Day 6 - The pursuit of internet/design challenges

After a day spent in the villages it was back to sorting out our old nemesis, the internet. Stephen has been working on fixing the internet cafe in the hostel over the last couple of days but it looks as if will be Saturday at the earliest before that’s up and running again so we had to determine another source in the meantime. On the tour the morning previosuly Asante had shown us a separate internet café nearby on campus that had a decent connection so that was our first port of call. Jess and I couldn’t believe our luck when we arrived and everything was working perfectly and it seemed that we had solved our problem. Alas, we had not factored in Stephen’s arrival. On an incredible run of bad luck, Stephen arrived at the café and within about thirty seconds the café lost internet completely, much to his chagrin!

Our next best bet was to attempt to find some internet cards to correspond with the campus wireless networks available in our hostel. KNUST’s campus has a number of different residence halls which are currently dormant due to the fact that the Unviersity is out of term but on the tour yesterday, Asante gave me some interesting info about the different halls and their traditions. If you come from Katanga Hall you are known as a fellow, a Mongol if from Republic, a Spartan if from Independence, Unity and a Royal if from Elizabeth Hall. An inexplicably intense rivalry exists between Katanga and Unity Hall and Asante went on to tell me that some of their procession days can get quite ugly and territorial, but on every other day of the year it is not strange to see a Fellow and a walking as friends.

Our group exchange stories about the morning search

We spent the morning going from hall to hall looking for the cards and eventually, in Republic Hall, we stumbled upon an office that sold ‘e-campus’ cards. Our elation was to prove short lived though as it turns out it’s a network that is practically non existent in our dorms! A plethora of fruitless calls to local card dealers was to follow before I decided to cut out the middle. I took out one of the IDDS bikes (Crossman picked four of them up yesterday afternoon) and set out for Aydeuase, a local town not too far outside campus, and getting out of the campus and into the surrounding area was probably the best decision I could have made! I eventually found an FnF internet café, bought as many cards as I could afford and realized just how important learning the local language can be and how useful were the few words of twi I had already picked up. The vast majority of Ghanaian’s I have met so far speak very good English but they really appreciate when you make an effort to converse in the local language, even if it is often just a tokenistic gesture.

E-campus codes - Close, but no cigar

This afternoon Amy left to visit the villages in the Northern Region and Benjamin Linder duly took charge of the design challenges meeting later that evening. Ben arrived yesterday evening and is a faculty member in Design and Mechanical Engineering in Olin College in Boston and has been a key player in IDDS since its inception in 2007. In the meeting Ben filled us in on the potential design challenges and projects that could feature at IDDS 09’. There was a real sense of excitement and energy in the room as Ben listed off the projects and tried to give some description as to what they might entail. Talking about the projects for the first time really made it hit home that the participants will be splitting up into teams and heading out to villages in little over a week!

Tombo in pensive mood at the design challenge meeting

It was extremely helpful to have input at the meeting from Killian, Asante and Amin, three of our Ghanaian participants, as they explained the local context behind a number of the problems the projects concern themselves with. In particular I don’t think we could have grasped so fully the technique of Yam Mounding, a common practice in villages across the country, had we not had their expertise to draw on. This is all so different from MIT last year where we often bemoaned the distance between our committee room and the real life context in which people daily faced the problems we were attempting to solve. The anticipation is building for IDDS, Ghana 09’ …

Killian provides some critical background into yam mounding

Here’s a list of the tentative projects for this year:


1.Bamboo Matchstick Making
2.Forest Health Monitoring
3.Groundnut Threshing
4.Cassava Processing
5.Yam Earth Mounder
6.Destoning Rice
7.Shelf Life Extension of Fresh Foods
8.Shea oil extraction
9.Kid friendly latrine’s
10.latrine emptying
11.Cool Medicine Storage
12.ICT Enabled Baby Monitoring
13.Clorine dosing
14.Super Cap Chlorinator
15.Small Scale Energy Storage
16.Portable Hydro Power Light
17.Recycled Plastic Products
18.Transporting Heavy Clay Loads

Twi phrase of the day:
Me ho ye – I’m fine

Day 5 - Village Visit Groundwork

Having sat at a laptop working on publicity and other logistical issues over the last few days I finally had a chance to visit a couple of villages our participants will be working in and it was easily the most revealing few hours I have spent in Kumasi to date. In total IDDS will be working in ten villages throughout the Bromg - Ahafo and Ashanti regions and teams will visit the same village three times during the course of the summit. As such, it is critical that we get these villages fully on board and that they understand completely the mission and vision of IDDS. Participants will also be spending one or two nights in these villages during their visits so there are a number of logistical issues that need to be worked out between the IDDS organizers and the village elders and chiefs.

