By Tony Iyare, United Nations Development Program’s ‘Choices’ Magazine
December 2003

Mgbala Agwa, Nigeria – No one is sure just how many people have died due to HIV/AIDS in this town of 15,000 but to the people who live here, the deaths are adding up. The rising death rate here as well as across sub-Saharan Africa, where 29 million people are living with the disease, were enough evidence for 36-year-old Nduka Ozor, a Lagos-based business man and coordinator of the community’s Youth Forum, that people needed to get the facts about the disease.

Working with online volunteers from the United Nations Volunteers and NetAid, Mr. Ozor has been able to stock a library at the village health centre with reading materials on HIV/AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases. Mr. Ozor found out about the UN Online Volunteering Service while surfing the Web, registered, and was able to find volunteers.

“I conceived this idea in June 2001 after seeing the alarming rate of deaths in my village. I got in touch with online volunteers to support us in our programmes to educate our people and we got more books than needed,” Mr. Ozor says.

Initially, his idea was not well received. “When I first mentioned the idea of educating the community about the negative effects of HIV/AIDS at the village assembly, I was almost booed and jeered,” he recalls. “Some locals even thought I was out to expose their murky extramarital affairs to their wives,” he says.

Some 4,133 kilometres away in Istanbul, Turkey, Yasemin Gunay, a 21 year-old engineering student at Bosphorus University, was the first to respond to a Web posting for volunteers.

“I found an assignment that I had in mind right away,” Ms. Gunay says. “Mgbala Agwa had posted an assignment for online volunteers to search for book donors for their newly opened library.”

Today there are about 3,000 volumes that line the shelves of the tiny library, which is housed in a closet-sized room in Mgbala Agwa, a town that can be reached via a five-kilometre dirt road that joins the main highway to Onitsha, a major market in the south-east, the nexus of Nigeria’s oil industry in the stormy Niger Delta region. This Igbo homestead is located about 700 kilometres south-east of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, and sits on table-land in a green belt spiced mostly by palm and gmelina trees. Its vast green and serene nature and motley collection of thatched houses were obviously spared from the devastation wrought by the three-year-old Nigerian Civil War, which raged between 1967-1970.

The library, along with a local HIV/AIDS awareness campaign, have helped slow the advance of the disease in Mgbala Agwa, which is in Imo State, where the HIV/AIDS prevalence rate is 4.2 percent out of a population of 3.3 million. That rate is expected to rise to seven percent within two years.

Online volunteers coordinate donations

Donations to the library, books and computer CD-ROMS, were coordinated by online volunteers under the aegis of a service run by UN Volunteers and NetAid, a non-profit organization. In addition, the project has been supported by various organizations, including the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, Johns Hopkins University, The Hesperian Foundation and other organizations based in Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States and Zambia.

After several e-mails from Mr. Ozor outlining the needs of the new library, Ms. Gunay established an online Yahoo group that allowed various volunteers to communicate and share files. Through Ms. Gunay, who spent close to 1,000 working hours on the library project, the efforts of several volunteers were coordinated and the various outreach activities aimed at organizations and authors produced significant contributions.

Ms. Gunay believes that through the books, the people of Mgbala Agwa “will be more cautious and the new generations will have more knowledge about how HIV/AIDS is threatening their lives.”

NetAid Online Volunteering, a service jointly managed by UN Volunteers and NetAid, has been offering volunteers the chance to do “virtual fieldwork” since February 1999. According to Jayne Cravens, who heads up the service at UN Volunteers, online volunteering allows people to become involved in UN Volunteers without having to leave their homes and helps to support non-governmental organizations working in the developing world. Online volunteers can perform a range of important tasks such as fundraising, Web site building, translating, research and writing, and marketing—basically anything that doesn’t require a physical presence in the field. Working by e-mail and telephone, UN Volunteers and NetAid offer guidance and ideas to volunteers and host organizations alike.

