A few weeks ago, RURA, Rwanda's Utilities Regulatory Agency, announced the new procedures for acquiring short codes in the country.  Short codes are just that, short (four digit for our purposes) phone numbers which allow companies and organizations to build services which are more easily accessible to the general public.  Instead of having to dial a 10 digit number, a user can instead use a shorter four digit number.

Short codes also serve the purpose of allowing services to be deployed across carriers.  To build a reliable SMS service, such as the ones Nyaruka builds, you need to integrate with the carrier's SMSC.  Each carrier has it's own SMSC, and that's where SMS'es get routed on their network, or alternatively crosses to another network.  If you want to build an SMS service that works well on all networks, you need to integrate with each of these, and you need a shortcode to make it easy for the customer to access them all.

Old Procedures

In Rwanda thus far, acquiring short codes has been a pretty easy affair.  You just put in a request to RURA for a new shortcode, along with your intended use and a week or two later they reserve a new four digit number for you.  This worked but posed some problems, both for us as customers of RURA and for RURA themselves.  

For RURA, because short codes had no cost to them, there wasn't much incentive for companies to use them wisely, or even wait until they had a business plan to acquire them.  Worse yet, with no maintenance fee, short codes would often lay stagnant, unused, but still reserved and unavailable to use.  That's a real problem when there are only 10,000 short codes available.

For companies, RURA didn't have any procedures for us to pick our own short codes.  Instead, you would include seven or eight different short codes you'd be happy with in your request, but more often than not you were just assigned a random shortcode.  Not a great outcome if you are trying to build a consumer facing service.

New Procedures

The new procedures that RURA announced should go a long way towards solving both of these issues.  But before getting into that, I must first commend RURA for making both the presentation and the application form easily available on their site, this is great to see and shows a real willingness to operate openly.  Even more importantly, I was also really impressed with how they presented the new plan, inviting all the stakeholders to a meeting and allowing for lots of feedback and discussion.  Very well done.

The main change, as expected, are that short codes will no longer be free, but instead require a yearly maintenance fee.  This is a good change, as it now rightly discourages squatters from taking over short codes.  In addition, it now means that you will be able to request a specific short code and if free, receive it.

The new fee structure is 25,000 RWFs as an application fee, then either a $200 USD or $1,000 USD yearly maintenance fee for the short code, depending on what category it falls in.  $200 short codes are reserved for what RURA calls "Customer Information Services" and here I think they will run into trouble, as it is not immediately clear what falls under that category.

Although not in the slides, further discussion with RURA at the meeting leads us to believe that RURA is reserving the $200 fee for short codes which are less desirable and used for non-profit purposes.  But again, this is a hard thing to define, there is no bright line rule that works well, especially as more and more SMS services are trying to support their programs by deploying premium or normal rated SMS services.

Our Comments

Although we are fine with the plan as presented, I think a better option would have been to just define different classes of short codes based on their desirability, and charge differently based on those, regardless of purpose.  For example, RURA could have said any short code with only one digit, say: "1111" would be $2,000 a year, those with two pairs or consecutive digits, say: "1234" or "2020" would be $1,000 a year.  Those with two different digits, say "1112" would be $500, and all others would be $200.  

That kind of fee structure would allow small businesses to still acquire short codes at reasonable prices when first starting up, and later graduate to a nicer shortcode.  It also removes the very subjective measure of what is a "Customer Information Service" and instead makes the pricing completely transparent, which is always a good thing.

But even if it isn't quite perfect in our view, the new procedure is much better than before, and having a yearly maintenance fee should go a long way towards freeing up desirable short codes which aren't in active use.

Online Registration

One of the things that was both good and disheartening to hear was that RURA was also planning to launch an online registration system for short codes.  This is great news, as it is one thing that really doesn't work well currently.  In order to be able to pick a short code, you really want an up to date website which lists all the short codes already taken, letting you weigh the pros and cons of those still available.  So having an online database and registration form is a huge step towards making the process both streamlined and more useful for customers.

The disappointment comes in that Nyaruka built such a system specifically for RURA and presented it to them back in May of this year.  We had experienced a lot of the pains in the old paper procedure for short code registration, so we decided to build something better.  Emile spent about a month thinking through the problem and building the site, and we presented it to RURA, offering it for free save for any further customizations and a small hosting fee.

RURA seems to have decided to go their own way on this, as is certainly their right, but it is a bit disheartening to see.  We haven't seen the system that RURA itself will deploy, but I hope it does a better job than ours, and I hope it launches before the November 30th deadline for applications for existing shortcodes.  

Speaking of which, here's the demo video we put together for that system.  Built, designed, and coded in Rwanda by a Rwandan.  Even if it never gets used, I'm proud of the work Emile did in thinking through the problem and implementing it.

We recently decided to hire an intern at Nyaruka.  We thought it might be a nice way to give back to the community, to help a student along for a few months, give them a taste of working at a software company.  The internship periods were starting soon, so we quickly put together an application form and started advertising for applicants.

