Our next speaker now is Kpetermenti Siakor from iLab Liberia,
which is an organization that provides information and communications technology services
to individuals and organizations in Liberia.
Hi, everyone.
When I was a child growing up in Ghana,
I was always curious about why my classmates didn't want to be friends with me.
I thought it was because I was a refugee coming from Liberia, but I figured out that, well,
people actually like two kinds of people. They like rich people and they like smart people.
Rich was out of my reach, but smart, I thought, well, that's something I can work with.
So I put in the hours and worked pretty hard, and did well in school,
and made a lot of friends in the process.
By the time I finished high school in 2006, Liberia had just elected the first female president in Africa
and ended about 15 years of two civil wars.
We had 19,000 United Nations troops in the countries and a lot of NGOs around.
Moving back to Liberia, I realized that the things that I took for granted, like electricity, water,
and a relatively good educational system that I was used to in Ghana was simply not in Liberia.
So my focus switched from wanting to be the smart person with a lot of friends,
to actually wanting to make an impact, to do something about the situation there.
So, fast forward to 2011, I joined Ushahidi Liberia,
and Ushahidi is a technology company from Kenya that maps election-related issues.
Today they map almost everything, but it was started up after the 2007 election related violence
to provide information on where the hot spots and the trouble spots were in the country.
Ushahidi was in Liberia at this time to prevent, to try and build an early warning,
early response system to mark, to check the indicators and to predict and prevent conflict.
I was working as a developer, building plug-ins and customizing the platform.
My team wanted to build something that would outlive the election, something that would outlive
the funding when the project closed.
And that was the beginning of iLab.
We built iLab to answer one question.
What would Liberians, these partners we were working with in this consortium,
what would they do if they had access to information.
What this looked like was we built a computer lab
with about 30 computers and a high-speed internet connection,
and wanted to see what they would do with it. We had at least two outcomes.
One, we were able to build a community of over 3,000 people who were involved with us later on in many ways.
But secondly, one of our members, Divine, came in to one of our programs,
heard that we had cameras available for rent, available for anyone who needed to borrow it for free.
He borrowed this and made documentaries and was able to earn a living.
Today, Divine has created Liberia's first film institute.
And this community also persisted and supported us during Ebola.
When Ebola struck in 2014, usually that is where all the NGOs go, but this time,
all the NGOs were going in the other direction.
I think they probably missed their way,
but that vacuum they created allowed Liberians to really step up.
The community health workers we hear so much about, stepped up and our community was no different.
They were the volunteers who went to the emergency dispatch which was also a call center
that controlled ambulances to pick up bodies and to also respond to calls.
They went there and were able to digitize their processes, such that the data they collected,
that took five days to get to the Ministry of Health,
now took almost less than a minute, because they were using live spreadsheets
that were connected to other volunteers at the Ministry of Health data management units.
So that was something we were really, really excited about.
But that hasn’t been our challenges.
In working with partners and in order to sustain our open and free platform,
we have had to do consulting for other partners, and there we learned that, for example,
taking farmers from their farms and putting them in workshops for 2-3 weeks,
and teaching them about farming, feeding them, paying them to attend,
and pay their way back, wasn't very sustainable.
So we realized that we were actually crippling their effectiveness.
Now fast forward to 2016.
We decided to build something bigger, to really take all the things that we have learned over the years,
and build a space that allows small businesses to be able to rent our spaces,
NGOs, individuals who wanted access to information,
and skills building, to have a space to make that possible.
So, that is what we are calling iLab. So in this historic year,
as Liberia turns 170 years old, and we elect our 25th president,
at iLab we are also opening iCampus to the public.
And finally, we have one last question we want to be able to answer at this point,
and that is what would we accomplish if we set out to deliberately create wealth for Liberians,
instead of just trying to help them earn a livelihood.
What kind of a world would we create with that? Thank you.
Wow, thank you for your commitment and sharing that with us.
I think one thing that I notice between both you and Raj Panjabi who won the Skoll award yesterday,
is that both of you have such pride in being a Liberian,
and a real passion for trying to build that country back up.
I'd love to hear, having been a refugee and coming back to Liberia,
what really motivates you at your core to do this work?
One big one is that we are very late. Liberia became independent in 1847.
That's a long, long time ago.
We are founding members of the League of Nations before the UN and all that,
but Liberia looks like a 5 or 10-year-old country today.
The question is can we continue getting this wrong over and over again?
So there is a real sense of urgency, and a lot of organizations,
a lot of people who work in Liberia, you get that sense.
So just think, when you think about how old you are,
just like our place in life, you pass 30 years, you are like, what?
So soon? And that reality is always before us.
We have to do something, we have to do it yesterday, we are already late, so we have to move fast.
I know one thing that we've had some chance to talk about
over the past few days is the infrastructure challenges that you face in your work.
You mentioned in the past that the cost of electricity, the cost of internet access,
and that just being a major impediment to progress in the country.
How can we as a community best be supportive of situations and conditions that you're facing?
Thank you for that. I would say that it's really important to try to understand Liberia a little bit more.
Because it doesn't resemble a lot of African countries. It doesn't fit into a lot of African narrative.
To give you an example, our office that we had before we would pay 4,800 United States dollars
for a three bedroom apartment a month, and for an internet connection with 2 megabytes,
the second internet connection we paid $3,500 a month.
Now with those numbers, forget sustainability.
Today we have a plan that will make us more sustainable,
but we've had very generous friends over the years who have had programs in Liberia,
therefore understood that reality and said look, we know this is not the most sustainable thing,
but we understand that you have a plan, we are willing to support you until you get there.
Today, it's come down from $3,500 to $180 a month,
which is still pretty much on the high side, but it's way better than a few years ago.
But we are also looking forward to understanding and really learning
from all of you who have worked in very challenging environments similar to ours.
What are some of the creative things you have done to really help you do well.
So I'm really happy that we have been able to exist since 2011 until today,
and we are looking forward to very bright days ahead.
Alright, thank you so much for your passion.