Tenets

I suspect that I have already grown up, so the question of what I want to be when I grow up is null and void. But this is one of the questions that reveals ambition and big dreams in kids. They are full of enthusiasm and zero cares in the world. Even for teens, life is just a bliss. And then they grow up.

In a short time, there are bills to pay, health to maintain, responsibilities to meet, social ladder to climb, status to build or preserve, or battles to fight or avoid. So many things rob one the ambitions and the great outlook that one had when they were young. Life becomes about trying to get bad situations not become worse.

The environment never helps because you are forced to act your age.

Lost Joy

There are rules and expectations for life. You have to act in a certain way in order to maintain your seat at the table of sane people.

Executives in suits and ties wish they could openly lick an ice-cream without losing their status. Others want to enjoy a bouncy castle but their status cannot allow them.  Boring routine becomes the norm, and life is lived in between paychecks. Soon, you are planning for retirement, and starting a business that will most likely fail. You are watching what you eat because the doctor says that you might not live long. You no longer take risks because you might end up losing your kids school fees.

So many little sources of joy are no longer available for those who grow up. Life takes a gloomy approach. That is the cost of growing up.

Benjamin Franklin said it, that some people die at age 25 and aren’t buried until 75. How true!

People lose all the good aspects of life. They are too tired to jump in excitement. They are too rigid to laugh at a simple joke. They are trying to act their age, yet there is no code of conduct prescribed by the constitution for each age.

Before they realize it, they are gone.

What a waste of life!

Learn from Kids

Maybe we should learn from kids. They are the epitome of happiness. Children find joy in little things – real joys. On the contrary, adults are always on a state of trying to survive.

Adults base their happiness on how well they are doing relative to other people around them, and thus feel bad when others do better than them. It is better to be paid 25 units when all other colleagues are being paid 20 units each, than to be paid 30 units when all your colleagues are being paid 35 units.

Kids rarely care what other people think of them. Adults are very much driven by what people think about them. They spend all their money trying to impress people who do not give a damn about who they are. They are always trying to impress internet strangers.

Kids are not afraid to cry when the world hurts. Adults must carefully conceal their feelings because the board cannot tolerate crybabies. Then they go ahead and commit suicide.

Kids do not hold grudges forever. Adults are trying to settle old scores from World War Zero.

Kids are not usually paralyzed by indecisiveness. They move forward with the available option. They are optimistic about life. They seek new experiences.

Yet, kids are happy, and achieve a lot. If you think learning to walk is a simple task, the best engineers the world has to offer have spent so many years trying to get robots to walk. AI can not match the natural intelligence of babies. Try learning a new language and you will realize that kids actually achieve a huge milestone.

Do not die young and spend all your life as a living dead.

In 2010, I hit a jackpot that was too good to be true.

The previous year, someone had introduced me to something called academic writing, but I had ignored it. This time I saw how someone was making good money through academic writing and I decided to try it.

Background

Every Kenyan who was in college in the last ten years would know what I am talking about when I mention academic writing. For those still in the dark, it is a remote gig where one is paid to write assignments, projects or even thesis for students in UK and US Universities. It was said that these students had the money, but no time or competence to do their assignments. In Kenya, students had the time, and needed the money.

This interesting scenario brought in some middlemen who ran writing bureaus, mostly from Eastern Europe. They had online platforms where students would submit their assignments, and another interface where writers could bid to do the work. Such platforms included Uvocorp, Essay Writers, Academia Research and many more.

The industry still thrives to date. In fact, it has become more complex despite attempts to crack down on the vice. It is so common in Kenya that Kenya is considered a global powerhouse in the industry. Kenyans calls it academic writing. Elsewhere, it has the infamous name of contract cheating industry.

The Lure

Being a student in Kenya, there are very limited opportunities to make money. With a high unemployment rate, not even graduates are assured of jobs.

Finding a way to make money is always welcome. The good thing with academic writing was that it was appealing to a group of people who had the right skills, the time, and the need.

One other appeal of academic writing was the fact that it gave one an opportunity to explore interesting topics. You would write about engineering, law, history, medicine, philosophy or any topic that you found fit. This in itself was interesting.

The Start

I got connected to somebody who was in the industry and had accounts with one of these platforms. They would give some assignments, and I would be paid KShs 180 bob per page. That was the start, and I was just doing enough pages for extra income. In October 2010, I did 23 pages and the following month I did 24 pages. That was an income of 4,140 and 4,320 shillings respectively, just enough to feed a student.

