To ICT or not to ICT?

Comments

By muffkitten

Thu 6 Nov, 2008 - 18:56

I am the Director of an NPO Art and Craft Trust. I would like to rant and rave a bit about a phenomena we face at this time of year (i.e. Christmas). We have legions of people, with large budgets for functions, who see us as a free source of decor. They call us up and tell us that they have a wonderful opportunity for us to market and expose our work and talents. What this involves is us taking large pieces from the shop we have, booking transport, display the work and wiring it up, and at the end of the function reversing this process. This basically costs us money, and earns us the reputation of being the place where you can get free decor. At the same time work loaned out, has to be sold at a reduced priced, and often returns damaged.

When you express concern about this, people act as if you are ungrateful. I would like to stress that we have pressure on us to be self sustaining, and we try to juggle our small budgets to make stock for our shops, so these 'opportunities' are money draining black holes, which earn us a reputation which we fight to move away from the entire year.

I would like to appeal to function organizers, corporates etc to instead set aside money to buy pieces from NPO's. In this way you will really be developing us, the work we do and those we serve.

Robin Opperman- Director Umcebo Trust.

Monday, October 27, 2008 - 16:33

I often sit in on meetings and presentations, where people talk of ICT's, and how they will transform the work that we do, and how we do it. What worries me is that we never follow this debate through to its conclusion, and look at the truth of this all. ICT's are amazingly powerful, and can take NGO's and their work to new and exciting places. I do think that we fail to acknowledge that these ICT's can and will only take what is there (on a day-to-day basis) and magnify it. If you are a disorganized shambles, you will be an even bigger one in cyberspace, and the opposite is true as well. To illustrate why I am saying this. Back in 1999 I was attended the ThinkQuest Awards Weekend in LA, where teacher/student teams collaborated internationally across the net, to produce educational websites, which were adjudicated for prizes. There was a team consisting of students from Hong Kong, and their Indian Partners, who worked on a medical website. The students from India lived in a rural area, with old hardware and an incredibly slow internet connection. In addition, these students had an erractic power supply, that was more off than on, and yet they managed to make this amazing contribution and received a silver award. What this shows, and this is often a case in Africa, is that we think if we throw money (i.e. hardware and software) at a problem, that everything will be alright. These students succeeded, because they had that spark inside, which made them work hard, despite being under resourced and severely disadvantaged. Hard work and success is about something within the human spirit, and we need to interrogate this, as we try to devise intelligent and effective development solutions, involving ICT's. We cannot be complacent about this technology and its power, by falling for easy explanations and understandings of it, and where it can take us, and those involved in the projects we run. Robin Opperman Director-Umcebo Trust robin@umcebotrust.co.za