Category: Education

Code 8 To The Rescue!

Code 8 To The Rescue!

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

TeamCode8Risking at least irony four male university students in Kampala just won the inaugural Women’s Empowerment Award in St. Petersburg for an innovative device to easily and rapidly detect malaria.

Any notion that’s it more than ironic is lost immediately when you realize that pregnant mothers in Africa harbor a greater fear of having malaria than any other group.

This is not only because malaria can quickly end a pregnancy but because the treatment can harm the fetus and in cases where the mother is less than perfectly healthy, cause miscarriage.

The four Makere university students engineered the device which is plugged into a smartphone, and created the app software that analyzes it.

The best test for malaria is a blood test. But the test will often come back negative when in fact the patient has malaria. What? This is because the best symptom of malaria is altered red blood cells, which explode in the body during a malaria attack but then are methodically excreted. A malaria attack rarely lasts longer than an hour, but the interval before the next attack can be as long as twelve hours.

So by the time the patient gets to the clinic and waits for her test, her symptoms may have subsided. And since reading the microscopic results of a swab is a human endeavor, mistakes happen and more often when the sensitivity of a pregnant mother is considered.

My wife suffered the same incorrect diagnosis here in the U.S. after returning from a safari and contracting malaria.

We called our doctor while she was having the attack; we knew it was malaria. But by the time she felt good enough to get in the car (after the attack subsides), travel to the hospital, wait for the test, 3-4 hours had transpired and the diagnosis she received was negative.

(Aggressive protestations sufficed for us to get the right therapy, and she was cured, and a subsequent visit with a test closer to a subsequent attack before the medication began to take hold proved we were correct: she had malaria.)

The four Uganda computer science students created a simple red-light device which they call a “matiscope.” Similar, in fact, to the types of devices that read fingerprints, the red light sensor detects red blood cells without any skin piercing.

Blood cells ooze to the surface of the skin normally all the time, but are so few they aren’t noticeable. And the skin itself is porous. The light penetrates several micro layers reaching even more red blood cells.

The sensor detects a blood cell altered by a malaria attack instantly.

The four students were guests of Microsoft for the company’s annual “Imagine Cup” competition for students, this year held in St. Petersburg. While there they won the inaugural Women’s Empowerment Award organized by an UN agency.

Brian Gitta, Joshua Businge, Simon Lubambo and Josiah Kavuma call themselves “Team Code 8″ after laboring through eight different computer code designs before hitting on the one that worked.

Team leader, Gitta, told an audience he was motivated to invent the device because of his “fear of needles” and being “pricked to death” as a child who constantly contracted malaria.

But, in fact, simply reducing the time between the attack and detection is the genius of the invention. And Team Code 8’s matiscope and the software they developed to detect the altered red blood cells isn’t sophisticated enough yet to determine the specific type of malaria (there are four types) or exactly how bad the infection is, often necessary for determining proper treatment.

So it’s a first but very important step, and for millions of people who might be infected, it might be all that’s needed. Normally otherwise healthy adults who contract malaria can be prescribed rather standard levels of medication to wipe it out, without knowing specifically the malaria type or level of infection.

What it means for pregnant mothers, though, is that the doctors have to hospitalize the mother and make sure that the blood test is taken immediately as the next attack begins.

The practicality of the device, though, allows for self diagnoses very much as similar devices are being manufactured today for pregnancy and HIV AIDS.

The app for the smartphone, of course, is cheap. But right now the plug-in device is fairly cost prohibitive for most individual rural Africans, but could prove cost beneficial for remote health clinics, companies and institutions which provide on-site medical care, and of course, hospitals.

But the Team is contacting entrepreneurs around the world who with mass production could greatly reduce the cost.

Leave it to the kids, eh?

Too Much To Whom?

Too Much To Whom?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Less than three short years from the Arab Spring, ethnic domination and conflict is growing throughout Africa. Capitalism may be the culprit.

