Alex Little

With all the recent talk about Google Chrome OS and Microsoft office on the web, putting cloud computing back in the technology headlines, I recently read a less well publicised Microsoft story in the Seattle Times:

As U.S. companies begin exploring cloud computing this year, a school system on the other side of the globe has already leapt into the cloud. Ethiopia is rolling out 250,000 laptops to schoolteachers all over the country, all running on Microsoft’s platform called Azure.

The project, as described in the article, seems to overlook 2 huge issues, as do most of the people who have left comments on the article.

Firstly, the internet infrastructure in Ethiopia is just not robust, widespread or reliable enough for teachers to just connect up their shiny new laptops to some data centre in the US. Take for example Abi Adi, a town of around 20000 people, about 3 hours drive from where I’ve been working in Mekelle. A colleague, working in the teacher training college there, tried to get a couple of new phone lines installed to give extra (dial-up) internet access, but was told that all the lines for the town had already been allocated and no more would be available until new lines were installed, but no immediate plans were in place to increase the number of lines available.

And many Ethiopian towns and villages are far less well connected than Abi Adi.

There are obviously other options to delivering internet access through copper or fibre networks, such as through VSAT or the mobile phone network. But again to get these installed, or made reliable for the proposed project, would be a massive (and costly) undertaking in it’s own right.

Secondly, there’s no mention of the training and support that would be need to be given to teachers. The support infrastructure would need to be huge, who is going to fix the machines when they (almost inevitably) get a virus, or overheat after being choked with dust?

My experience of the One Laptop Per Child project shows that the training and support given to teachers and students is absolutely crucial to the success of the project – in much the same way it will be to this new project.

So, do I think cloud computing could work for Ethiopian teachers? Certainly not currently.

It’s not that I don’t like the idea of what they’re trying to do here, but just very wary that it’s yet another white elephant project which sounds good and gets them in the headlines. The money could be far better spent working with ETC (Ethiopia’s sole telecoms company) to improve the general internet infrastructure, and training teachers to work better with the technology already available to them. Only then might Ethiopia be able to take advantage of the possibilities afforded by cloud computing.