, this does make things easier for people… as long as they have Internet access and pick the right search terms (e.g. “starting a company in Uganda“).

Now, what does this information mean for my students?  Mostly it means that they need to hire a lawyer to incorporate as a partnership.  We’ve consulted with a friend of a friend of theirs, and it will cost about 365,000 UGX (180 USD) in licensing and lawyer’s fees to go through the entire process. Their hope is to start a company that uses information technology to support healthcare in Uganda, through the development of software and the support of IT systems. They are helping me by providing ongoing computer and mobile phone maintenance to the healthcare providers I’m working with, even after I go back to the States, and working on supporting the software we’re developing.

Now they just have to come up with a name for the company…

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Young Researchers in ITID

Jan 1st, 2010
by melissa.
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I’ve just had two papers published in the Journal of Information Technology & International Development’s special issue on Human Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) (Vol 5, Issue 4, Winter 2009).

The first is a lit review and historical overview of the area:
Ho, M., Smyth, T., Kam, M., & Dearden, A. (2009). Human-Computer Interaction for Development: The Past, Present, and Future. Information Technologies & International Development, 5(4). http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/view/420/188

Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in research into the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of developing regions, particularly into how such ICTs might be appropriately designed to meet the unique user and infrastructural requirements that we encounter in these cross-cultural environments. This emerging field, known to some as HCI4D, is the product of a diverse set of origins. As such, it can often be difficult to navigate prior work, and/or to piece together a broad picture of what the field looks like as a whole. In this paper, we aim to contextualize HCI4D—to give it some historical background, to review its existing literature spanning a number of research traditions, to discuss some of its key issues arising from the work done so far, and to suggest some major research objectives for the future.

The second is a paper drawing on the field experiences of all of the authors, a group of (mostly) graduate students:
Anokwa, Y., Smyth, T., Ramachandran, D., Sherwani, J., Schwartzman, Y., Luk, R., Ho, M., Moraveji, N., & DeRenzi, B. (2009). Stories from the Field: Reflections on HCI4D Experiences. Information Technologies & International Development, 5(4). http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/view/427/195

Human-computer interaction for development (HCI4D) requires considerable time in the field interacting with users. While this is true for most HCI work, fieldwork in developing regions presents unique challenges due to differences in culture, language, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. As a group of nine HCI4D researchers, we have adopted a systematic approach to reflect on the challenges we have encountered in the field. Arising from this exercise are three contributions: The first is our research method itself, which uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative instruments to elicit and synthesize individual experiences. The second, intended for beginning researchers, is a set of lessons learned and suggested strategies for navigating the unique challenges of HCI4D research. The third, intended for the HCI4D community at large, is a critical reflection on the field itself, inspired by our findings. Topics covered include the incentives and agendas of the research world, the importance of managing expectations, the nature of “participation” in HCI4D, and the conflict between research and development more generally.

I really like researchers and the projects written about in the articles, so I encourage you to peruse the entire issue.

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