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But nonetheless, we have Mr. Emerson,
who will be joining us and telling us
today about this.
Yeah, so.
OK.
Good afternoon.
Wow. OK, so I hope your Congress
has been good so far and you're not too
hung over or too tired.
So today I'm talking along
with my colleague from Sierra Leone.
If Skype works.
If the Skype.
Yes. Awesome.
All right, guys, make
some noise
here.
All right.
Awesome.
Great.
So today are
talks about what
by most standards would be considered a
miracle because
it.
So a little bit of.
So here's the structure of the talk, so
I'm going to give like a two minute
introduction.
There is a bit of an out.
You can see the structure of the talk and
then we're just going to crack into it.
So introduction.
My name is Emison Tan.
For six months between October
2014 and April 2015,
I was the country
coordinator for a consortium of NGOs
called Net Hope.
And that Hope is a consortium of 33 of
the world's largest NGOs, which
specializes in the consortium,
specializes in
technology and
I.T. and development.
And I was
dispatched to Sierra Leone to be the
country coordinator with the world's
vaguest orders because they could not
find anyone who wanted to go.
So I got three people salaries and
they just said, go there and improve
things.
And then the orders just stopped.
So that's what I tried to do,
these guys.
So, Sultan, can you
save that Sultan?
Harold.
That's Harold Francis
yo.
OK, so these guys are from I.T.
labs and these guys
are based in Freetown in Sierra
Leone.
That's Sierra Leone, you can see I see up
there, and these guys
are all self-taught programmers,
self-taught hackers, you know, they
and these guys basically
saved that country from complete
collapse.
And I can't possibly
begin to describe how many lives
were saved as a result of their work
and indeed, you know, we could have lost
the whole of West Africa anyway.
So and this is basically their story.
So a bit of an introduction.
This is Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone is
roughly the size of Ireland.
It's on the west coast of
West Africa.
It's got about six and a half million
people, thereabouts.
Nobody really actually knows because, you
know, the census is kind of
rubbish and it's.
Yeah, right. It's the second poorest
country on earth officially.
And that was before Ebola,
the Ebola epidemic.
It had a civil war between 1991
and 2002.
And that is the source of so many
movies like, you know, blood diamonds.
And, you know, like, you know, you got
people like Leonardo DiCaprio running
around going like, oh, my God, look,
there's blood diamonds and people and
civil war and, you know, all this sort of
madness.
And that's before Ebola.
That's what Sierra Leone was really
famous for. It was famous for a grotesque
civil war.
And and I'm
being very, very poor.
But it's really rich in diamonds
and gold and minerals and the rest of it,
which is why everyone likes to fight
over the place
kind of shit anyway.
Yeah,
it also has only 150 meters
of fiber optic cable in the entire
country. And it goes from the cable
landing station up to this of like
microwave tower and then the rest of the
countries all point-to-point mcray.
So if the Skype connection goes down, it
probably will because it started raining
or something.
Right. So I could
bang on for hours about Sierra Leone and
Ebola. But hopefully
a documentary crew came and followed me
around in
Sierra Leone doing an Ebola
vaccine.
Jolimont.
A little patch of design, I seem to
bleed from opening
bleeding from the ears, the eyes
red at the end.
But when you see an Ebola
patient suffering from those conditions,
obviously there's no.
Since Ebola came, schools have just
been stopped using this is not going
normally again, like the way it was.
Ebola has overtaken the whole nation,
so students can't come because of the
risk.
Our country is Suffian, we don't know the
way our country is clean, we don't know
the trend of our nation.
We don't know what we are heading to.
We don't know our future, our children
suffering education, not being
locked up, no movement.
Everything is going backward.
Haiti, earthquake, Katrina,
all these things raise a billion and
a half dollars, but we don't see the same
public outcry here.
Within one week, the House Nandy
affected on Monday for me to know we
didn't do what we did until one
day and ended up with
the people in day one
voted you told
them everything point to
let you know that you needed
to help.
But when you say no, but
I did not do all of good.
Ebola will be defeated in Sierra Leone,
but in the meantime, people are
suffering. We saw some examples last
month where people couldn't go to
the farms at the edge of the village
because the village was under quarantine.
Those people then had to sit there for
three weeks relying on food aid, not
being able to collect the rice harvest,
which then was clearly going to have no
impact down the road.
We came to see Leone because we wanted to
tell the story of the people who were on
the front lines, who so many heroes,
so many people who are working in the
battle of disease this outbreak,
and with obviously very little help.
And this is a war losing my friend does
not mean that I was not protected in
the war.
It is my duty to protect because I
didn't volunteer to help my people all
happen. That's the question I've
been asking myself.
That's why I decided to come
and randomly talk to my.
My name is Seattle, I'm sorry,
I'm an Ebola fighter.
My name is Lieutenant Omar, I'm
an Ebola fighter.
Hi, my name is Joe and I'm going to be a
fighter.
I am. And
I am a fighter.
Daniel Boone, the
Ebola fighter.
My name is Dr. Vincent de
La.
My name is Young Samuel.
My name is Aminatta is Caveat.
