Mohamed Abdalmalik, an 18-year old Sudanese man, never imagined that one day he would be a business owner of a cyber-cafe in the downtown business district of Khartoum, the capital city of Sudan. Abdalmalik was never exposed to computers, he knew very little English, and even more challenging, he is deaf.
Ahmed Eisa is the founder and chairperson of Gedaref Digital City Organization (GDCO), a nongovernmental and nonprofit organization headquartered in Gedaref -- eastern Sudan -- that donated the 120 computers to the Amal School for its computer education program for the underprivileged. This organization is the only institution in Sudan -- the largest country in the African continent -- that provides organized computer education to the handicapped by running two schools in the Sudanese cities, Gedaref and Khartoum.
Abdalmalik belongs to the first batch of students to have benefited from this computer education course. Today there are now more than 200 disabled young men and women who have already received free training and free computers. "As a result, they not only have become self-dependent like Mohamed, but they are also helping their families and friends and contributing to the society," said Eisa. Eight other disabled persons from Amal School have also started their own informal training schools to train their "colleagues and friends."
Established in 2005, GDCO is an outcome of Eisa's urge for "development and advancement of every citizen in the Gedaref state through ICT" and largesse from the digital city of Eindhoven, Netherlands, that donated 750 computers to Eisa to kick-start his dreams.
"Since GDCO's initial aim was to enable people to reach and cope with the electronic era," said Eisa, these computers were first used to set up primarily digitization and capacity building projects like The Digital (Electronic) Medical Record, E-Learning and Support at Gedaref University, Intelligent School and Oracle Skills, and the like.
But soon Eisa realized that his country needed much more. For one, Sudan is one of the poorest countries in the world -- an average resident survives on less than a dollar a day -- was lagging terribly behind the world and needed the information and communication technology (ICT) urgently for development. But more importantly, stemming from poverty, the country was also suffering from very poor level of education, and thus "almost zero level of computer awareness."
"I knew that if I had to improve the lives of my people, I had to convince them to adopt the use of ICT," said Eisa. "The digital divide was too wide to bridge easily. I realized that we have to train the poor first and started training initiatives in poorest city and rural areas in Gedaref, imparting computer education at cost price."
While training the poor, Eisa also started wondering if was possible to provide a global language for the disabled.
"The digital divide is primarily caused by inequalities, he
said."This inequality could arise due to economic reasons -- like the difference [beteween] the rich and the poor -- geographical reasons -- like cities and villages -- and even health reasons, such as the difference between a healthy person and a differently abled person."
Eisa figured that in trying to address the poor and the rural population, GDCO needed a plan for the disabled, and thus, was born the computer education course at the Amal School.
"Currently at any point in time, GDCO initiatives are helping at least 124 disabled and about 1,500 others to learn and benefit from the use of ICT," explained Eisa.
The organization has also established a couple of community development projects for the government that it calls e-agriculture and e-government
The e-agriculture project is a GIS started in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture. This tracks crop patterns, weather conditions, harvesting conditions and "other agriculture-related information to help farmers get the best help in farming," he said. The e-farmer project also includes an e-commerce initiative that provides live commodity prices to member (13,000 currently) farmers.
The e-government project, on the other hand, is currently more security oriented and involves the training of police. It operates a training center at the Khartoum Police Head Quarters that has 20 computers to train police officers on ICT-enabled issuance and management of passports, identity cards, and driving and vehicle licenses.
According to Eisa, GDCO can provide its own sustenance. It runs without any monetary assistance from the government and has a revenue generation model that charges "a paltry" $15 to $25 fee from "those who can afford to pay" for GDCO's training courses.
"The poor are taught for free however," explained Eisa, and some money also comes from donations from private, NGOs and government entities to assist this.
Nevertheless, enlightening the uneducated, even if it done for free, is not always easy, Eisa's biggest problem continues to be motivating a large number of people to learn computers. With poverty so widespread, ICT is not a priority for the average Sudanese resident. "It often requires a fair amount of convincing to get somebody from particularly a poor family to spend a few hours everyday for attending classes," he said. Indeed spending the time learning in class that could have been spent earning, is perhaps a luxury few poor people can afford.
Additionally poor infrastructure and high hardware costs also pose problems. And language is the other big problem. "Most Sudanese speak only Arabic, and it is difficult to get content written in their language," said Eisa.
This is why GDCO is reaching out now. Eisa has recently signed an agreement with the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) in New Delhi, India, to introduce the university's courses in the e-learning programs it runs with the Gedaref University. These courses will be introduced in English first and will be translated in Arabic very shortly.
The organization has also partnered with the Information Society through North Africa and the Middle East Telecenter leader (EATLF) as well as East Africa Telecenter leaders(TC-MENA) for "sharing experiences and knowledge."
Looking ahead, Eisa said that GDCO is also concentrating on the government-owned Telecenter Academy in Sudan to improve the quality of training and expand the utility of the Academy's 1150 telecenters. More importantly, "We are also going to replicate our projects in others parts of Sudan to eventually extend GDCO's reach all over the country," he said. And given his track record of success, that's likely to happen fairly rapidly.
Indrajit Basu is the international correspondent for Government Technology's Digital Communities.
