AI for Africa – one young female scientist’s drive to develop solutions

AI for Africa – one young female scientist’s drive to develop solutions
We meet Rokhaya Diagne, a twenty something AI developer and entrepreneur who is using AI to overcome Africa’s specific challenges.  She’s currently creating a diagnostic platform for malaria in Senegal as well as using underwater drones to map and monitor biodiversity for marine conservation agencies and to improve fishing.

Unlocking Africa's job creation potential
Fewer than 25% of  jobseekers in Africa secure formal employment, despite the fact that almost a million people are looking for work every month. The majority are under the age of 30 and they simply lack the tech skills needed to compete in an ever changing market.  But how can this problem be solved? Dr Bhaskar Chakravorti, the Dean of Global Business at The Fletcher School at Tufts University is on the show with some suggestions.   

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell, with commentary from Ania Lichtarowicz.

More on this week's stories:
Unlocking Africa's job creation potential
Rokhaya Diagne

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Greetings one and all. It's Gareth here with the Somewhere on Earth podcast and it's Tuesday the 19th of March 2024. We have voices from Senegal and Mozambique and we'll see what else we can put together for you. Definitely plenty of action going on here in the studio in London. 

00:00:26 Gareth Mitchell 

And with us for some expertise today it's it's Ania Lichtarowicz  this side of the glass. Again. Now this is turning into a habit. What's your excuse this time? 

00:00:34 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Well, I liked it last time, didn't I? 

00:00:37 Gareth Mitchell 

You did, actually. You did well, it suited you. 

00:00:38 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I don't. Ohh gosh, that's so kind of you to say I did well. 

00:00:42 Gareth Mitchell 

Bit of sucking up to the boss gets you everywhere, doesn't it? 

00:00:44 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Exactly. Well, you know, I might like it so much, you know I could stay here. Hashtag just saying. 

00:00:48 Gareth Mitchell 

That's OK, I've. Look I've got Ghislaine on speed dial here. Where is she? Right. OK, well, this this is very nice. Ania, I'm glad you're this side of the glass. And we've got plenty to chat about on the serious side of things as well. So let's get into the podcast. 

00:01:08 Gareth Mitchell 

And coming up. We have the very bright student in Senegal who's doing a whole lot of work with AI and big data. One of her projects is tackling malaria in Senegal. And speaking of top talent, Africa has a young, dynamic workforce. But are there the jobs and opportunities to match? It's all right here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:01:37 Gareth Mitchell 

So let's start with the inspirational young computing student and data science fan whose adventures in science and computing began in earnest when her mother told her to get off the games console and actually do something. And Rokhaya Diagne really has done something, quite a few things. She's Senegalese and she's gone into a number of internships after joining the Dakar, American University of Science and Technology as a student, Rokhaya is working on various important projects, including using AI to help tackle malaria in Senegal. Oh, and a quick bit of back story here before we hear the main interview, it took producer Ania. Well, you'll tell us about this, Ania, it took took you quite a few goes to get this set up, didn't it? 

00:02:17 Ania Lichtarowicz 

It did. I mean, she appeared in a in a very big article in the New York Times. And obviously, you know, keen interest, Nana before actually our our backer saw it and said we must talk to this amazing young woman. This amazing young woman was not really contactable though, or neither was her university. Now, to be fair, there were things going on in Senegal, so there were three Internet suspensions in the last 9 months. 

00:02:42 Ania Lichtarowicz 

There's been political uncertainty in the country since June 23, when an opposition leader, Ousmane Sonko, I think that's how he pronounced his name, was arrested. Other opposition leaders were arrested. Some were attacked by the police. There were meant to be presidential elections on the 25th of February, but they were postponed by the outgoing president. 

00:03:02 Ania Lichtarowicz 

The Senegal Constitutional Council did actually say this, actually, no, we're going to go ahead with them as soon as we can, so it was really difficult to get hold of Rokhaya. We were speaking, we were writing to each other in French via LinkedIn. That that was that all worked brilliantly. And then you remember the interview that we did with her. It was really difficult to get a time because of the shutdowns. It was really difficult to actually hear her because it was, you know, the connection was was, wasn't great and it kept falling over, didn't it? 