My name is my antifascist Bangla
and Ebola fighter.
John.
I want to ask the world
to see unions and
the labor unions
who have had this crisis
and CEOs are me on the same
shinobi.
So.
Not at all that that little trailer does
a much better job than I ever could of
summarizing.
It's a war, you know.
And in wars,
people die.
And what happened was that the
disease ripped its way through
the already very fragile health system,
the some of the first people to start
dying in significant numbers were nurses
and doctors and
medical staff on the system
just started to collapse.
The country came all that all
activity in the country essentially
came to a halt.
Commerce stopped, schools stopped,
everything stopped.
And it looked like there for a while it
was just it would rip
through the population of the country.
And the U.N.
finally declared an international
health emergency, set up a special
U.N. mission.
And then you saw all of these
countries like the US and
the U.K., start to mobilize their
militaries to actually start to to
help Liberia and Sierra
Leone and Guinea
start to respond to the crisis.
And I arrived in
October on a
UN aircraft with really with some of the
real first wave of like experienced
humanitarian and
medical workers from outside.
I don't know is.
So there should be a fellow here from
e-health Africa than if is here.
There is, yeah.
So I showed up.
So I was the only technology.
I thought I was the only technologist on
the plane. But it turns out I was wrong.
It turns out that Treston from
e-health Africa was on the plane and
I have to salute this man up here.
If you can't see he's behind you
for being stand up.
For being brave enough to actually get
on the plane because in
back in August and September,
essentially.
If you went if you were considering going
people, everyone thought that you were
going to die.
I went to a friend's wedding the
week before I left and
I got talking to the priest and the
priest is like, oh, no, what do you do?
And, you know, I'm going to Sierra Leone.
I'm doing this on the other.
And he just stops.
And then he just gave me the blessing,
you know, hand comes out a
bit of holy oil, you know, on the
forehead and tries to say something in
English. Then he muttered something in
Latin. And it turns out, actually, that
he used to be a battlefield, you know,
chaplain. And he actually gave me last
rites. It's like, thanks, asshole.
So plainly it didn't work.
So I'm still here.
So anyway, so
the the U.N., the U.N.,
H.O.
come up with this strategy to.
Arrest the spread of the disease,
they call it bending the line, and what
this does is it gets you from a situation
where everything's going up exponentially,
you know, outbreak, contagion.
Dustin Hoffman, panic to
a situation where actually everything
levels out and you get control of the
disease. And then from that point
onwards, that the that the
the trajectory is downhill.
And that was 70 percent
of all
people who have died of Ebola buried
safely and 70 percent
of all life cases in isolation,
so they can't, in fact, other people in
the community.
There's only some that sounds great on
paper, you know, because you're like,
well, you know, that's easy, you know,
because there's only small
problems with that because, you know,
like the health system has evaporated
and ceased to exist.
There are only two major paved highways
outside of Freetown.
Am I right?
I'm right in thinking that.
Right.
Yeah, yeah, OK, and all right, well,
depends on your definition of paved.
There's no functioning power grid.
There's no functioning
running water.
In most places,
the mobile phone network only
extends to about 40 percent of the
country.
Ah, shit, this is actually a lot,
so these numbers look great on paper, but
it's actually much harder than you think
and we're
going to need an army because,
you know, at one point, so before the
crisis, Sierra Leone had one
doctor for every 50000
people.
So to give you an idea, Germany
per thousand sorry,
I think, yeah, per thousand people has
thirty eight point nine doctors
per thousand people here in Germany.
They have one doctor for fifty
thousand people.
That's quite a lot.
And that's quite a waiting line.
You know, they are waiting to see the
doctor and the rest. It's like, OK,
you're No.
Forty nine thousand five hundred
and seventy eight.
You know, please don't die before
you before the doctor will see
you
grim.
So, you know, so.
So it's like. Right, OK, so what are we
going to do? We've got nothing to reconstitute
the entire health service from scratch.
So it was decided
that with the NGOs and the British
would build, the British army would build
18 of these Ebola treatment centers,
community care centers, we'd hire
thousands of contact traces, hundreds
of safe burial teams, hundreds of
ambulance drivers, hundreds of
disinfection teams, all the lab staff.
And then all of this would have to be
coordinated with like command
centers run by the army, you know,
rapid response teams on
the one one seven emergency
line, which e-health Africa
have to give credit for sorting that one
out. Good work.
The lab reporting system.
I ended up being deeply involved in
rolling out a lot of the infrastructure,
like all these VSAT based Internet to
key facilities, thousands of mobile
phones, SAT phones, big
on the Internet. So there's huge
infrastructure expansion project
and it all has to happen within about,
you know.
Six to eight weeks,
because that's I sat down when
I first got there, I got dragged into a
lot of this largely by accident.
I got dragged into this high level
meeting because it's like, well, you
know, you're the technology guy.
You know how to set this stuff up.
Yeah, maybe,
you know, like come to this meeting and
we'll we'll have a discussion about
the way the country is going and what
needs to be done.
And it's very senior.
This very senior UN official
and gives the frankest briefing
I've ever heard when I said, right, okay,
well, basically
we have like a couple of months
or we're going to lose we're going
to lose the region.