I once felt that education alone could ameliorate racism, but as demonstrated especially in places like Syria, Egypt and Rwanda, that’s not proving true. At least not when that education has occurred over fewer than several generations.

Few countries in Africa have been beset by ethnic turbulence to the extent of Rwanda, and fewer still have enjoyed such rapid prosperity in my life time. The guilt that America and France felt for having allowed the 1994 genocide was followed by such enormous amounts of aid that almost all the country, today, looks very similar to a successful western society.

Unlike the rural areas where my mother lives in Wisconsin, similar rural areas in Rwanda have fiber optic cable and access to high speed internet. The system of roads now rivals both in extent and quality that of places in rural Europe.

While the number of actual doctors is relatively low in Rwanda, the level of health service is high for an African country, as heady social services planners recognize that most of the diseases prevalent in Africa are best handled by nurses and health clinics rather than hospitals.

So as Rwanda’s ostensible peace and prosperity grows, many of its African neighbors find it increasingly difficult to plan policy based on Rwanda’s past of ethnic turbulence. South Africa announced recently, for example, that Rwandans who were given exile in the 1990s must now return.

Even the richest of African countries like South Africa feels a conflict when its national resources are used by foreign nationals. But the Rwandan exiles in South Africa are terrified of the prospect of returning home.

I am the child of second generation immigrants who spent their lives inside their own ethnic communities, and while my parents’ generation intermarried, usually one or the other parent infused us children with a certain ethnic identity. I think this is true for much of America.

And now, as a fourth generation of melded cultures, my childrens’ generation seems truly ethnic free. So it is reasonable to wonder if that’s the magic number: four generations of ethnic melding to emerge from racism.

Yet Rwanda stands as the example this is not true. The Hutus and Tutsis have intermarried for so many generations over hundreds of years, that their language has become the same. But there is arguably no ethnicity in the world that remains as hateful and separating.

The Alewites and Christians of Syria have been the persecuted for centuries, until somehow the Alewites imposed control on a region where albeit they remain a minority, they are free of their persecution. Conflict as open battle was reduced in Syria, but at the cost of many freedoms like speech and political opposition.

Compared to Rwanda, the South African ethnic problems remain in infancy, even though they were forged more than two centuries ago and reenforced throughout the modern era. Then, presto in 1993, a political system emerged that based upon its constitution remains one of the most just and fair on earth.

But a generation has nearly passed since then, and basic economic inequity has not improved for the majority. There has been interesting change: the two groups of South Africans that have always held most of the financial worth, the whites and the Asians, seem to be trading places.

But the vast majority of South Africans remain stalled out at the bottom. Now it’s important to add that the overall level of all sublevels has improved. There is more wealth all around, but the relationship of the ethnic groups at the bottom hasn’t changed to those at the top, even though it is the bottom group which holds political power.

It seems to me that there is something world-wide that ensures a status quo of racism defined by ethnic domination of politics and/or economies. And South Africa is the place to study this mystery, because this is precisely where the lowest economic classes hold the most political power.

And lo and behold, similarly in America, the middle class holds political power, yet it is mired in stagnation. In America, today, economic classes are acting as if they are ethnic groups.

And in both South Africa and America, political power has not ensured economic progress.

Africa is growing rapidly in economic terms… as its ethnic travails increase. America’s ethnic travails are diminishing, but it’s economic stratification grows stronger and more inequitable.

Is this, then, the universal relation? Capitalism is racism?

Outside Threats

Outside Threats

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Yesterday’s deadly grenade attack in Arusha isn’t simply an indication of escalating religious tensions in Tanzania, but of the same escalating individual malevolence evident in the Boston massacre.

In neither incident do I believe there is any kind of organized group involvement, despite FOX News, Representative Stephen King or the other crazies on Meet the Press yesterday. Both cases seem to me to be engineered and implemented by wayward souls.

Wayward souls that have access in Boston to deadly technologies from Google searches. Wayward souls in Arusha who can trade a bushel of tomatoes for a grenade at practically any market in Africa.