NetAid’s Online Volunteering programme manager, Benjamin Stokes, explains that to benefit from the initiative, organizations have to show their non-profit status, confirm that they are working on development issues in developing countries and express willingness to work with online volunteers. Mr. Stokes adds that the commitment to working with volunteers and integrating them into an organization is key to maximizing the value of online volunteers.

“Our job is working to raise awareness about extreme poverty and offer people concrete ways that they can help improve the lives of the world’s poorest people,” Mr. Stokes says. “Online volunteering is a great way to get people involved in this cause.”

Putting the library to work

Loveth Egbulugha, a high school student, has been a regular caller at the library every Saturday and Sunday for two months. “Since I’ve been coming to the library, I’ve come to grasp with the reality of what HIV/AIDS is about, ways of contracting it and how to prevent it. I’ve also read about gonorrhoea.”

Perusing the book Making an Impact in HIV/AIDS by Jocelyn Dejong while clutching How to Write a Radio Serial Drama for Social Development: A Script Writer’s Manual, Ms. Egbulugha, 21, says she initially paid little attention to the local campaign against HIV/AIDS. “One day I came to visit someone who gave birth to a baby at the Health Centre and decided to check the books. I found out that they had interesting books and have been visiting twice a week ever since.”

Dickson Mgborokwu, 20, a student of Urban Development Secondary School in the nearby town of Owerri, says after he was given an assignment on the origin of HIV/AIDS, he rummaged through the library of Alvan Ikoku College of Education, a prominent teacher training school. But he was unlucky in his research until a student directed him to the library at Mgbala Agwa.

“I got more than enough materials about the origin of HIV/AIDS, how you can treat it in the early stage, how it can be controlled and how it can be prevented,” says Mr. Mgborokwu, who now visits the library during his lesson free period on Tuesdays and Sundays.

John Smart Anumaka, 24, a student of Political Science of Imo State University, says the library has been useful in providing materials to enrich his project on Third World’s Nations View of HIV/AIDS. “When my supervisor picked this topic, I stared to the skies thinking how I will get the materials to write the project,” he says. “Then I came here.”

Anselm Uche Ononogbo, 30, President of Mgbala Agwa Youth Forum explains that because of financial constraints, no one is in charge of the library full time. “We rotate it among members of the executive committee on a weekly basis. We also have some volunteers who usually assist on weekends.” Despite the absence of a librarian or a catalogue, “No book has been pilfered, lost or defaced,” he says.

Mr. Ononogbo wishes for a bigger library and more shelves to hold all the books belonging to the Youth Forum. “We need a bigger library and shelves to keep the books. Since the world is a global village, there’s need for computers, Internet facilities, photocopy machines, and so on.”

For a community whose local economy centres largely on subsistence farming that hardly produces enough to meet the needs of the people, and where water, paved roads, electricity and other social infrastructure are very scarce, the library has become an impromptu meeting place, and provides some refuge for the teeming army of jobless youths who tend to congregate near the library there to meet and share ideas.

Mr. Ozor is overwhelmed by the volume of books his campaign has elicited and he’s planning a bigger project. He is now thinking of expanding the scope of the library beyond the community because of the magnitude of books received from different international organizations. To give some bite to Mr. Ozor’s pet idea, he is thinking of floating an NGO to embark on a national campaign. “Since the books we got are beyond our scope, we now want to expand our work to touch the lives of other Nigerians.”

—Tony Iyare has been a stringer for The New York Times in Nigeria for 11 years.

Nigeria at a Glance

Population: 117.8 million
Area: 923,768 sq km
Human Development Ranking: 152 of 173 countries
No. of telephone mainlines per 1,000 people: 5
No. of cellular subscribers per 1,000 people: 3
No. of personnal computers per 1,000 people: 7
No. of Internet users per 1,000 people: 2
GDP per capita: $850

Sources: Human Development Report 2003 and UNDP Global ICT for Development Factbook