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Building digital bridges to Africa
For a specialist in international development and computer technology, Cliff Missen has an unusual resume: High school dropout. Homesteader in Alaska. Prison guard. Well driller. But his most formative experience came even earlier, when as a child he was shuttled between various relatives and foster homes. “I knew what it was like to feel powerless,” Missen says. “But I also had the experience of being served by those who took me in when I didn’t have a home. When I was 17, I made a pledge that I was going to try to live a life of service, too.”
Over the course of three decades, Missen has fulfilled that pledge in a variety of ways. Much of his efforts have focused on Africa. At 20 he spent three months helping set up a rural health clinic in Liberia. Then he went to college in the States and afterwards returned to Liberia as the founder of Wellspring Africa, a non-profit organization that brought low-cost water well drilling technology to remote areas. A Fulbright Scholarship in 1998-99 gave him the opportunity to teach computer technology at the University of Jos in Nigeria. Today he is the director of the Widernet Project, a non-profit organization based at the University of Iowa that works to improve digital communications in developing nations.
“Across the globe, seven out of eight people have no access to the Internet,” says Missen. “Much of the world is being left out of the great digital conversation.”
Launched by Missen in 2000, the Widernet Project seeks to bridge that divide through a variety of initiatives. The non-profit trains technicians and decision-makers in African universities, develops low-cost solutions to information technology problems in developing nations, and donates computer equipment to partner universities. With funding from sources that include the U.S. State Department, USAID, and the MacArthur Foundation, Widernet initiatives have involved some 3,200 participants and shipped more than a thousand refurbished computers to Africa.
Of all the Widernet Project’s efforts, Missen is most excited about the eGranary Digital Library, an invention that provides Internet resources off-line to institutions lacking adequate digital connections.
“The idea came about by accident,” remembers Missen. “When I was teaching in Nigeria I was very frustrated by not having access to the Internet, so I had my assistant at the University of Iowa download a set of useful websites onto CDs and send them to me. I put those sites on the campus server at the University of Jos so that everyone could have access to them. The reaction was positively electric. People had never seen information that was so up-to-date and so fast. Overnight we had our first case of Internet addiction.”
Missen quickly saw the potential of a self-contained Internet-like system—an “Internet in a Box,” as it’s been called. In much of the developing world, Internet connections are non-existent or painfully slow and erratic. Missen’s solution, the eGranary Digital Library, includes content from more than 650 organizations, publishers, and authors. Some sites are already in the public domain, while others have granted the Widernet Project permission to distribute their information free-of-charge. The rapidly expanding digital library contains more than five million documents and multi-media clips. Stored on a hard drive and packaged with its own operating system, eGranary can be easily distributed through locally based networks of computers.
“The entire system fits into the palm of my hand,” says Missen. “And when it’s installed on a computer, it works many times faster than a conventional Internet connection. A school child in Tanzania has faster access to information than a student at Harvard.”
The eGranary Digital Library sells for $500 for a self-contained unit and $2,800 for a system capable of serving thousands of networked computers. Currently some 300,000 students in more than 100 educational institutions in Africa, Bangladesh, India, and Haiti are using this cornucopia of knowledge. We’ve developed a battery-powered version that fits into a suitcase and can be set up within an hour to create a wireless public library anywhere.”
A man of infectious enthusiasm, Missen is a passionate evangelist for the Widernet Project. More than 300 volunteers have donated time to the organization, testing and preparing donated computer equipment, installing digital library material, designing databases, and hosting African visitors.
“As someone who has lived in situations where I had no control over what was happening, I know how important it is to feel empowered,” he says. “And in today’s world, knowledge is power. To see people take this daunting and foreign technology, master it, and then turn around to teach others—well, that to me is pure joy.”
