Alex Little

Over the past week or so I’ve read a few blog postings and articles about how to get a job in international development or as an aid worker (Guardian and Aid worker video). I wouldn’t consider myself to be working in, what most people would call, international development (I’ll come onto that later) and certainly not an aid worker. But in any case I thought I’d add my tuppence worth as to how I arrived in the job I’m doing now. Given my lack of (conscious) career planning I’m not sure whether any of this should be taken as sound career advice, but maybe my experience will help someone.

As probably many people reading this already know, I worked at the Open University (UK) for over 7 years. After this amount of time I decided that I needed a change. Not that I particularly wanted to leave the OU, rather, I needed a new challenge and to look at what other options might be out there for me. I’d often considered applying to VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas), but either didn’t think I had the skills/experience needed or was too busy doing other things. I certainly didn’t apply with the explicit intention of then working full time in international development. My first piece of luck was that VSO had a placement available for a project directly in the area I had most experience in (elearning, as I’d been working on at the OU), I’d expected to be offered a placement doing general ICT infrastructure development and skills training.

Whilst working in Mekelle (Ethiopia) I had my second piece of luck, which was to become involved with a project from Alcalá University (near Madrid) which was also trying to develop the elearning capacity and facilities at Mekelle Uni. I extended my VSO placement specifically to continue working on this project and now, here I am almost a year after finishing my VSO placement, working as project manager at Alcalá Uni on the same project in Mekelle and preparing to go back to Ethiopia in a few weeks time. Admittedly my personal circumstances have helped me hugely, I’ve been able to be very flexible as to where I live and be able to travel anywhere anytime. Many other VSO volunteers I knew in Ethiopia returned to their home countries and similar jobs.

So… back to why I don’t consider myself to be an international development worker… I prefer to consider myself to be working on an elearning and ICT project which happens to be in Ethiopia. Most people would probably describe that as international development, although I could work on a similar project anywhere (Russia, Japan, Argentina etc), yes, the circumstances (working culture, state of infrastructure etc) would be different, but aren’t they different in every country, even every organisation, anyway?

For the work I’m now involved in and how we’d like to move forward, keeping ourselves distanced from being seen as an NGO/charity is probably our best way forward. My feeling is that being seen as an NGO/charity may perpetuates the impression that we’re there simply to donate equipment, which then ends up being installed but inoperable and unsupported after only a few months. There is certainly still a place for charities/NGOs etc, especially working in relief work, healthcare & education for the extremely poor, but not so much for ICT development.

Probably the only advice I could give to anyone wanting to get into a similar field (which is much the same as you’ll find in any other article about careers in international development) which is that you must to spend some time abroad (probably volunteering) to really gain an appreciation of the issues and challenges faced. Just having a Masters or some other qualification won’t be enough. Apart from the few days in pre-departure training with VSO, I have no formal training or qualifications in international development.

Perhaps I’ve just been very lucky or perhaps I made my own luck, I’ll leave it to you to decide which!

In the last couple of days I’ve received couple of emails about web/IT jobs which may be of interest to people reading this blog, one voluntary and one paid…

Firstly, a voluntary short term IT job (sys/network admin & web development) in Tanzania with Mpingo Conservation & Development Initiative. I’ve not got a weblink for the full job info, but can email on to you if interested.

Secondly, (paid) web developer job with Aptivate – international IT development company who I did some work with last summer in Cambridge, see Aptivate website for full details.

Earlier this week I spent a few days working Cambridge doing some volunteer web development work for Aptivate. They are in the process of developing a new low bandwidth site for CDAC (Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities), this particular site is aimed at the victims of the Haiti earthquake and is to help ensure that aid and relief agencies are able to communicate well with local communities as they rebuild their lives. The site isn’t yet finalised, so can’t put the url up yet, but will do so once it’s ready.

As an aside, OpenLearn now has a course on “Using Voluntary work to get ahead in the job market“.

Much of the past couple of weeks have been spent making sure I’m ready to head off again to Ethiopia to work on the Digital Campus project. En route, I’m going to the eLearning Africa conference in Zambia, where I’m giving a presentation next Friday. Looking forward to getting back to Mekelle to see how everything it going there, seems like quite a lot of progress is still being made. My plan whilst I’m there is to help support the phd students and the ICT team, but also planning how the project can progress into the next academic year.

Hopefully I’ll be back blogging a bit more regularly over the coming few weeks!

After a very uneventful journey home, I’m now back in the cold and wet of the UK – although it is quite good to be back really. Haven’t been up to much since I returned, just getting everything unpacked and starting to get in touch with everyone again.

I have posted up the edited highlights of my photos from the past few months (since I returned in August). These are all just the photos from trips away and evenings out, I’m working on putting another album together to show the work that we’ve done in setting up the new computer labs and training sessions.

Have already started to spend far too much money – ordered 2 new computers (laptop and desktop).
Hope to catch up with you all again soon

Today is my last day in work at Mekelle. Feels very strange to be leaving after such a long time, but think I’m ready to go back – for a break at least. Still no running water at home, though I got a shower at a friends house last night. So there are a few things here I won’t miss!

