Barrio Malawi - development

Case Study: Overcoming the Digital Divide in Malawi

jon — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 12:04:20 -0500

Our last week in Malawi, and there is one final success story to report! It seems the internet connectivity will be coming this year to the development offices of the CCAP church (Church of Central Africa Presbyterian) in Ekwendeni (just 15km north of Mzuzu). I am very excited. Some of the most effective aide offices in all of Malawi are based in Ekwendeni and run by the CCAP church there. Decent internet connectivity is only going to increase the productivity of people who are already doing some of the most effective development work in Malawi: fighting the spread of AIDS, opening clean water sources, treating sickness, and creating education and job opportunities for Malawians.

The manner in which the offices and organizations of Ekwendeni were able to "bridge the Digtial Divide" and obtain internet connectivity is fascinating and, I think, useful for others in remote parts of the world who are interested in connecting. There are three steps to achieving connectivity off the main communications grid:

Resource Pooling
Often connectivity options are only accessible if a number of people and organizations pool their financial resources together. In the case of Ekwendeni in Malawi, the CCAP church offices there were each asked how much per month they could contribute to internet connectivity per month and front for installation costs at their office.

Once the budget was finalized various ISPs in the capital city Lilongwe were approached with the budgets and asked to submit competitive proposals for providing as much bandwidth as possible given the budget constraints of the CCAP offices. Also companies were asked to provide plans for sharing the connection among the various offices once internet connectivity had been establish successfully to a single point on the CCAP campus.

Within one month 4 companies had responded. One said that they could not offer anything for the budget that CCAP had provided. Three others returned with proposals for various different connectivity options.

By pooling resources and approaching the ISPs directly, the offices of the CCAP retroactively created a market and brought it to the attention of ISPs that were too far away and too unaware of the connectivity needs 500km away. This approach was much more effective that their previous attempts where they had called up ISPs and simply said that they were "interested in getting an internet connection". For the ISPs in the capital city, everyone is "interested in getting a connection", the trick is identifying serious buyers who have enough resources to pay. The resource pooling strategy gave ISPs a immediate idea of the seriousness of the CCAP and brought to their attention that connecting the CCAP would be profitable endeavor.

Engineering as Development
From the standpoint of the ISPs, the proposal by CCAP came at a very fortunate time. Until very recently, the only option for connecting a site like Ekwendeni had been to license and install a dedicated VSAT satellite internet connection. It was only within the last year that some new wireless technology allowed ISPs to use existing cell phone towers to relay data back to shared VSATs in larger cities from remote areas.

These new technologies drastically lowered the price of connecting remote places like Equindeni, and made it possible for some the of ISPs to offer profitable internet service to the CCAP.

Macro Level Internet Policy
The national regulation of the internet in Malawi also played a huge role in the internet connectivity of CCAP in Ekwendeni. In Malawi, there are steep regulation fees that must be paid on VSAT internet connections. These fees are so steep that they effectively price a VSAT out of the budget of the CCAP. During the time when the VSAT was the only connectivity option, essentially this meant that these fines priced the whole internet out of the budget of the CCAP.

But with the new cellular rely wireless technology, that is not tightly regulated by the government, it became affordable for CCAP to connect. While these regulations are out of the power of individuals and organizations to control, individual organizations can play a role in publicizing their inefficiencies and ineffectiveness to the government and to decision makers.

Conclusion
It was the combination of resource pooling, engineering, policy that finally made the CCAP a true market for high speed internet connectivity. The combination of these three factors all coming together at the right time are finally what will bring reliable, powerful, capable connectivity to the office of the CCAP that were once on the wrong side of the Digital Divide.

Digital Development

jon — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 02:23:52 -0500

If there really is development work to be done everywhere, then how best to go about it?

In my time here, I have come to believe more than ever in engineering, pure and empathetic put-me-in-your-shoes engineering, as one of the most effective strategies for realizing development. (Remember, I am thinking of development as increase in the amount of time that a person or group can foreseeably sustain their lives into the future.)

In the library the other day I came across an interview with the CEO of General Electric, Jeffery Immlet, who I find has been saying and doing very interesting things recently. In the interview Immelt says something to the effect of:

What the developing world needs is not "defeaturization" - factoring down of developed world products to meet budget constraints of its people - rather technology engineered from the ground up to meet the needs and market demands of its populations.