00:03:31 Gareth Mitchell 

Right. OK. Yeah. So apart from everyone queuing up to talk to this incredible young woman and then the political turmoil in her country and the Internet popping in and out, and then my availability and her availability, and anyway, we got there in the end. So it's a bit of a back story. We we like to explain these things to you. So basically we’re just really pleased that we got this. Now I will say there is a bit of interference on the sound on this interview. 

00:03:53 Gareth Mitchell 

But I hope now that you've heard the story of how we just got the audio at all, you'll just be, that you'll be kind about just how the audio has come out, but you can hear it Rokhaya absolutely fine. She's brilliant as you'll hear. So let's carry on with her story and her work and the conversation starts with AI and big data. 

00:04:18 Rokhaya Diagne 

We realised at some point that one of the most significant challenges in Senegal, it's just everywhere. You would just realise that you got diseases around. But access to timely and accurate healthcare diagnosis, particularly in rural areas, was the main problem. So in a lot of areas in my country or in other countries in Africa, people do not have very skilled people everywhere they want, like we have very talented people. But unfortunately, we don't have a lot of them like there are not that many, which means that some people will find themselves in areas where they will not be able to have that expertise. 

00:05:02 Gareth Mitchell 

Right. Sure. And so when you're lacking that kind of expertise, I guess technology has to be at least part of countering that, and you're talking about AI here. So what kind of health conditions and diseases are you interested in diagnosing using a an AI approach? 

00:05:21 Rokhaya Diagne 

The first disease I started with was tuberculosis, with a group of friends, but then I realised that we didn't have that much data. The reason why we choose AI here is like a transformative solution because it enhances, like, diagnosis, accuracy and speed. But then it allows us to be able to save, like to potentially save lives through early detection and treatment. And with the use of AI, we would be able to analyse a huge amount of data from a lot of things that we can have around. 

00:05:54 Gareth Mitchell 

Is is there a way that you can bring in existing tools from outside Senegal or is this really a very specific Senegalese use case that really nobody's designed a tool around it. And even if they had, it wouldn't be based on data in Senegal that pertains to populations there. So it really sounds as if you're tackling something where there isn't the data, there aren't the tools. Are you kind of starting from scratch? 

00:06:21 Rokhaya Diagne 

Well, yes, what we're doing is mainly like, you know that we have some tools that we could rely on. But those tools are not really available everywhere, like in some areas you would go to Senegal, you would just not find any microscope. Or if you do find some microscope, those microscopes are not, you know it's it's very cheap microscope. So it's not high quality microscope that will allow those people to be able to provide some you know, very good high quality diagnosis. So what would happen is would be the fact that you can either find microscopes but not people that are trained to be able to go through some those microscopes and perform the analysis because they don't have enough people to bring them on those areas. Or you don't even find a microscope, so you can have trained people, but not with the necessary tools to be able to provide accurate diagnosis. That's why actually in my, our case we, with my university. We decided to work on malaria to help people or labs or structures because in some areas you don't even have labs. Those structures are not well equipped. 

00:07:34 Gareth Mitchell 

So when you talk about these images, are you talking about, say, the bacteria with tuberculosis or is it the parasites with malaria? What are you actually looking at? 

00:07:42 Rokhaya Diagne 

Our main focus right now is malaria because we are working on it with my university. Is a collaboration between my university and the lab in Senegal, which is called Iressa.  So they're the one providing us data and what they give us is microscopic slides that are slides that are already prepared and fixed. So all we do is just use those slides and  you know, collect our own data sets to make to make sure that it works with the type of microscopy that We are using in this case and then that we are, was to actually have our own data sets of images and then those images will be used to train our AI model just to make sure that the algorithm can accurately identify malaria infected cells from blood samples. So I think you know the process was challenging of course, but I think it's rewarding because it it it promises to develop malaria diagnosis significantly, especially in our areas. 

00:08:50 Gareth Mitchell 

What your research is all about, then, is better training the AI models. So you're training the AI. That's one step, but now it needs to be useful out in the field. So how will that help with diagnostics,  especially in some of the remoter areas of Senegal. 

