After I had received a bunch of inquires from people around the globe about Citizen Media in Uganda, I thought it best that I start a list of all the people I know who are or may be interested in such things. I don’t want to be the only one speaking about the topic since one principle of Citizen Media, as I understand it, is that many people should be able to participate in a dialogue.

I have no aims or objectives for this group other than the idea that if a bunch of people had a better forum to discuss things and get things started, then maybe more things will be discussed and more things will be started.

So, let the dialogue begin! Email me at glennagordon [at] gmail dot com for more information.

My very first Google Group: Citizen Media and ICT in Uganda.

Copyright Glenna Gordon. The walls at the Jinja Road Roundabout were painted with political empowerment slogans and murals just weeks before Chogm in November 2007.

I posted a few days ago, asking, where have all the Ugandan political bloggers gone?

First off, my post elicited a directly political post from Ugandan Insomniac, which includes a bunch of newspaper covers (something most people out of Uganda don’t get to see even if they check the Vision and Monitor websites every day) and had some much needed commentary on Andrew Mwenda’s new enterprise – which may be losing its edge, as more than one person has said to me. (Which makes me think back to my original comment on self censorship, but that’s another can of worms for a another post.)

Next, a great commnet from Antipop on why there might not be more political bloggers:

To be honest with you most of us come to blogger to escape from it all. The fires, the term limits, the land wrangles, GAVI funds, presidential jet, potholes, fuel prices, press freedom, FDC, NRM,…it is everywhere you turn. the papers, the radio, tv, in the bar, even the woman that sells cassava roots in the market will have something to say about how the soaring prices have everything to do with a MUNYANKOLE president. the last thing you wnat to do is come to blogger and find it. I guess we are just tired. There is only so much whinning we can do.

And while I am particularly fond of whinning, of both the political and nonpolitical types, Jackfruity blogs to point out that Citizen Media doesn’t have to be about politics:

One of the most important things to come of out last month’s
Global Voices Summit is that the political voices aren’t the only ones that need to be amplified. Cultural and social voices are equally important to an understanding of other places, and several recent posts attempt to present readers with a more nuanced view of countries that are only discussed internationally when a crisis brings them to our attention.

Meanwhile, another expat in Uganda laments the difficulties of trying to get more Citizen Media started. She asks, Can Citizen Media Change Uganda?

In short, no. During Elizabeth Kameo’s training on writing and gathering news, it became apparent that some of the participants were not convinced of the changes citizen journalism can incur. Most in the crowd did not believe that writing a blog post would motivate the Ugandan government into action. They’re probably right. Chances are the Ugandan government will pay little attention to a scattering of blogs – many left stagnant for long periods of time. There is a slim probability that someone posting about Kampala’s man-holes – pot holes that can engulf a man, more often a small child, that are found on sidewalks and other obscure places – will be filled once an MP reads about it. Chances are the government will not pass the domestic relations bill into an act. Or will they train policemen to respect recently passed legislation on rape, domestic abuse and circumcision.

Though people aren’t blogging much about the things listed above here, perhpas that’s because the need is less urgent than for people in other countries who do write more political blogs. (This is a statement with no empircal evidence, just a conjecture I’d be happy to abandon in the face of any such evidence.) An Associated Press article here showed how Zimbabweans are using blogs and text messages as a source of information. The article implies that people are using these means because there aren’t other means avaliable.

Maybe all of us living in Uganda should be glad that blogs have not yet had to serve this kind of function and that leisure and a relatively stable situtation in this country allows for putting up photos of kittens (which, by the way, ARE SO CUTE) and bashing Facebook groups.

After all, I love kittens and bashing Facebook almost as much as whining, of both the political and nonpolitical kind.

The Ugandan blogosphere is vibrant – lots of blogs, lots of ideas, lots of contributors, lots of words, lots of posts, lots of comments.

But where have all the political blogs gone? There’s this one, but that’s also a newspaper column, or this one, not updated frequently, or this one that’s not by a Ugandan, and some others that are more general to Africa and not specific to Uganda.