In my opinion Immelt could not have been more correct, or more eloquent, in his statement.

In my field of work ICT4DEV (Internet and communication technology for development), we talk a lot about the problem of the "digital divide", which basically says that the world is divided into technology "haves" and "have-nots". The "have" nations develop quickly using technology to efficiently create wealth. The "have-nots" are left out of economic development because of a modern day electronic chicken and the egg problem; they don't have technology so they cannot develop, but they can't get technology until their economies develop.

In Malawi, I have drastically changed my personal view of the digital divide. I no longer, for instance, believe that a nation or people is worse off simply because they lack access to technology. General lacking of technology is not the problem. In fact technology, in the wrong place at the wrong time, creates more problems. I believe instead that there are groups, nations and people who could greatly further their development if they were able to obtain access to very specific technologies engineered to meet their needs. These technologies are sometimes out of reach; this to me is the digital divide.

The digital divide is not so much a chasm that must be bridged by a transfer of technology invented in the industrialized world, as it is a mountain range that can be carefully scaled when the creativity and market demands of both the industrializing world and industrialized world meet in the middle. It is not so much a poverty problem, as a possible poverty solution.

This difference is subtle, but I think that this perspective changes the way many nerds think about development in the industrializing world. We need to stop thinking that people are "poor" simply because they lack access to a technology. Digital divide crusaders who seek to install inernet access everywhere in the world are mislead if they believe that the technology alone will alleviate poverty.

In specific situations, people who are poor can use technologies, like a tin roof or the internet, to greatly improve the sustainability of their lives. Our goal should be to identify those specific situations and engineer specific technologies to meet those needs and budgets. Thinking this way changes our strategies and our approach to tackling the digital divide. We move away from strategies like "technology transfer" and "defeaturization" and closer to real answers when we are engineering directly to meet market demands and needs of poorer markets.

Here are some organizations that are on the right track:

One Laptop per Child initiative
Baobab Health Partenership

Pondering Poverty

jon — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 05:06:57 -0400

When we were in Tanzania visiting Marissa's sister, Sami, and I stumbled across a very interesting discussion of poverty in a copy of the magazine NewAfrican January 2006 no. 447 in the article “Is Poverty African?” pg. 14:

In the article, Dr. Vandan Shiva says, “Poverty is a final state, not an initial state in the economic paradigm which destroys ecological and social systems for maintaining life, health, and sustenance of the planet and people.”

This may sound straightforward to some, but poverty is a word that I find most people use too carelessly. There are many who talk about it and even fight against it, but very few, I find, who can define it. It seems to me that dealing with social problems is just like dealing with anything else. You cannot fight against something effectively until you have defined it fully in your mind. Know your opponent.

After years of studying and discussing poverty, I am just now beginning to believe that I know how to identify and attack it.

Shiva says in the article, people are seen as poor “if they eat millet as opposed to commercially processed junk food. They are seen as poor if they live in self-built housing made from environmentally adopted materials such as bamboo instead of concrete. They are seen as poor if they wear handmade garments of natural fiber as opposed to synthetics.” If, as Shiva suggests, poverty is better defined as a lacking of sustainability, then I too am guilty of this. Too often I call things I see poverty when really they are just not very western, not very material, or not very industrialized.

Couldn't the USA be considered impoverished because its economy is completely dependent upon oil? At best, global oil reserves are predicted to last only until 2050 (2035 if your pessimistic). It seems to me that, yes, America's social, economic, and ecological structure could be considered impoverished because, at the moment, its ability to maintain life, health, and sustenance of its population can only be foreseeably envisioned to last 2050.

As Marissa pointed out in her blog entry, thinking of poverty strictly in material terms, is unproductive. There are those like Amartya Sen who give us a broader framework for understanding poverty in terms of freedom. Then there is me in Malawi, struggling to coherently define poverty in terms of how far an individual or community realizstically sustain their lives, opportunities, and aspirations into the future.

Academic discussions of poverty usually divide the world into two categories: the “developed world” and the “developing world” or the “first” and “third” world. In Argentina, I came to believe that these classifications give us the wrong impression - that there are no development works (sustainability improvements) that need to be done in “developed” countries.

