 He is the late addition to the program, replacing Friday, who unfortunately couldn't get the visa, but this is going to be great to hear about civic tech in the future. Hi everybody, my name is Shinwaki Folare, but I get to call myself a civic tech practitioner. And basically, what I want to do is just tell us some stories of some efforts in Nigeria as well. Some of them are efforts that I led that failed, so I'll just tell us these three stories. This was a project that was about helping the locals report on all spills in Nigeria. It looked like a very good intervention at that time because there was a spate of oil spills and the IOC, the international oil companies, government, and the locals were having a big fight. So the idea was, why don't we just have a portal and an application, a mobile app, where you will be able to report your side of the story. And that became this, all spill witness, but it fell dead on arrival. And interestingly, when we got to the local come, because we had to go and sell this app to the locals, we realized that they weren't interested in this, but rather they were interested in how they can benefit from extorting the situation, which was a very dire situation, but they were able to extort the IOCs whenever there was an oil spill. So this is one example of one field project. This one is also clearly a poor needs assessment, an example of a poor needs assessment. Interestingly, the interesting thing about this site was it was launched in 2012, and it had the same core engine that ran something like Dropbox. So in order to manage the data that you got from a very remote place, we had to build in a layer that allowed them to send data without, with very low bandwidth, but it failed. So what we learned from that is that we have to first get community buying before we built these products. These are the products. Hello and welcome to Marketplace Africa. I'm Robin Kono here on the streets of Central Johannesburg on the show this week, investing in Africa, who's doing it and what more needs to be done. We begin with a market that's primed for takeoff, providing internet access to the millions of Africans who aren't online. Major internet companies are eyeing Africa as Christian Purefoy reports from Nigeria for our in focus segments. Nigeria's computer geeks, armed with just their mobile phones, are hoping to save hundreds of lives every year from collapsing buildings across Lagos. There's a lot of weight because of its tilt so you can see the cracks. Cheon Akun Falaran and his colleagues are embracing new technology. Their new mobile application allows people to take a photo of a potentially dangerous building and the date and GPS coordinates will be automatically uploaded to the internet for the government's attention. Before, well, he didn't get government, well, he got government's attention, but people didn't bother to take any pictures or send it to the government. This is another example of a product that even CNN thought it was a great idea because in Lagos then there was a spate of collapsing buildings and they always had these telltale signs on the building before it collapsed and government's claim was that if they could get the information beforehand then they could do something about it. But interestingly, even though it was backed by the government, it didn't work. So that's the second example and what we realized was that there was a lot of apathy from the urban areas with tools like this. We experienced this because when we tried to get people that should normally use this kind of products, they weren't interested at all. And what we figured out is there was a latent apathy with the very elite areas in Koot in Nigeria. This data was what we just found out. It's just to explain the phenomenon that we observed. This is the abandoned voter's card in Nigeria. This is this part of Nigeria in red as the IS literacy rates, but they are the people that are least interested in elections as it turns out. And it's one of the reasons why Civic Tech tools, they are not so interested in Civic Tech tools. This is the subnational illiteracy rates. And you can see that these areas where we have the red, they seem to be more interested in the elections because they collected their PVCs. So this is another story that explains why in urban areas we might not have as much adoption of Civic Tech in Nigeria. So I'll go to the very successful Civic Tech companies, organizations, budgets, EIE, some of them you know. And one of the reasons we observed that made them very successful initially was because they simply had a call to action on their, they were media companies that had advocacy components built into their work. And this is the model that seems very successful in Nigeria. So it isn't fully Civic Tech because when they tried to build their own Civic Tech tools as well, they failed as well. But one last one I'd like to talk about is Tracker. And what this site does is it provides information about public projects to people in the community so that they can provide some sort of advocacy around this project. And something interesting happened in this, in the last two or three months that's never happened in Nigeria. I need to let you know that Nigeria has been a country that has been on the military rule for 33 years. So we have a percentage of the citizens that seem very passive or interested in things like this. But with Tracker's efforts, we found out that after they did an initial public engagement about the project that was, about a road, a 21 kilometer road that was coming to a community that when the road was completed and the contractor and government wanted to hand it over to them, they refused it. And you know in the normal, they were surprised, the government was surprised that why would these people refuse what in quotes in the Nigerian psychology is a gift to them. But they said, oh, we have already seen this project in the budget. This is the number of kilometer of roads you said you were going to do. This is what you're bringing to us. And somebody in the community had gone ahead to measure the length of road that was built. It was 14 kilometers instead of 21. So they put out a fight with the government officials and they had to now return back. They came back a couple of months after and they built the full 21 kilometers of road. But the tool that Tracker built for this as well wasn't as successful. So trying to now understand all this, we realized that there were, in order to get people to be more excited about civic tech tools in Nigeria, it was important to first start from the point where we just give them the information for them to act on. As against trying to get them to push information into an app and own it. And that is where we're trying to get all these organizations to move towards now, is to create a database of people in this community and push information to them. We are not at that point yet where they would own the platform and start using it. So it's very important that we know where the community is so that we put more effort in community development before we build tools. But not to leave, so that I can leave you with one good story, one good example. In the 2011, 2015 elections, we had a parallel vote tally using USSD, which is low tech. And by the time all the results came in from short code USSD, the difference between the votes that we were able to tally and the government's official votes was 2%. So on that day, when people were most engaged, probably because it was elections, we realized that that low technology, USSD seemed to be a very, very powerful tool to engage people. So where we are, I'll say, is still at the very low tech, civic tech level. And that's what we observed from the study of all these projects. So that's the very grim story. I hope that it doesn't seem too bad, but it's very good that we know where we are so that we can build from that point on. Thank you.