We might lose all three countries.
And right now there are people in New
York who are making contingency plans
for millions of deaths.
And that's quite sobering.
And a difficult you know, so you have to
take a minute, sent yourself
think through the problems and try
not to get overwhelmed.
So, right, I'm going to take
a quick break here, see how much
time I've got
to talk
about some of the principles of a
successful intervention, because
this isn't exactly obvious
and.
So.
And these are all backed by little
stories, so be on the ground, not
remote. So I went trusting
when lots of
people didn't.
We had loads of offers of help,
Google Blasim,
you know, IBM, Blethen and
others.
And their condition was it's like, yeah,
we're really willing to help, but this
is going to be awesome. We're going to
apply our vast technology, technological
prowess to this,
but we're going to do it remotely.
We're going to do it from London or
California because, you know, like,
you know, if I got my name on, I might
die and, you know, and my insurance
doesn't cover this shit.
So no.
So they totally chickened out
and unfortunately, you
cannot develop systems quickly
where there are complex business
processes and local conditions remotely,
you just can't do it.
So those guys.
Thanks, guys. Thanks, but no thanks.
Sorry.
Make use of local resources and people.
These guys understood
the environment intimately, they
they they know how everything works
or doesn't work.
I mean, the classic example is we had to
hire data entry clerks and
hiring a data entry clerk here is really
pretty easy.
You know, you get some CVS and you
read the CVS and you go, oh, look, you
know, you can read and write and you
appear to be vaguely bright and I'm sure.
But are you right?
You can trace Sierra Leone.
It's a little bit different because
most people's CVS are completely
meaningless.
You know, there are lots and lots of
words. And, you know, that doesn't
actually mean very much.
So what these guys did was they came up
with an English comprehension and
literacy test.
It was hilarious.
I don't know if you remember that,
especially the bit whether the
instructions were wrong.
And I think this is one of Francis said
the instructions on this literacy test
were wrong. If you didn't question the
instructions, you
failed.
Because what that meant was you couldn't
actually read the instructions and
understand that they were wrong or you
knew they were wrong, but you were too,
you know, you were too timid to actually
say, hey, this is wrong.
We don't want people like that because
they'll be dealing with messy data, which
which will be a mess, you know.
So, yeah.
One hundred and eighty three people
applied. How many did we hire in the end?
About about
30.
13.
Yeah. So from from a pool of
180 people who replied to the offer,
we ended up with 13 who could actually
read, write and actually like
question what they were reading,
which is kind of amazing.
The real literacy rate, officially, the
literacy rate in Sierra Leone is 35
percent. The real literacy rate, i.e.
comprehension and being able to
actually work it out is under 20
percent.
That's one in fewer than one in
five. People can read and write
on a new era and a competent.
That's shocking, Libbard.
Compared to Germany, where your literacy
rate is over 99 percent.
This is a very difficult environment to
work in.
So next, Principlist take chances
and fight inertia, right, so
you're not supposed to hire people like
these, none of these guys here is like,
you know, over the age of 40,
you know, they all use this dodgy
open source stuff.
Yeah,
and and,
you know, it's like normally for a big
for a huge ERP deployment, because
you go to you go to like SAP
or Accenture or,
you know, whichever whichever
fucking one's more money.
What you don't do is you don't go to a
bunch of guys who walk out of, you know,
like what's effectively a converted
garage.
But the only difference is, is SAP might
not actually care whether the project
succeeds. These guys really care.
They care a lot.
So I put my so
when I when when me and the team
that were there were looking at all these
problems.
Started thinking about this,
you know, I was like, look, we've got to
use local talent that the only people who
actually really understand how everything
works and, you know, they have they're
much more heavily invested in success
than anybody else.
We have to use the locals
and then we bully the United
Nations Development Program into paying
for it all.
They really didn't want to.
But there we talked the leadership
around and the rest of it, and then they
took ownership and of the process
and it became a smashing success.
So, you know, all for the best
use, open source software, reuse and
leverage, what exists.
This is kind of critical and what this
talk is largely about, because what
you'll see later on is that none
of this would be possible without
open source software, without open source
frameworks, without being
able to leverage all of that
historic work.
That has gone into this because you could
not possibly develop systems
this quickly
for such low amounts
of money and this sort of environment
with this kind of robustness, without
the existence of this huge open source
ecosystem and
the huge size of the open source
ecosystem and the fact that it covers
everything, including like really boring
things like accounting and ERP
and and, you
know, like logistics, management and
stuff like this means that, you know,
like there are open source solutions for
all of this.
And what that enables you to do is draw
on all of that and be able to spin up
things very, very quickly.
And then plan how you're going to leave,
because the problem here is
that most NGOs, most development
aid projects
don't plan to leave.
They just show up, they show up and they
make stuff in the rest of it.
The locals don't build any of their own
stuff. They don't own any of it.
And then the funding runs out.
The white guys fuck off back
home, job done.
And then what happens is that their
country fills up with garbage
because like a good example might be,
you go to the hospitals and what you find
are all these piles and piles and piles
of old Ubiquiti, you know,
little Ubiquiti nano stations
and stuff like this.
