Teen Blazes Tech Trail for Jamaican Youth

In the three years since Makonnen Blake Hannah was named a government technology consultant, he’s been to Harvard twice, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center once and is now networking daily with some of the brightest young minds in the United States.

Back home, he has delivered speeches, dedicated new high-tech projects and, every month, sent his boss a detailed report on everything from the hottest new computer games to instructions on building intranets in the nation’s schools.

And he did most of it before his 16th birthday.

In the process, the gifted Rastafarian has become an icon of hope for his generation--a singular inspiration for a Caribbean youth culture bred into poverty and violence with few options beyond ganja and the gun.

As Hannah himself put it in a recent speech to Jamaica’s Optimists Club, his position has “sent a signal to us youth that we’re important.”

Because the Cabinet appointed “a young techie,” he said, “it immediately made other youths sit up and take notice of technology. . . . It showed them that using computers was a new way they could earn a living.”

Just one problem: Some of Hannah’s most ardent advice has been beyond the government bureaucracy’s capacity to implement or even understand.

As his mother, Barbara Blake Hannah, author and radio host, put it: “Our technocrats know nothing about technology.”

Hannah’s young career--he took the job when he was 13--his early successes and his continuing frustrations afford a glimpse at the developing world’s struggle to close the technology gap.

Jamaica, like so many underdeveloped nations, views information technology and the Web as springboards to prosperity. In a region where tourist dollars are limited, agriculture is waning and unemployment is rising, Caribbean nations such as Jamaica are trying to create high-tech work forces that will attract some of the multibillion-dollar global information-technology industry.

Jamaica is ahead of most. With a goal of creating 40,000 jobs in an island nation of 2.6 million people, Commerce and Technology Minister Phillip Paulwell has launched a $113-million, three-year program to train a new “techie generation,” build infrastructure and market Jamaica as an IT hub.

There are plans for computer technology institutes, duty-free industrial parks, government joint ventures and a venture capital fund that would reduce the risk of investing in Jamaica’s shaky economy.

But Hannah, who was hired by Paulwell, and others say that far more needs to be done to bring Jamaica’s newest generation into the cyber world.

Many of Jamaica’s elementary and junior high schools still don’t have computers, and the schools that do have no access to the Web.

“What youths need and want right now is Internet in the schools,” Hannah wrote in his latest report to Paulwell. “They need the Internet to widen their horizons, to give them the chance to see the world outside in a different way from how they can see it on television.

“I know putting Internet in schools in expensive. But connection with the Internet is the main reason for having a computer. It’s like having a CD player and no CDs. So everyone is frustrated.”

Hannah has been pushing for the ministry to set up intranets--or internal Internet sites--within communities of schools; intranets don’t need costly Internet service providers. Similarly, Hannah’s proposal for a mobile TechSchool that would travel throughout the country teaching the brightest minds leading-edge computer skills has been on hold for two years.

A ministry official said both plans are under consideration but cited bureaucratic complications between ministries for the delays.

As for his own technological growth, Hannah, who has been home-tutored since birth, said, “I’m going deeper and deeper into studying computers--beyond the level of just setting up Web sites--taking the technology to the next level.”

Asked what’s on that next level, Hannah replied: “Helping Jamaica.”