Examining the data-driven value chains that are changing Rwanda’s tea sector

by Chris Foster 16/02/2015

What role is new Internet connectivity playing in changing these sectors—which are often seen as slow to adopt new technologies?

by Chris Foster 16/02/2015

Behind the material movement that takes tea from the slopes of Rwanda’s ‘thousand hills’ to a box on a shelf in Tesco, is a growing set of less visible digital data flows. Image by pasunejen.

Production of export commodity goods like tea, coffee and chocolate is an important contributor to economies in Africa. Producers sell their goods into international markets, with the final products being sold in supermarkets, here in the UK and throughout the world. So what role is new Internet connectivity playing in changing these sectors—which are often seen as slow to adopt new technologies? As part of our work examining the impacts of growing Internet connectivity and new digital ICTs in East Africa we explored uses of the Internet and ICTs in the tea sector in Rwanda. Tea is a sector with well-established practices and relations in the region, so we were curious if ICT might be changing it. Of course, one cannot ignore the movements of material goods when you research the tea sector. Tea is Rwanda’s main export by value, and in 2012 it moved over 21,000 tonnes of tea, accruing around $56m in value. During our fieldwork we interviewed cooperatives in remote offices surrounded by tea plantations in the temperate Southern highlands, tea processors in noisy tea factories heavy with the overpowering smell of fermenting tea leaves, and tea buyers and sellers surrounded by corridors piled high with sacks of tea. But behind the material movement that takes tea from the slopes of Rwanda’s ‘thousand hills’ to a box on a shelf in Tesco, is a growing set of less visible digital data flows. Whilst the adoption of digital technologies is not comprehensive in the Rwandan tea sector (with, for example, very low Internet use among tea growers), we did find growing use of the Internet and ICTs. More importantly, where they were present, digital flows of information (such as tea-batch tracking, logistics and sales prices) were increasingly important to the ability of firms to improve production and ultimately to increase their profit share from tea. We have termed this a ‘data-driven value chain’ to highlight that these new…

Development

Why haven’t digital platforms transformed firms in developing countries? The Rwandan tourism sector explored

by Chris Foster 10/02/2015

Have Rwandan firms been able to access online platforms? What impact has access to these platforms had on firms?

by Chris Foster 10/02/2015

Tourism is becoming an increasingly important contributor to Rwanda’s economy. Image of Homo sapiens and Gorilla beringei beringei meeting in Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park by Andries3.

One of the great hopes for new Internet connectivity in the developing world is that it will allow those in developing countries who offer products and services to link to and profit from global customers. With the landing of undersea Internet infrastructure in East Africa, there have been hopes that as firms begin to use the Internet more extensively that improved links to markets will positively impact them. Central to enabling new customer transactions is the emergence of platforms—digital services, websites and online exchanges—that allow more direct customer-producer interactions to occur. As part of our work exploring the impacts of growing internet connectivity and digital ICTs in East Africa, we wanted to explore how digital platforms were affecting Rwandan firms. Have Rwandan firms been able to access online platforms? What impact has access to these platforms had on firms? Tourism is becoming an increasingly important contributor to Rwanda’s economy, with 3.1% direct contribution to GDP, and representing 7% of employment. Tourism is typically focused on affluent international tourists who come to explore the wildlife of the country, most notably as the most accessible location to see the mountain gorilla. Rwandan policy makers see tourism as a potential area for expansion, and new connectivity could be one key driver in making the country more accessible to customers. Tourist service providers in Rwanda have a very high Internet adoption, and even the smallest hotel or tour agency is likely to have at least one mobile Internet-connected laptop. Many of the global platforms also have a presence in the region: online travel agents such as Expedia and Hotels.com work with Rwandan hotels, common social media used by tourists such as TripAdvisor and Facebook are also well-known, and firms have been encouraged by the government to integrate into payment platforms like Visa. So, in the case of Rwandan tourism, Internet connectivity, Internet access and sector-wide platforms are certainly available for tourism firms. During our…

Politics & Government, Tools

Will China’s new national search engine, ChinaSo, fare better than “The Little Search Engine that Couldn’t”?

by Min Jiang 10/02/2015

Branded explicitly as “China Search: Authoritative National Search,” ChinaSo reinforces a sense of national identity. How does it perform?

by Min Jiang 10/02/2015

State search engine ChinaSo launched in March 2014 following indifferent performance from the previous state-run search engine Jike. Its long-term impact on China’s search market and users remains unclear.