I’ve been really pleased with the progress we’ve managed to make in developing elearning at Mekelle, especially over the last months, though I’m sure I could easily spend another 10 years here and still not get everything done that I’d like. Now I just have a few days in Mekelle getting packed up before flying to Addis for another few more days and back to UK next weekend. My next blog entry will probably be once I’m back in the UK, after I’ve had a bit of time to settle in again. Will be in touch with as many people as possible once I’m back and looking forward to seeing everyone again

Tutors from Health Sciences and Engineering Colleges

Last week we had our second full weeks training course with our elearning tutors. Jaime came over from Alcala University to deliver most of the training and I was there to help out with more of the technical aspects and generally lend a hand.

It was a completely different week to the previous training week we had back in November. Then it was the start of the training so it was much more hectic and we had more participants – who seemed to flit between attending or not – so it was difficult to manage with everyone working at different paces. In November we gave people plenty of time for practical work as well as giving presentations – but at the end of the week, some people thought there was too much time to work on their own. I suspect that many of these were the people who were more interested in getting the certificate to say they’ve done the training than actually implementing anything.

This week we had a core group of about 12 tutors who attended the whole week, which was almost entirely practical sessions – just a few presentations. Jaime had much of the previous week meeting with the tutors for individual tutorials and catch up, which worked out to be time well spent. The outcome was a very productive week and we now have many courses (around 15) almost fully uploaded on our Moodle server (see: http://www.mu.edu.et/elearning) – many of the courses allow guest access if you would like to take a look. Next challenge is to make sure the student accounts have been created and that they have received some form of induction to the lab.

Unfortunately we still have some unresolved technical issues in the labs which has been making things a little tricky to manage. None of the issues by themselves are show-stoppers, but all the little issues add up and we’ve already experienced the fact that we’re not always told when there are issues – instead people just don’t use the lab. So we need to make sure there are plenty of ways in which staff and students can communicate when they are having difficulties.

Enjoying a meal at Axum hotel

At the end of the week we had a nice meal out with all the tutors at the Axum hotel. Even though it was a Friday night, most places are very quiet – it’s still fasting time in the run up to Easter and many people won’t go out to restaurants/bars if they’re not able to eat meat!

Some of our first elearning students

Today I held the first student induction session for Seyoum’s ‘Marketing Management for Industrial Engineers’ course. All seemed to go very well, we had far fewer problems with the students logging in than I was expecting – I think this was mainly due to Seyoum being able to explain in Amharic what they needed to do.

Just before Christmas I was contacted by VSO asking if they could use my blog to help recruit more IT volunteers. Little did I know that this blog would be the main focus of this campaign! You can find the homepage for the campaign at http://www.vso.org.uk/itroles.

If you’ve arrived here from the VSO website, then I hope you find my blog useful and I hope the postings of my experiences here encourage you to apply to be an IT volunteer too . If you’re thinking of applying and would like to know more about my experience as VSO volunteer, please feel free to contact me, by either posting a comment below or emailing me directly at alex@alexlittle.net.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve been getting involved in a new elearning project at Mekelle Uni. We’ve got funding to build 2 new computer labs for the Health Science and Engineering faculties. I will be returning to Mekelle at the beginning of August, to assist with setting up the labs.

The pilot project, involving 10 tutors (5 from each of Health Sciences and Engineering faculties) and 200 students, will run for the coming academic year. In the next few months we’ll be setting up the labs and providing general elearning training to the tutors. In addition we’d like to offer mentoring to the tutors, giving them a broader range of experiences and advice as they develop their skills in using electronic resources in their teaching.

So… we’re looking to recruit some volunteer mentors, especially those with experience in teaching any aspect of health science or engineering. Given the low tutor numbers, we’re only looking for a time commitment of a few hours per month. So if you, or you know of someone, who would be interested then please get in touch with me.

We’d be very grateful for any assistance, if you would like more information about the project or what the mentoring involves, then just drop me a line.

I’ve been away the last couple of weeks – hence the lack of blog postings recently, so I’ll try and make up for it this week!

The new intake of volunteers arrived a couple of weeks ago, so at the end of their training we had another IT volunteers workshop. Returning to the Red Cross training centre for the first time since I arrived in Ethiopia felt a little strange, but also made me realise how long I’ve been here for now (coming up to 6 months), even though it only feels like 5 minutes!

The number of current IT volunteers outnumbered the number of new IT volunteers 9 to 3. There were 8 IT placements available in Ethiopia for the February intake, only 5 of which got filled, then only 3 new people actually arrived. So there’s plenty of opportunities available if anyone feels like taking some time out from their normal jobs!

Today I met attended a workshop with BTCV to try to decide on the future of the Volunteer Passport that I was involved with a few months ago (especially as I’m not going to be here to maintain it).

The Passport hasn’t been used that much yet – but there are several reasons for this, firstly that it’s not been promoted anywhere yet (many people in BTCV don’t know about it), secondly, it’s functionality is slightly confused and thirdly, it still need finishing off.

The original purpose of the Passport was to allow volunteers to record their skills and experience and then use this as evidence to put towards formal qualifications (NVQs etc) and act as an ePortfolio system. However since we decided to use Elgg as the basis for the system, this opened up the possibility of it becoming a social network for BTCV.

Much of our discussion today was about whether or not BTCV should be providing a social networking system for it’s volunteers (why not just use facebook?) and how it could be justified. We eventually came to the conclusion that it probably could be justified if we had some good use cases and evidence of how it would benefit current BTCV activities, but that the system as it stands would need  work on the interface design (layout, structure and terminology).

If there is anyone out there who is interested in following up this work (especially from a technical/development point of view) then please drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with the BTCV team