By Nivi Sharma & Loyce Chole

Mathare Valley is one of the oldest, poorest, most densely populated slums in the world. Despite having over 60,000 people living per km² (in contrast to the national average of 82 persons per km²⁾, many people in Kenya are not aware of the poor living conditions in the region. It’s rare for people in the rest of the world to even know about Mathare Valley, let alone understand the impact of the digital divide on their livelihoods.

BRCK has connected more than 2 million people to the internet over the past 3 years. This year, we have embarked on a bold and ambitious project in partnership with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. Within the framework of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) funding program develoPPP, GIZ and BRCK joined forces to bring Moja free WiFi to Mathare Valley. The partners are installing a technical infrastructure that connects the entire slum population of at least 600,000 people. This infrastructure is the largest mesh network in Africa where residents are able to access the internet at no direct cost. Using their smartphones, users perform digital tasks on the Moja platform like watching an ad or filling out a survey to earn Moja points that they can then use as credit to access the internet. Moja is also a repository for health and education information that is disseminated to residents, helping them cope with the economic impacts of the pandemic. 

5,000 SMEs and entrepreneurs are being trained by our partners, Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO). SHOFCO, is a Kenyan, grassroots non-profit that aims to build urban promise from urban poverty. SHOFCO are training Mathare business owners on how to leverage the free Internet service to unlock the potential of digital access to jump start or grow their businesses; and digital services to gain business skills as well as take advantage of government and social services. A further 5,000 residents of Mathare will be trained on basic digital skills giving them the tools to participate in the global economy.

BRCK’s innovation lies in using mesh technology to improve network coverage and resilience in Mathare by allowing access points to intelligently connect to each other and fail over in case of network issues. In order to provide high quality, affordable connectivity, BRCK has developed the SupaMESH WiFi Access Point. This device has been co-created by BRCK, Ignitenet and Facebook Connectivity to enable large mesh networks (>100 Sites) in challenging environments. 

Deploying and maintaining a network infrastructure in Mathare Valley is not without challenges. Power is a major issue at most sites – it’s neither reliable, nor clean. Theft and vandalism are also a risk we foresee. However, having rolled out a quarter of the planned network so far, we see how much the youth value the service and we’re confidently counting on them to continue to protect the “bright yellow WiFi squares” that have dotted the Valley. We are especially grateful for the support from Community Based Organizations and Youth Groups like Mathare Social Justice Centre, Pamoja Twaweza Community Project, Shantit and Muoroto.

One of the biggest concerns that young people brought to BRCKs attention was that there are not enough points earning activities for them. In short, they want more digital tasks on the platform from organizations who value their time or their eyeballs. These are the first important steps towards giving the youth the opportunity to earn from real digital work: we are encouraging all organizations interested in engaging with these young people to think creatively about leveraging the Moja platform: advocacy and awareness campaigns; short polls and long surveys; and brand awareness. With Moja WiFi, the youth of Mathare Valley now have the opportunity to be active participants and beneficiaries of the digital economy.

We’re receiving increased interest from Education focused organizations to use the BRCK to enable access to their content both online and offline.

One of the partners we’re working with is Studi Academy in Tanzania. Studi is passionate about changing how students in secondary schools in developing countries learn. They provide an online platform for students to engage with localized content adapted to local syllabus and language through educational animations & challenging quizzes, games to add fun and competitiveness and a structure that supports students to pass their critical exams.

Dar es Salaam city center

School “advertising” in Mbagala area, outside Dar es Salaam

One of the schools Studi is working with is St. Anthony’s school, a secondary school on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam. They are using BRCKs to connect their computer labs to the internet, and more importantly to Studi’s content. The Head of Computer labs, is responsible for ensuring students can access Studi content easily.

We visited the school to see their experience first hand. Their BRCKs  have been working great though the mobile signal is intermittent. We ran some tests and  recommended that they get a unidirectional antenna as they have a cell-tower quite close to where the computer labs are located.

BRCKs connected to mobile internet from SIM cards

We also visited Acacia Secondary School, 30km from Dar es Salaam. Their school is 8km from the main road, sitting on a beautiful 55 acre piece of land. Before they receive BRCKs from Studi, it was important for us to run some tests to see what the best use case for their students  would be. For internet connectivity, we suggested that in addition to BRCKs, they should get an amplifier and an omnidirectional antenna. We also recommended that they cache content locally on the BRCK, as it has expandable storage capacity, giving the students a better experience than if they were trying to interact with the content online.

Acacia School buildings are 8km from this entrance

With many insights gained on how we can support our partners working in remote educational institutions, we continue to be excited about the potential to provide hardware and software tools to enable online and offline learning.

Are you running an educational institution or making education focused investments ? Talk to us – [email protected]

The BRCK team is back in Nairobi! We’ve just spent six days testing BRCKs in the wild and learning from those who use our products to solve problems they face everyday. We’ve been a bit remiss in providing regular updates as we go. It turns out Jinja, Uganda, is an exciting place, and we were running from sunup ‘til sundown to fit everything in, leaving little time for blogging. We’ve now got hours of footage and records of conversations to go through, and we’ll be filling you in over the next week or two.