Lets start by using terms “industrialized” (ie: USA) and “industrializing” (ie: Malawi) instead. The populations of both nations clearly are experiencing types of poverty (lacking of realistic long-term sustainability). There is work to be done in both nations to provide more sustainable lifestyles to their populations. Clearly There is “development” work to be done everywhere, both in “industrializing” and “industrialized” countries.

The balance of For- and Non-profits

jon — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 10:18:41 -0400

I am skimming a book by David Bornstien called "How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas". Somehow I have managed to get past the incredibly modest title and short introduction yet still have no idea what a Social Entrepreneur actually is... but we can come back to that
in a later blog.

The book begins with a discussion of the explosive expansion of the Non-profit (NGO) sector in recent years. Both the number of organizations and the amount of money invested in the non-profit sector have increased greatly since 1960. This "explosion" of non-profits is something that you can't ignore living in Malawi (especially when you travel to Lilongwe, the capital city) ... non-profits are everywhere. There is an acronym and organization for every type of social cause you can imagine, even the ones you could never have imagined. The only one i havent seen is an NGO to help other struggling NGOs. But i am sure its on the way.

I feel a little overwhelmed by non-profits at the moment. So, I am trying my hardest to keep a positive view of the effectiveness of non-profit endeavors. There are simply so many... pulling in so many
different directions... so many that fail... or come for a short time and then vanish. Long term success stories in non-profit work in Malawi are hard to come by.

The amount of non-profit money in the Malawian economy is astounding... "development" work is an industry if not THE industry in Malawi. While I agree with Bornstien that NGOs serve an important role in societies because they can fill needs that could not be filled adequately by market economies, I have a hunch that one of the biggest hindrances of economic growth here in Malawi is an unhealthy balance between the non-profit and for-profit sectors of the economy. I did some very quick research in the CIA world fact book and found:

GDP of the Malawian economy in 2005 was about $1.2 billion dollars
Foreign aide investment (Governments, World Bank, IMF) was about $0.45 billion dollars

According to my rough estimate it seems about the public non-profit sector donations\loans are equal to about 1/3 the total GDP of the country. I was not able to locate figures for private foundation donations to Malawi, but my guess is that these figures are large as well. If we were to include private non-profit donation into the figure, I imagine we would be very safe to assume that, "donations" make up a dollar amount equal to at least one half of the "production" within the Malawian economy. And that's being conservative.

To me this looks like an unhealthy balance for an economy.

Here is an example of what I am talking about: When my mom was visiting she ask Marissa and myself a very insightful question - "What types of job opportunities are available to Malawians once they graduate from secondary school (high school)?". I had no quick reply. It's hard to imagine for foreigners, but there is not much industry here. Paying jobs are few and far in between. The biggest "industry" I could think of that is providing people jobs is what I will call the "development industry". The foreign funded government or non-profit groups (NGOs) that come to Malawi to try to "help". Its true, some of the best jobs that Malawians can aspire to obtain are jobs at foreign funded NGOs. They usually pay very well when compared to local industry pay.

My thought is that foreign funded non-profits actually hold a sort of monopoly on the Malawian labor force. Because they can pay so much more in salaries they are able to hire the most qualified Malawians for their work. Local industry, which cannot match the high salaries, must settle for less qualified employees. I wonder if it wouldn't be better if more of Malawi's most talented professionals where working within “production” sector of the economy as entrepreneurs and managers in the for-profit sector?

Again, I have not been able to do extensive research, these are quick estimates. I am not a professional economist, but I pose this idea for all of you out there to ponder and debate, and tell me where I am wrong. This is, simply a hunch; something that I would look into if I were a better economist and had more time.

If its true that, in certain cases, non-profits are able to fill certain societal needs better than for-profit companies; then it must also be true that there are other societal needs that are much better filled by for-profit "production" endeavors than non-profit "donation" ones.

More balance between the two sectors might be a very good thing for Malawi.

Ungweru Community Center

jon — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 07:49:03 -0400

I think that I have found my dream job. Directly across from Mzuzu University, down a dirt road, through a corn field you will find the Ungweru Community Center. There you will find nice 4 computers, the latest news papers, sodas and cookies for sale. Ungweru Community Center is a for-profit endeavor, started by the catholic church and the university, to offer technology classes to the public at very reasonable prices. Currently there are typing and basic computing classes (Microsoft Word and Windows XP) offered at Ungweru. I have been asked to help them begin teaching basic computer networking and internet skills... without using the internet of course!!