When Jike, the Chinese state-run search engine, launched in 2011, its efforts received a mixed response. The Chinese government pulled out all the stops to promote it, including placing Deng Yaping, one of China’s most successful athletes at the helm. Jike strategically branded itself as friendly, high-tech, and patriotic to appeal to national pride, competition, and trust. It also signaled a serious attempt by a powerful authoritarian state to nationalise the Internet within its territory, and to extend its influence in the digital sphere. However, plagued by technological inferiority, management deficiencies, financial woes and user indifference, Jike failed in terms of user adoption, pointing to the limits of state influence in the marketplace. Users and critics remain skeptical of state-run search engines. While some news outlets referred to Jike as “the little search engine that couldn’t,” Chinese propaganda was busy at work rebranding, recalibrating, and reimagining its efforts. The result? The search engine formally known as Jike has now morphed into a new enterprise known as “ChinaSo”. This transformation is not new—Jike originally launched in 2010 under the name Goso, rebranding itself as Jike a year later. The March 2014 unveiling of ChinaSo was the result of the merging of the two state-run search engines Jike and Panguso. Only time will tell if this new (ad)venture will prove more fruitful. However, several things are worthy of note here. First, despite repeated trials, the Chinese state has not given up on its efforts to expand its digital toolbox and weave a ‘China Wide Web’. Rather, state media have pooled their resources to make their collective, strategic bets. The merging of Jike and Panguso into ChinaSo was backed by several state media giants, including People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, and China Central Television. Branded explicitly as “China Search: Authoritative National Search,” ChinaSo reinforces a sense of national identity. How does it perform? ChinaSo now ranks 225th in China and 2139th globally (Alexa.com, 8…

Politics & Government

Why does the Open Government Data agenda face such barriers?

by Chris Martin 26/01/2015

Reflect upon the barriers preventing the OGD agenda from making a breakthrough into the mainstream.

by Chris Martin 26/01/2015

Advocates hope that opening government data will increase government transparency, catalyse economic growth, address social and environmental challenges. Image by the UK's Open Data Institute.

Advocates of Open Government Data (OGD)—that is, data produced or commissioned by government or government-controlled entities that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone—talk about the potential of such data to increase government transparency, catalyse economic growth, address social and environmental challenges and boost democratic participation. This heady mix of potential benefits has proved persuasive to the UK Government (and governments around the world). Over the past decade, since the emergence of the OGD agenda, the UK Government has invested extensively in making more of its data open. This investment has included £10 million to establish the Open Data Institute and a £7.5 million fund to support public bodies overcome technical barriers to releasing open data. Yet the transformative impacts claimed by OGD advocates, in government as well as NGOs such as the Open Knowledge Foundation, still seem a rather distant possibility. Even the more modest goal of integrating the creation and use of OGD into the mainstream practices of government, businesses and citizens remains to be achieved. In my recent article Barriers to the Open Government Data Agenda: Taking a Multi-Level Perspective (Policy & Internet 6:3) I reflect upon the barriers preventing the OGD agenda from making a breakthrough into the mainstream. These reflections centre on the five key finds of a survey exploring where key stakeholders within the UK OGD community perceive barriers to the OGD agenda. The key messages from the UK OGD community are that: 1. Barriers to the OGD agenda are perceived to be widespread Unsurprisingly, given the relatively limited impact of OGD to date, my research shows that barriers to the OGD agenda are perceived to be widespread and numerous in the UK’s OGD community. What I find rather more surprising is the expectation, amongst policy makers, that these barriers ought to just melt away when exposed to the OGD agenda’s transparently obvious value and virtue. Given that the breakthrough of the…

