Implementing Information and Communication Technology in Higher Education in Tanzania

Technologies are neither developed nor used in a sociocultural vacuum. They always embody and make use of some kind of tacit knowledge. The gulf between the knowledge that designers possess and the knowledge that users have increases when ICTs are distributed in non-Western developing countries. If an ICT project is ignorant about how to effect local implementation, progress will probably be negligible, and if the planning of an ICT project is irrelevant to local needs and conditions, what may seem like progress may actually not improve anything at all. In this paper we outline our ICT education development project for a Tanzanian college, introduce a model for analysing ICT projects in cultural contexts, and analyse our Tanzanian project in terms of that model. We argue that successful contextualisation takes cognizance of at least four levels (or phases) of projects. These are import, transfer, apply, and contextualise.