Life-long learning or livelihood - the Dadamac Ltd idea

Submitted by Pamela on 31 December 2012 - 2:41pm

This post continues from Dadamac - taking stock for 2013 which is a personal account, helping me to take some decisions for 2013.

Part way through a section on "Financial, organisational and motivational issues" I needed to stop and think in more depth, so I wrote Motivation for my work in Nigeria. That made sense of things up to a few years ago.

It's important for me to see how things are changing because I do have some serious decisions to take, and there are implications for other people as well, so I want to get the decisions right. This blog is another consideration in some depth and looks at Dadamac Ltd.

This is long because I wrote it for me and I needed to think about it. I might wirte a shorter, more readable version at some point.

The background to Dadamac Limited

My connections with Nigeria had squeezed out my "proper job" and I was totally hooked on my UK-Nigeria involvement, although the motivation and directions had changed subtly over the years.

I had done what I could regarding Peter's project in SW Nigeria. The value of the Information Centre that we had set up through OCDN (Oke-Ogun Community Development Network) had been recognised. It had moved into a new phase under IITA. I had developed a link with John Dada and Fantsuam Foundation (FF) and so I was connected with a mature well-established integrated community development programme. I appreciated my connection with FF both for what it was doing locally, and also for the links FF had with the earlier stages of my work with the Information Centre. I could see how FF might act as an umbrella organisation for continuing some aspects of Peter's project - aspects that I cared about but were not part of the new direction under IITA. I hoped that the FF link would ultimately benefit my collaborators and friends connected with OCDN and Ago-Are.

The ongoing work I was doing with John on the Teachers Talking programme had become my main UK-Nigeria interest. I appreciated Teachers Talking because the original attraction of Peter's work, from my point of view, was its connection with ICT, educational systems and the roles of teachers and learners in the 21st century. However, my involvement in Ago-Are and at Fantsuam mearn that I had been drawn into all kinds of wider issues relating to "development" - not suprising really as the organisation that Peter Oyawale had originally asked me to join was called "Committee for African Welfare and Development"

Back home I was spending a ridiculous amount of time on the Internet, struggling to learn new things relevant to the work in Nigeria, and trying to understand better how various things fitted together. I was active in many online groups as well as reading and thinking. I was also in contact with people in my Nigerian network, largely through yahoo. Challenged by a UK friend as to the value of any of it I had justified my current involvement simply on my own account, in terms of the learning that I was doing. I had no way of judging if there was any benefit to anyone else.

It was hard to explain what I was doing. My work didn't fit it into any of the usual categories. It wasn't funded research or development within an established organisation, It wasn't like any of the other projects I read about where individual people got involved with friends in Africa and raised loads of money to build schools, hospitals and orphanages and had impact on thousands of people.

My story was different. I had got involved with some people in Nigeria who didn't have easy access ot the Internet and I was collaborating with them. I had a cheap, realiable broadband connection. We were collaborating face to face and at a distance. Initially I had inherited an embryonic project in Ago--Are and directed it from a distacne. The Information Centre in rural SW Nigeria had been the result, but I was no longer involved with that. I had designed and delivered an innovative and relevant course for serving teachers in North Central rural Nigeria, but it was only small scale occassional local training - totally invisible compared to all the national and international ICT education programmes It seemed that all I had to show was the fact that I went to Nigeria sometimes, that when I was there I did some teaching and as a result I had good contacts and knew someithing about what people were doing and how things worked.

I knew that our collaborative use of the Internet was key to what we were doing, but it was invisible to others and hard to explain.

If I could only justify my work for "the learning" that I was doing then, from a financial point of view, and from an intellectual point of view, I was like a mature student working my way through college. That's all very fine for a while (cutting costs to a minimum, doing just enough paid work to cover the bills, and spending every minute on the studies or the work that pays for them). In fact studying like that can be a fine lifestyle for several years (and it's surprising how quickly the years pass, and such thngs become "normal"), but it's not ideal as a permanent way of life.

At some point it's time to stop being a student, take what you've learned, and see what (if anything) it's worth to other people. In a way, setting up Dadamac Limited was that experiment into the value of what I had learned through my years of UK-Nigeria involvement.

I knew that what I valued wasn't just about what I learned when I was face-to-face with people in Nigeria. There was value in the ongoing learning when I was back home, and, even more importantly, in the collaboration that we could do at a distance. I felt privileged and greatly enriched through the relationships I had developed in Nigeria and the knowledge I had gained over the years. It was wonderful when I came back to the UK to be able to keep in touch with Fantsuam Foundation via its VSAT and to tap into what was going on at the grass roots in rural Africa straight from home.

I thought that what I enjoyed was a hugely valuable potential resource for anyone with a genuine interest in effective rural development. If it was as valuable as I believed then perhaps it was time to offer it to other people, to stop subsidsing my work and "monetise" what we had developed.

Plan A for Dadamac Ltd

The plan was very simple. With hindsight it was ludicrously naive but at the time it seemed like a good idea.

