TZ software developers fail to seize rare chance

Dar es Salaam. Tanzanian software developers have missed an opportunity to participate in developing a computer software to help children in the country and elsewhere use digital devices to learn to read and write.

A competition to develop the software through the “Global Learning Xprize” initiative was announced early this year. In the competition developers would use Android to build software that enables children to learn autonomously.

It is being organized by the Xprize Foundation with in collaboration with UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) and the World Food Programme (WFP). Only foreign developers have participated in the competition.

The focus of the competition is development of an open-source software that will be user-friendly to be installed on tablets that will be used to enhance quality early education, especially for children with limited access to schooling. This way they will be able to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic.

The top five finalists in the competition will receive $1 million (Sh2 billion) each and their software will be field tested in Tanga and Arusha regions. An estimated 4,000 children across 200 villages will participate in the 18-month field test, each of whom will receive a donated tablet. The organisers have said, however, that no entries were received from Tanzania.

The team whose solution enables the greatest proficiency gains in reading, writing and arithmetic will receive the grand prize of $10 million (Sh20 billion). At the end of the competition, all five solutions will be released as open source, free for anyone to use and adapt.

A total of 136 software developing teams from 33 countries registered for the education technology solutions competition, none of them from Tanzania, although the envisaged software would be field tested in the country.

When The Citizen visited the University of Dar es Salaam’s (UDSM) Information and Communication Technology Incubator (Udicti), one of the country’s most eminent centres of higher learning, it found out that the potential for technological innovation and software developing is huge.

What is missing is that innovative young people at different levels of education as well as the staying-home ones are not given adequate support due to the government’s budgetary constraints and lack of interest by the private sector on technological innovations.

Ms Vidate Msoka, an assistant lecturer at Udicti, said local public and private institutions tended to seek ICT experts from outside the country. “If the government invested more in technology and research, we would have advanced in innovation in new technologies. The potential is there,” she added.

Giving examples, she said last year a group of five young Tanzanians participated in a technology competition in Barcelona, Spain, and won.

The competition had two components; acceleration programme and community engagement programme.

The community engagement programme aimed at building innovations that can solve challenges of water and energy sufficiency in Tanzania.

The team prepared a pre-paid water metering system which could operate in two modes; first as a Point of sale (POS) and a household pre-paid meter. When operating as a POS, payments can be made by using coins or through mobile money services.

“This indicates that we have talents. If we invest in them we can be in a position to compete internationally,” Ms Msoka noted.

Another development was a web based platform called Agricultural Routine Data System (ARDS) that was established in 2014 by the UDSM’s department of Computer Science and Engineering (DoCSE) to help collection and dissemination of agriculture, livestock and fisheries data in Tanzania.

Local government extension officers were trained on how to use the system and it has since helped them analyze information through various analytical tools like pivot tables, data visualization and geographical information system (GIS) plugins.

It has also enabled the users to monitor key indicators within the agricultural sector and track performance in various strategic and operational areas for timely and accurate results.

Despite the huge potential, Tanzania’s education system is still a problem; it does not adequately impart students with innovative and entrepreneurial skills, according to Mr Moses Ismail, an academician at Udicti. “Even students with inventive prospects do not receive enough support from the government and society to bring their ideas to fruition,” he said.

He explained that another challenge is the gap between the industry and academicians. There is no close contact between the two, something that makes it difficult for academia to know exactly what the other needs in order to fine-tune curricula and the whole system of teaching.

“We academicians are richly aware of different ideas and knowledge that can be used in the field because we conduct multiple researches. This could work out best for the community if the government and other industry stakeholders trusted and consulted academicians and researchers before any implementations,” he elaborated.

Udicti has started charting strategies for bridging the gap between academia and the industries. Udicti is currently creating a post-graduate management system through a web portal that will connect scholars and other professions countrywide for idea sharing and execution. This will also help researchers to directly meet and pinpoint actual needs of the society.

It will also help young professionals to cultivate creativity to achieve the goals of their inventiveness. Mr Ismail has asked the government to invest heavily in research by increasing the budget, to facilitate thorough technological explorations and innovations.