00:09:05 Rokhaya Diagne 

So actually what we are providing is a platform that will, where you know, lab technicians can just go and connect to the platform and then from the microscopic slides that they have that they could just put it on the microscope, that they will connect to the computer and then from there they will be able to, the AI model will be able to tell what's on the on the slide. If we have a case of infection and the level of infection and all the information that are necessary and that the use of the platform goes beyond that. Because it will allow to our governments to have a better tracking of malaria cases in Senegal because that platform can help our governments have a better you know better understanding and you know have maybe in time they can have those results. 

00:10:04 Gareth Mitchell 

There you go. That is Rokhaya Diagne speaking to us there from Senegal in the midst of all kinds of upheaval in that country, and the Internet went down several times during that interview as well. But what did it on that one? It did, yeah. It went down on that interview as well.  

00:10:18 Ania Lichtarowicz 

It did. 

00:10:22 Gareth Mitchell 

So Ania, back here in the studio. So we talked there in the introduction quite a lot about what's been going on in Senegal. You brought us up to speed with that, but listening back on that interview, what really strikes me is this real kind of, the the role of big data and AI and this being very much Rokhaya saying that, now I'm just putting words in her mouth here. But you know, I think she's effectively saying that, yes, there's all kinds of technology out there. There's lots of data, there is training data for these models, but not all of it is going to be relevant to the setting that she's in. And I mean, you've been a health correspondent, so you know all about the issues of diagnosing or screening for the likes of malaria or TB. 

00:11:09 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I think she put it so well herself that you either get  you know, the limited number of skilled people or you get the equipment to be able to identify if a sample has malaria and the AI tools that she's developing really are are looking at overcoming that, and that, what that will allow for governments and even local health clinics to do is to plan, you know, to know how many cases or roughly how many cases there are of malaria in Senegal. Until they know it's very difficult to decide well where should mosquito nets go, for instance, or where should treatments go, what type of treatments. You know, have we got, you know, resistant malaria here. Do we need artemisinin based treatments? It just allows... 

00:11:54 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I think I think what's really important here with big data, well any type of data is if you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out, the data quality has to be really good. And that's one thing that I think Rokhaya is really, really pushing for. With good data you're going to be able to have good analysis with good analysis, you're going to then have good planning. 

00:12:12 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, such an important point, Ania. Well, there is more from Rokhaya in the extended in the podcast extra version and the subscription version and it's well worth the listen because out of all things, we ended up talking about underwater drones and seagrass. Figure that one out. So that's in the podcast extra. 

00:12:40 Gareth Mitchell 

It’s pre-record Gareth here.  Interrupting the live Gareth with an important message. Yeah, they’re just playing this in to give me a rest. Aren’t they clever. And the message is, please subscribe to the extended version of this podcast won’t you.  It’s where the guests often relax.  I get to wing it a bit and I get to find out more about people’s work and their lives. It’s ten US dollars a month. Most podcatchers open up the subscription content, if you just click on the padlock or something, and or you can go to somewhereonearth.co. Press the big button on the left hand side to subscribe, or the big button on the right to donate. You can opt out at any time, and because we know it’s so easy to cancel we really do try to make it good. No filler, just a bit of extra bonus content to make your, and our day. 

00:13:31 Gareth Mitchell 

Alright, so, we heard there at the beginning from Rokhaya in Senegal and it really struck me listening to her story about her talent, how valuable that is, the journey she's had with her education. She's been through a couple of universities, studied biology to start with and now is ending up in computing in big data and AI. 

00:13:55 Gareth Mitchell 

And it had all of us on the team thinking about kind of zooming out from Rokhaya’s case there into the bigger picture around talent in Africa. And we're always hearing about how the great continent of Africa just has this young workforce and a dynamic workforce and that's great. But what are the kind of roadblocks then in terms 

00:14:18 Gareth Mitchell 

of taking that really harnessing and leveraging that workforce. Well, one of the people we go to in these situations cause it always has fascinating things to say on this kind of topic is Bhaskar Chakravorti. He's Dean of Global Business at Tufts University in the United States. You may have heard on the podcast 

00:14:33 Gareth Mitchell 

a few weeks ago, and he's also the chair of a research initiative called Digital Planet, and that explores the impact of digital innovations around the world. And he has a load of data at his fingertips about a lot of these questions, including the whole workforce across the continent of Africa question. And this is what he had to say. 