It’s all the same. Neither is worse or more terrifying than the other. The higher tech move by the Boston duo was more deadly, just because American society is more sophisticated than Tanzanian.

Escalating religious and ideological tensions in America and Tanzania have been evident for years, and I agree with Arusha’s MP Godbless Lema that governments need to proactively address the schisms growing in their societies:

“”Religious fundamentalism is a reality in this country, but the government does nothing,” Lema said angrily outside the church, as police cordoned off the area.

Lema is one of the few honest, aggressive stars of Tanzanian politics. Like the minority of American politicians who want to address the Boston massacre with better schools and counseling and more jobs, rather than creating more fictitious global enemies, Lema knows the media speculation of the cause is absurd.

The ideologically bankrupt in a society will always point to the outside to explain a cancer within.

Since colonial times Tanzania has been one of the most Catholic countries of Africa, a product of King Leopold’s mid 19th Century conference that divided the colonial African world up by religion, so that missionaries didn’t duplicate their work.

One of the greatest historical ironies of Africa was that during the socialist policies of early independent Tanzanian in the 1970s to be a member of the Tanzanian communist party you also had to be a Catholic.

The amalgamation of Zanzibar with mainland Tanganyika in 1964 was like mixing holy water with myrrh. Since time immemorial Zanzibar was ruled by the radical Islamists of Oman, and even though it’s been given considerable autonomy, tensions have never fully eased with the mostly Christian mainland.

In October a respected Sheik in Arusha was hospitalized after an explosive device was set in his home. That was followed by church bombings in Zanzibar.

And so the cycle goes on and on, individual anger and want having found a convenient battle.

The Tanzanian government today arrested five Saudis, conveniently of a Muslim sect that is mostly disliked in Zanzibar, and charged them with terrorism.

Absurd, of course. This was the same Tanzanian government who employs the Arusha police commissioner who took 2½ hours to get to the church that was bombed Sunday morning, a half hour after the Vatican’s emissary attending the ceremony had been whisked out of the country.

The Honorable Lema is right. Governments do little today, in either America or Tanzania, to mend social schisms. Let’s just blame outsiders.

How To .. do everything.

How To .. do everything.

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

We all know the media is the message. And we all deny it: the media seriously effected the U.S. Presidential election. Africans are more honest and thereby less self-destructive.

Today and tomorrow in Dakar, African intellectuals gather with African media moguls to continue work on a continent-wide framework for developing media. This is the 5th annual “Africa Leaders Media Forum” and they know that they control much of Africa’s destiny.

Last year’s conference closing declaration said, “as demonstrated by the Arab Spring…, media have a profound role to play in social transformation, giving voice to people, and promoting freedom.”

Just like CNN, MSNBC, Rush Limbaugh and the NBC Nightly News. The difference is that we Americans staunchly refuse to accept the obvious brashly insisting a good journalist can be “objective.” Africans know better.

That doesn’t mean that objectivity isn’t a plausible tenant of news reporting; it just means that it’s unattainable. With that realization a reporter is able to temper his own bias better, while clearly accepting and admitting it. There is then much less suspicion between her and her readers.

Today’s agenda began with an open public forum at a nearby university that was covered by Forbes contributor, Elise Knutsen, writing for AllAfrica.

“Panelists at the meeting spoke with manifest passion as they discussed issues related to media, governance and inclusive citizenship,” she reports. Again and again the electrified forum affirmed how powerful the media is: Whether to “promote citizenship” or “empower women” the media had a critical responsibility to frame itself correctly, otherwise it would do so intrinsically, out of control.

Is that what’s happening in America?

This is communist stuff to many Americans, despite the fact that Marshall McLuhan’s the-medium-in-the-message theory was widely accepted with his first publications in 1964.

Tomorrow’s opening session acknowledges the massive revolutions, new constitutions and increased turbulence in much of Africa. “How is the media exploiting citizens’ new wave of awareness?” the session narrative asks.

