ICT and Poverty: The San Bushmen - A Networked World



ICT and Poverty: The San Bushmen

Many ICT and poverty projects use a model based on giving people access to new skills or resources by engaging the capabilities of the computer to earn money in new industries, a technology-driven approach to poverty alleviation.

There are many flaws with this approach, as I have discussed elsewhere; what is needed instead is an approach that uses technological capabilities to engage the economic needs and resources of the communities involved and creates new opportunities out of existing capabilities.

This is much more difficult, but there is a perfect example on the edge of the Kalahari desert that fits the bill.

Over the past 25 years the San people, the Kalahari Bushmen, have become a depressed and marginalised community, excluded from their traditional nomadic range by the good intentions of those who have fenced it into national wildlife parks in which there is no place for humans, and certainly no place for those who treat these preserves of endangered species as a larder.

In the past the San people’s understanding of their environment was everything they needed, but as the fences went up, that understanding became irrelevant; they lost everything and fell into poverty.

Now an interface is being built between the traditional knowledge that had sustained them for millennia and the new, commercialised, money-centred world in which they find themselves. It is called the CyberTracker.[1].

The private CyberTracker project is making the important traditional knowledge of the San (Bushmen) about the migratory movements of wild animals in southern Africa accessible by means of handheld portable computers. To date more than 120 trackers have been acquainted with the new technology. The San’s skills are benefiting the national parks, which can in this way reliably monitor their game stock. The project has also led to a significant decline in poaching.

James, a San (''Bushman'') from the Kalahari, works as a tracker for the South African National Parks Authority. … James can neither read nor write. He used to have to tell his observations to another game warden, who wrote them down and passed them on. This was laborious and time-consuming. Today in only a few minutes James enters his findings into a handheld computer which dangles from his arm. The device uses a touch-sensitive screen, and James need only type in various signs and symbols with a small plastic pen. Then for a few seconds he connects the computer to the Global Positioning System (GPS). In this way each of the approximately 100 analyses he makes every day is labelled with its date, time and geographical location. When he gets back he transfers all the data to a PC.

The inventor and monitor of this revolutionary combination of traditional knowledge and high-tech is Louis Liebenberg, a noted South African tracker and specialist in the threatened culture of the San. Using the CyberTracker software he has succeeded in preserving and further developing the Bushmen's knowledge about nature and landscape, which has been handed down orally over thousands of years from generation to generation. The aim is better to understand the animals' behaviour patterns and migratory movements. Trackers like James are contributing to reliable management of the nature reserves and effective monitoring of the game stock. Moreover it has been shown that the presence of trackers considerably reduces the incidence of poaching.

Since 1995 over 120 trackers have been trained. 8 CyberTracker teams are currently working in 8 national parks in southern Africa.[2]

The importance of this idea is that it does not attempt to capture the knowledge that it takes the exponents of San bushcraft 20 or 30 years to develop; rather, it provides an interface between the vast and subtle store of knowledge of San trackers and the park administration and creates a two-way economic benefit between them and the park administration, which now has a tool through which it can buy, not the knowledge, but the information that it generates.

Until now the application of ICT in park management had been typically Western, with high-tech devices being designed and built for specific animals. The lion, buffalo, or hyena had to be hunted, darted, knocked out, restrained, handled, fitted with the GPS transmitter collar, and then released, disoriented and smelling of humans, back to its group. Often the animal would simply brush the device off either by accident or in anger and not only would the benefit be lost, but sometimes the expensive device as well, along with the expensive Western-educated, foreign wage-earning technicians’ time and resources to supply and fit and track it.

Meanwhile the San trackers sat listlessly in their hovels, their minds filled with knowledge that was unavailable to others and worthless to them.

The CyberTracker releases all sides from some of their problems. The net cost to the park authority goes down, while the quality of the information, drawn through the filters of San culture and expertise, goes up, and the unintrusive monitoring by the San means the animals are able to live normal lives again. By focusing on what people know, by starting where they are now and finding ways for technology to translate the value that poor communities have into values that rich communities can appreciate, ICT CAN contribute to poverty alleviation, but the look of the programmes, the paradigm within which they work, needs to be rewritten.

Poor communities have their own economies; they have their own knowledge that produces perfectly good information; it is simply in an economic or social or scientific language that rich communities don’t understand. I do not mean by this that these communities have mystical knowledge to which rich Westerners are no loner privy, I mean simply that they could not have survived in their environment for many millennia unless they had a science, an understanding, a knowledge about that place that was intimate and precise and valuable. But before the rich world gets access to it, we have to find a translator, and ICT can be that translator; and we have to agree on a fair price for the information while leaving the knowledge intact and in the ownership of those who created it.

This process should not be seen only in terms of its ability to raise people out of poverty, although that is its primary function; it is intensely practical for the wealthy world as well, and once again, the San are the focus of this process.

Sidelined over decades because of their dwindling numbers and ancient way of life, the San have been reduced to a few struggling communities living on the fringes of society. But now their traditional knowledge may be their salvation; they stand to make a lot of money—and gain much respect—from the international marketing of an appetite-suppressant they have been using for thousands of generations.

The drug named P57 is based on a substance scientists found in the desert plant Hoodia Gordinii. The San call the cactus !khoba and have been chewing on it for thousands of years to stave off hunger and thirst during long hunting trips in their parched Kalahari desert home.

A deal has been signed between the South African San Council and the country's Scientific and Industrial Research Council (CSIR), which identified the appetite- suppressing ingredient in Hoodia during research into indigenous plants in 1996. At a small ceremony recently held in the Kalahari desert near the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, which South Africa shares with Botswana, the San and the CSIR made a deal to share royalties earned by commercial sale of the San's ancient knowledge of the plant. [3]

While intelligent diets and the end of gross feeding by a few privileged communities might be to all our benefits in the long run, engaging with the knowledge of communities in poverty, respecting that knowledge, and, wherever possible, using technologies to translate its inherent value into the revenue they need, is a practical, but subtle and difficult, good first step.

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