And it's like, what is this doing in a
pile? And it's like, well, the money run
out and then, you know, the satellite
link went away and then all this stuff
broke down. And then we just sort of like
just threw it all in a box.
You know, and that was the military
hospital up up in
Wilkenson, and so, you know, there are
pictures of me with like, you know, piles
of old Ubiquiti gear taken apart
of me fixing it because it was like,
well, this is stuff we don't have to buy
if you plan to leave.
What that means is, is that you ensure
that you have somebody there who
will take ownership of what is built.
And once they have ownership of it, it
means that they're responsible for its
onward development, irrespective of
whether they get funding from outside or
not. So, for example, the stuff
the Sultan and these guys
have done is, you know,
it's available, it can be reused
and hopefully that will be reused
in the reconstituted Sierra Leonean
health service.
Am I right in thinking that they're
actually going to do that?
Oh, yes. Yes, it's
been done, though.
OK, well, they go see that,
you know, we can make it happen,
but you have to plan to leave.
You never want to stay there forever.
And you never want to actually patronize
people by just giving them things
forever.
You know, they have to learn to stand on
their own two feet.
Open source software, open source
ecosystem allows them to do that.
So anyway, OK, so, you know, let's
let's have a talk here about how
what these guys actually had to do.
So, you know, management information
system paying people
and this bit here, actually, I'm going to
get you guys to actually start pitching
in on this, because I've
I've talked for far too long.
And, you know, these guys are bored of
hearing my voice.
So some challenges,
you know, so there's some pressure on the
health system and more or less collapsed,
we have to hire, you know,
a couple of tens of thousands of nurses
and medical staff and contact tracers
and all these other guys.
And it turns out in the old Sierra
Leone health system, nobody gets paid.
For months.
Possibly ever.
And when we got there, we were presented
with the the payment system
for the old Sierra Leonean medical
system. I didn't take a fight over.
It was three. I, you know, like a four
boxes of copier paper.
Yeah. Like that.
That just literally just dumped these
boxes of I don't know if you remember
the files when they just dumped
the paper. And it's just like they go,
that's that's what we've got.
And it was a bit of a it was a bit of a
mess, so nobody gets paid.
And what that does is it forces people to
be corrupt. It forces people
to take money from patients,
which is extraordinarily dangerous in
this context.
It also undermines people's confidence
in the health system.
Basically, it means that the whole
thing becomes as horribly untrustworthy.
And
because people weren't being paid for
months on end, they went on strike.
And then you started seeing scenes like
this.
These are from actually from Liberia,
prospectives from Liberia.
But you saw bodies in the streets.
On one occasion, I
there was a strike and patients
weren't being fed, so they
just broke out
like these are, you know, like Ebola
patients and they just broke out and just
started running out and looking for food
because, you know, the health care
workers had gone on strike because they
hadn't been paid for six months.
So, you know, like
strike civil disorder, riots,
the rest of society shut down.
If the epidemic doesn't go stop, you
know, like abating.
You know, this senior official in another
meeting says you guys have got six weeks
to come up with a working solution to
pay everybody or
or the country's fucked.
And they actually use that word because
that's and that's not normal.
You know, there's a middle
aged guy and it's basically like, right.
You know, it's like either come up with
something or we're going to have to think
of something else that's going to be very
ugly.
And.
The story basically goes after this,
these, you know, during one of these
meetings, I actually, you know, they
tracked me in and they said, well, you
know, is there a technology solution to
any of this?
And I'm like, well, it sounds like you
need an ERP.
Blank looks across
the room, what is an
ERP system?
Well, it's an enterprise resource
planning system. You know, it manages
payroll and H.R.
and, you know,
logistics and stuff like that.
Great.
Can you build one?
Sure.
I can do that.
I don't know how I've audited
them before. I've audited them before,
but I'm not sure it'll
be fine. Look, I'll look into it.
I'll get back to you tomorrow.
No, you got out and you're just like,
fuck what I just signed up to.
Right. OK, let's.
OK, don't panic. Don't panic.
I think this wants to sit down with the
payment team, and
that led to a very, very weird
conversation.
So, you know, and this gives you an idea
of of just how difficult
this actually is because, you know, they
sat in these meetings.
They're like, you know, right, where are
we going to pay people? And the normal
way of paying people in Sierra Leone is
with cash.
And what that means is that if you want
to go and buy anything like, I don't
know, fuel, you actually need a kilogram
of money, because that's
how I used to pay people.
I used to pay people using literally
kilograms of money.
On occasion. I would just wait because
it's easier to weigh a stack of bills
that's like this big than it is
to actually count them.
You just go, OK, well, that looks like
about three kilos of money that you
can you know, now I have
that laptop here go.
You know, this is actually a bit of a
problem because when you're talking about
trying to pay tens of thousands of people
in the rest of it and the banking system
is shut down, you know,
we sat down in a meeting with a central
bank and the central bank guy is there
with on with the World Bank and the IMF.
And it's like, well, we're going to run out
of banknotes at some point.
