“Go fix it. That’s a call to everybody. Go fix it.”
So extolled Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in a recent NPR interview. She was speaking about the Ebola scourge on her country, now mercifully in decline, but she could have been speaking about hundreds of other challenges facing that West African nation.
Sirleaf’s call to her people also perfectly encompasses the ethos of Georgia Tech. Go fix it. At Tech, if a problem or opportunity presents itself, we assemble the people, build the prototype and innovate the solution.
On Feb. 11, Georgia Tech and the Republic of Liberia signed a Memorandum of Understanding celebrating nearly a decade-long “go fix it” style partnership that explores how information and communication technologies can serve as a tool in Liberia’s development. The memorandum solidified a relationship between Liberia’s national telecommunications operator, Libtelco, its Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and my Technologies and International Development Lab at Georgia Tech.
When it comes to information and communication technologies, Liberia is a country of extremes. It has one of the world’s lowest levels of Internet penetration, with just 5 percent of the population experiencing some degree of access, according to the United Nation’s ITU. But it has enjoyed some of the highest growth rates in mobile phone use anywhere, with an estimated 60 percent of the population subscribers to one of three private mobile phone operators.
In 2003, when Liberia emerged out of 15 years of intense civil war, the country’s infrastructure stood in ruin, including the telecommunication networks. Today the lights are finely coming on – literally. The nation’s capital, Monrovia, is starting to deploy streetlights throughout the city; an underwater optical fiber cable brings Internet connectivity, via light waves, to the country’s shore.
This submarine fiber optic cable, named ACE, originates in France and traces the Western coast of Africa all the way to South Africa. When the cable made landfall in 2011, it brought to Liberia her first international connection to the Internet. The cable has delivered modern high-bandwidth global Internet to the shores of Liberia.
Now it’s Libtelco’s aspiration to distribute this bandwidth beyond its coastal landing point, to the people who live throughout the nation. This is no small task, requiring the development and deployment of a national telecommunications backbone. Georgia Tech researchers are working with Libtelco to help develop the technical approach, as well as the financing plans and demand drivers, for this major project.
Collaboration around the fiber optic cable is just one partnership between Tech and Liberia. Tech was a key contributor to the country’s national information and communication policy and has helped build capacity within its telecommunications regulatory authority.
In a series of world-firsts, we collaborated with their Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an independent governmental body tasked with giving voice to civil war victims and encouraging processes of national healing. Researchers from my lab developed interactive video story-sharing technologies to support a healing dialog and created the first secure online system that allowed Liberians to submit sworn sealed testimony directly to the Commission via the Internet. As the Commission finished its work, it shipped its entire physical archive to Georgia Tech for conservation, digital scanning and safekeeping.
Georgia Tech students have been central partners throughout this collaboration with Liberia. Every summer Tech students travel to Monrovia to offer classes on computer topics to the country’s emerging tech-savvy community. The courses are hosted by the iLab, a technology innovation and training center in Monrovia co-founded by a Georgia Tech alumnus.
All of these projects point to Liberia’s ever-increasing recognition of the promise computer and communication technologies offer for the nation’s development. The recently-signed memorandum signals the important role that Georgia Tech is playing in realizing this promise. “Go fix it” is the Tech leitmotif and an attitude we share with Liberia. It is this shared philosophy that helps drive our productive partnership.