Economics, Social Data Science

Gender gaps in virtual economies: are there virtual ‘pink’ and ‘blue’ collar occupations?

by Vili Lehdonvirta 15/01/2015

Men and women tend to be rewarded differently for the same amount of work. Since online economies are such a big part of many people’s lives today, we wanted to know if this holds true in those economies as well.

by Vili Lehdonvirta 15/01/2015

She could end up earning 11 percent less than her male colleagues .. Image from EVE Online by zcar.300.

Ed: Firstly, what is a ‘virtual’ economy? And what exactly are people earning or exchanging in these online environments? Vili: A virtual economy is an economy that revolves around artificially scarce virtual markers, such as Facebook likes or, in this case, virtual items and currencies in an online game. A lot of what we do online today is rewarded with such virtual wealth instead of, say, money. Ed: In terms of ‘virtual earning power’ what was the relationship between character gender and user gender? Vili: We know that in national economies, men and women tend to be rewarded differently for the same amount of work; men tend to earn more than women. Since online economies are such a big part of many people’s lives today, we wanted to know if this holds true in those economies as well. Looking at the virtual economies of two massively-multiplayer online games (MMOG), we found that there are indeed some gender differences in how much virtual wealth players accumulate within the same number of hours played. In one game, EVE Online, male players were on average 11 percent wealthier than female players of the same age, character skill level, and time spent playing. We believe that this finding is explained at least in part by the fact that male and female players tend to favour different activities within the game worlds, what we call “virtual pink and blue collar occupations”. In national economies, this is called occupational segregation: jobs perceived as suitable for men are rewarded differently from jobs perceived as suitable for women, resulting in a gender earnings gap. However, in another game, EverQuest II, we found that male and female players were approximately equally wealthy. This reflects the fact that games differ in what kind of activities they reward. Some provide a better economic return on fighting and exploring, while others make it more profitable to engage in trading and building social…

Environment

Can drones, data and digital technology provide answers to nature conservation challenges?

by Lisa Sargood 08/12/2014

Drone technology for conservation purposes is new, and its cost effectiveness—when compared with other kinds of intervention, such as training field observers—not yet proven.

by Lisa Sargood 08/12/2014

Drones create headlines. Like AI, their unfettered use plays on our most sci-fi induced fears. Military deployment both intrigues us and serves to increase our suspicions. Commerce enthusiastically explores their value to meet consumers ‘on-demand’ expectations. Natural history film-makers experiment with drone technology to give us rare access to the natural world. In June 2014, the US National Park Service banned them from 401 parks while it worked out a new management policy and this week a pilot reported sighting a UAV near the flight path of a passenger jet. It’s clear that the increasing use of drones presents complex challenges. UAVs or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles offer intriguing possibilities for nature conservation. One dominant focus of experimentation is their use for data capture and monitoring alongside data analytics and other spatial and reporting tools. The potential of integrated digital capabilities such GPS / satellite tagging and geo-mapping, cloud services, mobile devices, camera-traps, radio telemetry, LiDAR and data from field observation, to better understand and respond to nature conservation concerns may be significant. Suggestive of this promise, is the facility to assess biodiversity in difficult or rapidly changing terrain, to track rehabilitated species and gather data to refine reintroduction programmes or to pick-up real-time changes in animal behaviour that may indicate imminent threat of poaching. The need has never been greater. The findings of the WWF Living Planet Report 2014 are sobering: ‘Species populations worldwide have declined by 52% since 1970’. Many digitally enabled conservation projects are now underway, and hopes are high. Professor Serge Wich, Professor in Primate Biology, Liverpool John Moores University and Lian Pin Koh (Founding Directors of Conservationdrones.org), have developed drone technology to support tracking of orangutans and to assess their habitat loss. This work produces 3d geometrically accurate computer representations of the forest in near real-time that can help for example, to detect forest fires and illegal logging activity. In the course of this work they…