Or were polticial blogs never there in the first place? There’s plenty of thoughts on boda bodas, Big Brother Africa, the bad weather Kampala’s been having lately, being broke, and other aspects of life in Uganda that certainly aren’t apolitical, but they aren’t exactly government budgets and school fires either.

Here’s an email I got from a reader recently:

I’m wondering if you could suggest a site for me. I’ve been searching for a while for an online forum re: Uganda news and politics. It’s been tough finding more than news sites or sites that compile various news sources. I’m really looking for critical discussion on current events in UG and/or E Africa. For example, where are people posting about and discussing term limits, failed/successful development projects, UG economics, etc? NV and Monitor perspectives are so narrow and the discussion is lost after a day.

Where do you go for these sorts of discussions? Where might you suggest one goes for this?

And this one came to a list on I’m for Global Voices from a popular expat blogger, Jackfruity:

How about a cross-Africa post on the ICC‘s charges? Uganda has a couple of contributions (hopefully we’ll have more soon, but not a lot of people are blogging about it right now). What do you think? I’d be happy to put it together if people want to send me links.

I never really saw much from the Ugandan blogosphere about the ICC charges, though I’d be happy if I was wrong and there’s something I wasn’t reading. Omar al-Bashir’s indictement could have some serious repercussions on what’s going on with Joseph Kony, who is wanted by the ICC, and therefore what’s going on with an entire region of this country – millions of people.

But maybe they aren’t the people with blogspot addresses?

I’m technically an author for Global Voices, though I’ve done about four posts in the past year. Though I love the window into people’s lives (I’m thinking of you, and you, and you and everyone else) it’s not the kind of citizen media stuff that I find exciting – the kind that fills the gap between what the newspapers are saying and what people are really thinking.

Or maybe I’m looking in all the wrong places? I’d love to hear what readers think about this and basically just about anything else as well.

I want to know what people think about the structures that affect their lives, but I’m wondering if maybe the internet in Uganda is not the space to express them? Though there’s not a very heavy hand of government involved in internet censorship, maybe self censorship is so strong the government doesn’t have to be heavy handed?

A picture post for today. Some by me, some by others.

Laptops distributed in Nepal.

Food riots in Mogadishu. (AFP)

Sudanese who have been living in neighboring countries including Chad, Uganda, Congo and CAR are returning to South Sudan for a census, which looked promising but has had more than a few hitches. I took a bunch of photos for this story but they never ran on the wire. So unlike my other AP photos, I actually own these and can use them as I’d like, ie, for your photo copying purposes, dear reader.

When I wrote about the Acholi women living in in Kireka, I first hung out with them at an NGO called Meeting Point for lots of singing and dancing. I’ve been to many a singing and dancing session, but this is the first one where they put a hollowed out gourd on my head during the festivities. Unfortunately, since there was a gourd on my head, I wasn’t able to properly use my zoom lens and capture the event for posterity.

There’s a really interesting piece up on Frontline by Edwin Okong’o, a member of the Kenyan diaspora living in California and working as a journalist.

Okong’o tells the story of how during the election aftermath, the website Mashada, an online discussion forum, received inflammatory hate speech. Several comments were filed under the screen named “Man R,” which someone online, through some misleading googling, decided was Okong’o. Then hateful messages were directed towards him.

Mashada stopped accepting comments temporarily, but Okong’o's name was nonetheless sullied.

I’d like to make some sweeping comments about the dangers of hate speech on the Internet or the role of online media during the Kenyan election aftermath, but I’ll leave that to Mr. Okong’o and just use this space as a chance to mention his work.

That’s a headline from yesterday’s New Vision.

The story excludes vital pieces of information to understand that number:

1) How much of that money is spent by individuals? Corporations? NGOs? One guy watching YouTube at UNDP?

2) How much of that money is for a permanent connection versus small fees at Internet cafes?

3) How many people are actually using the internet?

The answer to the third question, according to Google, is 750,000 as of September 2007, about 2.6 percent of the population. According to Wikipedia, which is getting its information from the CIA World Fact Book, Uganda ranks 86th in terms of the raw number of Internet users, but the ranking cannot be sorted according to the percent of people who use the Internet.