After a quick 8am trial run tour of the campus with Asante, one of the Ghanaian organizers, I was free to get my stuff together for the visit to the villages. Three of the Ghanaian organizers, George, Killian and Amin were to accompany us on the trip and Jessica Huang, Kofi Taha and his son made up the rest of our party. We set out at 1030am for the office of the Municipal Director of the region, to make sure that he approved of our desire to work with the villages in his area and understood our message. George Obeng spoke mainly on our behalf and I was hugely impressed with his exceptional communication and diplomacy skills and it soon became clear that the Municipal Director felt the same, fully understood our goals and was fully behind what we hoped to achieve.We were only out of the office about two minutes before Isa had found a group of local kids to play football with! We had a quick kick about before moving on to meet some of George’s local contact’s that would prove instrumental during the visits later that day.

Isa gets to know some local kids through the universal language of football

As we sat down for a quick meal and a glass of coke George’s friends began to introduce themselves to our group. Samuel and Nimo first told us their names before Jerry Ziggy, a former radio station presenter, took the floor. He gave a brief description of the work he has done in the past and the contacts that he has in the villages and it was easy to turn back the clock and imagine his animated voice booming out of a speaker station. After this, George explained in Twi the aims of IDDS to the other Ghanaian’s and what approach we needed to take when visiting the villages for the first time. It was interesting being on the wrong side of a language barrier for once and definitely made me more conscious of the fact that I only have about four Twi phrases to my name so far.

Jerry and the others grasped the concept that George was explaining to them pretty quickly and we soon moved into a broader discussion in English on what we would try to explain to the chief on our arrival. Interestingly, I saw a Confucius saying posted on the wall of the Municipal Director’s Office stating “What you hear, you forget. What you see, you remember. What you do, you know” and I feel that these few words encapsulate better than I could the way in which we would like participants to experience village life. Kofi explained this to George, Jerry and the others and we soon reached a consensus on who should speak and represent IDDS in which village.

We set out for Adumkrom, the first of our village stop offs about a forty minute drive from KNUST. On arrival, we were greeted by elder members of the community and they quickly brought us into the palace, a sturdy room at the back of the village. The village itself was pretty small, about 500 people, and as you can imagine our arrival caused quite a stir. We all sat down with the chief and after some formalities Jerry stood up to make our case for IDDS. Again, his media personality shone through and even though he was speaking in Twi and I had no idea what he was talking about I still would have signed up for what he was selling!

Jerry Ziggy explains our mission to the chief

The chief initially looked quite intimidating but it soon became clear that he was very excited that IDDS was coming to his village, and he really seemed to grasp the central idea that we were trying to get across. He also cracked a joke or two that left us English- only speakers behind the rest of the room as we had to wait for George or Jerry to translate them for us. We eventually realized that he was suggesting that when the participants brought the prototype to the village for the third and final visit, they would have difficulty taking it back with them! He said it was a great honor for him to be the chief of the village at this time and to have this chance to work with us at IDDS. The crowd gathered around us also seemed excited about the prospect of working with a team from around the world to develop relevant technologies that could be used in the context of their community.

The indominatable chief himself

Agyaerago, the second village we visited was almost completely different from the first and I felt that a lesson in itself could be drawn from this. There is no single formula for working in the field, the specific local focus is always different and needs to be taken into account if any sort of development is to be sustainable. The people in Agyaerago were far more outgoing than those in the first village and I think this could be attributed to the fact that this village was much closer to the town than the others, and thus more used to visitors. There was also a power sharing committee in this village as there has been some dispute in the past about chiefdom here.

Jess shares a joks with some of the village women

Before we had the chance to go and meet the committee, Isa already had his football out and had challenged some of the local kids to a game, which duly began in earnest. Samuel kept an eye on him as we got our meeting started and Nimo this time was chosen to present our vision to the group. Again, the reaction was wholly positive and we soon exchanged contacts and arranged some quick logistics about food and accommodation. During the meeting Kofi saw a woman carrying maize on her head and asked if he could buy some pieces from here. He wanted ten but she initially only had five pieces and she left to return just at the end of the meeting to give another five and refused to accept payment for them. I think this example exemplified the positive attitude towards our presence that existed throughout our stay here. We’ll have to make sure the team knows to bring a corresponding food gift though, for their first visit!

Mad for Football!