Our last update concerned a school on Lingira island in Lake Victoria. Despite having only a small village on the island, the school’s 12 teachers serve over 250 students from neighboring islands, too.

One of the head teachers, Frederick, showed us around – his passion for chemistry was apparent in the way he described the school’s water filtration system (using electrolytic chlorination to disinfect the water) and the solar power system that runs it. He was extremely gracious in sharing his hopes for delivering more practical, hands-on content from the web (he has his physics students building rheostats from scratch, determined to help them build an understanding of technology, even if it’s not readily available locally).

We tested a number of different types of antennas on Lingira and got the school connected. With the help of Hackers for Charity, over the next few weeks the “Living Hope” Secondary School will be building new content from the web into their curriculum, and inspiring their students to ever greater heights of achievement.

Context is Everything

We’ve been working with educators and content providers here in Kenya over the last six months to understand how technology can make their lives easier instead of harder. Why would we need to go all the way to Uganda to do the same, some might ask? Despite being only a 15-hour drive apart, (give or take a couple hours at the border) Jinja and Nairobi offer very different contexts for deploying edtech solutions.

Much of Kenya is very dry, with dust and heat being a major concern for electronics, both things the BRCK is designed to handle. In Uganda, with an average annual rainfall of over 150cm in the highlands (compared to Kenya’s average of 100cm, mostly concentrated near the border), water and humidity are greater concerns. The BRCK performed admirably in these conditions, with no noticeable moisture buildup in the case despite 30°C heat, 96% humidity, boat spray, and even being dropped in the floor of the raft.

(Note – the BRCK is NOT waterproof. Do NOT submerge your BRCK, leave it out in the rain, or expose it to overly wet conditions for long periods of time.)

In addition to different environmental conditions, the teachers we met in Uganda have unique goals and face different constraints. Not being educators ourselves, we built the BRCK as a platform for delivering any kind of content. While our partners at eLimu are working to deliver a custom package that conforms to the Kenyan curriculum via tablets, and Sugata Mitra’s “School in the Cloud” TED prize wish is seeking to provide access to the entirety of the web, Johnny at Hackers for Charity introduced us to Luom and David from Karamoja.org, working in northern Uganda near the border with South Sudan. Because even a 3G connection is difficult to achieve where they work, they are interested in blending online and offline content through the RACHEL platform that delivers offline versions of Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and other content packages.

We didn’t originally think of the BRCK as an offline solution, but the Karamoja.org team are excited enough about the ability to store content on the BRCK and periodically sync it with updates via WiFi from a drone or regular visits from staff to areas with a stronger signal, they made the 10-hour journey from Karamoja to Jinja to tell us what they want the BRCK to do. It was deeply humbling to see their dedication to bringing the same opportunities for learning to the children of rural Uganda that much of the rest of the world take for granted, and it’s these sorts of innovative ideas – that come from locals with years of experience working in their own communities – that drive us to design in Africa, for Africa, and to get the engineering and design team out of the office as much as possible.

Teachers Just Want to Teach

One of the primary reasons Johnny Long founded Hackers for Charity was the realization that technology offered boundless opportunities for learning, but only if teachers know how to use it. The schools in Uganda tend not to have IT departments, so he rallied the hacker community to provide their skill sets to help teachers focus on teaching, and leave the tech to the geeks. He now has a global volunteer network of programmers and hackers working to make technology simpler and easier to use.

One of the educators he introduced us to, Lisa Coggin – who helps run a number of schools north of Jinja – emphasized the need for a push-button solution to online content delivery. Teachers don’t have the time to sort out IP addresses and subnet masks, and even terms such as “dashboard” are not automatically intuitive to those working outside the tech sector. We’ve been pushing hard at BRCK to redesign the way people connect to the internet, and Lisa’s feedback on her experience with the BRCK was invaluable in steering us towards ways to further simplify our interface.

Partners in Connectivity

Ultimately, our trip to Jinja was a resounding success. Our hosts at Hackers for Charity were phenomenally generous, and we can’t thank those who took the time to share their experiences, thoughts, and hopes with us enough. We also took some time to have fun testing a couple other uses of the BRCK involving sensors and remotely operated vehicles, which we’ll get into in our next posts, but more than anything, we’re thrilled to see how excited everyone we met is about the BRCK, and to see the promise of BRCK+ED making a real difference in the future of learning in Africa.

BRCK’s been lucky enough to get some exciting press attention in the last month, here are the highlights.

Der Spiegel has a great article about mobile changing Africa and gives a great context for BRCK.

The Conversation featured BRCK as well

OH, we also made it into Wired UK back in November!!!!

I gave a talk at PopTech this year on the BRCK and what I think it means for last mile connectivity in Africa. I believe that digitally connecting people and information is the great challenge of ours.

