Women entrepreneurs in rural Nigeria now have the gift of e-commerce, thanks to Viterbi School computer science undergraduates in Professor David Wilczynski’s capstone design course.

 
The students, mostly seniors majoring in computer science, presented their “micronet website” to Chief Bisi Ogunleye, founder of the Country Women of Nigeria (COWAN), during a two-day microfinance conference, hosted by the USC Marshall School of Business and co-sponsored in by the African Millennium Foundation (AMF). Once deployed, the newly designed website will allow COWAN and organizations like it to raise funds via online giving.

 

Left to right: Jonathan Shintaku,Vesile Evrim, Tejas Padekar (in red shirt), Shireen Hyderi, Joel Sandoval and Rema Morgan (at computer) go over some features of the new website.

Microfinance, the focus of the Marshall School conference, has become a powerful tool for small-scale entrepreneurs in impoverished countries, such as Africa, who need seed money to start their businesses, said Malena Ruth, AMF president and co-founder.  

Chief Bisi, who is a pioneer in the economic empowerment of women and a gifted advocate for Africans’ full participation in policy and decision-making, spoke of a variety of African trades in which women are actively involved, such as textiles and fabric-weaving, growing vegetables, food processing, and arts and crafts.  Bisi has spent nearly two decades promoting “micro-credit” as a way of empowering these small, rural women-run businesses.  

Even without the benefit of e-commerce, COWAN, the entrepreneurial co-op that Bisi founded in 1982, today represents more than 1,390 groups and 260,000 active members across eight states of Nigeria.  It is known for its women-designed programs in credit, agriculture, and small business development.   

“An Internet network such as this will just make it exponentially easier to link grassroots organizations with those who have resources to support them, as well as linking these grassroots organizations to people or groups with expertise in, say, developing food production, either in Africa or in some of the incubation laboratories here,” said Gerrie Smith, an AMF board member. “Really, what we’ve begun here is phenomenally important.”  

The goal of this “capstone” software design project was to create a direct link between donors and grassroots organizations, a forum in which they could find each other and interact, Wilczynski said.  

“We also wanted to create a beautiful website where AMF could produce news and content, information and forums and things like that, so that it would be easy to find out what’s going on at the AMF in a way that is easily maintainable by them,” he added.  

Chief Bisi Ogunleye, founder of the Country Women of Nigeria (COWAN), is a pioneer in the economic empowerment of women.

    
Students met with the African Millennium Foundation in fall 2005 to determine the parameters of the project.

 

“This architecture will accommodate three types of users — donors, grassroots organizations and administrative users — and satisfy the project goals of allowing donations to be made online and providing the site with a secure login and registration system,” said Rema Morgan, another student presenter. “The site also features an approval system so that AMF can review and approve all donations, keep track of transactions and archive its records.”      

 

The content management section allows users to post feature stories and photographs about their own organizations and activities, and to exchange ideas and opinions with entrepreneurs around the world about related topics.

 

Chief Bisi and AMF President Ruth seemed most impressed with having the capability to conduct e-transactions and sales over the Internet.

 

“This is truly magnificent,” Ruth said. “I think this will go a long way in helping businesses get going.”

 

"We employ ‘best practice’ principles, so you’re getting a real first-class web server and a secure, central database system,” Wilzynski assured Ruth and Bisi in his closing remarks. “But that’s where our role as a university ends. Now you need to find a company out there that will deploy the system and get your e-commerce boutiques and donations going.”

Computer science students join AMF President Malena Ruth (center in white) and Chief Bisi Ogunleye (next to her) for a group shot. AMF board member Gerrie Smith is on far left; Professor David Wilczynsk is on far right.

“Capstone” courses are often part of USC’s undergraduate service learning component, which gives senior level students in all majors a chance to work with community-based organizations requesting assistance with a range of technically focused projects.  

Wilczynski's two-semester course -- CSCI 377 and CSCI 477 -- included work on many non-profit proposals in addition to the "Micronet" website. However, unlike some of the other projects, "MicroNet" was originally developed by USC Marshall School of Business students Tyler Ohanian and Josh Verseput in a 2004 business proposal to AMF entitled "Coordinating Through Databasing and Newsletters." The work grew out of an ongoing partnership between the AMF, the Marshall School of Business and USC's Civic and Community Relations Office.

 

 

--Diane Ainsworth