The floor is open for questions in Agyaergo

Some of the kids, not quite sure what to make of us

On a tight schedule, we knew we could only afford thirty minutes in our last village so we had to make sure that we struck a delicate balance between staying longer than needed and rushing the visit. Kyekyewere is only a short distance from Agyaergo but the bumpy and uneven road between the two means it takes a little longer by car. Again, in structure, this village looks, and feels, completely different to the other two. We had a meeting with the chief in a more open palace area and there were also a number of other representatives present from the community. There were plenty of good natured jokes made at our expense in Twi but the chief and the villagers all seemed excited about the prospect of IDDS and welcomed the participants to Kyekyewere with open arms.

Kyekyewere is equipped with latrines

The chief in Kyekyewere listens intently to the IDDS message

A water pump in Kyekeywere

Reflecting on the bus home I realized that the villages were not quite what I was expecting but were still a million miles away from home, and even from KNUST. All in all though, a successful trip which bodes well for the later participant visits. We made it back just in time for our 8pm meeting and thankfully a group had cooked some potluck food for everyone, a god send at the end of such a long day! As we ate we checked off items on the agenda and started planning our next couple of days of preparation. Amy is heading off to the villages in the Bromg - Ahafo Region tomorrow afternoon so we’ve a lot of work before she gets back on Saturday...

Thank god for potluck dinners!

Twi phrase for the day:
Ete-sen – How are you?

Day 4 - Team Updates and Tropical Thunderstorms

This morning we added three new members to our organising team as Amit Gandhi, Nathan Cooke and Ela Ben-Ur all arrived after a hefty journey from the West Coast of the US. Amit’s luggage was lost along the way but hopefully it will be recovered and sent down to Kumasi in the next couple of days. Dealing with issues such as this for members of the organising committee should stand us in good stead if participants should face similar problems during their travels. Joe repeatedly paraphrases ‘hope for the best, plan for the worst’ and I think this forms the bulk of how we are approaching the next week or so before the participants land in Kumasi. With over twenty organizers on the committee we are confident we have all the bases covered though!

At our 5pm session in the Business Centre Amy voiced the common dislike that exists for meetings and came up with a new improved meeting format to help combat this. Each sub committee reports into the main group but can not go over 2 minutes and should only put forward the issues that require everyone’s attention, rather than a list of all the individual work items they have done over the last two days. This worked a treat and I think we were as close to an hour on the meeting time as we have ever been!

Tombo shows off her suite inventory at the 5pm meeting

Amy hoped to continue this theme of constant improvement and refinement by organising a newly thought out version of capture the flag but just as we were gearing up to head outside the rain started. It doesn’t often rain during the day in Kumasi but at night we are frequently treated to some pretty exceptional thunderstorms. This one was the best one yet, with the thunder and lightning eventually causing the power to cut out, leaving us no option but to head upstairs and make some smoothies instead. There was something inexplicably cool about putting together a strawberry, banana(and melon) smoothie by torchlight in the midst of a tropical thunderstorm. Eventually the power came back on and we decided to spend the hour playing a less physically demanding board game that Amy had brought along.

Isa is not impressed with the rain!

The smoothies were awesome by the way. Kudos has to be given here to Kofi Taha’s 7-year old son Isa, who is staying here with us in the dorms for the week. Kofi is an MIT Grad student and his son is, well, a bit of a livewire to say the least! Always at the centre of everything, he has really helped brighten up the hostel in the short time he’s been here, effortlessly putting a smile on our faces(unless he’s hitting you!) and we’re sure to miss him when he heads home on Friday morning.

Laura keeps us guessing at Taboo

Twi phrase for the day:
Me din de...Niall - My name is…Niall
Je fre me...Niall – My name is…Niall

Day 3 - All Systems Go!

From as early as 7am this morning there were mini-committee brainstorming meetings happening all over the hostel, as teams tried to track each other down to get started on their agendas for the week. Learning the dynamics of how KNUST functions is important at this stage as we are quickly finding out that, like most Universities, there are specific channels and bureaucracies through which everything must pass before it can be ratified. John Quansah and George Obeng in particular have been exceptionally helpful in this regard, as their knowledge of the KNUST political landscape has been invaluable in the progress we have made so far.

The logistics of hosting a conference such as IDDS outside of the safety zone of MIT certainly carries some difficulties, but also enriches the conference in so many ways. One of the main aims of IDDS is to help enable individuals and communities become active creators of technology, rather than simply passive recipients and I think that we are adopting and adapting this hands on approach in learning from scratch how we can operate IDDS in the altered setting of KNUST and Kumasi. Learning how to interact with the local media is a perfect example of how the IDDS model of collaboration and co-creation is being applied daily by organizers during this summit. The Publicity team have drawn extensively on Killian's, one of our Ghanaian organizers, knowledge of the local media landscape and worked with him to come up with a Publicity strategy for the summit.

