In 2021, Kayode Adeniyi built a data collection app for Nigeria’s Ministry of Education to gather information on libraries across several states, from their facilities to the resources they held. His team tested the app, deployed it to the field, and waited for the data to come in.
Then the complaints started.
Data collectors in northern Nigeria were filling out the forms, but poor internet connectivity meant much of the information never made it to the database. Work that had been completed in the field was disappearing before the team could use it.
“We were building as if all the data collectors were in Garki or Wuse, where we had a good internet connection,” Adeniyi says. “If we actually scoped where we were designing this app for initially and we knew that there’s no internet there, we would have done it differently.”
Originally published by TechCabal.