Economic and Community Development in Canar, Ecuador.
On almost any day of the week, you can find Juan Rodrigo and his wife Sara Estela behind the counter in their small photo shop in Cañar, Ecuador, a humble village of about 10,000 mestizo and indigenous people located at about 10,000 feet in the Andes Mountains of southern Ecuador. It’s a modest shop, with room only for about five or six customers at a time. The counters and shelves behind them are crammed with a variety of photographic and other supplies – small, inexpensive cameras, transistor radios, toys, even equipment for the local passion, futbol (soccer).
The busiest days at the photo shop are on Sundays, when church services and street market day coincide, bringing people from the surrounding hills into town. Sundays are normally a day off for most people in the area, so it’s a good day to take care of errands. Since many Cañaris do not have phones, they depend on word of mouth for news and information about their community and the people in it.
Juan started his photography business with a little training from a visiting photographer, a simple 35mm camera and a $20 loan for film. By taking photos of local futbol and volleyball teams at weekend tournaments, then selling the prints and enlargements, Juan and Sara have gradually built-up their business to its current levels – which include not only the shop, but a portrait studio and video services as well – theirs is one of the few indigenous-owned shops in the village that is thriving.
Their shop is also one of four photography studios in Cañar. However, none of these shops has a photo processing lab. So, even now, with a thriving business, Juan needs to take the rolls of film for development to Azogues, a one hour bus ride from Cañar. Other studio owners also need to do the same thing. It’s a second round of bus trips if customers want enlargements or duplicates.
Technology Adoption and Economic Success
Juan and Sara - in their photo shop with customers
Sara and Juan have a dream. When we first met them, they expressed the hope of one day owning a photo processing lab. Automatic photo processing machines cost (US) $15,000 and up, require considerable space, chemicals, and constant maintenance to operate. With this equipment they would like to provide a place where more people can come and get their pictures developed in town to generate more local business.
“I would be the only one in this valley to have such a lab,” says Jose. “People would come from the other villages to my shop, rather than make the bus drive to Azogues or Cuenca.”
The rapid adoption and spread of digital photography has the potential to offer Juan a future that he had never anticipated but now eagerly awaits. With an investment amounting to a fraction of the cost of a photo processing lab (though still significant by local standards) Juan and Sara could use digital cameras and PC technology to revolutionize photography in their village and in surrounding areas.
With this dream, Juan and Sara exemplify a common aspiration and recognizable motivation lying at the heart of technology adoption in the developing world – the chance for a better life, the chance for economic opportunity. The theme has become a familiar one in our studies.
In the state of Tamil Nadu, in southern India, local entrepreneur Abdual Razaak has purchased and licensed a kiosk at which his fellow villagers can access email, health care information, government ministry services such as caste certificates, and even have their crops diagnosed by a local community college agriculture department. Abdual Razaak, the first member of his family to complete a high school education, has been so successful with this kiosk that he plans to open two more in nearby villages. Razaak is part of a network of such kiosk operators, organized by the Indian firm N-logue.
In Bangladesh, the Village Phone project run by the Grameen* Foundation has brought telephones and economic opportunity to roughly 10,000 villages. The concept is simple: Using the Grameen lending model of micro-credit, local women entrepreneurs are provided a loan to invest in a cellular phone, which they can then provide as a service to their fellow villagers at a nominal charge – a service where none before had existed. This scheme has enabled the women who operate the phones to move from stifling poverty to an income that is roughly double the per capita annual income of Bangladesh.
Keeping it Local
Near Inga Pirca - Countryside near Juan and Sara's village
But economic advancement is not the sole motivation underlying Juan Miguel and Sara Estela’s efforts. In fact, while many of his compatriots have left the country seeking work overseas (an estimated one million undocumented Ecuadorians live in the New York metropolitan area alone – a huge portion of the country’s roughly twelve million people) Juan has purposely remained behind, at home, with the goal of bettering his community through his own entrepreneurial efforts.