Come January 2011, I had more time and more resources. By April 2011, I was doing 300 pages a month at KShs 200 per page. That was enough money to last me a few semesters.

Writing and studying needed some balance. When school was in session, it was hard to keep up with writing, only doing enough to keep me going. Many people had already discovered academic writing and there were enough support groups to assist when you were in a fix.

Ethics

No one really saw academic writing as something unethical. No one would call it aiding academic cheating. It was just work. Registered companies were offering the services and various players were making it possible, including PayPal, Skrill, and others.

I never gave it much thought, until one day I had a unique assignment. I did 12 pages of work on a certain topic in nursing that I had little knowledge about (I was studying Engineering). Neither the topic nor what I wrote made any sense to me, and I was very sure that the client would reject the work. To my surprise, the client was extremely satisfied and even wanted me to do their final term paper.

That is when I started to question the whole thing. Here was a nursing student who seemed to be an F student, and was banking on me to help them get good grades. What would happen when they graduated? How were they going to work in hospitals? Would I allow such a person to treat me?

I lost interest in academic writing, but I never quit fully.

Selling Accounts

I still went on with the writing, but by the end of the year I had shifted focus to something else. Instead of working with a middle man, one could open their own account with the websites offering academic writing services and build their own portfolio. The pay was also better, starting at $5 per page for beginners. I started creating accounts with those websites.

Creating accounts was the hard part. The tests were quite hard and it would take about 4 attempts to successfully get one registered. It involved a lot of hard work and preparation, but the results were worth.

I managed to open a few accounts which I sold to interested people. I remember that the last one I sold in September 2012, for KShs 25000. That was still good money. But I had had enough. I stopped dealing in anything to do with academic writing.

Today

More than ten years later, academic writing is still thriving in Kenya. Instead of working with middlemen from Eastern Europe, Kenyans have now set up their own businesses where they deal with the foreign students directly. It is a booming business.

I don’t need to introduce the year 2020 to anybody on planet Earth because the year has done a pretty good job of announcing its presence. The rich, the poor, the famous, the obscure, the healthy, the sickly, the employed, the unemployed and every possible group of people has felt the fangs of the year pierce.

For most people, it has been a year of losses, failures, pain and all the bad things that we would not even want our enemies to experience. It would make sense to say good riddance to 2020, but the lessons are also big. It would be worse if we do not learn from the failures of 2020. Remember, he who refuses to learn from history are destined to repeat it.

One of the greatest lessons of 2020 is building resilience in an environment where failure is inevitable. The year taught us that one can fail in almost any sector, and the most important skill is to be able to rise up when the fall comes.

It could have been a job loss, stalled academic programs, closed business or a general loss of income. This nearly affected everybody.

When Losing a Job is Worse than never being Employed

One of the observations was that sometimes, people who lose their jobs end up becoming worse than those who never had them in the first place. Why does that happen? Because people without jobs usually develop mechanisms to cope with very little incomes, while those with jobs don’t. The poor adapt to living in almost any environment but the rich rarely do that. When disaster strikes, it is those who were unprepared who are hit hard.

While many of them are able to rise up again given an opportunity like a new job, the period with no job or income hits people hard. Their mental health takes a big hit and almost paralysis them. This is because they are not able to survive in a state of reduced incomes. This affected many people in 2020.

Is it possible for one to be immune from such setbacks? It is, but it is not easy.

Learning to Fall from the Toddlers

There is no better place to understand how we should react to failure than from watching babies learn to walk. They start by learning how to stand, then walk while supported, before they can finally start walking without any support. The initial phase involves walking for a short distance, many times targeting to reach a support object a few steps away.

During this process, the baby will fall many times. I realized that one of the key skills that they master early is how to fall. They figure out how to fall forward and how to fall backwards, safely. With this mastered, they are free to fall anytime since they can fall safely. They no longer fear the fall, and can safely try out walking which comes with many falls, and needs persistent attempts in order to master.

That is how we all end up walking; a simple skill because we all have, but a very complex skills if you ask the engineers trying to make walking robots.

Building Resilience

Whatever 2021 holds, we must build skills that will allow us to rise if we fall. We need to figure out how to keep moving with reduced incomes, how to still operate when we are grounded, how to achieve the most even when health is failing, and how to identify new opportunities that can lubricate life when the going gets tough.

How we achieve this may vary from person to person or situation to situation, but is definitely necessary.

