When the village taught the city IT
 

Rural Kafachan is a rare story of success of how ICT could change the life of a rustic community and teach the proud city a lesson on computer knowledge reports SEGUN ORUAME
 

The rural community of Kafachan could not have wished for something better. Four years ago, Kafachan was just like any other rural settlements. Farmers go to farms. The women run piggery. The young ones go to school and then they finish and wait for something to happen. Most drift away to the cities and those that remain, no matter how brilliant they were in the classrooms, ended up as their forefathers: managers of subsistence farming. Like their forefathers, they marry, procreate and continue the virtuous circle of a terrible fate of abject penury.

But the Fantsuam Foundation changed all that. The NGO started off as a micro financing institution with start off capital provided by indigenes of Kafachan in diasporas. One man, John Dada had initiated all that. Went round the US and Europe convincing Kafachan indigenes that the local folks back home quite appreciated the tokens given them when they did visit home from abroad now and then. However, they could do more. Set up something more permanent that would bring lasting impacts on the community. That was how the Fantsuam Foundation began. There were doubts when it all started. The natives have had experience with cooperative and thrift societies in the past that was not pleasant. There was no reason that to believe Fantsuam’s would be different.

When it in spite of the thick doubts, Fantsuam had 300 people coming to be part of the micro financing process. Less than six months later, it had grown exponentaily to more than 1000 members and Fantsuam had to expand its office space. Now there was problem. Too much paper work. Dada decided to bring in the computers and that changed the focus of Fantsuam and the life of Kafachan forever; and for good.

When the computer came, there was a need to train the women who have been managing the paper work. It was a challenge on its own. Dada is a strong believer of the ‘anyone can do it’ principle particularly in IT. They would not higher computer literate hands rather they would train the hands of the local women who have been keeping the books to handle the mouse and the key board and also understand Excel. This they did. When Fantsuam needed to audit its accounts it hired a tested auditing firm in the mining city of Jos. The auditor came to the village grudgingly. Fantsuam was not the usual kind of clients and auditing an account in a rural community could be as exciting as getting to doma similar job in Lagos or even Kaduna City.

But Fantsuam had promised to ensure the auditor get some comfort during his stay. He came and got the shock of his life. Fancy being taught how to use the computer by rural women who had limited exposure to education. When the auditor came, he asked for the files. And one of the women politely led him to a computer, asked him to sit and opened the files. The auditor stared for a while. He was torn between puzzlement and embarrassment. He had never used a computer before though he sees them everyday in Jos. Now, he was being asked by a rural woman to use one and work. Dada came to the rescue. Asked that the files be printed out. When the auditor was done. He swore that he would get himself trained in computer. The incident was both shocking and challenging.

That sums up the manner in which Fantsuam has impacted on its immediate environment and distance places. From a humble start, it has become the only Cisco approved training centre in a rural setting on the continent. Hundreds of young men and women have been trained in basic computer skill from which the Cisco Academy grew. The basic computer school still runs beside the Cisco centre whose arrow head is …Fantsuam launched a VSAT facility to provide a rural based Internet access, about two years ago, and today it runs a cybercafe operated independently by two of its former computer students. It is the only Internet centre for the entire locality of more than 70, 000 people. Because the West African Examination Council (WAEC), the examination body for the sub-region, has taking its registration online, all the secondary schools in the area have asked the café for a window to get their candidates registered online. It was just a mustard seed when it started, now it has become the cornerstone for IT empowerment in a once forsaken community. When the computers develop faults, former students of the computer school repair them locally inside a workshop run they run privately.

There are more ambitious plans. Fantsuam is driving an initiative to build a website where the language and culture of the Kafachan people will form the content on the community portal. “Our people in the west are complaining that they are losing touch with home and their children growing in those environments are completely detached from their roots. Those children don’t know how their parents’ language sounds or what are the basic cultural attributes of their parents who came from Africa,” Dada told IT Edge during the three hour trip by road to Abuja from Kafachan.
Today, the Fantsuam Foundation has grown beyond its original design to become some sort of hub for technology acquisition in a rural setting and get volunteers, now and then, from abroad. When IT Edge visited, a volunteer from Canada was training the local women on how they build stoves powered by solar energy to do their cooking. The stoves are built from commonplace items. See story.

Has the Fantsuam Foundation changed lives? It has, said Tony Adagbor, who went through the rudiments of computer appreciation and acquire the basic skills on Windows and Linux operating systems, the complexity of networking and the Internet. “When I first came to Kafanchan, I knew nothing about computing. Suddenly within a space of one year I had a dramatic transformation from a person who knew nothing in the subject to some body with a considerable awareness in ICT. It was unbelievable to me,” said Adagbor, who has volunteered service with the Cisco Academy “as a way of given back to the organisation.” Seun Ade has a similar testimony. “I have been fulfilled,” Ade began. “. Apart from the computer basic knowledge, this NGO introduced an advanced computer information technology, Cisco. I happened to be one of the privileged students to enroll and to graduate successfully. It is here in Kafachan that I got all the knowledge through the help of Fantsuam Foundation. More to that, I was privileged to attend a workshop in Katsina which is about the advanced Microsoft office packages, there I was also trained to be an instructor,” added Ade,

A women's scholarship scheme has encouraged more female enrolment at all levels of the computer training programmes. The cost of training for basic computer and Cisco programmes is heavily subsidised by the local community through the micro financing institution. Local youths set up the VSAT antenna and the from the capital of city in Kaduna, young people do come to for their Internet and computer training at Fantsuam. Their chances of getting jobs in the city are improved if they have computer skills, which are provided affordably. The village is teaching the city computer knowledge in a classic reminder that IT is a leveler. Fantsuam is working on fanning-out Internet access points through wireless means from its VSAT location at Bayanloco where its main office is to the interior hamlets and settlements so that women will not need to make a special trip to Bayanloco to make urgent phone calls or send email. For Dada, the dream was to get rural folks access money from a common lending pool. That dream has grown beyond its original dream to become a rare testimony in Africa’s backwater economy of how ICT cab change people and their environment.


Using the Sun to cook.
Rural folks need not buy kerosene to do their cooking and could escape paying the price of the ever-increasing cost of fuel if they learn to woo the sun. A training programme on how rural women build solar stoves using very simple and ready available implements was done in rural Kafachan recently. Using a computer video demo produced outside of the country, the process of building and using the stove was re-created using local content and to take the rural women through the simple procedures.

Building the stove requires a metal object shaped like a dish; a foil, the type used to wrap cakes (The foil is gummed to the metal dish with the help of an Evostik gum); a piece of flat iron running across the metal dish and on which the pot would seat; and a nail put in the centre of the dish-like metal to guide the user in getting the right location for sun rays. Once built, the user only needs to ensure that there is no shadow around the nail. Shadow means the sunrays would not collect very well on the ‘foiled’ surface. When it is established that there is no shadow, a pot, preferably a black pot is then placed on the iron seat and food is ready to be cooked. Black retains heat. The speed at which food will cook depends on the intensity of the sun. When the sun is hot. It may take less than 15 minutes to boil water to do tea for a family of four. On a cloudy day, it could take hours. But the essence is not to replace the kerosene entirely but to help make savings on the budget for fuel. For the women, anything that conserves money is welcome so long it can do the job on ‘hungry days.’

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