The photography shop, which is located near the commercial heart of the village, doubles as a de facto community center for Los Chaskis, the organization founded by Juan Miguel and his fellow indigenous Cañari people. The studio in back serves as a rehearsal room for Juan and his band-mates. They perform traditional Cañari music, Jose’s first real love, at parties, wedding celebrations, and other events. They have even undertaken the creation of a CD. His band is part of a larger movement to recapture local traditions, including indigenous healing practices, dances, and religious and festival customs.
With digital technology, Juan would do his own entire photo developing. His customers could pay only for the prints they wanted, saving precious dollars. And it could all be done in his shop. Jose’s business, his family, his band-mates, and his community could make use of digital photography and computing technologies. Juan and local families could use digital technology to send and receive pictures from family and friends who are living abroad. The PC could also be a resource for Jose’s Los Chaskis band to market their music and organize and communicate with other community-based groups from the region.
The PC, as they see it, would fit in with the goals of knowledge, empowerment and cultural preservation that lie at the heart of their activism and their entrepreneurism. “For us, it is not about getting rich, it is about providing a better way of life for ourselves and our people,” Juan told us. “We see opportunities with the computer. We could distribute our music on the Internet. We could use the PC to catalogue traditional farming practices and medicines. For me, all this is tied in with the goal of helping our people.”
Juan Chuma, cousin of Juan Rodrigo, agrees. He is one of the few members of the Cañari community to receive a university education, and the only one to actually have a PC in his possession (a rented PC, which he used to write his college thesis). Juan Chuma used the PC to document the traditional agricultural practices of his villagers. His goal is to combine the best of traditional farming methods with appropriate technological innovations to produce a demonstration farm in his village. “The technology is useful for listing what people are doing on their farms,” he says. "Ultimately I want to be able to combine technology with the technology of our people, the indigenous technology."
Opportunities and Hurdles
There are a few implications of the attitudes and approach to technology in Cañar worth noting. First, note that computing technology is currently a scarce resource. The value that a connected PC would bring to the community is recognized as something more than just a chance for economic gain. Like people in many communities, Juan Miguel Acero wants to leverage that power to help his community and his people. This is a pattern we have noted in many other similar situation, including, for instance, Santiago, where computing was regarded as much as a tool for social capital as it was for individual economic opportunity.
Second, it was clear that the "beige box" PC is a poor fit for this community, for a variety of reasons.
Infrastructure: Conditions in this part of Ecuador are rugged. Water service is turned off at night. Electricity is expensive and randomly unavailable. Phone lines are few and phone calls out from the village are expensive. Juan and Sara's studio is dusty and unheated. And the studio itself is probably one of the BEST suited places for a PC of all the spaces that the locals inhabit on a regular basis.
Use environments: Many of the applications the people of Cañar discussed, for instance, cataloguing information about indigenous plants used for healing ceremonies, or agricultural practices, require gathering of information while out literally in the fields, not sitting at a desk. While advances in interconnectivity and ease of use for consumer electronics and PC's certainly stand to improve in the coming years, it remains uncertain how well the array of digital cameras, video, or other tools will aid in the collection of field information and the organization of it on the PC. Maybe a better strategy is to allow people to do all their "computing" (gathering and organizing media) on a single device while "in the field."
Software: Throughout Latin America users and technologists alike lamented the lack of Spanish or indigenous language software in any kind of variety of applications. Programming and localizing are still heavily skill intensive tasks, beyond the reach of local communities such as this one to custom design the kind of applications they would most like to have. A limited supply of useful software is a serious bottleneck to technology adoption in the developing world.
Support: In the United States, we take for granted the large networks of informal technical support that are routinely needed to keep technology up and running. Everyone has a nephew, son or daughter, kid next door who's into games, or maybe just a close friend from a high tech company who can be called on in a pinch to troubleshoot or otherwise get us out of a jam on the PC. In Cañar, there are may be a handful of computers. No one works with them regularly enough to do this kind of informal support. This basic lack of technical expertise is true in many developing communities.