Are you just like, what do you mean you're
going to run out of banknotes?
You know, it's like, well, you know,
reinjecting like 11 million dollars
into the economy every couple of weeks,
you know, and we're using the army to
distribute it all.
And, you know, it takes a it takes an
entire battalion of soldiers a week
to move the money around,
you know, because there's no money
recirculating into the system, coming
back to the central bank. We're going to
run out of banknotes.
You just like what the fuck
you want your bank, how do you run out of
money?
So sorry.
I like you very quickly.
Think of some solutions in your head and
you go ATMs, right?
OK, well, they're on their ATMs
in the country and nothing outside of
Freetown, the capital
credit cards, well, there's no
payment network for those to work with,
so that's out.
How about online banking?
Well,
fewer than one in fewer fewer than one
in 100 people has a bank account.
And like most people can't
read and write. So
no.
How about accurate stuff?
Can we just, like, work out who we need
to pay?
Well, no, not really, because
that doesn't exist either, because there
are only 12 surnames in the country.
And it turns out that roughly,
roughly, you know, like roughly
we think that roughly 60 percent of the
staff list from the Ministry of Health
actually might be ghost duplicate or
fraudulent.
So that doesn't exist.
Shit.
Well, they got lots of patronage
and, you know, plenty of corruption,
lots to go around.
And the guys in the World Bank were like,
you know, you have to get you have to put
a stop to the corruption of the parties
or we're going to stop paying,
you know, and that basically means the
end of the country. So it's like, OK,
well, plainly we have to do something
about this.
So I screwed up making the presentation,
so some solutions and this is what I'm
going to bring these guys in.
So, Larissa, are you
guys still. Are you guys still in touch
with the Nerissa?
Yes.
Yeah, yeah. OK, so Larissa was one of my
colleagues on the payment on this on
this led team.
And Larissa
lives in Sierra Leone, has lived there
for a very long time.
And she knew Sultan and
labs from some other previous project.
And I was describing this meeting where
it's like, yeah, we just need NEPI and,
you know, it'll be fine.
And she's like, you know, I know these
guys and that's actually what
she said. She said, I know these local
guys.
And I was like, right, OK, well
plainly nobody else is going to show up,
bring him in.
And so Sultan showed up
by Sultan.
This guy showed up and he showed up with
a laptop held together with some sticky
tape.
And he then showed me his code.
And this is the key moment, really,
because we started talking and we started
talking Python.
And then he shows me his code.
And I'm like, well, actually, this is
pretty good. You know, structure's
good.
You know, it's like I can logically
follow it. I can actually read this.
This is actually quite good.
It's like how long it takes to read, you
know, to do this, oh, like a week or
whatever, you know.
And it's like this is actually quite.
Well, thought through and and then they
showed me the.
It turns out they used open LP before
to build the the human
resources system for a local
cell phone provider, which is quite
small. It's got like two
one thousand something odd uses,
but it was really good.
They implemented features like, for
example, to combat tardiness.
If you don't log into your workstation,
the system schedules a meeting with
your manager.
If you don't show up for the meeting with
the manager, it automatically fires you
suddenly afsal this this little cell
phone, find out 100 percent attendance
rates.
And I'm not really actually sold to me.
Is that, you know, because I've been
working on the other phone infrastructure
stuff. I've been talking to the the
the CEO of Afsal and
he was like, yeah, the system keeps
firing me automatically because,
you know, because what it would do is it
would say you haven't gone to your
workstation, then schedule a meeting
with himself because he's the CEO.
It's like the schedules, the system
schedules a meeting with your manager,
which was him.
And then, of course, he never bothered to
log into it to say that, yes, he's got a
legitimate reason for not showing up to
work. So the system fired him every
week.
So I'm just like, you know, what, if you
can do it, if you can do it for
a little mobile phone company, I
what's the difference? Like a thousand
people.
Thirty thousand people.
It's just scaling, isn't that right?
Yeah.
You know, I just have to invent some
business process and stuff it it'll
be fine
maybe.
Yeah. I'm grossly oversimplifying.
So, you know, like that gave me
confidence that they could do it.
And I'm like, you know, it turns out that
it turns out that most of the world's
worst, most motivational speaker, because
I think I remember in one meeting
with Sultan and the guy,
it was like, you know, well,
you know, we're going to give you the job
of building this thing.
It's going to have to be done in record.
You know, it's going to be the world's
fastest large scale
ERP deployment.
It's going to be the the
the fastest large scale
payment system deployment.
But I believe you can do it principally
because if it all goes horribly
wrong and the country collapses, the
British army will pull me out.
But you guys will have to stay.
You know, it's like
I'm a I'm a terrible motivational
speaker.
So it turns out that
we did discuss in those meetings
a number of crazy ideas
to try and get money into Sierra
Leone. At one point, we even discussed
dollar rising the economy.
It's like, you know, they don't they're
running out of banknotes.
Right? So why don't we just introduce
us dollars?
We'll just make US dollar as the currency
that'll work well, won't it?
I mean, what what could go wrong?
Look at Iraq.
Wait a minute.
