Digital Health and Africa: an emerging narrative

The potential and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to cater for digital health depend on the context and its meaning-making. Therefore, the concepts and materialization of digital health in Africa are specific for Africa. This transdisciplinary and reflexive paper introduces and positions African particulars pertaining ICTs and an emerging narrative of digital health in Africa. The narrative pivots decentering and the necessary interplay of African community engagement, workforce enhancement, and thought leadership as the means towards inclusive and embedded digital health interventions in Africa

A strategy to make ICT accessible in rural Zambia: a case study of Macha

The problem discussed in this dissertation is to gather evidence of good practice and derive strategy for the development of ICT access in rural Zambia. Access to ICT services is important, also in rural areas of Africa. The challenges are many. There is a distinct void in tangible descriptions of the realities of ICT Access in rural areas or actionable guidelines for practitioners. This study involves a case study in the rural areas of Zambia. It does so through ethnography involving 10 years of observation of aspects of ICT access in rural Macha, Zambia. In this community, emerging from an articulated vision, ICT access in the form of the Internet arrived in 2004. Macha Works with its ICT unit LinkNet provides the basis for this interpretive approach from within the rural cultural setting. The purpose of the study is to benefit the local rural community, addressing the fundamentals of reality to add to the body of knowledge. The study involves cross cultural interaction and takes a trans-disciplinary view on science. It involves Participative Action Learning and Research aimed at recognising the complex adaptive systems while being aligned with the ethics of the rural African environment. Emphasis is on the needs of the community, rather than of the individual utilising empirical evidence. The good practices in Macha that inform strategy to make ICT accessible in rural areas are: engaging the community, building relationships; workforce development, unlocking productivity; thought leadership, establishing authority

The Shortcomings of Globalised Internet Technology in Southern Africa

Network protocols and applications have mostly been devel- oped in and for a Western context and usually have an embedded set of assumptions about network performance and availability. As a result web-browsing, cloud-based services, live voice and video over IP, desktop applications and software updates often fail or perform poorly in (rural) areas of Southern Africa. This paper uncovers some of the reasons for this poor performance such as Windows TCP failing to reach capacity in high-delay networks, long DNS delays or time-outs and applications such as Office365 assuming constant connectivity to function, and de- scribes them, set in the Southern African contexts. We address the issue of colonisation in ICT context and show the extend of such in the area of networking. These observations provide strong motivation for Africa- based engineering research to ensure that future network protocols and applications are context-sensitive, adaptive and truly global

Dutch Historical Spelling Normalization for Parsing and Coreference Resolution

Non-canonical language can be handled in an NLP pipeline using normalization of the input (e.g., MoNoise; van der Goot & van Noord, CLINjournal 2017) or domain adaptation of the pipeline (e.g., Hupkes & Bod, LREC 2016); we focus on the former. MoNoise shows that normalization is effective for social media language. We consider a different domain: Dutch literature from Project Gutenberg. We work with 9 fragments that make up the OpenBoek corpus (van den Berg et al., CLIN 2021). The fragments consist of 10,000+ tokens from texts first published 1860-1920, both translated and originally Dutch.MoNoise consists of several modules: a lookup table, automatic spelling correction (aspell), and word embeddings; we aim to explore these techniques on our data in future work. Here we report results of a rule-based approach implemented with a sed script (i.e., regular expressions) for normalizing frequently occurring non-standard spellings.The output consists of instructions to the Alpino parser (van Noord, TALN 2006) to treat words with non-canonical orthography as if they occur with modern spelling. The advantage of this approach is that the resulting parse trees contain the original tokens, and existing annotation layers (such as coreference) do not have to be re-aligned. Consider the following sentence from Couperus, Eline Vere (ch. I, § II):18-1|- Is het [ @alt zo zoo ] goed ? vroeg zij met bevende stem , [ @alt ene eene ] , van te voren bestudeerde poze aannemende .Here [ @alt zo zoo ] indicates that the original token zoo should be treated as zo. Besides doubled vowels, other frequent spelling normalizations are de/den, zei/zeide, and mensen/menschen. When multiple alternatives are given the parser considers the input as a lattice and uses the sequence of tokens that generates the most likely parse. Parse trees for the above sentence show that the automatic spelling normalization is not perfect (the correct normalization of eene is een with POS lid rather than ene), but it does lead to a correct bracketing of the NP eene … poze. Furthermore, it turns out that a comma is missing after bestudeerde in the Project Gutenberg etext we use (EBook-No. 19563); the DBNL version of this text (coup002elin01_01) does have this comma—this underscores the importance of professionally edited critical editions.We will perform an intrinsic evaluation of our spelling normalization pipeline with manually corrected texts and report F1 scores (Reynaert, LREC 2008). We also perform an extrinsic evaluation of downstream tasks: part-of-speech tagging, mention detection, and coreference resolution. Scores for the latter two tasks on Multatuli, Max Havelaar:mentions lea pronrecall prec f1 recall prec f1 CoNLL accoriginal 89.96 81.29 85.40 54.80 47.07 50.64 65.76 55.00normalized 90.18 82.22 86.02 54.82 45.96 50.00 65.48 54.20The mention score is improved, which makes sense given that parsing of NPs seems to improve after spelling normalization, but there is a decrease in the coreference metrics, which warrants further investigation