Politics & Government

Finnish decision to allow same-sex marriage “shows the power of citizen initiatives”

by Vili Lehdonvirta 28/11/2014

It is the first piece of “crowdsourced” legislation on its way to becoming law in Finland.

by Vili Lehdonvirta 28/11/2014

November rainbows in front of the Finnish parliament house in Helsinki, one hour before the vote for same-sex marriage. Photo by Anni Sairio.

In a pivotal vote today, the Finnish parliament voted in favour of removing references to gender in the country’s marriage law, which will make it possible for same-sex couples to get married. It was predicted to be an extremely close vote, but in the end gender neutrality won with 105 votes to 92. Same-sex couples have been able to enter into registered partnerships in Finland since 2002, but this form of union lacks some of the legal and more notably symbolic privileges of marriage. Today’s decision is thus a historic milestone in the progress towards tolerance and equality before the law for all the people of Finland. Today’s parliamentary decision is also a milestone for another reason: it is the first piece of “crowdsourced” legislation on its way to becoming law in Finland. A 2012 constitutional change made it possible for 50,000 citizens or more to propose a bill to the parliament, through a mechanism known as the citizen initiative. Citizens can develop bills on a website maintained by the Open Ministry, a government-supported citizen association. The Open Ministry aims to be the deliberative version of government ministries that do the background work for government bills. Once the text of a citizen bill is finalised, citizens can also endorse it on a website maintained by the Ministry of Justice. If a bill attracts more than 50,000 endorsements within six months, it is delivered to the parliament. A significant reason behind the creation of the citien initiative system was to increase citizen involvement in decision making and thus enhance the legitimacy of Finland’s political system: to make people feel that they can make a difference. Finland, like most Western democracies, is suffering from dwindling voter turnout rates (though in the last parliamentary elections, domestic voter turnout was a healthy 70.5 percent). However, here lies one of the potential pitfalls of the citizen initiative system. Of the six citizen bills delivered to…

Ethics

The Future of Europe is Science and ethical foresight should be a priority

by Luciano Floridi 20/11/2014

How will we keep healthy? How will we live, learn, work and interact in the future? How will we produce and consume and how will we manage resources?

by Luciano Floridi 20/11/2014

On October 6 and 7, the European Commission, with the participation of Portuguese authorities and the support of the Champalimaud Foundation, organised in Lisbon a high-level conference on “The Future of Europe is Science”. Mr. Barroso, President of the European Commission, opened the meeting. I had the honour of giving one of the keynote addresses. The explicit goal of the conference was twofold. On the one hand, we tried to take stock of European achievements in science, engineering, technology and innovation (SETI) during the last 10 years. On the other hand, we looked into potential future opportunities that SETI may bring to Europe, both in economic terms (growth, jobs, new business opportunities) and in terms of wellbeing (individual welfare and higher social standards). One of the most interesting aspects of the meeting was the presentation of the latest report on “The Future of Europe is Science” by the President’s Science and Technology Advisory Council (STAC). The report addresses some very big questions: How will we keep healthy? How will we live, learn, work and interact in the future? How will we produce and consume and how will we manage resources? It also seeks to outline some key challenges that will be faced by Europe over the next 15 years. It is well written, clear, evidence-based and convincing. I recommend reading it. In what follows, I wish to highlight three of its features that I find particularly significant. First, it is enormously refreshing and reassuring to see that the report treats science and technology as equally important and intertwined. The report takes this for granted, but anyone stuck in some Greek dichotomy between knowledge (episteme, science) and mere technique (techne, technology) will be astonished. While this divorcing of the two has always been a bad idea, it is still popular in contexts where applied science, e.g. applied physics or engineering, is considered a Cinderella. During my talk, I referred to Galileo as a paradigmatic scientist who had to be innovative in terms of…