Because the media alone is the thermostat for so many public events. You dial up the enthusiasm or you dial it down. The media does this more than government organizations, schools or dining room table conversations over dinner. It’s the media, stupid!

In America we’re so afraid of power. We’re certain that power of any kind has a preeminent evil, and that any corralling of it is generally for greed and misuse which will right away curtail our own free will.

That’s really laughable, because power is power and if it isn’t corralled there’s at least an equal chance with anything else that it will curtail our own free will, and that’s the point!

Combine these notions with the false hopes that objectivity can be followed and you’ve a formula for master disaster.

What the African media understands it lacks is the technological know-how of America. Later sessions will explore the new technologies, and that will be followed by a session that then asks, “Are the African media fit to report on these multiple challenges?”

As with so much in Africa’s rapidly progressing institutions, today, there is a concern there isn’t enough money (resources) to properly develop. But the question is broader than getting enough video cameras. It includes, too, the moral and temporal fitness of the people who will be using those cameras.

Ooooh. Once again, socialism, communism whatever you want to call it, right? Yes, actually, that’s right. Media is community of-the-people and by-the-people more than many other institutions in society, certainly more than the elected assemblies and officials whose paths to power are wrought with obligation.

Media is much more dynamic. It reflects the moments of truth, and it’s those aggregate moments that we need to display, analyze and preserve.

Following Dakar’s stellar example, I intend to invite Brian Williams, Rush Limbaugh, Robert Murdoch, David Brooks and Maureen Dowd to our own American conference on how the media needs to become morally fit and responsible to the will of the people.

I’m going to call it, “The How To Do Everything” conference to attract a broad audience.

… Although I might have to run for President, first.

Clash of the Faithful

Clash of the Faithful

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A colonial benchmark is struck in Kenya as Parliament considers banning religious organizations in publically funded schools. The Catholic Church has initiated a massive campaign to counter Parliament’s likely move which I doubt will be successful.

The Education Bill is one of the most striking features of Kenya’s rapid move to implement its new and modern constitution. If successful the bill will effectively wrest the last bit of control religious institutions have on Kenya’s public primary and secondary schools.

Currently up to a quarter of Kenya’s rural primary and secondary schools maintain a religious character as a legacy from colonial times. The state normally places and pays for the teachers and in most cases (but not all) the administration, and the church maintains the infrastructure and controls much of the school day including extra-curricular activities. It is specifically these religious activities that clash with Kenya’s new constitution that Parliament is directed to implement.

Most of these schools are on property owned by the church, and one of the more contentious debates expected is whether the new Kenya will use its modern power of eminent domain to effect ultimate jurisdiction over the existing land and school structures.

Education has been the top priority of every African government since modern governments existed, and regardless of their political and social persuasions, virtually every African country’s education was built on religious foundations.

The British explorer David Livingstone created the sound bite for colonial development in the 1830s: Civilization, Commerce & Christianity. The Three C’s were implemented by a mixture of privately funded missionary work and rapid education funded by the colonial powers.

The two were inseparably intertwined in the 19th Century, whether that was German Lutheranism, British anti-Catholicism or French, Belgium and Portugese Catholicism. Education is expensive, and the colonies had neither a legacy of any type of education or the wherewithal to fund secular educational services.

Besides in the colonial days it was only America that had struck a secular course for its society and America had no African colonies.

When my wife and I first went to Kenya it was to teach. We were hired and paid by the Kenyan government, but assigned to a large 800-student boys boarding school in a remote location in western Kenya that the then Kenyatta government had little interest in supporting. The Catholic Church stepped in, providing almost all of the funds for St. Paul’s Amukura Secondary School and a Headmaster and Assistant Headmaster that were both priests.

The priests essentially ran every component of the school, from sports to curriculum, although a national examination that determined matriculation often governed what the curriculum should be.