When Covid-19 struck, the first reaction was some form of panic and extreme caution. Racial profiling broke out in China, Americans had a run on tissue paper, and Kenyans wanted the government to shut all borders and make the country an Island. A huge demand for masks kept the prices so high, and it is unbelievable that prices have fallen by up to 95% today. Then came the curfews and cessation of movements. Those seemed like they were very necessary to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Six months later, it seems like we have majorly learnt to live with Covid-19. While the cases have not reduced to zero, and number of deaths seem to be increasing, everywhere I look I see people who have made peace with Covid-19 and opted to go down fighting, if necessary.

Schools are now open. Masks have been discarded. Public gathering have resumed full throttle. Public service vehicles are carrying full capacity. Cases of Covid-19 no longer make the news.

What changed?

Several things, including caution fatigue, and a better understanding of the virus (both accurate and inaccurate understanding). People also realized that Covid-19 is not the worst threat to mankind today, and while you are hiding from corona virus, an armed mosquito might send you under with malarial bite.

I had a conversation with my dad about how the perception and response to Covid-19 has changed and he had some very insightful words. He said that there has always to be a balanced between caution and risk, especially if the threat is long term. It is not logical to spend all your life running from one form of death, while the risk from other types of deaths exist. That is why it did not make sense to have an extended lock-down at the expense of livelihoods.

How Covid-19 unfolds is still a mystery, but one thing that is certain is that we cannot have an extended lockdown again. At least not in a country where malaria, cancer, road accidents and other simple illnesses pose a similar or worse threat.

However, Covid-19 remains to be a moving target. No one knows what exactly it will end. Only hope.

In an agricultural based economy, any area that receives low amounts of rainfall and lacks access to underground or surface water for irrigation ends up with very limited options. One such area is Northern Kenya which is characterized by annual average amounts of 150 – 450 mm, making it majorly suitable for nomadic pastoralism.

The Bigger Kenya

Northern Kenya houses 38% of the Kenyan population and covers 70% of total landmass in Kenya. The distinct characteristics of this vast land is the abundance of development challenges such as poverty, hunger, lack of quality health services, limited number of schools, gender inequality and many others.

With limited resources and options for improving the quality of life, one of the easiest ways to escape poverty is through education. However, this has always proved to be a challenge in Northern Kenya.

More than 50% of children in Northern Kenya live more than 11 km from a secondary school, making it very hard for students to make it to school and back home every day. Consequently, there are so many children who are out of school at any given point. A survey of 3 counties in the region once found that more than 50% of households had a child out of school.

There are many factors that contribute to low school enrollment in Northern Kenya and many of these would require multiple solutions cutting across different sectors. For example, the opportunity cost for education in the region is too high. If one enrolls in school, they miss out on being trained on the most relevant skill in the area – keeping cattle. Due to other factors, students may not do well in school and are not likely to get into the formal job market, thus they are neither useful in their home places and cannot sustain themselves in urban areas.

Thus, telling a child to go to school in some parts of Northern Kenya could be equivalent of telling a child from a working class family to venture into football instead of education. Success could come, but as an exception.

Although there is no silver bullet that can solve all the problems, one gap that needs to be exploited in the simplest way possible is use of simple digital technologies.

Mobile Connectivity

At the moment, Safaricom which has the widest network coverage in Kenya has 96% of the population covered with 2G network and 93% with 3G network. In Northern Kenya, the government has intervened to have telcos put up mobile networks in some non-profitable areas like very remote locations and majority of the population have some access to the network.

The area lacks access to electricity but receives a lot of sunshine with at least 8 hours of sunshine every day and this makes it ideal for use of solar power. Generally, solar power would be adequate to power most digital technology devices in Northern Kenya all year round.

With mobile network and possible source of power, what can be done to help improve the quality of education?

Some of the challenges that need to be solved are:

• Low population density making it to have schools within the reach of every child.
• Nomadic lifestyle that means families are sometimes on the move.
• Poor infrastructure making it hard to provide and monitor services.
• Social inequalities making girls less likely to attend school.
• High opportunity cost of education.
• Rampant insecurity and cattle rustling.
• Shortage of teachers, and low quality of teaching due to many untrained teachers.

Most of these problems require government intervention and a long term strategy, but there is a place for engineers to design products that can fit people in these areas. This could be:

• Creating apps that can help these kids learn English in a language that they understand, such as M-Lugha has done.
• Creating digital mentorship channels to encourage young people to stay to school and show them possibilities in education – a sort of penpals.
• Labs that are powered by solar.
• Using content loaded tablets to empower teachers like it is being done by Bridge.
• Using climate data and satellite images to predict where pastoralists will be moving to and thus plan appropriately to keep the children learning.