This map shows connectivity as a percentage of the population, but alas, everything in the 1 – 10 percent range is the same ice-blue color. (The image is a little small here – try this for a bigger view.)

The Wikipedia article, however, ranks Kenya at 54th in terms of the number of users (just below 3 million), and this is 7.5 percent of the population. That’s a pretty big difference in the number of users considering that the populations of Uganda and Kenya are about 30 million and 35 million respectively.

Part of this could be explained by the Vision article, which says,

Uganda’s Internet costs are the highest in the region. It costs $2,300 for accessing 512 mega bits per second per month whereas in Kenya, the 512 mega bits cost $500.

That’s a huge price difference. Internet in Uganda is prohibitively expensive. At a fast internet cafe, it will cost about Ush 3,000 per hour ($1.70). It may cost less per hour somewhere else, but the speed of the connection may be so slow that the users ends up spending more time, and therefore more money, to get the same information.

Home internet is also ridiculously expensive. The MTN Broadband Plan, newly launched and one of the CHEAPEST services available, is Ush 295,000 for set up alone. That’s about $174. That’s a lot of money – anywhere – but especially in Uganda. And that only gets you the basic set up – a monthly subscription package is on top of that.

A doctor at Mulago, Uganda’s top referral hospital, makes about Ush 500,000 per month ($294), and a teacher at a government school makes about Ush 200,000 per month ($117). Neither of these educated members of Uganda’s upper-middle class can afford their own internet connection.

While the Internet is not considered a basic endowed right (not yet, at least), I find it highly problematic that it’s so incredibly costly in Uganda. It’s important for people to have access to the Internet for loads of reasons that have nothing to do with BoingBoing. What about someone who wanted to go online and anonymously get information about HIV/AIDS? An NGO looking for a grant or some other kind of assistance? A student trying to find out what other kids his or her age are learning? Or for someone who wanted to start e-commerce? Or keep in touch with friends and relatives abroad?

There are a million reasons why people in Uganda need the internet. And all of them are worth more than $174 a month or $1.70 per hour, but need to cost less.

For more on internet connectivity in Africa, see White African’s post on the topic. There’s a You Tube video on the topic, but my internet connection is too slow to watch it. Whose idea was it to disseminate information about African internet connectivity via YouTube, a mode almost completely unavailable to people in Africa?

Though the NYTimes has run a few pieces saying most hospitals and schools were connected to the net, this piece seems most realistic…

But as of mid-July, only one-third of the 300 schools covered in Terracom’s contract had high-speed Internet service. All 300 were supposed to have been connected by 2006.

Over all, less than 1 percent of the population is connected to the Internet.

The piece goes on to detail how an American company seemed to have gone bad on its deal with the Rwandan government, and also couldn’t really handle the unanticipated challenges of working here. But apparently they’re back on track and trying to turn Rwanda into an information society. We’ll see.

Much ink has been spilled of late on Rwanda as an ICT hub. This article has gotten picked up all over the place, and I just wanted to point out a few things.

The article is mainly about the growing ICT industry in Rwanda, but also mentions this:

A related “village phone” endeavour undertaken by Nokia and the Grameen Foundation USA in 2006 sought to bring affordable mobile communications access to rural villages in Rwanda, as well as the creation of over 3,000 related small businesses throughout the country in the next three years.

“The number of village phones (as of July) deployed amount to 167. The target is to reach 1,000 by the end of 2007,” Nokia’s Middle East and Africa Director of Communications, Yolanda Pineda, told IPS.

Well, I’m glad that 167 people who didn’t have phones before have them now, but a) that isn’t that many, and b) do they have money for airtime?

The article also says:

The government continues to supply and invest in technology at both the primary and university school levels, as over 1,200 primary schools are equipped with computers and at least 10 percent of Rwanda’s secondary schools have wireless Internet.

But do they have power to turn them on? Do they have something to do with these computers? Do the teachers know how to use them?

Finally, it ends with an official quoted as saying this:

“I can also see Kigali developing into a real regional hub-the Singapore of East Africa.”

Yeah, Kigali looks just like Singapore.