From where we (John and I) were standing at the time we started Dadamac it seemed that a lot of the people far away in the UK and elsewhere who made decisions and did research were rather out of touch with reality as we knew it. Kazanka Comfort (the general secretaray of the Fantsuam Foundation micro finance programme) came back from a conference is South Africa and was telling us about it. She recognised a linking theme between all the learned papers there. It seemed that people were all explaining to each other that the approach of "Bring the technology and they will come" didn't actually work. It ws hard for us to believe that anyone needed to go to a conference to learn that. It had been a totally obvious fact to all three of us for many years, so it seemed incredible and very sad that people were wasting their research brains and budgets on such "non-information" and trekking round the world to hear it from each other. Why didn't they have a chat with people like us first, and then use their considerable resources on doing reseach projects that would be in touch with reality, projects that would have a sensible focus and thus find out something that would be genuinely useful?

I was forever reading about "participatory research" and "working with stakeholders" and "pilot projects that would be replicated" and such like. Why didn't people participate with John and his network in Fantsuam Foundation and beyond? Obviously we had the missing piece they were looking for.

It seemed to me like a no-brainer that people who were currently working in a top-down way would jump at the chance to work with John, if I made it easy enough for them.

John was uniquely placed to help them dip into local knowledge and do what they wanted to do in a better, more effective and useful way. He had huge practical knowledge of all aspects of integrated, needs-led community development, and was involved in it all in an ongoing way. In his daily work, he slipped automatically between English and various Nigerian languages. He was a local man who was had also been an adacemic in the UK. He was comfortable and "at home" in a wide variety of situations and social groups, calm and good humoured, with tremendous knowledge and networks. He understood how things fitted together and their wider implications - practically, socially, politically, economically, culturally - and not only that, he was available online. I could help people to connect up with him, just like we'd done when we worked on Teachers Talking.

If anyone wanted genuine information about realities in rural Africa, or wanted to try something out, then they would do well to work in collaboration with John, and, through him, with his network. All we needed to do - or so it seemed to me - was to raise the visibility of John and the Fantsuam network when I went back home, and enable people to easily break out of their out-of-date "top down" ways of doing things.

John was already doing stuff that was way ahead of the top down "pilot studies" that failed to repilcate, and his projects were all in response to local need. Fantsuam was a perfect place to study things as they really were, or to start new projects that would have a hope of berng realistc and replicable. Working together as Dadamac we could bring together reseach and practice. Useful projects would get continued locally afterwards to the benefit of all concerned. All projects would be planned so that local people were not exploited and gained some kind of benefit through their involvment.

As we saw, it money was being wasted hand over fist on research that contributed nothing useful in practice. If the people involved spent some of their budgets on involving us then the resutls would be so much better that they would actually be saving money. It would be a win-win situation. And it wasn't just researchers - all kinds of people were interested in development issues in rural Africa. We could offer communication between UK and a large area of rural Nigiera with an established network linking all the issues of integrated community development. With Dadamac in the picture things wouldn't need to be top down and irrelevant any more.

Wrong

I had made a woefully incorrect assumption. I thought that "they" would want to stop being top-down and that "they" would quickly see the value of being able to communicate effectively using the channels we had established. It was stupid of me and I should have known better.

I knew from all kinds of previous experience that it's no good providing "solutions" if people don't see there is a "problem". I know how hard it is to learn (or teach) something if there is no initial spark of interest in finding out. I've even done work related to sales and know something about the pressures put on people to "make it easy to choose to buy", but I didn't think through the implications regarding Dadamac becoming financially viable.

Ironically I had often mocked ICT projects that brought top-down development to rural Africa and they then took ages to realise that "Bring the technology and they will come" doesn't work. I didn't recognise that the same applied if I was going in the opposite direction and offering "a solution" from rural Nigeria back to the UK. It took me until ICTD2010 to finally accept that I wasn't going to be able to do it. It's taken me longer to decide what I should do as a result.

Another rich learning experience

So - I failed to "make a go" of Dadamac as a financailly viable organisation. I didn't even manage to make it into a self-funding hobby. When I started Dadamac I paid for some help so that if it did take off I would be able to call on more of that help and handle things effectively. We did some useful things (see Dadamac Ltd) but I couldn't find any projects that would pay. I think everything we did was worth doing. They illustrated the kind of thing we wanted to do for people, and enabled us to set up systems and try them out. However, doing things that are interesting and worthwhile for no money, and learning a lot as a result, doesn't pay bills. Depending on how you look at it, it's either an investment that hasn't paid off, or it's a continutaion of being a self-funded student.

The nearest we have got to a properly funded UK-Nigeria research project is a collaboration between City University and Fantsuam Foundation. It is about re-cycyling plastic waste as floor tiles. City Universtiy students came up with the idea and wanted to see if it would work in rural Africa as a possible small business. The first stage is happening at present, and is funded by comic relief. We managed to get the Nigeria side funded, so it is a step in the right direction. However it seemed there was no way to get funding for the enabling role of Dadamac.