Using the web to help communties in tension

Let me give you bit of background as to why this topic is of such importance to me. I grew up in one of the poorer, gangster ridden areas in Cape Town called Mitchell's Plain. Drugs and gangerism was the order of the day and school was but a mere after thought. I consider myself one of the lucky ones to have taken the bad and used as a positive step to going through the education system and through college. Now that I am at a point where I can contribute back to the community that I grew up in, I want to use the expertise as a software developer/web guru over the past few years.

Although I have moved out of the area I still have friends and family that is still stuck in the cycle of poverty and drug, which often the results in crime. Some questions needs to be asked:

• what is the difference between people who make it out and those who dont?
• what is the support structures that was in place to help the youngsters to make it?
• is there any help available?
• is there any mentors?

The last question is very important for me. One has to know what was 'out there' or what was on the other side of the fence. The people in these communities often don't often see the benefits in the completing school. There is always this sense of survival. The idea of having to go to school for a few years is often overridden by the need to have an income, albeit from work, crime or selling drugs. The idea of going to college is then become a laughable after thought. With mentoring these communities have something or someone to look up to or to be encourage to them. What these communities need is proper mentors, people you went through similar circumstances and beat it. People who had the will and the vision to persevere.

My focus therefore is how can we mentor these communities using technology? The idea I have is to help these communities using some technologies that is cheap, convenient and which is already being used by most of them.

There is still a very big gap in the digital divide. Most of our people haven't even had access to a computer let alone the internet. For reason still unbeknown to us at this time the cost of bandwidth is still a big issue in Africa. This is no different in the South Africa. The lack of computer literacy skills as a big role to play as well but the this has a direct relation to the literacy level in general.

Even though the litercy level are low and we have bandwidth issues, our people are still communicating. There are no stats yet, but it seems these people communicate more than people that have computers are the mean communicate via email, internet, chat, forum etc. The preferred tools that this people are using are mobile phones. The reasons for this is that cell phones are relatively cheap and convenient and very easy to use. Almost everyone has a cellphone, even unemployed persons.

Some of the struggles that these communities face are drug addiction, gangster ism, poverty, unemployment but to name a few. The focus of my master's thesis will be to focus on one of the areas that the communities are struggling with and apply a technology solution that is cheap and that the users are already familiar with

There are three components to that needs to be focused on:

1. The communities base: the people that needs counseling
   
2. The tools: this includes mobile phones, software and the web
3. The mentors/counselors: the people who will provide the counseling to the communities using the tools