Here’s the talk itself:

Erik Hersman: BRCK breakthrough from PopTech on Vimeo.

Here’s my post on the talk itself, in its entirety:

A few weeks ago the #Kenya365 final instameet happened, we had finished the full year of Kenyan instagramming and it was a chance to get everyone together. Mutua Matheka suggested we go to the Kenya Railways Museum, a place I hadn’t been since I was in school. I took my daughters with me, and we had a great time exploring the old trains and marveling at the engineering feats required to create what they did over 100 years ago.

As I was getting ready for my talk at PopTech I started thinking about how those engineers of yesteryear connected the world. Since man had first tamed the horse, we had never moved as quickly or as consistently as when the railroad was created. It was a true changing of the world.

A map of global railway lines

There were many incredible obstacles for the pioneering engineers of that time to overcome.

Kenya’s railway museum reminds of us this rich history of overcoming obstacles with the story of Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson who at the ripe age of 31 was commissioned by the British East Africa Company to help extend the East Africa Railway (EAR) through the Tsavo region on the way from Mombasa to Uganda. It was at the Tsavo river that the unfolding of the great “Man Eaters of Tsavo” lion story unfolds, where two extremely large male lions stopped the railroad’s progress for the better part of a year. Official railway records state 28 died, though 140+ is a more accurate number as it constitutes the non-railway employees taken as well. No matter what the thousands of Indians and African workers did, they couldn’t stop the lions from jumping the thorn bushes, entering tents and braving the fires. Too many nights friends and co-workers were dragged screaming and eaten within hearing distance. It was enough that the workers started to flee in their hundreds.

Now for Col. Patterson, being a stalwart Man of Empire, this was a true crisis. His arrival had coincided with the attacks, so he was to blame by many. He was being disgraced and by any means necessary, he had to get the job done. Fortunately he had served a number of years in India and was an accomplished tiger hunter. 9 months later, Patterson bags both lions in the span of three weeks, changing his story from one of scapegoat and failure to one of a hero. Of course the book he wrote about it didn’t hurt his reputation either – and many of us know this story from the 1996 movie where Val Kilmer plays Col. Patterson in “The Ghost and the Darkness”.

Col. Patterson and one of the man eaters of Tsavo lions

If these pioneers were alive today, what would be their frontier?

Physically connecting people and things was the great challenge of their time. Digitally connecting people and information is the great challenge of ours.

They drove this iron backbone into every continent. It is no coincidence that our new backbones run alongside these same rails and roads. The world over, the engineers of our day are building this internet connectivity through fiberoptic cable into every continent, and Africa is no different.

A map of the railway lines in Africa

A map of the internet terrestrial fiber optic cables in Africa

(Once again, we all owe a debt to Steve Song for his maps of Internet in Africa, with this terrestrial cable map. A more detailed PDF.)

Terrestrial Internet Backbones and the Obstacles of Today

We have our own obstacles today. For, though we build the internet backbone into Africa, what happens when the rail ends? We have a problem where the infrastructure doesn’t match the connectivity equipment; meaning burnt out servers and routers due to power surges and brown-outs. This caused us to ask, “why are we using the routers and modems designed for London and New York when we live in Nairobi and New Delhi?”

With the BRCK, we’re extending the rail lines of connectivity to the edges of the network.

BRCK provides true last mile connection for Africa and other emerging markets. We designed it for our own needs, in Nairobi. It’s a rugged and simple WiFi device, made for our challenging environment where all of the redundancies of the device for both power and internet connectivity equate to productivity. It connects both people and sensors.

We envision it being used him homes and offices around the continent, by travelers, workers and community health workers in rural areas and by organizations managing everything from water flow sensor to remote power station management on the edges of the grid.

While all of the big technology companies go after “the next big thing”, where they endeavor to stretch the edges of what’s possible with technology, most of the world sits unable to take advantage of the older technology. High-end and brilliant technology is being transplanted from the US and EU to Africa – it is the best technology in the world, it just doesn’t work were we live.

It has become clear that no one else is taking this problem seriously. It’s time for us, as African technologists, to stand up and solve our own problems. To grasp the opportunities. We might even find that the addressable market is much larger and lucrative than our Western counterparts are aware of.

It’s the end of making do with things designed for other people, from other places with other needs. We’re entering a time where good enough is no longer good enough. The BRCK is just one of many new products that are designed for us, by us and meets our needs.

What’s next for BRCK?

We’re raising a round of investment now for BRCK, you can find out more on Angel List at Angel.co/BRCK. The IP is held by Ushahidi, and the BRCK has spun out as an independent commercial entity in a way that if it does well, so does Ushahidi. We have a strong business strategy, and a fantastic team with which to execute it.

This coming week we are traveling to the far edges of the network as we chase the November 3rd solar eclipse. The BRCK will be stress tested to it’s very limit, for ruggedness, connectivity and reach. If we get the VSat (BGan) connection we’re looking for, then we might be able to live stream the solar eclipse on Nov 3rd from the edges of Lake Turkana to the rest of the world.