All right. Let's just abandon this idea.
Move swiftly onwards.
What could possibly go wrong, so,
so and that turned out and then that
discussion turned into, well, OK,
what can we use that
aren't banknotes, that
doesn't involve disrupting or totally
cratering the economy?
Well, what about mobile phone credit?
Because mobile phone credit is is is is
pretty much cash, right?
You know, if you can tell me about OK,
well, why don't we just use mobile money,
40 percent of people here have a phone.
You know, if they can't read an SMS
messaging, find somebody else.
You can read an SMS message.
They can they can talk to an interactive
voice system.
All right. Let's just make mobile money.
No problem. Right.
And then you find out that, in fact,
actually
a lot of what you need doesn't exist
because, you know, like one company
had a mobile money scheme, Airtel, and
this is happy as
hell thing, but they only
covered like 20 percent of the
population. So it's like.
Right. Well, we need to get the other
companies on board and they don't
have a mobile money system at all.
So we're just going to have to force them
to make a mobile money system
with the systems that they have
with a presidential decree.
Which I wrote at three o'clock in the
morning
since, like, you know, it's 3:00 a.m.,
they give me policy control.
OK.
Doo doo doo doo doo, just make it legal
and of course, you know, if you've seen
Star Wars, this is a wonderful scene
where the emperor is there and he's like,
you know, but so is it legal?
I will make it legal.
So we ended up having to extend the
entire system, ended up having to create
a digital money ecosystem, which
is sort of hilarious.
So and this is the approach that was come
up with. So it's like, OK, so we have a
comparatively advanced
and I use that word very, very loosely
compared to the advanced mobile phone
based digital payment ecosystem.
Yeah, that's kind of sort of
true at the beginning was very true by
the end. We've got a good, solid local
social enterprise, these guys who are
able to pull it off.
And we have mobile phones.
All right. Mobile phones are really,
really cheap. It turns out that we bought
something like 10000
little sort of, you know,
cheap ten dollar phones.
And it's given away
like candy.
You know, it's like this is how you get
this is your mobile wallet, this is how
you get your money, have a phone.
And that kind of work,
there were terrible phones, they
I still hallucinate the ringtone from
these horrible little red phones
because there were everywhere and they
only had one ringtone and it drove me
nuts.
I you know, sometimes occasionally
I hear.
And.
How to work a miracle, so
right at this point, I'm I'm
not Sultan, can you see?
Can you see my slide?
Yes, I think so.
OK.
Please, God, please Skype, God, do not
stop us now, OK?
I sacrificed a vegan this morning
for that so that this would work.
All right.
OK, so what I'm going to do here
is I'm going to describe
the problems and then I'm going to get
Sultan and these guys here to actually
kind of like talk through a bit of the
solution.
So there was no work ID scheme.
We couldn't use fingerprints and
biometrics because
that was a cross contamination risk.
If you were ill and you swiped
fingerprint reader and left sweat all
over it and then somebody else came along
and swiped it, you would get Ebola and
die.
Not cool.
Most people, you know,
and they weren't really keen on that.
So we had to come
up with a way of enrolling people
biometrically into the scheme because
bear in mind, only one in five people can
read and write and most people don't know
what their birthday is and some people
don't know how to spell their names.
And some people might get
different people to write their name out
and it might come out differently, but
will be the same guy and then some people
share my Balfa is a disaster.
So these guys
so we used ODC to
make an enrollment application and we
use what was the opensource
facial recognition framework that you
ended up using?
It's called Open BAEO.
OK, can you describe it?
So it is
you know, it is built off,
you know, an excellent
computer vision library
called Open Sea.
So what we did
was, you know, we just
wrote a
tiny script on on
on top of or open about
that.
In essence, you know.
Compared to the
feature or pictures
that was brought back
from the field,
yeah, one of the things that we did
do is we had great fun.
But so they were they were
in the process of toiling in Sierra
Leone, this voter registration.
This voter registration program, which
we completely wrecked because we took
their voter registration machines and
dismantled them all to to make
out to make how to make our health
worker enrollment kit
here.
I think I think they're still very pissed
off with us for doing this.
It may be hard, but,
yeah, we wrecked a few million dollars
worth of work, whatever.
So data repository we used opening up
to anyone here on opening
up.
No.
Oh, no.
I mean, there were probably somewhere
in the
deep deep is quite interesting because
the terrible data and the rest of it
meant that these guys
had to duplicate everything.
So, you know,
they implemented this library and
it works, right?
Yeah.
Yes, it did work.
The problem was the quality
of the of the data.
You know, we we we see was extremely
poor. You know, they even
have to have data in which
has to on the individual's
names and sort of supply,
you know, and we had twenty
thousand cuts.
You know, there were no
there are not enough unique I.D.
things, things that you can use like
states,
etc..
So the numbers were absent
for most of
the the the the
the the.
So, you know, so but that meant we
could not use the traditional
way of de de de
de de de de de de
de de Katie.
We could not use maybe it's
just so we had to
research
and basically
a national library
and it is eviscerated
in the paper.
You know, it is it's actually quite
a quite interesting and
robust piece
of work.