The response was excellent.  In less than a week, we got over 50 applicants from various universities.  Our application was mostly focused on coding questions, very simple things like writing a function to return whether a number is odd or even and simple string manipulations.  We are strong believers that coding ability comes first, far before degrees or certificates, so our focus was there.

The applications we got back were varied.  Some obviously cheated on their answers, clearly copy/pasting from somewhere on the internet despite our warnings not to use external references.  Others gave it their best shot, honestly trying but getting few answers correct.  But about eight applicants looked promising, and from those we picked the four which we thought did the best and asked them to come in for a follow up interview.

And here we learned just how badly the Rwandan universities are failing them.

Our interview question for the applicants was a simple one: given a string such as "AABAB", return the string with all consecutive duplicate letters removed, ergo: "ABAB".  This is the type of problem one might be given as a first assignment in Computer Science, something that uses only the most basic fundamentals and constructs.  But our applicants struggled with it, far more than is reasonable.

Now keep in mind that although this is an internship, all these students were three, four, or even five years into their Computer Science programs.  By now they should have a reasonable grasp of programming, debugging etc..  If asked they will tell you their curriculum includes the same titles that any Western CS program might have, Operating Systems, Algorithms etc.. but despite their impressive names, it is clear the universities aren't teaching their students much at all.

This angers me.

It makes me mad at the professors teaching courses they aren't qualified to teach and mad at the universities charging students in both time and money and yet not fulfilling their promise.

The problem stems to their methods in teaching Computer Science.  Universities here are still teaching their students using pen and paper, teaching from books instead of computer screens, teaching by lecturing instead of by doing.  That simply does not work for this field, you cannot learn how to program by reading a book.

Computer Science isn't unique in this respect, but sometimes this is hard for people who aren't coders to understand, so an analogy might help.

Imagine you take a course to learn how to swim.  Not just a short course, but a dedicated university program on swimming.  Over the course of years, you attend classes where you learn the names and characteristics of various bodies of water you can swim in.  You listen to lectures about buoyancy, take exams on rip tides, diagram the various swimming strokes.  Your professors, while unable to swim themselves, assure you that they have also completed this certification and have read many books on the subject.  So after years of study, years of applying yourself according to the plans of the university and hours upon hours in the classroom, you graduate with your certificate.

To celebrate, you go to the beach, where you quickly drown.  Because, in truth, despite your years of studying, you have no idea how to swim.  You've never been in the water.

This is the state of Computer Science in Rwanda (and really the region in general).  Despite impressive graduation numbers, despite the glowing press, despite the undisputed progress, there is a shocking failure to actually teach any of the required skills to be a programmer.

This must stop.  This must change if Rwanda is at all serious about trying to build an IT sector.

The universities must take a hard look at their professors and their curriculums and redesign them to be more effective.  There isn't a huge pool of qualified professors to draw upon, but that doesn't make it hopeless.  Both MIT and Stanford, provide many of their class materials online.  Not only the lecture notes and assignment, but videos of the lectures themselves.  Why not build courses around these?  I would guess that small groups of students assigned to work through these courses together would learn far more than they are now.

To give you an idea, this single MIT course: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, would provide an understanding of CS fundamentals that far exceeds what is taught in the four year programs at the Rwandan universities.  A single course!  Why can't KIST professors help students through such a course, playing the video lectures, working through the assignments with the students?  Why isn't this a model that is adopted?

My advice to anybody in Rwanda who wants to learn Computer Science is this: Don't attend University.

Instead, invest the money in a laptop and a modem.  Download and start working your way through the MIT course, find friends to do it with, help each other along.  Do the assignments, write the code.  It will be hard at times, you will struggle, but it is the only way to learn.  When you do complete that course, which should take less than a year, you will have skills that far exceed any of your colleagues who attended University.  And with those skills you'll be able to find work doing real programming.  As a matter of fact, come to us and show us you did the work, and we'll help you along, certificate or not.

To the Rwandan Government, I plead with you to get serious and start talking to people already here on how you can do better.  Some programs already exist which are successfully training students, PIH's Medical Informatics Course being the prime example.  But their scale is far too small, their focus too specific.  Start finding ways of starting similar programs or scaling the successful ones up.   Look at things like Nairobi's iHub as inspiration on how to build the space and community which can help foster an IT community.  What if Kigali had an iHub where students could come and work through the MIT course together?  Imagine the possibilities if you encouraged a community of students and professionals alike to collaborate in learning?

None of this is expensive, none of this is hard, but the current institutions are failing their students, and in turn, their country in accomplishing Rwanda's goal of building an IT sector.  The first step is admitting that what is being done is not working, that the current graduates are not qualified, that the education system is failing them.

Once we can admit that, then we can all work together to do a better job.  

We're here because we believe in that dream and because we want to help, so are many others.  Let's work together to make it happen.