Geek Heresy (21 page)

Yet little of their computer use could be called productive. The most popular activities were watching movies and listening to music.
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And their usage betrayed a shallow understanding of computer use. One funny habit was to attach “.com” to anything they searched for. When searching for the Indian movie
Pokiri
, for example, they would type “movie
Pokiri.com
” into the search engine, like a magical incantation. In any case, no one was learning skills that could help them in their home lives or careers.

Upgrading Technology Versus Upgrading Skills

Of the three researchers who started the basement PC project, Ratan stayed with it longest. Ratan is a woman of compact energy and a strong sense of social justice. Unlike many of the other researchers in the office, she knew the working-class staff by name, and though she was quite young, they all looked up to her.

Ratan wasn’t satisfied with minor gains in computer literacy, so she convened another meeting with the staff and asked them what they wanted to learn from the computer. English was the most common response, so Ratan upgraded Kelsa+ with English instructional CDs.

Ratan administered English tests before the upgrade and three months afterward. The results were what you might expect. Although one person spent a lot of time with the software, most were casual users. Among the seven staff members who took both tests, there was an insignificant bump in average English proficiency.

But Ratan did have something else to be proud of. A security guard who was inspired by Kelsa+ enrolled himself in a data-entry course at a private training center. Every day after his shift, he used the Kelsa+ PC to practice what he had learned. After several weeks, he handed in his resignation. He had qualified for a job in data entry. He would take an initial cut in pay – as a seasoned security guard, he made slightly more than entry-level back-office workers typically did. But his growth potential was far greater. He might one day command a white-collar manager’s salary that would dwarf anything he could have made in physical security.
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He was happiest, though, about something less tangible: social status. “Today,” he said, “I can stand up in front of my father and friends and say that I am no more a watchman, but I am doing a computer job.”
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Kelsa+ shows that while giving away a packaged intervention does little on its own, a social aim can still be achieved if the intervention is paired with training. In international development circles, people often speak of “handholding” activities to encourage the best use of a packaged intervention, or “capacity building” to support organizational development. Microloans can be combined with financial education.
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The sale of new seeds might occur within the context of proper extension. Vaccines are best delivered in the hands of well-trained health workers. Even the gift of a goat can be more useful with advice on its proper care.
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It’s important to recognize, though, that a packaged intervention and the training for it are two very different things, just as owning a piano and knowing how to play it are. Training may require a physical object as a teaching aid, but it’s much more than the provision of things. Teaching demands the effort and engagement of skilled people – things that can’t be packaged.

Admittedly, training is expensive. But compared to a packaged intervention alone, training has far greater effect. On the one hand, about forty people had access to the Kelsa+ PC in our office. They had the full range of “opportunities” that the Internet provides, but they got little of concrete value out of it. On the other hand, there was one person who sought training who experienced a dramatic upgrade in his earning capacity, social status, and life satisfaction.

Among my field-worn colleagues, you often hear that technology is only 10 percent of the solution. In fact, many projects that start out as technology giveaways evolve into instructional programs. Of the world’s remaining telecenters, many survived by morphing into computer training schools. Even Sugata Mitra, the man behind Hole-in-the-Wall, admits that his open-access computers have more impact under the care of a teacher or school.
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The Amazing Students of Ashesi University

Kelsa+ reminded me of an experience I had before I went to India. In 2001 or so, my friend Nina Marini told me about an exciting venture she was about to help launch. She had recently graduated from UC Berkeley’s School of Business, where she met Patrick Awuah, a Ghanaian American who was determined to start Ghana’s first liberal arts college. Marini was inspired by his vision and had signed on as Ashesi University’s founding vice president. I offered that maybe one day I’d teach there.

That day came earlier than I expected. In 2002, Ashesi took on its initial cohort of students and was in urgent need of someone to teach first-semester calculus. Marini asked me if I could fill in for one term, and I agreed.

When I arrived, there were two surprises. The first was that the class was wholly unprepared for calculus. A diagnostic test showed that two-thirds of the twenty-five students hadn’t mastered basic algebra. Only a few of them could plot a straight-line equation on a graph. I wanted to deliver on what I’d promised, but in the one quarter I was allotted,
I couldn’t squeeze in several years’ worth of remedial math. The textbooks I had ordered were a poor fit, so I decided to develop a streamlined curriculum from scratch. I would shepherd the students from algebra through basic calculus, but focus narrowly on single-variable polynomials.

The second surprise was just how eager and motivated the students were. They were a teacher’s dream come true. I had initially reserved a second track on trigonometry and exponential functions for a small group that was on firmer footing, and I announced on the first day that they would learn it through supplementary homework. But during office hours a long queue formed outside my door. One by one, the other students begged to be included in the second track. I gave in – it seemed wrong to decline so much aspiration.

The students worked hard. I assigned several hours of homework each night – meanwhile, they had other classes – but they were spurred on by the challenge. They absorbed the material at an amazing rate, as if they’d been starved all their life for the knowledge. By the end of the term, everyone understood derivatives and integrals and could perform calculus on polynomials. A good portion also mastered sines, cosines, and exponentiation as well. Final exam grades were all As and Bs, and one heroically achieved B– (about which more in a moment). I went home with the satisfaction that I had contributed in some small way to the students’ education and professional growth.

I’ve stayed in touch with the students ever since. I returned to Ghana for their commencement in 2005 as well as for Ashesi’s tenth anniversary in 2012. Today those students are programmers, entrepreneurs, and experts in a range of professions. Solomon Antwi is a consultant in international development. Andrew Tarawali is an investment adviser at an agricultural investment fund. Kweku Tandoh heads engineering at Rancard Solutions, one of Ghana’s top software firms.