 

00:14:53 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

Africa is one of the youngest regions in the world. Highly challenged on so many fronts, most significantly on the economic front. And when I say Africa, we're talking about 54 plus countries and of course, every region, every country in Africa has its own challenges. But the youthful demographic is is a fairly universal phenomenon across the continent. 

00:15:16 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

One of the biggest difficulties in Africa, is getting meaningful, productive jobs. You know, for this very young population, but prior to giving them jobs, we also need to make sure that they have education and the skills necessary to have productive lives. So Africa has a number of distinctive challenges, but this is the potential opportunity for the continent to turn a few things around 

00:15:46 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

and utilise this youthful demographic and this is a population that has also taken to digital technologies in a quite, wholeheartedly and the penetration of the mobile phone has been not at the same pace as the rest of the world, but it's definitely picked up quite a bit over the last you know, five to seven years and the young people are generally especially in the urban areas much more digitally enabled than than one would have expected. 

00:16:14 Gareth Mitchell 

One point that comes out from your research is a kind of good news, bad news story in a way, you know? So the good news is that you have the skills, the, the equally good news is that you have the jobs and the needs for these skills, the bad news is they're just all in the wrong place. They're mismatched. So the job seekers are not where the jobs are, but is, or can technology be helping with that working online, that kind of thing. 

00:16:39 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

They definitely can if you just think about the need for people to be able to do relatively simple coding work or relatively, you know, basic repetitive back office ork, and of course a lot of that work has historically been done in countries like India, the Philippines and other parts of the developing world, but there continues to be needs for different levels of skills in basic services that can be delivered over the Internet system. 

00:17:13 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

So if we can get the young people in many parts of Africa sufficiently skilled to be able to sort of occupy, you know, these these roles, there is a potential for them to be able to use this technology and become productive members. A second use of this technology is for them to use their phones as a way to run businesses, and sometimes those businesses are home delivery or those businesses are delivering flowers or repair businesses. So there are lots of small and medium enterprises that can be built on top of essentially access to a mobile phone, but that requires the ability to organise, requires some skills and 

00:18:02 Bhaskar Chakravorti 

sort of creating this ecosystem of informal services that we are beginning to see in many parts of the continent, but that needs to be scaled up. And another important part of the use of the phone is being able to be paid on the phone. So you deliver a service and in return you get paid and the payment comes through over the phone. In some parts of Africa, that's much further along and places like Kenya, of course, is well known. But there are other parts of Africa, such as Nigeria, for instance, is somewhat further behind in terms of using mobile payments as frequently as you see on the eastern side. 

00:18:40 Gareth Mitchell 

That's Baskar Chakravorti didn't know about that fact that Nigeria is a bit further behind when it comes to mobile phone payments because you know what? Just about anybody listening to this across the continent of Africa will know all about Empezar. We've certainly used it. My God, it's so useful. 

00:19:06 Ania Lichtarowicz 

We have, we have indeed, in Kenya. 

00:19:08 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Yeah. 

00:18:58 Gareth Mitchell 

Amazing stuff and it was just really good just to get that check in, isn't it from Bhaskar, who's always got that data at his fingertips and he'll give you a narrative about skills and maybe the mismatch between the skills and the opportunities and potentially some of the solutions, so what strikes you when you listen to the back of that interview? 

00:19:17 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Well I always keep having to remind myself that 70% of the population is in Africa is under 30. I mean it's it just is incomprehensible to me and I really struggle to kind of keep remembering about that and that these people really need to be skilled and know what to do. I mean, there there was a survey. 

00:19:39 Ania Lichtarowicz 

recently in the UK that that showed that parents are just bewildered as to what careers their children can do, it's not as simple as doctor lawyer, plumber, electrician or or what have you, teacher because they don't know what jobs are out there. I mean, even young people will struggle to know what jobs they might be doing in the future because they haven’t been invented yet. So really to try and do that for such a huge amount of the population, it is difficult obviously, but they need to have the basic IT skills there. 

00:20:07 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And that whole point about African solutions for African problems as well, I suppose. 

00:20:14 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Exactly. I mean it has to be Africans for Africa. What would happen if multinationals, and some of them are doing this, come in, they create their own data, they gather their own data. And what happens if then this is used to create some algorithms that that will then be used? Who owns that data? Discuss. If, like Rokhaya is gathering and using her skills to get the local data, they're going to have ownership over it, and I think that is incredibly important for Africa going forward. 

