Working in IT in DRC

Since I was a young lad watching Live Aid and the famine in Kenya I always dreamed of one day working in development. In 2003 I got my opportunity. Rather than venturing out as an ascetic Mother Teresa type I was going to work as Information and Communications Technology Officer, initially with an Irish NGO and later with an organisation within the United Nations.

 

I was originally tasked with managing, supporting and upgrading ICT infrastructure in 3 locations around the country, training staff in each location and identifying individuals in each location who could support the systems during my absence. Later this grew to 12 locations as ICT officer and my final year was spent as an Information Management Officer tracing information flows and business processes and designing systems correspondingly such as a website, an intranet and a document management system with appropriate metadata and taxonomies. I also consulted with UNDP on the communications strategy for elections this year.

 

In 2003 I left my offices in Ireland where I’d been surrounded by servers and test PCs, broadband connections and memories of late nights troubleshooting and writing code. Some weeks later I arrived in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, a city of between six and ten million people (according to estimates), a city with no phone lines, although mobile phones are abundant in the cities, and a country where an estimated 4.5 million people have died as a direct result of war in the previous 9 years.

 

The first task I undertook was to upgrade the communications systems in two remote locations – Goma and Kasongo. The Kasongo office was the more challenging of the two. Kasongo is in the centre of DRC. The population is about 800,000 and there are 6 cars. The only way to travel around DRC is by plane as the infrastructure has been destroyed by war. Staff used laptops as power was only provided for a couple of hours a day. We used UPS (uninterrupted power supplies) until the batteries were depleted and surge protection for unexpected power spikes which could fry equipment in seconds. Instead of using satellite phones which cost £2 per minute to download emails in field offices with no internet access I wanted to install VSATs (satellite dishes) to provide always-on internet connections. Use of satellite phones for 10-15 minutes per day worked out at almost £1000 per month. Bandwidth rental on a dish would cost £200 with all the benefits internet access would bring thereby saving almost £10,000 per year. It was strange going from a phone line connection to the internet at home in Ireland to setting up a broadband connection with a wireless local area network in a remote village with no power in the middle of DRC but it was the best and most inexpensive solution. And all this in a place where there is not even running water. It felt great to connect this village (or at least this office) to the world, to search for ‘Kasongo’ on the web and show the staff their village and images of their administrators. Sometimes I think I was the more excited by it as I didn’t feel so remote and removed from the rest of the world anymore.

 

The systems put in place must be sustainable. A VSAT’s reliability and uptime is 99.5%. This meant I could do my work, leave and not have to do constant checkups. If there were problems in the future a technician would have to be flown in. This is a costly exercise. On another occasion while building a website using PHP with a mySQL backend database I scaled back my plans, deleted the database and used flat text files for backend data. This sacrificed the flexibility within the project but had I not done this, there was no one to change the database or rewrite the code. Ease of use and maintenance always won out in the end but I also always tried to keep scalability in mind.

 

 

Offices in DRC need the same systems as anywhere else. Staff Word and Excel, desktops or laptops(I preferred laptops for mobility, the built in battery, the weight for international delivery and the fact that, in my experience, desktops seem to crash more), offices need networks, people need email and file storage space. This is managed the same way as anywhere else. The digital divide is not about different systems as these are the same anywhere. The digital divide is another example of the vast differences between the developed world and the developing world, the rich and the poor. Such divides exist in so many levels of our own societies but the way in which digital technology has become a mainstay in our everyday lives in the past decade makes us increasingly aware of other divides, much greater divides. The prosperity that came with the dotcom bubble was a phenomenon of the West and, in general, the profits of so much more have been ours alone.

 

I could talk ad nausea about networks, VPNs, different operating systems, licensing issues, standardisation and attempts to coordinate strategies between Kinshasa and field offices with Dublin, Geneva and New York but it meant more to me than that. I met wonderful people and had incredible experiences. I saw happiness and sadness and experience both. I witnessed a nation of beautiful people and struggled hard to reconcile that with what I read in newspapers about events in the country and in neighbouring countries before them. I worked in Rwanda and saw a country scarred by its history, DRC tormented by its colonial history and heritage. I travelled to South Africa and saw a beautiful country trying to heal the wounds of its past. I learned about the politicisation of development and the trials and tribulations of successes and failures in the field, the sadness of those who care when they see their work destroyed before them but above all the pain of the victims of war and the remains they are left with to struggle by on day by day. I am more grateful now for my own background yet continue hope and pray for change for those less fortunate than ourselves and that I may contribute to such in my future. DRC has had a transitional government in place since 2003 and recently held its first elections since independence in 1960. The seeds are being sown for a better future.

 

Overall I spent almost 3 years in DRC.  It was difficult to travel everywhere in vehicles, more often than not with a driver, travelling from one guarded compound to another looking out the windows at life going by in the city, a life that was not mine but that I looked upon as a voyeur. I lived within this as an expat, within a different community, a community and society most of these people would never know yet I have to believe that my contribution to communications made a difference to the organisations I worked for and improved their ability to coordinate and respond to humanitarian needs. Now I live in London but I know I’ll go back, maybe not to DRC but I’ll go back.