Another way in which IDDS will be working with the local community, rather than simply for it, will be through it’s interactions with Suame Magazine. This is an engineering cluster located in the centre of Kumasi, spanning twenty miles and with a working population of over 200,000 people. There are approximately 12,000 independent micro, small and medium enterprises located in the area and their main activities of vehicle repair and metal fabrication (welding and casting) are renowned for their ingenuity all across West Africa. During the summit, participants will be working with these engineers and mechanics in the ‘Magazine’ and they will have the chance to share ideas, techniques, and technologies with each other in the hope of solving a design challenge that could help transform the lives of those living on less than 2$ a day.

Some of the organizers had the chance to visit Suame today, while other’s among us took a trip to Tech Junction to pick up some food for the suites in our hostel. Perfecting your haggling skills has to be at the top of your priorities at this IDDS as otherwise you will find yourself out of pocket pretty quickly! The more stalls there are, the more you can work the price down but regardless, it seems that everywhere has a certain ‘obruni’, or ‘white person’ tax that you really need to be persistent to avoid. There are some interesting and delicious local dishes here in Kumasi though, which is one of the major upsides of relocating from MIT. Earlier in the day we took a trip to a local student restaurant, the KCCR, and there you can choose from a variety of dishes for only 2.5 Cedis, the equivalent of about 1.50 USD. However, getting the choice of dish right for your own individual stomach is pretty important. While the rest of us enjoyed the wonders of palava, jollof rice, fried plantain and red-red, Stephen was struggling to make his way through Fu-Fu, a traditional soup with goat meat. Most Ghanaian’s I’ve met so far absolutely adore Fu-Fu but it seems that it was just too much, too soon, for Stephen’s conservative English stomach.

Amy, Gwyn and Ela playing hardball with a Ghanaian fruit seller

Later in the evening Amy decided that she had been sitting at her laptop all day and invited us all out for some form of game induced run around. After toying with a couple of concepts we eventually settled on a pretty exiting(namely because it was pitch dark) game of Capture the Flag in a nearby field/forest. A quick game of British Bulldog was to follow and then we decided to race back to the hostel, just to make sure we were really tired out. As Stephen and I gracefully broke clear of the others we suddenly became a target for about 7 fox-like dogs that simultaneously left their housing posts and decided that the tasty looking Europeans needed to be chased. It was with a definite sense of relief that we arrived out of breath at the hostel and the only consolation to be drawn from this pretty harrowing experience was that I had won the race, and thus finally triumphed over my colonial oppressor.

Miguel and I, clearly amused by Stephen's reaction to the Fu-Fu

Just when we thought we could sneak off to bed(it was 12am at this point) Amy remembered she had promised one of the security guards, Bright, that she would play a traditional Ghanaian game of cards, Spar, with him that evening. Five of us decided to join her but had we known just how long this card game could go on for, we might have thought twice about it. Spar is played by round, and on a points system with stones as counters and the look on Amy’s face when Bright came inside with about thirty stones was priceless. Amy, Laura and I thankfully were some of the first to be eliminated but I went to bed at 130am half expecting to still see Bright, Stephen and Michael huddled together around the table when I woke up in the morning!

Twi phrase of the day:

Wu din deh sen? – What is your name?
Je fre wo sen? – They call you how?

Day 2 - A meeting of minds

Our first group organizer meeting was not due to start until 7pm this evening and thus we spent much of the day taking the time to adjust to our new surroundings in KNUST. It takes some time to realize just how huge this campus actually is. The land was granted to the University by the Ashanti King in the early 1950’s and ever since has been slowly filling up with new buildings and departments for KNUST. Even still, there remains a huge amount of the college covered in forest and tropical fauna. While the campus is a beautiful place to live for seven weeks, it is important we do not become too comfortable in the bubble that is provides as otherwise our village visits will come as a bit of a shock!

We took a walk to the Engineering Guest House for lunch and then began some work on readying the suites for the participant’s arrival in just over a week. While the Tek Hostel currently seems a fairly serene setting for the conference, I can imagine things getting a little bit hectic when the sixty or so participants arrive! However, we are quickly coming to the conclusion that Sundays will not be incredibly constructive from a work point of view as everywhere seems to be closed for the day as people take the day off to go to church. Ghana is predominantly Christian country, although Islam is on the rise and there are a huge number of indigenous religions practiced in rural villages around the country.

The internet in our hostel was also completely down for the entire which was quite frustrating but in a strange way, quite refreshing. In a world where facebook and gmail completely dominate our lives it is nice to take a step back and realize that we are not often living in the real world! Physical human interaction or ‘the Reality-net’, as Amy likes to call it, is actually much more important and I think this is in keeping with the spirit of IDDS, a conference that aims to produce physical prototypes, rather than paper proceedings.