Extension and advice: Technology retains talent

With little access to formal extension services, a rural Zambian community set up an internet connection to develop local agriculture, education and energy facilities. The community is now using local radio to encourage other villages to do the sam

Information and Knowledge Transfer in the rural community of Macha, Zambia

Science is using methodologies to study behaviour. These methodologies are socially constructed, culture specific, and deeply affected by North American and Western language. African cultures feature empathic processes fueled by compassion and the desire for co-existence. It operates on communal, often primary oral, cultures and uses mostly oral tradition in its presentations. Oral traditions process knowledge and verbalize data specifically.This case of long term research in which Information and Communications Technology is introduced in a highly oral and rural culture shows that using constructs available in primary oral culture can create outcomes that are a useful function within oral tradition circumstances. Analysis of methodologies used during the eleven-year case study suggest that outcomes benefit from interactions that are aligned within oral-culture formats. The case study follows 'the flow of science' - analysing, interpreting, clarifying, constructing - primarily in the oral tradition. Outcomes appear fruitful in oral traditions.This long term and unique approach opens the door to new ways of understanding in rural Africa, and recognition that literacy and orality exist side by side

Reflections: A Narrative on Displacement of Technology and Meaning in an African Place

Een narratief over technologie en betekenis in een Afrikaanse omgeving Gertjan van Stam Dit promotieonderzoek behandelt de introductie van externe ICT-technologie in een rurale Afrikaanse omgeving, in Zambia. Dit onderzoek bestudeert de vraag: Hoe worden in de verhalen van ingenieurs – die technologie maken – de relaties met buitenlandse ingenieurs geïnterpreteerd? Hoe verwijzen deze verhalen naar kolonialisme en wat gebeurt er vervolgens met deze verhalen in de interactie met hun omgeving? Hoe informeren deze verhalen, in die omgeving, perspectieven op de toekomst? Mijn proefschrift is een onderzoeksrapport aan de lokale autoriteiten van de Afrikaanse organisatie “Macha Works” in het dorp Macha in Zambia. Het proefschrift beschrijft mijn ervaringen en observaties in de Afrikaanse praktijk en mijn reflecties over de introductie van, en omgang met technologie in een Afrikaanse plattelandsgemeenschap. Hierbij analyseer ik de bruikbaarheid van technologieën, die van buitenaf worden geïntroduceerd, in de gemeenschap van Macha. Ik concludeer dat er een nieuw begrippenkader nodig is om de verhalen over technologie in Afrika te kunnen duiden. In een Afrikaanse gemeenschappen wordt betekenis gevormd door de lens van gemeenschappelijke waarden. In dit kader stel ik een nieuw begrippenkader voor met vijf essentiële Afrikaanse waarden. Deze noem ik ‘de Grote Vijf’ (“the Big Five”). Deze Afrikaanse kernwaarden zijn essentieel om Afrikaanse verhalen goed te kunnen begrijpen: - Ubuntu, beschreven als ‘gemeenschapsliefde’ - Oratio, benoemd als het ‘actief communiceren van belichaamde kennis’ - Relatio, een ‘relationele toewijzing van hulpbronnen’ - Dominatio, een waardering van ‘volwassenheid’ - Animatio, het ‘continu aanwezige moment’ In het onderzoek wordt getoond dat deze waarden betekenis geven aan verhalen in Afrika. In dit proefschrift concludeer ik dat de betekenis die de samenleving toekent aan technologie verbonden is met een Afrikaans wereldbeeld – en dat de introductie van technologie van buitenaf op problemen stuit wanneer onvoldoende rekening wordt gehouden met deze eigen Afrikaanse manier van kijken. Het valt op dat technologie meestal vanuit het westen wordt geïntroduceerd zonder rekening te houden met de Afrikaanse kijk op de wereld. Opvallend is dat via technologie de historische structuren en de koloniale relaties bevestigd worden. Imperialistische en oriëntalistische beelden walsen over de eigen Afrikaanse wereldbeelden heen. Vaak gaat de introductie van technologie dan ook verkeerd, precies omdat er geen aansluiting is bij Afrikaanse betekenisgeving. Technologie – ingevoerd zonder respect voor de eigen Afrikaanse waarden en zingeving, wordt onderdeel van een supra-koloniale relatie tussen het Westen en Afrika. De eigen inheemse zingeving die het Afrikaanse wereldbeeld bepalen worden dan onzichtbaar of gedenigreerd. Wanneer respect voor de inheemse waarden voor maatschappelijke betekenisgeving in Afrika ontbreekt, verwordt technologie (die van buitenaf is ingevoerd) tot een instrument van overheersing en ongelijkheid