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the one putting this information on the web, and in theory, the gov’t could change the policy, making this document out of date.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…

It’s part of an interesting new direction for technology research – instead of just building faster, more high-resolution (and more expensive) devices, people are working on ways to build low cost devices that are more robust, can be mass produced, and can provide good enough information for primary triage.

On another note, these devices (as the economist article posits) could be well deployed with a good mobile-phone-based data collection system – collecting not just text and numbers, but images as well.

As part of the evaluation for the Uganda OBA project, Ben Bellows and his collaborators at Makarere University are conducting a household survey in the coverage area of the project and in a similar control area. As part of this survey they have to also do sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing, trying to determine the actual prevalence of STIs and not just an estimate based on who comes in for diagnosis and treatment. Can you imagine how much easier and verifiable these surveys would be if 1) the data collection could be done electronically, and 2) digital media for the testing could be integrated into the data collection records? Not that all diagnoses could be done with cell-phone microscopy, and you still need careful sample and slide preparation. But it’s still something to think about…

In Kenya the results were delayed for several days as the voting was completed. In the meantime Kenyans rioted. Then the results were announced – the incumbent President Kibaki had won. And then the EU Electoral commission declared dissatisfaction with the vote tallying process: ““We believe that… the ECK… has not succeeded in establishing the credibility of the tallying process to the satisfaction of all parties and candidates,” chief EU observer Alexander Lambsdorff said in a statement.“. More Kenyans rioted – and now the latest news report says 30 have burned to death in a church set on flame by a mob.

[an aside: i imagine americans in a similar situation might object, but would be too apathetic to do anything as energetic as rioting. perhaps it has to do with our low voter turnout... and i guess al gore did the nice thing and conceded rather than waving a banner and accusing the bush family of voter fraud]

So problem #1: it takes a long time to manually count votes. And problem #2: auditing capabilities are limited – although some auditing can be done (apparently one district reported 110% turnout), only the incumbent party gets a useful “assurance” of the tally’s credibility. Both of these problems seem easily solvable by information technologies. For example one could use DTN+Tierstore to collect the votes and publicly publish them, decentralizing the counting and publication of the votes such that an attacker (in the Bruce Schneier technical sense) would have to compromise many units. But to prevent ballot stuffing, each vote would need to be accompanied by an individual identifier like a thumbprint (is it possible to distinguish a thumbprint from other fingerprints?) or signature, which could also be published on a per-district level, disassociated from the voter tally of the district. Use of computing equipment also assures the speed of tallying so the result could take hours instead of days.

But however, feasible/interesting this may seem as a research project, I anticipate a few possible glitches. Firstly, one would have to collaborate with the government, which may not actually want fair elections. Then (as a PhD student) one would have to be quite lucky to have the election during the course of the PhD, and really, aside from testing, they would have only one try per country every 4 (5? 10?) years. And there’s no guarantee that even with a verifiable and transparent election people won’t riot anyways. Although it seems that election fraud is the cause of this spate of violence, I would surmise to guess that a key underlying cause would the ethnic division, and the corrupt elections were just an excuse for such outward displays of frustration, angst, and wanton destruction. Um. And I wouldn’t want to be in Kenya during that disputed election period… But I think it’s still perfectly feasible to 1) do research on election systems in developing countries and 2) design a novel software+hardware solution motivated by an understanding of election systems in these countries, along with a model for how this solution could be adopted by various countrie, all without doing a full-scale deployment.
So if anyone is looking for a research topic… take this one and run with it.