The Church, not the government, solicited aid from abroad to fund the schools science laboratories, build and maintain the infrastructure that allowed hundreds of rural boys to board at the school, provide a small dispensary and in many cases scholarships for the most needy.

That has changed significantly over the years, with the government now mandating virtually everything but after-school hours’ programs. Kenya’s rapid development has meant that many boarding schools and the high costs associated with them changed into day schools, but where boarding is still necessary the Church remains the paymaster.

Extracurricular activities, boarding where it continues, and the land on which the schools still sit are the contentious issues before Parliament.

It is the Catholic Church that has the most to lose, and it is pulling no punches in its drive to dissuade Kenyan legislators from further diluting its influence.

If Parliament continues on the track predicted, “…our schools will start producing Godless creatures and the society will be ruined,” Kisii Catholic Bishop Joseph Mairura told reporters this weekend.

The issue is especially sensitive right now as Kenyan Christian churches suffer violent terrorist attacks presumed to be in retaliation for the government’s invasion of parts of Somalia controlled by Islamists.

Public sentiment is charged. The comments left after Sunday’s weekend stories that the leadership of the church is going to fight Parliament’s moves were divisive and angry.

Is a certain Church/State separation the right move for Kenya now at a time of stressed government resources?

It depends on how much faith you have.

Education Needed on This

Education Needed on This

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

Teacher strikes in Africa and around the world mark a critical point in the global recession.

In Kenya the country’s entire educator workforce is on strike, from primary school through university. Last month’s teacher strike in Tanzania has been suspended only temporarily, and in Uganda teachers are poised to walk off the job in the next few weeks.

But there are also actions or looming actions in England and Wales, Australia and of course in my home city of Chicago. Teachers are also threatening work action in Peru and South Africa. Teacher leaders have been jailed in Bahrain which could once again destabilize that city-state.

What’s going on? There’s just too many educator work actions in too many widely different places to suggest anything like coincidence.

The Chicago strike is not about pay; the Kenya strike is about pay; and from the Mideast to Asia the range of issues is as wide as the geography. But in the end it is all about the bottom line. It’s all about the cost of education and the widely presumed notion that it isn’t working well.

I have no idea if education is working well in London or Sydney or Bahrain, and I’m pretty convinced it’s not working as well as it should in Chicago or Nairobi. But actually when you stand back from the globe and look at the turmoil, not even that seems to be the point!

Education is among the last of public services to be hurt by a global recession. When an industrial plant closes, usually a sizeable chunk of the workforce is let go all at once. Not so with education. You can’t close schools wholesale. Instead you inch up the class size, reduce the scope of services and month after month squeeze the teachers for a little bit more.

If the squeeze goes on for long enough it pops. And that’s what’s happening, now.

Conservatives around the world see this as an opportunity to trim excess and improve delivery. Progressives see just the opposite, an attempt to balance a wider social imbalance on an already stressed system.

But that’s not the point of this blog.

When such diverse societies in so many places in the world begin battles with their educators over such a range of issues, it means that globally society is really being stressed to new and maybe dangerous points.

There is a way out of this. And put aside for a minute the enormously different issues from one school system to another across the world. Education distress worldwide is an indicator that in sum the global recession isn’t easing; it’s getting worse.

There are models to turn this around: In France, China, Australia and the U.S., stimulus is being exercised. It’s important to note how different is the extremely conservative politics and society of Australia compared to the socialist politics and society of France; and how different the U.S. and China are in so many ways.

Yet these four countries have all used or are using now stimulus, and they are all much better off than countries like Britain and Peru which have opted for austerity.

The laws of economics trump all other laws.

Many African countries are on the cusp of having to make the decision about stimulus or austerity, because when the developed world tanked into recession, they actually benefited for a few years. Their decisions about stimulus vs. austerity are only now being legislated.

They should take heed carefully. The U.S. did it correctly; Britain did not. If we can get enough of the world to realize this and follow suit, then the education wars won’t be followed by wars in health care, civil and national defense.