our man in cameroon

Written in response to this

In June 2006, I was living in Hanoi and I wrote this piece detailing the hard work we were putting into cleaning up KOTO’s new restaurant – the facility I was fundraising for in my former VSO post.

At the time I wasn’t blogging for funds, or no more than any one would whose waking hours were spent wondering where they hell we’d find $80,000 dollars to save a wonderful organisation.

But someone read that post. By chance they’d eaten in the KOTO restaurant that was to close and which we were trying to replace. It dawned on them that while they were eating their beautiful lunch we were scrubbing and cleaning.

It moved them. It moved them enough to get in touch and to let us know of a fund that they helped administer. The told me I should apply. We did.

In time we received several thousand much-needed dollars.

However, one of the problems with fundraising for a specific item is that day-to-day needs will also continue to swallow money. It’s hard to say no when often the need is just as vital and potentially far more urgent.

How do you balance the need for a new facility with that of urgent health care?

Strictly speaking if you adhere to international charity guidelines this is illegal. If you tell people you want money for a specific project – then that is where there money has to be spent.

At KOTO we found a way off-setting those costs by ramping up the sponsorship programme. A total of $80 a month would cover housing, feeding, healthcare and an allowance for each trainee.

That is not cheap. We knew we had to give so much back.

A newsletter was good. PDFed and emailed. Better still was when we hit on the idea of Flickr.

Before it had been impossible, due to poor internet, to send photos out individually but we could upload them. We photographed everything including lessons, field trips, sports activities and ultimately graduation ceremonies.

Tech savvy sponsors could follow us virtually day by day. For the rest – a regular email included a link to the best of the photos.

Increasing media interest in KOTO lead to visits from both the American and Australian first ladies. The BBC visited. So did CNN. The media had access to all our photos and used them.

We gained further sponsors just for those field trips. We even used Flickr to send postcards drawn by the kids themselves.

Meanwhile my blog was growing in popularity and I was getting requests to write for the local media.  I, of course, wrote about KOTO and the money we needed.

And on a wonderful day when we finally opened that new KOTO our sponsors could see where the money had gone.

I’ve since left Hanoi but I understand the new restaurant is always full and the cash continues to be ploughed back into the project. The possibility of a new KOTO in Saigon has been mentioned.

So KOTO is, potentially, now sustainable – the restaurant is generating revenue for the organisation.

However, this is also a cautionary tale because I look at what I set up and the Flickr account has lapsed.

Despite my promptings no one took over my blogging. The website was, up until recently, neglected.  As much as I tried to pass on these skills no one took them up. In that respect I failed.

Fast forward a few years and here I am in Cameroon.

AIDS in Africa might be less “saleable” than cute streetkids in Vietnam but the need is, if anything, more acute.

Further context – Asia is taking off while conditions in Africa, if anything, get worse.

The internet is even slower and less widespread. I told a friend recently that in Asia even streetkids had email addresses and used cyber cafes.  Here I find office colleagues don’t know how to email.

But…

I believe that means there is an even greater need here for getting the Web2.0 side up and running. To the developed world Africa spells corruption. Business who want to invest here demand transparency. Charity donors are no different.

While fund holders may want to see our books, the man or woman on the street just want to get a sense of the problem and see where the money is going. Even more they want to see the progress their donation prompts.

They don’t want to see hunger and disease but they do want to see smiles.

They want to see progress. In particular they want to see people being enabled to help themselves.

Emails can be used to update but better still if they become so involved that they follow my employer’s progress across several platforms – Flickr for pics, a blog for news and comment, Twitter for urgent updates or simply for networking.

And they can interact and ask questions too.

In Hanoi a great deal of money was raised from tourists and expats.  Here we have neither – we are forced to look internationally for donors.

It is soul destroying to have 30 pictures take a working day to upload but that should be put into context. The post system here means that it might take two weeks for me to send to a letter to a village one hour away.

And conditions here might be getting worse but technology has a habit of bucking that trend.

I do expect internet speed to improve and in time we will be able to use the likes of YouTube to further reinforce our messages. Podcasts would be fabulous.

Of course there are important Web2.0 nuances. Your blog is not a place to put your press releases. Your blog posts can’t be signed off by the board. They should be emotive and they should be descriptive. They should be a first person account. They cannot be written by committee.

My KOTO experience tells me that it is not enough to put a blog in place you have to train local people to keep it going in your absence. They are the authentic voices but they do have to know how to write for an international audience.

Nobody who gives money to any charity – whether they are an organisation or an individual – expects nothing in return. At most they want evidence of how it is spent, at the very least they want to feel good about themselves.

Technology can help us meet these expectations.

If everything goes to plan here, in the long term you won’t read too much about COPAAP, my current employers on this blog.

This week I am going to help set up a “training blog” for my colleague Atam to let him get a feel for blogging.

In time I want there to be a COPAAP blog, Twitter feed and Flickr.

It is a big undertaking but, I believe, it is relatively straightforward compared to many challenges we face. Blogging is easy.  Training volunteers to look after AIDS sufferers in remote villages is hard.

Watch this space

*Pic is of my desk here in Cameroon.

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This entry was posted on October 7, 2008 at 9:33 am and is filed under cameroon. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: africa, bamenda, cameroon, hanoi, koto, social networking, technology, vietnam, vso

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