At the last board meeting, I was named an honorary Board Member and we discussed the idea of teaching internet classes at Ungweru. An internet connection is far out of our budget, we are instead the process of creating a local network that will serve as a fully functioning replica of the actual internet. This means that in our little community center students will be able to practice and learn internet skills like HTML, email, networking etc. Because our mini-internet is an exact replica of the actual internet, only much much smaller (our network is of 5 computers instead of millions), the skills students learn taking our internet classes will be directly applicable in jobs in the real world.

Building a local network replica of the internet for students to learn, practice, and build real applicable IT skills is not as difficult or expensive as it might seem. I will be documenting the steps we use build our internet training center. Check back for updates.

Our look into the Malawian Hunger Crisis

jon — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 10:36:48 -0500

Here is our first inside look at the Malawian food crisis which so many of you back home in the USA have read about in the papers. We have found that there is much more to the “crisis” than the papers have told. This is our first attempt to explain the problem, as we see it, more fully. Its a twisted tale of economics, agriculture, taste buds, and “drought”.

Newspapers in the USA usually list drought as the culprit for hunger in Malawi. Predictably every year Malawi receives large amounts of rain during its rainy season from November to March. From April through October is the dry season. This is what newspapers in the USA often refer to as the drought. Its hard to call the dry season in Malawi a drought, because it is a very predictable weather pattern that happens every year in Malawi. A drought is a severe, unexpected absence of rain; Malawi's dry season is neither severe nor unexpected. The dry season happens every year. Currently in Malawi we are in the rainy season, everything is green and tropical. The forests look like the forests of Brazil. During the dry season, Malawi makes a transformation from a tropical paradise to an arid climate which feels and looks much like the plains of Colorado or the mountains of northern Arizona. Its dry, but like Arizona, a fairly green and lush – capable of sustaining indigenous plants adapted to local weather patterns. So if you hear about drought in Malawi, chances are you are really just hearing about our dry season, something that all of us living in Malawi know will come every year. We are convinced that there really is no drought in Malawi. There is only a dry season.

The rainy season is also known as the hungry season, because the staple food crop maize is not mature enough to be harvested and consumed. Marissa and I have been asking a few Malawians that we have meet along the way about prices of maize. Because the maize harvest is just about one month away, we are deep into hunger season. The price of a 50kg bag of maize has reached 3000 MK (about $23.00 USD). If there is any maize at all in the markets, most people simply can't afford to buy. During the harvest the price of maize will fall to 500 MK (about $3.84 USD) for the same 50 kg bag. I was told buy a friend that the 50kg bag of maize can feed himself and his brother for two months. Due to many factors, there is simply not enough maize produced to supply the hunger demands of the Malawian population for the year. Each year maize becomes scarce and those that cannot afford to buy it often go hungry.

Malawians have a strong cultural preference for eating maize. In fact we have heard many foreign agricultural aide workers blame Malawian taste buds alone for the food crisis. The cultural preference (or maize addiction) seems to be a young tradition rooted in government initiatives of about 30-40 years ago during the Green Revolution. During that time the government convinced Malawian farmers that high calorie maize would be the answer to the country's hunger problems. It was also thought that maize could be exported for profit. Maize can be a very high yield crop per acre when supplied with enough water and fertilizer.

Some foreign aide workers have explained to us, however, that maize production requires unnecessarily high amounts of water and fertilizer. They add, that it is also more prone to droughts than some other crops that grow naturally here in Malawi. Maize production takes a relatively heavy toll on the naturally fertile soil and needs a consistent supply of water which is not available here during the dry season without irrigation. We have yet to find a single farmer in Malawi that irrigates their crops. A nutritionists we spoke with also mentioned that maize, although filling, has a very low nutritional value. The foreign agriculture and food security community are mostly of the opinion that Malawi's hunger crisis can directly be traced to Malawi's strong cultural preference to grow and eat maize.

