Travel notes

What is the place of OLPC in the future of Bangladesh?

I asked this question whenever I could during our trip to Bangladesh to visit Jess's friends Jan 15 - Feb 12, 2010.

Much of the time, I found myself explaining about computers, internet access, and how other countries had used deployments of laptops to primary students to springboard into the digital era. (for slides and captions related to OLPC see http://picasaweb.google.com/jess.ganas/BangladeshOLPCVisit2010#)

Highlights in Narrative

On the other hand, I was extremely fortunate to be able to hook up with some of the leaders, and digital vanguard, who are already contributing to the digital future of the country.

Jess's friend, A.K.M. Wahidi (Wahidi), let us use an apartment that we shared with a teenaged son of his brother, Kasim Wahidi (Kasim). The two brothers are part of a family of 7 or so raised in the village of Sitakundo, which is about 30 KM North of Chittagong.

Wahidi was good at school, and got an engineering degree. After a few years working as an engineer, he got wanderlust, and shipped out in the merchant marine. After 10 years or so, he landed in Brooklyn, where Jess was also living at the time.

Wahidi now lives more than half of his time in Boston, and the other part in Sitakundo. He is strongly committed to education, especially for girls. A few years ago, he built a High School, which the government took over. More recently he has been supporting a primary school, located on the front portion of his family's land. While we were there, he was actively supervising the construction of a new facility for this school.

Wahidi's brother, Kasim, stayed in Bangladesh, and is well connected in the village of Sitakundu. He has served as the president of the village council for the last three years. He arranged for me to meet with two primary school principals, two high school principals, two central government officials, and the technically oriented entrepreneur who had installed his own broadband microwave link and launched a now defunct internet cafe in the village.

As an outgrowth of these visits, I have a much clearer picture of what might be useful as a way forward towards a digital future in the village of Sitakundo -- which I will detail at the end of this blog.

Before I left the US, I emailed people from Bangladesh, and North East India, with the intention of finding out what was happening, and connectinng if possible. One of those contacts resulted in my meeting with Ishtiaque, who was a visiting professor at BUET University, in Dhaka. It turned out that Ishtiaque's friend from the Media Labs at MIT was visiting, and was able to meet with me also. This friend suggested that I give a talk at another university (BRAC) to a computer club. My agenda, for giving this talk, was to try to hook up with technically oriented, idealistic, people who might take on a pilot project deployment.

As part of my preparation for giving this talk, I put out an introduction on the OLPC listserve for Bangladesh. Jamil Ahmed, responded, and I invited him to attend my presentation at BRAC University. It turned out that Jamil was the leader of an NGO, funded by someone in Spain, that has 20 or so full time computer people localizing open source tools for Bangladesh. His group is responsible for almost 100% localization into Bangla on the OLPC web site. (see http://translate.sugarlabs.org/)

One of the highlights of my trip was visiting Jamil's NGO, "Ankur ICT Development Foundation", hearing about their initiative to prepare learning materials in Bangla, and their plans to begin "Train the Trainer" 3 day workshops at "Bangladesh Telecentre Network" locations in villages outside of Dhaka.

Observations

Educational setting

I observed many children of school age, who were in the fields, or in business settings and therefore not in school.

There did appear to be a large number of private schools. Wahidi explained that in his opinion the public schools were over crowded, and not providing the quality education that his school was able to provide. On the other hand, he had to charge the parents school fees to offset teacher salaries, and the costs of materials.

The public schools I visited, seemed to have very large classes. The sixth class I visited, must have had 180 students, and just one teacher. It wasn't possible for me to judge whether a learning environment could be maintained, because my presence, accompanied by the principal, caused such a disturbance everyone was on their best behavior.

The private college I visited, (really more like our senior high school), had a computer lab which looked like a hopeful resource to me for increasing computer literacy. The classroom was large, with desks on one side of the room and 6 desktop computers on the other side of the room. The instructor had participated in some UNESCO distance learning courses from Dhaka. There was no internet access. The curriculum was centered around some course material developed by the government. It was Windows based, and focused on Word, Excel, and the Basic programming language.

It seemed that keeping the equipment working was an ongoing struggle. I noticed that one of the machines didn't boot. The error on the screen looked similar to what I have seen when the power fails during disk operations (which happens all the time) Another machine had a mouse where the ball was missing. (Kids are the same the world over).

But this was considerably better than the public high school we visited where the two machines were locked up in a store room and covered with enough dust to indicate that they hadn't be used in a long time.

Electrical Power

Only 40% of the population of Bangladesh have access to electricity, and these are disproportionately in the metropolitan areas. Even these people have to cope with multiple outages within a day because there is not enough generating capacity to serve everyone who has electrical service.

Digital infrastructure

During the time that we were in Bangladesh, wimax was being rolled out in Chittagong. But it did not reach the 30 or so km to Sitakundo. The wimax provider is Bangalion. On their web site they declare that they hope to cover all of Bangladesh by second quarter of 2011.

At this point, internet access is available pretty much everywhere via cellular technology 2g (edge). I bought a cellular modem (capable of 2g and 3g) and measured 60kb while we were uploading pictures to picasaweb using "edge" technology. The government of Bangladesh is reported to be in the process of licensing 3g, and there are reports that the government is insisting that telecom companies provide schools with free internet access, but I have not seen those references myself.

Bangalion, the wimax provider, has set a price on a continuous 1 mb connection at 3000tk/mo (about $43 per month). I talked with Shilbi, who has his own radio-link conection to Chittagong, and a fiber optic link to his office. He seemed to think that fiber connections between the schools might be possible and feasible, or on the other hand, additional radio-links. But he didn't have any concrete numbers about costs.

I'm wanting to get a school server installed some place and to see how usable cellular technology will be in a real classroom situation. (It's been a long time since I suffered with 60kb -- in Staten Island if have 50mb).

Initiatives I started during this trip

During my talking and asking questions, I developed the following strategy:

I want to start developing the resources that might be critical for a successful OLPC laptop deployment. I decided to try to help the college teacher become more effective in bringing computer literacy to his students, their parents, and hopefully to teachers in the surrounding village.

I bought Mustafa Karim, a projector, and gave him a cellular modem, with the thought that I might be aboe to communicate with him, and discover how successful he was in improving the scope of his teaching, and perhaps opening it to night classes, for primary teachers in the vicinity.

As a second initiative, I gave a laptop to Shibli, and encouraged him to play with it, and encourage the other teenagers to become familiar with the software and hardware of the XO.

The third prong was to agree to become an interface between "Ankur ICT development project" and OLPC. I'd like to see Jamil's "Train the Trainer" program be successful.