Yesterday it
was a national holiday (Nane Nane), the holiday usually celebrated on 8th
of August each year to recognize the contribution of the farmers to the
development of our nation. This year’s Nane Nane was great with Tigo
introducing their “Tigo Kilimo” project,
the USSD SMS based application which would
help farmers to enhance their farming skills and improve productivity.
Me, Tony,
Suleiman and Salum we were celebrating the holiday in our own weird way, actually we were at
the KiNU innovation hub discussing about our project we want to do. Actually the
project is still hot with steam on it not yet to go public. We discussed a lot
of issues on the Tanzania state of ICT and the way the industry is moving, the
game changers, the decision makers and even the opportunities that lies in the
tech industry in Tanzania and how are we going to exploit them.
Among so
many things we discussed the one which get a lot of attention was the National ID card project, which is actually being carried by the government
currently and there have been a lot of challenges facing the project including
data redundancy, inefficiency, time wastage, bureaucracy and so many other
thing. We thought on how we could have tackled the problem using ICT solutions.
The project is under
the Government agency NIDA, NIDA stands for National Identity
Authority (NIDA).
We viewed
different challenges that people were facing during the registration process
and we realize most of them were solvable using tech. Most of the complains
from the people was the way of registering, since people have to stand in long queues,
the bureaucracy, lack of clear information and the time span to stand at the centers and accomplish the whole process was too long for them. While
most of them complaining they have to dump the whole process and continue with
other things.
We observed
the manual system, the system that exist and discuss the challenge that we
would face if we could have turned the complete system digitized, with the use
of ICT tools to facilitate the process. Some of the immediate challenges we saw includes people’s
awareness on technology and the penetration rate of tech systems especially in
the rural Tanzania.
Hint:
Tanzania's mobile phone subscribers rose 22 percent to 25.6 million in the year
2010 and by the year 2015 the number is expected to reach 36 million mobile
subscribers all over the country. Roughly Tanzania wright now has around 30
million mobile subscribers.
According to Reuters “The number of
internet users rose to 6 million by May 2011 from 5.3 million at the end of
2010. Vodacom Tanzania,
part of South Africa's Vodacom, is the market leader with a 43 percent market
share followed by Bharti Airtel (28 percent), Millicom's subsidiary Tigo
Tanzania (22 percent) and Zantel (6 percent).
Other smaller players are state-run telecoms firm TTCL, Sasatel and
Benson, which have tiny market share.”
The site TradingEconomics estimates by Jan 2012 the population
of Tanzania was around 46.22 million people. Comparing with 30 million mobile subscribers throughout the
country, it means 71.4 percent of Tanzanians could be accessed through mobile
phone. Then mobile phones could have been used as the main source of information
to all these people. The problem of awareness could have been just solved by
simply sending SMS to them, don’t kill us it is just what we were discussing.
The other
main problem was how people could register using tech and at least reduce the
work load and the population at the local registration offices. We thought that
people in towns and cities were the internet access is good. They could have
just registered themselves to the online database directly, by filling forms
that exist online. We thought instead of having utilize a lot of paper works
which give rooms to bureaucracy, people they could just register themselves
online directly for those who can and other could be given support by
government officials on how to register themselves online. The problem could have been solved in
the city and in the local institutions.
The Tanzania
Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) report shows that as of October 2010, around 4.8 million
Tanzanians had access to the Internet up from 1.6 million users in 2005. Out of
the current figure, 2,663,200 were institutional users, 1,932,816 were
households or individual users and 260,280 Internet café users. These
groups of users could have registered directly online to overcome registration
chaos in cities and towns.
We thought the government could have train officials to use PCs and Laptops to carry out
the process in the rural areas where by people could just register themselves
by the support of the officials directly on the online database via the
internet access.
Actually we
thought about several things, but all of them were just our ideas and the way
we thought we should spend our Nane Nane holiday at the Kinu Innovation Hub. It was interesting session, I really enjoyed.
Later, this
beautiful lady named Jackie come with her beautiful idea of
combining fashion with technology. We discuss her project, It was just
marvelous. Thanks to the founders of KiNU hub and who so ever facilitating the existence
of the innovation center. Tanzanians let’s think creatively for better
tomorrow of our country and continent.