Development, Economics

Broadband may be East Africa’s 21st century railway to the world

by Mark Graham 17/11/2014

The excitement over the potentially transformative effects of the internet in low-income countries is nowhere more evident than in East Africa.

by Mark Graham 17/11/2014

Connecting 21st-century Africa takes more than just railways and roads. Steve Song, CC BY-NC-SA

Reposted from The Conversation. The excitement over the potentially transformative effects of the internet in low-income countries is nowhere more evident than in East Africa—the last major populated region of the world to gain a wired connection to the internet. Before 2009, there wasn’t a single fibre-optic cable connecting the region to the rest of the world. After hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, cables were laid to connect the region to the global network. Prices for internet access went down, speeds went up, and the number of internet users in the region skyrocketed. Politicians, journalists and academics all argued that better connectivity would lead to a blossoming of economic, social, and political activity—and a lot of influential people in the region made grand statements. For instance, former Kenyan president Mwai Kibai stated: I am gratified to be with you today at an event of truly historic proportions. The landing of this fibre-optic undersea cable project in Mombasa is one of the landmark projects in Kenya’s national development story. Indeed some have compared this to the completion of the Kenya-Uganda railway more than a century ago. This comparison is not far-fetched, because while the economies of the last century were driven by railway connections, the economies of today are largely driven by internet. The president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, also spoke about the revolutionary potentials of these changes in connectivity. He claimed: In Africa, we have missed both the agricultural and industrial revolutions and in Rwanda we are determined to take full advantage of the digital revolution. This revolution is summed up by the fact that it no longer is of utmost importance where you are but rather what you can do – this is of great benefit to traditionally marginalised regions and geographically isolated populations. As many who have studied politics have long since noted, proclamations like these can have an important impact: they frame how scarce resources can be…

Education, Social Data Science

Two years after the NYT’s ‘Year of the MOOC’: how much do we actually know about them?

by Rebecca Eynon 13/11/2014

Despite the hype around MOOCs to date, there are many similarities between MOOC research and the breadth of previous investigations into (online) learning.

by Rebecca Eynon 13/11/2014

Timeline of the development of MOOCs and open education, from: Yuan, Li, and Stephen Powell. MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education White Paper. University of Bolton: CETIS, 2013.

Ed: Does research on MOOCs differ in any way from existing research on online learning? Rebecca: Despite the hype around MOOCs to date, there are many similarities between MOOC research and the breadth of previous investigations into (online) learning. Many of the trends we’ve observed (the prevalence of forum lurking; community formation; etc.) have been studied previously and are supported by earlier findings. That said, the combination of scale, global-reach, duration, and “semi-synchronicity” of MOOCs have made them different enough to inspire this work. In particular, the optional nature of participation among a global-body of lifelong learners for a short burst of time (e.g. a few weeks) is a relatively new learning environment that, despite theoretical ties to existing educational research, poses a new set of challenges and opportunities. Ed: The MOOC forum networks you modelled seemed to be less efficient at spreading information than randomly generated networks. Do you think this inefficiency is due to structural constraints of the system (or just because inefficiency is not selected against); or is there something deeper happening here, maybe saying something about the nature of learning, and networked interaction? Rebecca: First off, it’s important to not confuse the structural “inefficiency” of communication with some inherent learning “inefficiency”. The inefficiency in the sub-forums is a matter of information diffusion—i.e., because there are communities that form in the discussion spaces, these communities tend to “trap” knowledge and information instead of promoting the spread of these ideas to a vast array of learners. This information diffusion inefficiency is not necessarily a bad thing, however. It’s a natural human tendency to form communities, and there is much education research that says learning in small groups can be much more beneficial / effective than large-scale learning. The important point that our work hopes to make is that the existence and nature of these communities seems to be influenced by the types of topics that are being discussed…

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