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.” The team eventually integrated SQLite, a serverless SQL database engine that stores an entire database in a single standard file. This allowed the app to store data locally and upload it when the collectors returned to an area with a stable connection.
But by then, they had lost weeks of work and had to return to the field to collect the data again. For Adeniyi, the episode captured a problem he has encountered repeatedly in technology: a system can work exactly as it was designed and still fail the people who are meant to use it. “These things are different on the ground,” he says.
Collecting farm-level data in Saminaka, Lere Local Government Area, Kaduna State, one household at a time. Image Source: Kayode Adeniyi From Architecture to Geography As a child growing up in Ado Ekiti, the capital of Ekiti State in southwestern Nigeria, Adeniyi wanted to become an architect. New buildings in the city made him