Joe and Dennis go into the finer details after the meeting

After a quick game of afternoon football we made our way up to the aptly named “Business Centre” in the Hostel for our first official organizer meeting of the summit. The vast majority of the organizers at this year’s summit were participants or organizers at last year’s summit and Amy will be looking to the experience of this team to ensure that the first IDDS outside of MIT runs as smoothly as possible. Even among our small organizing team there is huge diversity with representatives from America, Britain, Malawi, Brazil, India and Ghana. There is even a solitary Irishman who, being perfectly honest, is still not exactly sure how he ended up here. In our first meeting we signed ourselves up for mini sub-committees to help make the work more manageable. The organization of Social Events, Orientation, Build Its, Publicity and Speakers being just a few examples of the huge number of little things that need to be done to make sure that IDDS runs without any major hitches. As always with IDDS, some over enthusiastic committee members had to be restrained from attaching themselves to too many committees and Amy imposed a limit of four or five for each of us.

Mid-way through the meeting we were interrupted by Miguel Chaves, a Brazilian organizer and participant at every IDDS since its inception, as he announced his arrival at the hostel with a enthusiasm laden scream of “IDDS”. He was also joined by the less abrasive Jessica Huang, a past participant and graduate from Berkeley University, and we quickly descended the stairs to the ground floor to welcome them into the 09’ family. We spent the evening cooking together (Sumit’s sensational Indian rice has to get a special mention here) before getting some sleep before what looks set to be a fairly action packed Monday.

Twi phrase for the day:
Madaase – Thank You

Day 1 - The beginning of a new chapter…

We may have only arrived in Kumasi today but the planning for IDDS in Ghana has been in the pipeline for well over a year. MIT Senior lecturer Amy Smith founded the summit in 2007 and describes it as her “passion project” but this is the first time since its inception that it has been located away from her home University. IDDS prides itself on the spirit of co-creation and innovation which informs its vision and thus this has been the main motivating force behind the move to Kumasi. Over the course of the summit there will be the chance for participants to work with communities in rural villages in the Kumasi region and also with Swame Magazine, a collection of over 80,000 artisans and mechanics in the center of the city. There will thus be increased input from local partners into the creative process and it is hoped that this will make the projects more applicable to the localized context.

Four of the main protagonists at this year’s summit (John Quansah, Crossman Hormenoo, George Fuachie and George Obeng) were organizers and participants at last year’s conference at MIT. George Fuachie has been instrumental in securing the trust and enthusiasm of local villages towards the IDDS venture and the others are our main representatives at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), where most of the conference will take place. I seem to recall all four having frequent meetings about bringing IDDS to Ghana during the last IDDS and thus you can imagine how excited they all are about the almost unlimited potential that exists in the next seven weeks.

Amy had been here with Joe Agoada, a main organizer of this year’s summit, for just over a week before the rest of the organizing committee began arriving. I personally flew into Accra on Friday evening and then got the bus to Kumasi with Steven Gerrard and Hayley Sharp, two English past participants, and Andres Sierra, a recent design graduate from the Universidad Rafael Landivar in Guatemala. We had been given the rather onerous task of transferring about eighty hardback copies of a certain author’s (to remain unnamed) book from London to Kumasi so we may have looked slightly suspect to the customs officials as we hopped off our flight with a suitcase bursting at the seams with eighty of the same book!

After a hectic scramble to the taxi rank we eventually managed to squeeze all of our bags into a car and made our way to a hostel, to be up bright and early the next morning for the bus. Surviving solely on a diet of McVities digestive biscuits, dried banana plantain crisps, and a healthy serving of quality Nigerian drama we eventually managed to reach Tech Junction, our stop just outside KNUST. The hustle and bustle of the market junction was slightly overwhelming as we stepped off the bus so the smiling faces of Joe, George and Sumit, another of this year’s organizers, was most definitely a welcome one.

The Tek Credit Union Hostel will be our home for the next seven weeks, and it didn’t take too long for us to settle ourselves in. After a quick meal we made our way down to the campus pool for a swim and to take some time out to catch up with each other, one year on from IDDS 08’. None of us felt too guilty about this brief diversion from work as one gets the feeling that this could be our last night off in a long while!

For the duration of the conference I will be ending each blog post with one twi phrase, just you can learn a little of the local language, and get a flavour of the local culture, as you follow the progress of IDDS at KNUST.

Twi phrase for the day:
Akwaaba! - Welcome!