If you're interested in machine learning,
it's what we're looking at because it's
really, really quick and it
basically saved our bacon.
It is it is implemented
in Python, so you're not going
to get in the blazing fast speeds.
But your speed was
not too much of
who will be more interested
in your
vehicle. And we and
we see shown signs of
that balance than
the speed, you know, we had
this was the
duplication was was been
on know nice.
So
we didn't care so much about housing
assistance as long as, you know,
there are results in
the morning for an analyst
to go through.
So so what we did
was, you know, if
we you know, the
algorithm would spit out
a score.
And and
what we did this go is above a
certain threshold.
You know, we build the
application would go go ahead.
And and activities are
very much the the the
duplicates and
and and if if it was
between if it was built
that it was sent
into like a beam
from which, you know, I
know it was sent to Robin
and, you know, the difference between the
two entities
was was displayed and then analysts
will now go through and say, OK, is this
is this is this long.
And then just to finish
the feedback from the other items
was moved to back into the
the skin.
And since we were used for
to do so, you know, it was
iterating training I
exactly what communications
people can't read and write and stuff.
So, you know, we, we ended up
using.
It seems dumb phones
we used, we ended up with interactive
voice recognition and not
a open source product and
you know, corruption is a way of life.
So, you know, we just use the
what do we end up using all the auditing
features?
Was that the where the auditing features
that were used?
Were those part of the opening up call
feature set?
Well, no, no.
In fact, a lot of
the in fact, at the
end of the day, you know what?
We we we the about the only
thing we we No.
One was the the
framework, the ability
to give it up for us
to know how the
user interface for you
will be.
We had to do to to
to build a lot of the
things, the
sound of the.
So we have to speed things up
because it's time to run out of time
here.
So the
government demanded that all the data be
hosted in Sierra Leone, which it turns
out is a terrible plan because there's no
power grid, no data centers, no
good sysadmins, no infrastructure, no
nothing. And I ended up just
pulling them into letting our host state
order Amazon.
It turns out that Amazon is actually
fantastic for this sort of thing because,
you know, instantly available, they got
all these tools and the rest of it.
I don't know if my friend Catherine is
here from from Amazon.
She. Yeah, there you go.
Yeah. Good work.
Keep it up like well
on Amazon for producing
excellent infrastructure, you know,
because without them we'd be fucked.
Deployment management.
And so really interesting, the actually
the speed of development is actually
quite well. The system was frightening in
the space of under a month.
How many comments did you guys put in?
So, you know,
firstly, we had to do
two to put together
the entire system in just under
two weeks.
And, you know, so immense,
immense, a lot of
time at the office.
It meant a lot of time and energy,
a lots of coffee
and so on.
And and and,
you know, you know, we we had to
to to to to respond to
to, number one, how the system
was being was being used
or the number to what was
what was happening on the
ground. So in the in the space
of and then and
no, you know, efficiency
in the in the list,
the management process that
existed. So in the in the space
of the months, for from
the time we deployed the
system, we had to make like we had to
we see on the.
Comments know 300
comments, you know, we had to listen to
the guy the we had we had
to to to to,
you know, the the
employment and and
and meant take
several times a day.
So, yeah.
A frightening pace of development to
the core system was built in two
weeks.
Which if you think about building a huge
ERP system in two weeks, that's amazing.
And no one in their right mind should
ever try to do that ever again.
No, no, no, no, no, I
to do that.
That's not software development.
That's unsafe at any speed, right?
It is. It is.
I still have some symptoms
of some health concerns
taking too much caffeine
for like three days without
sleep, yet three days of coding
without God.
And. Yeah, and it works.
That's the amazing code.
It turns out that coding for your life.
Really.
Open source software restored faith
in the ability of the government and
systems to be run, honestly,
you can't put a price on that.
People were paid on time.
100 percent of the time
for the first time in Sierra Leone's
entire history.
But as Frances and Howard will tell you,
a business process, development
implementation is much harder than
technology in these contacts,
because what these guys did was they
organized teams to actually on
motorcycles to go and register every
single health care worker in hundreds of
facilities across the country over no
paved roads,
oftentimes in the face of intense,
like intense resistance.
There were car crashes.
People nearly died.
And, you know, these guys here are
actually organizational geniuses and they
actually deserve at least as much of
credit, if not more credit than than
than certainly me and the rest of the
foreigners. So please give it up for
Harold and Frances.
And lastly, whether you are.
Here are some results,
so you'll see that Guiney, our program,
kind of failed Liberia program
kind of failed Sierra Leone number of
Ebola response workers paid on time every
time 21000 and
58 total number of workers
in the country. The remainder were paid
by NGOs.
Twenty seven thousand.
The total that we managed to manage
successfully, 100 percent on the one was
on digital money that were paid
flawlessly, 100 percent.
We even sent some people to the
anti-corruption commission.
People now know that
if there is a system there,
it works and it is possible
to be honest and.
There are strong incentives, to be
honest, and
Sierra Leone owes a debt
to these guys for building a system
that actually restored people's faith
in the ability of that system
to deliver.