A Malawian friend of ours who is a teacher and works a guest house where we were staying, said that Malawians will have a house full of vegetables like avocados and tomatoes, yet if there is no maize, the person will tell you they have no food to eat. For this reason many Malawian farmers are gravely afraid to grow other crops. Marissa and I went to the market today, in the middle of the hungry season and were able to purchase bananas, avocados, beans, rice, tomato, potato, cassava, peanuts, eggplant, cabbage, and onion totaling about 5KG in weight for about 440 MK ($3.75 USD). This is hunger season, but it doesn't mean that there is not food in the markets. The land here in Malawi is very fertile and able to produce everything but maize this time of year. Interestingly the land produces these local species of fruits and vegetables with very little attention from Malawi's farmers. Much of the groceries we purchased today were gathered in the wild or were produced on small side plots of larger maize farms. Malawian farmers (pretty much everyone you meet) focus nearly all their production on maize to feed their families. Like most foreign agriculture aide workers, Marissa and I are more and more convinced that a reduced reliance on maize and a more diversified crop production of native species would almost surely eliminate the hunger crisis. Its amazing and frustrating to see hunger in a place where bananas, avocados, and mangoes grow by accident!

Our vegetables, bought at the gringo price we paid (local Malawians could have negotiated a much better price), are still more expensive than maize pound for pound. Processed and ground maize, unlike fruits and vegetables, can be stored for long periods of time without going bad. It would not be fair to fully blame Malawian taste buds for the food crisis. There are some clear economic preferences for maize that must be recognized here as well. It is true. however. that maize is really the only food crop in Malawi that is mass produced on a large scale. We have yet to determine whether mass production of other native crops might make them economically more attractive and affordable than maize.

To summarize ,the food crisis you hear about in Malawi is the result of many factors (drought is NOT one of them):

The strong cultural preference of Malawian society to eat maize
The resource intensive nature of maize production in Malawi. Maize doesn't grow naturally and requires heavy amounts of water and fertilizer to grow in Malawi. Maize is very vulnerable in the dry season.
The low nutritional value of maize
Lack of irrigation practices to mitigate the effects of the dry season
Cultural fear of crop diversification
Widespread mass production of maize makes the most attractive food source and essentially prices other fruits and vegetable food sources out of the market for the majority of Malawians

Tour of Opportunity International Bank of Malawi

jon — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 06:43:21 -0500

Today, Marissa and I toured a successful microfinance bank, called Opportunity International Bank of Malawi (OIBM). The bank is quickly gaining international attention. For those wondering, microfinance is an effort to provide traditional banking services like loans and savings accounts to the poorer sectors of the population. These sectors of the population are generally excluded from financial services because most commercial banks believe that it is not profitable to serve them. From what I understand, OIBM differs from most commercial banks, not in the way it is run, but in the people that it seeks to serve as clients.

Interestingly, while OIBM is different from most commercial banks, it is also different from most other microfinance institutions which are typically run as non-profit organizations. OIBM aims to be a fully for-profit bank with specially tailored services to meet the needs and demands of people of lower levels of income. The bank offers savings accounts with a manageable minimum and small business loans to help people expand their home businesses into new areas. In just three years OIBM has already begun to return a profit and serves 40,000 clients!

Immediately when you walk into an OIBM bank you get the feeling that you are in a real bank that is doing well. People treat you professionally and are dressed in suits. The floors of the building are made of marble. Our guide explained that OIBM wants their clients feel proud putting their money in the bank.

The bank offers all services in English (the language traditionally used in banks in Malawi), and in Chichewa (the language the people actually speak at home). The ATM machines allow clients to get money at any hour of the day and use fingerprint scanners instead of PIN numbers. Another thing of note, clients of the bank are always address as sir or madam. For many of the clients, because they are in general poor, this is the first time in their lives they have been shown such courtesy by a large business.

Almost all of OIBM’s employees are Malawian, another rariety here for a larger business. We also were able to meet some of the bank employees who spoke passionately about the services they are offering and the work that they do to expand economic opportunities for all of Malawi.

Both Marissa and I were really encouraged by what we saw… there are so many “development initiatives” here in Malawi. Something about this one really gave me the impression that it is making a genuine difference in people’s lives. We will keep you posted on further developments. Tomorrow we are going to tour some of the client’s businesses.

