Christopher Guess takes us on a journey on his encounter with a young inquisitive mind in the slums of Arusha, Tanzania. The charm of two unrelenting boys brings him to an interesting revelation – simplicity is expensive, though necessary when it comes to technology.
In the fall of 2008 I was living in the slums on the north side of Arusha, Tanzania, not far from Mount Kilimanjaro. I was staying with my friend and his now-wife in their rented two-room apartment. Traveling with my friend, Mike, a writer, we slept in the living room and our friends in the bedroom. We were awaken every morning by a young boy and his elder brother. They were probably five and seven years old. And we were probably the only two white men living within two kilometers, something that made us a kind of novelty to our new friends. They were great fun, and they loved practicing their very passable English on us whenever they could. The two brothers were lucky enough to have a television that picked up a few English-language cartoons and had garnered some pretty decent language skills, like kids tend to do.
In the fall of 2008 I was living in the slums on the north side of Arusha, Tanzania, not far from Mount Kilimanjaro. I was staying with my friend and his now-wife in their rented two-room apartment. Traveling with my friend, Mike, a writer, we slept in the living room and our friends in the bedroom. We were awaken every morning by a young boy and his elder brother. They were probably five and seven years old. And we were probably the only two white men living within two kilometers, something that made us a kind of novelty to our new friends. They were great fun, and they loved practicing their very passable English on us whenever they could. The two brothers were lucky enough to have a television that picked up a few English-language cartoons and had garnered some pretty decent language skills, like kids tend to do.
The television and an old Nokia cell phone were probably the most complicated and modern technology that either of these boys had ever experienced. Of course, being modern journalists, Mike and I had the tools of our recently-graduated-from-college lives. We had digital cameras, video cameras, laptops and of course, iPods (video ones at that!). The kids were enthralled by these items – even more so the younger of the two. They both loved seeing their pictures seconds after it had been taken. So, one day, I decided to let the younger boy play around with the camera. He looked at it, and almost immediately, he was taking surprisingly well-composed pictures and, with a look of awed amusement, reviewing his work on the camera display screen. A few days later, the elder of the two boys came over while I was watching an episode of Arrested Development on my iPod. He was intrigued, so I decided to let him give the device a go. I had Daft Punk on my library, but I decided to queue up something less foreign and a bit more familiar to the boy’s musical experience. Country seemed like a valid option, so I queued up Kenny Chesney and handed him the iPod to listen. Again, in less than 30 seconds, this little boy who had, for all I know, never seen an MP3 player before, was flying through the click wheel and skipping between songs. As a side note: I had chosen right, the kid seemed to really enjoy country music.
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| A young woman in a rural Africa village bears her mobile device |
Watching this kid simply “destroy” technology that continues to befuddle most of my middle-aged family members was baffling. It took me a little while to figure it out and while there’s no doubt that these two boys were very smart and intuitive, going from a number pad to an iPod is not a small leap. I realized what the trick was later that day – it all came down to design. The products, though complicated, were easy to use. True, neither of them were trying to change the settings on my Canon SLR, but taking pictures and seeing them (the most important parts), were simple. The iPod, seemed to have been designed for consumers like these boys, people with very little experience in anything high tech. Indeed, an iPod was designed with them in mind, essentially, the market for poor African children just happens to share a lot of commonalities with an older generation of Americans and Europeans.
Simplicity of technology and cost seem to have an inverse relationship these days. The cheaper you want something, the more complicated it’s going to have to be. Design comes as an afterthought, another money sink that companies, already pushing a release deadline, often don’t have time or the talent for. When computer scientists decide they want to build a computer that is cheap and small enough to put one in every classroom in India, you get the Raspberry Pi. It’s a $35 computer that is amazingly powerful for how much it costs. Unfortunately it’s also a very minimalist chip that takes someone with years of advanced computer training to just boot for the first time. Yes, there will be kind-hearted individuals who will make it their year’s end goal to allow easy set up, but it still won’t work as well as booting up an iPad or renting a DVD from Netflix. I’ve been a Linux user since I was 13 and it still took me four hours to get my Raspberry Pi to boot – a teacher in Kigali or Kashmir has very little chance.
Africa is breaking out and the need for technology is rising exponentially. The cost of training and the ease of access is another force to reckon with. Potential customers span from Western university educated businessmen to field repair technicians barely removed from their ancestral hut on the Masi Mara. For companies looking to sell products and technologies, simplicity should lead. Design should be considered first, cost second, and then how the product gets built. If something gets built, even if it will give 24-hour electricity to an entire village for pennies a day, someone whose education stopped at being able to read and multiply, will have to maintain it. The quicker the set up, the easier the training and the simpler the use, the better chance a company’s next-great-thing has to survive and sell.
It’s an old mantra, “keep it simple, stupid”.
Christopher Guess is a journalist, photographer and tech entrepreneur based in Brooklyn, New York. Christopher writes about emerging innovations and individuals within Africa’s tech industry. Through his reporting, he seeks to highlight the successes and issues that emerging economies face when transitioning to knowledge based economies. He has reported extensively in the United States and internationally on humanitarian and economic issues. Eastern Africa became a specific point of interest for him while travelling and reporting in the area in 2008. In addition to his journalism, Christopher is the co-founder of two tech start-ups in New York City, giving him a distinct vantage point on developmental milestones and opportunities.
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