And yet we want
really and you know,
and so here's some good news
out of today.
The Ebola epidemic worldwide is
over.
And that calls for a
little Fonzarelli guys
like
this,
if you like, we just want to say
something to the people and I know that's
pretty much I mean, in general,
nobody want to give it up for the
little guys.
I don't know if you see the video
idealize
no TV, no.
What do you see?
Be so much fun to
watch me.
Now, watch me,
watch me.
Now, much needs
to
be done by subpoena
because no
one wants her
mama.
Bye bye.
I thank God that he's gone in
Seattle
Grace.
Na na na.
All the fishermen
realize how
much you have to watch and right
to protect yourself.
A huge round of applause
because without you guys out here,
your development effort, none of this is
possible.
They put in the hard work to save my
country. You made it possible for.
And now right now, he's going to land on
the main line,
CNN, the
most trusted whatsoever
and doing it
in humanitarian aid or
development.
You can always get hold of me or Saltum
and we'll we'll always happy to talk.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
And that's me, take
a picture of the slide I'll post,
I'll get the slides posted somewhere
or other.
And, you know, you can ask whatever
questions you want, including the Dance
of Hope, including the dance.
Thank you, guys.
Also offshores.
I mean, we have five minutes.
We have five minutes for questions.
So please, anyone who have questions,
proceed to one of the mikes on the right
or the left side.
So five minutes ago.
So I will start with the lady
to microphone three.
Please proceed.
I'm honored. But that's OK.
Thanks for your work.
But I'm going to break the Joe.
No, thanks for your talk.
I found it in several ways racist.
And I wanted it to be said,
OK, OK.
All right, that's fine.
I'll take it from.
Yeah, OK.
Please, so I would like to know,
given the work
you have done, what is the legacy that
has remained now that the Ebola epidemic
is over, the systems that were built
remain.
So,
yeah, so at
this point, if I can just just come in
to answer the question.
So so what's happening now is the
the date the date
has been transitioned over to the
minister of health about 30
minutes or so before this.
I was in the meeting
with representatives from the ministry
and even representatives from from
from four from E Health since
they are the ICRC
partners of the Ministry
of Health.
So so so the infrastructure
is still very much
in place.
They're finding new ways to
to, you know, to to
utilize it.
OK, great.
Next, next one.
Number four. And so
this is all kind of an evil question
because after all, it was Ebola.
How many people died?
But do you think that maybe
this crisis was in some
way a good thing?
Because we have no infrastructure in
Sierra Leone and things are better
than before?
Well, in terms
of in terms of it's been been
better than before, I would not say
it is.
But at least we now,
you know, we understand what should
be done.
And I'm guessing, as you know, the
authorities understand how to
to to to to respond better
if they have something like this happen.
Things like this happen here on a small
scale. You know, every almost a week
there are measles breakouts,
there are, you know, the
DNC breakouts and
so on. And now I think, you know, the
infrastructure to rapidly
respond to these things
is that you don't want something from
anybody. Then there are
the good aspects, the good lessons
that can be realized.
I just hope it's it's been the lines
in our case.
Thank you.
Anybody else, the person who
I guess is more of a more
of a business question, but with so many
interested parties, you mentioned that
hope being a conglomeration of 30
plus NGOs under
the IMF, World Bank,
etc, etc.,
having to move so quickly.
What sort of reporting did you have to
do? Did you have to get things cleared?
You mentioned, you know, millions of
dollars coming in every week.
That's a lot of money.
And people usually like to have some sort
of standard on that.
Yeah. So I can I can answer that.
So there was a lot of
reporting
and honestly, to get the systems
developed at the right kind of speed
and at the right kind of pace,
what ended up happening was that many
of the systems and checks
and balances and controls
were they weren't
bypassed.
They ended up being abbreviated because,
for example,
any any job that's over about
100 thousand dollars, you're supposed to
have competitive bids.
If you're talking about trying to build
an enterprise ERP in, like,
you know, three weeks, that there's
simply no time to do that.
So what ended up happening was that we
told Sultan and the guys from audit labs,
you go ahead and start developing all of
this stuff because it has to be deployed
right now.
We will go and manipulate the system
to enable that
to happen.
And in the meantime, the government,
World Bank, IMF and the rest of it will
work through the finances to prime
the pump so that when the system is ready
to be deployed, the money
is there.
Everything collapsed together.
I mean, this is a real emergency, the one
other important thing is probably worth
saying is that there was no template
for this sort of thing.
Nobody knew how to do it.
Nobody knew how to manage it.
And in many cases, we had to invent
everything on the spot.
A massive credit is due to
Sultan and his guys and
the teams on the ground there because
they had to invent the business process,
they had to invent the management on
the spot.
That even here, that would be an
impossible challenge.
Thank you.
I think and I don't really care if you
all think I'm horribly racist or
whatever, because, you know, like I
have a huge amount of respect for these
guys. They save the nation.
Yeah.
Signal of hope.
Thank you so much. I think we can wrap it
up for now.
Run out of time for questions.
Yeah, and for once more, if I may, I'll
be in the smoking lounge.
Yeah.