The students learned exactly what they’d signed up for: computer programming and business administration. But the experience meant so much more. Ashesi students aren’t just capable users of technology.
They’re leaders of technology and enterprise creation. If Kelsa+ shows that a little instruction is worthwhile, Ashesi demonstrates that deep investment in people is even more valuable.

Intrinsic Growth

In 2012, my former students and I had a reunion dinner at the fancy new Accra Mall in Ghana. As I reminisced with them and heard about their lives, it occurred to me that Ashesi graduates were members of a global elite. Despite their unique culture and history, most of them nevertheless shared the same opportunities with middle- and upper-middle-class people from around the world. And those opportunities were noticeably different from those of the average Indian telecenter customer, or some of the working-class parents of TAF students, or any of the dozens of other people I’ve spent time with in the rural and urban-slum developing world.

In my class, the math they learned was less important than the growth they experienced in heart, mind, and will. Linda shot me blank looks in class but forged her bewilderment into the knowledge she needed to ace the next day’s quiz. Maame Dufie said she’d never thought she could learn calculus, but after doing well on the final exam, she knew she could do anything she put her mind to. When I polled some of my former students about what they learned most at Ashesi, no one mentioned the specifics of calculating a derivative. Seyram Ahiabor said that Ashesi’s liberal arts education granted him versatility and “a lot of confidence in taking up challenges.” Michelle Eghan learned that she had “the choice to question everything and not to accept things at face value.” Isaac Tuggun said, “I knew it was going to be tough, but it was the best decision I ever made.”

Tuggun was the student with the heroic B– I mentioned earlier: “I am from Nandom, a border town near Burkina Faso, in Upper West Region,” he once announced to me, “one of the three deprived regions in Ghana.” He was about ten years older than the other students, and from a comparatively less privileged background. “I lost both parents
while still in secondary school,” he said in his formal but fluent English. “My junior brother and junior sister were helpless and could not do anything to help themselves. There was no money. Even to get food was a problem. As a student I had to rear [a] few pigs and rabbits, a little poultry, selling cubes of sugar, cigarette, et cetera, all in small quantities.” On top of these struggles, his legs had been permanently damaged in a childhood accident, and he had never been able to receive proper medical care for them. He walked on crutches.

After ensuring some independence for his siblings, he explained, he “spent a number of years seeking employment in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso”: “I did translation for business people and even government officials or agencies for a living. But that could not transform much of my life so I came back to Ghana in 2000. I was seeking both employment and an opportunity to study, and I got admission at Ashesi University.” Tuggun was a bit of a legend at the school. Staff recalled the day he showed up at the admissions office with few formal qualifications. Turned away at first, he came back repeatedly to make his case. Eventually he was admitted on the basis of sheer charm, daring, and persistence. He even received a scholarship.

He was the lowest scorer on my diagnostic test and every subsequent exam, but he was also the hardest worker. He was often the only person in the library, plugging away at assignments after the other students had gone home. He frequently came to my office for extra help. He struggled to grasp each concept and handed in most of his assignments incomplete because he ran out of time. But he turned them in with a smile. And what he learned, he held onto. Tuggun earned that B–.

I kept in touch with Tuggun over email for a couple of years until, suddenly, I stopped hearing from him. He disappeared for seven or eight years. At Ashesi, they mourned the fact that he had never completed his degree.

Then, just as suddenly, he reappeared, right before the reunion dinner. Another classmate had run into him and put us back in touch. I met his fiancée at the dinner, and she helped arrange for Tuggun and me to meet in the northern city of Tamale, where
nonprofits proliferate like casinos in Las Vegas. We both happened to have other meetings there. On the day of our appointment, I waited for him in the warm, dark air of an outdoor restaurant. A sturdy pickup truck – the kind favored by United Nations officials – drove up. When the passenger door opened, out came a pair of crutches followed by none other than Isaac Tuggun. He told the driver to wait for about an hour while we talked.

It turned out that Tuggun had worked his way up the ladder of an advocacy organization called the Ghana Federation of the Disabled. “I started as administrative secretary and rose to the position of administrator,” he told me, “and then to national advocacy officer of the disability movement in Ghana.” When I met him in Tamale, he was managing a joint project with DANIDA, a Danish aid organization.

Three Pillars of Wisdom

How did Tuggun go from itinerant interpreter to being chauffeured in the limousines of the foreign aid world? He displays several characteristics that many self-starters take for granted, but that are much rarer among involuntarily impoverished people. Some of these qualities come with a good education, which is an express advantage. But there’s a tendency to think of education as being simply the ability to read, write, and do arithmetic, when an effective education involves so much more than academics. Conversely, many people lead satisfying lives because of their social skills, entrepreneurial drive, or force of personality without knowing a lot of science or history. In other words, even if education is one means to acquire the relevant traits, it’s often less about the textbook content than something else that happens to come with formal learning.

What allowed Tuggun to succeed were the same heart, mind, and will that make packaged interventions work. Tuggun has good intention, discernment, and self-control – qualities similar to what Rikin Gandhi had in leading Digital Green, and that Digital Green sought in its partners.

Heart, or Intention

First and foremost, Tuggun had the firm
intention
to make life better for someone: his future self. Everyone wants a better life, but excessive hardship of a kind that is all too common leaves many individuals resigned to lives of poverty and powerlessness. Learned helplessness squashes aspirations, leading people in poor or oppressed circumstances to focus narrowly on the present to the detriment of their futures.
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Tuggun, though, was not like this. “My parents never made it in life,” he told me. “I was very determined to break that cycle of poverty.” He had a strong intention to rise above the circumstances in which he found himself. He did what he needed to survive, but he also kept one eye on the hope of a better life. He avoided people who were likely to get him into trouble. And he kept looking for opportunities to climb out of his circumstances.