Last day in Nigeria! A short summary
By Selena Deckelmann
July 10, 2009
Today is my last day in Nigeria. I hop in a car in a couple hours and head off to visit the university in Akure, and then I will be driving to Lagos to catch a plane home.
My students are pictured above. We covered a great deal of material this week. They learned about the PostgreSQL project, basic database administration, how to develop a schema from forms and application requirements, how to write procedural code inside the database, and how to use the pgAdmin and psql interfaces.
I learned about how many of the officials and IT workers I met (both in the class and outside of it), had worked very hard on the court case that led to the change in government in Ondo State three months ago. There had been systematic election fraud, and they were able to prove it in court using some clever IT and forensic analysis work. The members of SITEDEC believe very strongly in the importance of IT in increasing government accountability and transparency, a belief re-affirmed by their recent successes.
I’m looking forward to hearing about how the work progresses on their census and voter registration databases. Of course, I want to come back to Nigeria. It’s a beautiful country, and I didn’t have nearly enough time here to appreciate it.
Comments