Simeon Oriko
A little after I received an email from the administrators of Youth Hub Africa to guest post on their website, I took a minute to think through the focus points I was asked to flesh out – The Intersect of IT and Youth Development, growing software/mobile apps development and penetration in Africa and success stories around IT innovations.
And while its easy for you and me to relate to these talking points, we should be careful not to stereotype the concepts that lay the basic tenets of youth development and social change using ICTs.
I firmly believe in the enabling power of Information Technology and what this means is that Information and Communication Technologies are playing a “facilitative” role in the development of Africa’s youth. The one thing I don’t believe is that technology is an end in itself to overcoming challenges and creating opportunities for our people.
A number of people have fallen prey to the fallacy that technology alone will solve our problems not realizing that technology is one piece of the whole puzzle.
Rather than understand the value that technology presents to us, and use that value to seek out opportunities in our social change practice, we’ve been accustomed to the practice of adding a tech component in our programs with a hope that it will “magically” produce the desired results.
Isn’t there something wrong with this logic?
The flaw in the picture is that we hype the technology we build so much that we forget the details of the impact we are supposed to create. We like to talk about how good the project is, how great that the idea is from Africa, how the technology created could become the next Google…etc.
Unfortunately, very few people focus on the impact and if they bother to highlight it, its majorly talk about how the technology itself created the impact and not how the lives of people have been changed and how that can be sustained!
This is dangerous because we may get to a point whereby we are building apps and various technologies so that we can “apply them in Africa” instead of looking at the various issues, analyzing the needs and ONLY THEN building technology based solutions to cater for those issues and needs. This is the view from the ground.
We need to realize that people are the center of what we do; not technology! I argue this from the point of view that people were still able to make an impact in their communities way before technology got to them.
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Simeon Oriko is a Kenyan-born Internet and Social Entrepreneur. He is the Founder and Executive Director of The Kuyu Project, a digital literacy initiative aimed at teaching African High School students to use to technology to make a difference in the world as well as to achieve their objectives.
He is also a co-founder of StorySpaces, an African digital storytelling platform and works there in the capacity of Innovation and Strategy lead.
