Non-governmental organisations are increasingly looking for qualified IT staff willing to volunteer in developing countries, writes John Collins.

Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates may be the richest man in the world with a net worth of $50 billion (€40.5 billion) according to the Forbes rich list, but he is also one of the most charitable. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is committed to donating $29.1 billion to good causes around the world ranging from Aids education in Africa to funding libraries in US public schools. In general, however, the technology industry is not known for its philanthropy - particularly given the vast sums of wealth that it has generated.

But technology has a huge role to play in the process of effectively delivering aid on the ground in developing countries, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are increasingly looking for qualified IT staff willing to volunteer overseas.

The pay is tiny or non-existent, the working environment is challenging and the job is often mundane. However, two Irish men who recently supported IT on the ground for aid agencies in Sudan found the experience extremely rewarding.

After qualifying from the University of Limerick in the mid-1990s Neal McCarthy joined Vision Consulting, the Irish IT consultancy which works with clients around the globe. McCarthy was hit with a severe case of wanderlust and left Vision to become an independent contractor which gave him the lifestyle and the salary to backpack around the world in his own time. But travelling in developing countries from Laos to Cuba he began, by his own admission, to "develop a social conscience".

"My epiphany happened in Guatemala," says McCarthy. "I was looking to do some volunteer work and considered taking a job planting trees. But then I thought if I was serious about this I could go to London, get an IT contract and pay them to get 200 people to plant trees." When he returned home McCarthy decided there must be a niche that he could exploit by offering his IT skills to NGOs. He signed up for a Masters in development studies at UCD in order to build up more knowledge of the sector.

"In the IT world they talk about having domain knowledge of the sector you are selling into, like banking," says McCarthy. "For me it was all about getting domain knowledge."

McCarthy's chance to put his skills into practice in the field came at the end of last year when he landed a six-month contract as Goal's IT officer in Sudan.

One of the biggest challenges he faced was simply one of geography - Sudan may be just one country in Africa but it is the size of western Europe. Goal employs more than 650 people in the country, of which about 120 use PCs. Factors like heat, dust and the regulatory environment make supporting IT on the ground a challenging task.

Barry Roche, who has worked in Concern's IT department in Dublin for the last two-and-a-half years, also faced challenges when he went to Sudan in 2004 to establish their IT infrastructure in order to respond to the impending crisis. "Aid staff live and die by their e-mail nowadays," says Roche, underlying the importance of communications and IT on the ground.

"They really use it to keep track of the numbers, particularly the food aid requirements. You just can't get those figures wrong. Once the ball is rolling and you've got airlifts organised it's very hard to change it." Technology is essential to provide feedback to donors and to capitalise on PR opportunities, he says. With e-mail, a picture taken in Sudan today can be on a poster in Ireland days later.

All satellite communications equipment in Sudan has to be licensed by the local department of communications which drives up the cost. A VSAT (satellite transceiver) system, which can provide high-speed internet connectivity, costs about $4,000 in Kenya but costs $14,000 in Sudan and requires persistent lobbying to be licensed.

As part of his lobbying, Roche had to negotiate with a Sudanese general. "I was sitting there wondering, what am I doing here," says Roche. "People forget that Sudan is not a democracy and the military are basically pulling the strings. Whatever you say about the merits of competition, at least it means you have somewhere else to go."

Even when field staff are equipped with satellite modems they are far from ideal due to the low levels of bandwidth they provide. Goal has signed up for a service from US company UUPlus whose software allows e-mail to be reliably routed over slow connections such as satellite phones.

Even for office-based staff using Sudatel, the state telco, there were challenges, McCarthy says. Due to the lax approach to internet security about a third of the IP addresses assigned to dial-up customers are blacklisted due to the number of viruses that have emanated from them.

McCarthy and Roche agree that the main aim of the IT systems deployed in developing countries is to keep it as simple but as robust as possible. Both were faced with infrastructure that wouldn't even be considered for business use at home when they arrived in the country.

"When you work in IT in the developed world there is a baseline of infrastructure that is given," says McCarthy. "What we think of as simple things like a reliable power supply cannot be taken for granted."

Language barriers can also be a problem in Sudan. Roche found that his "20 words of Arabic" were not much use when he was left on his own with a local electrician trying to install equipment. No matter what his request the refrain from the local workmen was always "no problem" - in Arabic of course.

Given the unique challenges of working in the field and the low pay compared to an IT job in the developed world, it's not a surprise that Roche says Concern always has difficulty recruiting suitably qualified IT staff, and he urges any techies who think they might be interested to contact Concern.

Having completed his contract McCarthy realises that his skills are not in frontline support. He is now considering how his experience in knowledge management and systems development could be provided to other NGOs. In particular he wants to explore how lower cost open source solutions could be deployed in the field. "I would really love to be able to go back to Sudan in a few years time with open source solutions that could really help make a difference," says McCarthy.