Fulbright Research Proposal

jon — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 01:33:42 -0500

Here is a shortened copy of the proposal I wrote for the Fulbright grant. It describes the project I will be working on while in Malawi

Overcoming the lack of access to appropriately implemented technologies in the developing world is fundamental to the problem of realizing social development. By increasing productivity and diversifying the workforce, the proper use of technology lays a vital foundation for public health, democracy and economic development. This is certainly true for the proliferation of information and communication technology (ICT). Studies by the Digital Opportunity Task Force, the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank's Information Development Fund and Harvard eReadiness Project all prove that the expansion of ICT connectivity can augment social development. Building community telecenters, enhancing rural commerce via ICT-based microcredit lending, launching web-based e-commerce, using the internet to teach public health and land management in rural areas, and using email to relay commodity prices: these are among the many ICT strategies that can enable faster progress. Increasing access to technology and crossing the digital divide is not an option; it is an absolute necessity if the poorest nations are not to fall even farther behind.

When I came to the University of Arizona in 1999, I was intrigued by a project now known as the Broadband for Development Initiative (BDI). BDI is an effort of the University of Arizona and Mzuzu University (in Malawi) to augment economic development in Northern Malawi via the use of ICTs. As I worked on the project, my curiosity grew into an intense desire to work in Malawi. This past summer I was fortunate to experience the country and its diverse culture, a place where I have been dreaming about working for years.

I arrived in Malawi at an exciting time for the BDI project. After three years of negotiations, Mzuzu University and three other national universities had acquired VSAT satellite systems that would finally provide affordable and reliable broadband Internet access to their campuses. For two weeks I traveled throughout Malawi and participated in discussions about the new system with intellectual leaders, Mzuzu University administrators and faculty. Nearly everyone in Mzuzu expressed excitement over the coming technology. Those that I spoke with also expressed an urgent need for research to determine culturally compatible methods of integrating broadband access into northern Malawian society in order to provide the greatest potential for economic development.

This project aims to create a comprehensive report to guide Internet for development efforts in the Mzuzu region of Malawi. My research will adopt a unique and proven method of creating sustainable Internet based development projects used by Dr. Barron Orr at the University of Arizona known as “stakeholder-driven development”. The outcome of the process will be a report that provides Mzuzu University administrators with recommendations of specific ICT for development projects that would be sustainable and most beneficial in the Mzuzu community.

In stakeholder-driven development, those that are meant to benefit from Internet applications are involved in their creation from the beginning. The first step is to assess stakeholder needs through participatory rapid appraisal techniques that will provide a full ethnographic assessment of both the individual user and community needs, information and connectivity gaps. This phase of the project, which will combine focus group and key respondent interviews and a quantitative survey instrument, will last for four months. I will interview business owners, local leaders, University staff and townspeople in order to become familiar with the needs and goals of the Mzuzu community. By the end of four months I hope to have an accurate picture of the community's most pressing needs and aspirations, including a short list of “lead users” or early adopters who will participate in the applications development phase. Based on the results of the needs assessment, I will narrow the scope of the project by selecting one or two specific development needs and target populations that proper application of Internet technology could help address.

The next step of the “stakeholder driven” development is to create prototype applications in collaboration with colleagues and students at Mzuzu University that can be tested and critiqued by the lead users identified in the needs assessment. I plan to devote months five and six to creating the prototype systems. Prototype systems will be created by leveraging the knowledge and experience of the “best practice” projects and adapting them to meet the needs of the Malawian target population. The prototype systems will be simple staged demos of what a full-featured system would entail. Each prototype will address a specific community development need as determined in the needs assessment phase of the project. Some possible projects include: enhancing field work activities (natural resource management, public health, agricultural extension) by making web-based information products mobile through hand held Personal Digital Assistants, helping University professors integrate the Internet into their classes, or working with the local hospital to improve record keeping infrastructure.

In the third and final phase of the research, lead users (and later the broader base of stakeholders) will be invited to a series of guided workshops for testing of the prototypes. Their opinions and experiences, difficulties and suggestions will be meticulously recorded. Their feedback will be used to identify and prioritize ICT for development projects best suited for the region. Based on the ethnographic research of Phase 1 and the systems research of Phase II, I will compile the stakeholder recommendations along with the corresponding prototype systems specifications into a actionable report for University administrators by the end of month ten.