Name: Jean-Paul Bauer
Publish Date: 06 March 2006

Country: India

As promised earlier in November 2005 issue of i4d, we are providing here the interview of Jean-Paul Bauer, one of the winners of Youth and ICT Award, 2005. Mr Bauer is currently IT Director of IkamvaYouth and technology consultant to bridges.org (an international ICT policy NGO). IkamvaYouth is a by-youth, for-youth, non-profit organisation based at the Nazeema Isaacs library in Khayelitsha, Cape Town that aims to broaden the post-school opportunities of disadvantaged youth in Khayelitsha. It seeks to address grass - root level problems and to build e-Literacy and communication skills enabled by ICTs. In IkamvaYouth, he has been central to the development of the IT set-up currently in place. He has also played a crucial role in managing the project.

What are main focus of your organisation?
IkamvaYouth aims to broaden the post-school opportunities of disadvantaged youth in Khayalitsha. It does so by implementing the following three core programmes:

• Computer literacy training for academic support, job skills, and career guidance,
• Supplementary Tutoring to complement the schooling system,
• Mentor programme ensuring that each member of IkamvaYouth has a plan (for study/internship/learnership/job/entrepreneurship opportunity) for the year following their matriculation.

Which focus of your organisational activities is/are most interesting to you?
I am interested in finding innovative ways for using technology to support IkamvaYouth in achieving its ambitious aims. I believe that there are many processes on the administrative side of IkamvaYouth that can benefit from the appropriate use of ICTs. One of the biggest challenges is how to achieve this on a shoe string budget. However, more interestingly I enjoy it when I can help our learners use ICTs to give them a voice, and, thereby giving them confidence in them selves. An example of this is helping one of our learners to publish their poems on our website.

In which activities you would like to involve yourself more for development of society?
I am interested in exploring how technology can be used to build virtual communities that focus on raising the social awareness of the participants with respect to each other and their environment.

What are the main inspiring factors behind your recent success?
First and foremost the absolute dedication of our volunteers and learners to IkamvaYouth. There are also more personal moments, like when I realise just how much one of our learners has developed and grown by being a part of IkamvaYouth. If you are given a task to inspire the youth for the betterment of the society and surroundings, how would you like to proceed towards that goal?

I think one of the primary tasks in achieving this goal would be to make the youth conscious of their surroundings. This consciousness should not be confined to the negative effects and symptoms of our society, but should also include the positive movements taking place in our society. Most importantly, we need to start focusing on solutions to the problems and not on the problems themselves, and how each individual can contribute to the solutions.

Do you think that ICT is a right way to achieve the Millennium Development Goals? If so, why?
I don't think that ICTs are by themselves a good driver for development, as needs such as primary health care and education are more pressing problems than access to ICT. I do however think that ICT's are an excellent support to well thought-out and designed development programmes, be they in the health, education or infrastructure development sectors.

I view ICTs primarily as being a magnifier of endeavours. If the endeavours are designed badly from the beginning, no amount of ICT is going to convert failure into success, they will more likely just accelerate the failure.

The converse is however also true. That is, a well defined and managed project's success can be amplified through the use of ICT.

Have you ever involved yourself into any ICT project? If so, can you please share some experiences of it in brief?
I have recently been involved in an attempt to bring the Internet to a location that does not have any direct Internet connectivity. We overcame this potential insurmountable obstacle by using a caching technology that gave the location a virtual, albeit very small subset of the Internet.

This solution was only considered after failing to find sponsorship for an Internet connection to the site. This has taught me that one should always look for the non-obvious solutions before giving up on an attempt to use ICTs in development projects.