Attention, philanthropists: Here’s a worthy cause for you. Cliff Missen needs money and help for a charity that brings the Internet’s vast amount of educational material to thousands of folks in Africa who have no Internet access.
Missen, a development specialist, is director of the WiderNet project at the University of Iowa. He and his eight volunteers have created the “eGranary,” which puts the equivalent of a library on a 750-gigabyte hard-disk drive. They then distribute these drives to school officials and librarians throughout Africa, who can then make the drive available offline to computer users on site, or make it available to users nearby who can be connected via a computer network – even if they don’t have a direct connection to the Internet.
Missen’s solution shows that you can help people in poor countries with modest technological gifts. That recognizes that the infrastructure in those countries often can’t support something more ambitious.
“Someone who just sends a computer to Africa misses the point,” Missen said. “If there is no Internet access, it isn’t useful.” Missen says it costs one medical school in Ghana more than $22,000 a month to get limited Internet access for 700 students. That cost alone is equal to the annual salaries of 30 full-time professors.
By the time all of the students shared the connection, it was painfully slow. Across Africa, broadband either isn’t available or is prohibitively expensive, and it relies on communications or electrical networks that are unreliable.
So Missen figured he could provide a subset of the Internet on a disk drive instead. Using a simple backup drive from Seagate Technology, he started loading as much educational information as he could. After two years, he is now on his fourth version of the eGranary.
It can hold more than 10 million documents, including thousands of instructional videos and audio files. By hooking it via network cable to a computer, anyone can access the data.
The eGranary Digital Library doesn’t have porn or the latest entertainment sites. But it does have the entire Wikipedia, the Gutenberg project that digitizes books, search engines, and all of the public-health data from the World Health Organization. As big as that sounds, it’s probably less than 1 percent of the actual material on the Internet. Missen gets permission from everyone who has rich educational information to put on the disk. It takes about three days to copy the data onto each drive.
Missen was a Fulbright scholar in 1999, spending a year in Nigeria.
He dug wells in communities that were as far as five hours on foot from the nearest road. In his spare time, he teaches people how to dig wells through another foundation dubbed Wellspring Africa.
Now his small team has given out 150 hard drives across Africa.
One recipient was a library in Liberia that hadn’t had electricity for eight years until recently. Missen estimates that tens of thousands of people have accessed the information on the drives.
The operation has been small-scale for about two years. It was initially funded by the Hewlett Foundation, but that grant has run out.
The cost of installing a drive and getting everything together to make it useful is about $5,000 in the first year, and it costs about $1,500 a year to maintain.
“We’re operating on fumes,” Missen said.