00:20:43 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, data ownership. And the other thing behind that phrase, African solutions for African problems is remembering that Africa is a vast continent of many countries. And what this is really about is country specific solutions, as if there's, you know, the myth that there's some solution like that's going to fix Africa anymore than anything is going to fix Europe or the United States. That’s probably a different because that's a country. But you know what, I mean, you know, as if thinking on the country specific thing that Uganda is not Rwanda, Senegal is not Ghana. 

00:21:14 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Exactly. And you know, you can we can discuss why that is, etcetera, etcetera. But they are different peoples and therefore they need different, different solutions to different problems. And I think one thing that I I recently read about was Nigeria, as everybody thinks, Oh my goodness, mean Nigeria every you know, so many people use the Internet, etcetera, etc. But what most people don't realise is that it's multi use. So people who do use the Internet, use it a lot, but they will have 5 devices, so the actual numbers of people using the Internet is much smaller. It's just people use it in different ways.  

00:21:50 Gareth Mitchell 

Right. Ania. Thank you. Just before we leave it for this edition, can we do some subscriber numbers? 

00:21:53 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Yeah, I think we got, yeah, we got a WhatsApp, we got a WhatsApp from Mozambique. I'm so excited. Mozambique, beautiful country. 

00:22:02 Gareth Mitchell 

Can we do that? Yeah, we're very excited. So here we are. It's beautifully self-contained. Here's one of our listeners. 

00:22:09 Martin 

Hi there, Martin here from, the, dairy goat guy from southern Mozambique, was an avid follower of the Digital Planet. Late adopter of the Somewhere on Earth, but very happy to have found the podcast, enjoying the old familiar voices and working my way through the catalogue. Thanks very much. Keep up the good work. 

00:22:31 Gareth Mitchell 

Very nice too. So I love that the goat guy from Mozambique. 

00:22:38 Ania Lichtarowicz 

 I love the fact that we have a catalogue. 

00:22:40 Gareth Mitchell 

I like that as well, and whether you're an early or a late adopter, you're just adopting the podcast. That's so. Thank you. We're very glad that you’re here. 

00:22:51 Ania Lichtarowicz 

But he has a very good use of AI doesn’t he. 

00:22:24 Gareth Mitchell 

He certainly does. In his profile pic, which is 2 goats. 

00:22:59 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Two goats with cheese and grapes in front of them. 

00:23:01 Gareth Mitchell 

All very importantly, all generated by AI. Yeah, it's all very well coming on to this podcast saying about AI and the really big global health problems and so on. Yeah, you know, it's also coming up with goat pictures as well.  

00:23:13 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Very positive there, very positive.  

00:23:15G areth Mitchell  

You get both ends of the spectrum on this podcast. Although I mentioned listener numbers, he didn't actually ask for one there. So we we had a listener, but can we do some subscriber listener numbers? 

00:23:25 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Well, we can and I mean you know, we have to just mention now that we do have some quite important SOEP SUDS numbers now, don't we? 

00:23:34 Gareth Mitchell 

Sure do. Yes, none other Jimmy Wales. 

00:23:39 Gareth Mitchell 

He’s got one. 

00:23:41 Ania Lichtarowicz 

And I know, and Amanda Renteria, CEO for the Code for America. 

00:23:44Gareth Mitchell 

Yes, it certainly made my database here look very like star-studded, shall we say. So following keenly in their footsteps in their number tracks is Adrian, who says ‘May I claim alpha, the fine structure constant with a value of about 1/137. Again, how do you enter that on our database? I might just turn it into like decimal 0 point, whatever it is. 

00:24:12 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I think you’re gonna have to. 

00:24:13 Gareth Mitchell 

I think it's the only way of expressing it, and it's no, I I could probably write alpha on the database. Let's think about that. But Ania, you and probably all the listeners, must be wondering why Adrian wants that number. OK, well, it's obviously I'd know this kind of stuff. It's related to the strength of electron, electron interactions that cause the separation of lines in the hydrogen spectrum. 

00:24:20 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Go on, go on. 

00:24:33 Gareth Mitchell 

Wikipedia. It's very useful for that particular research, Adrian. Can he have, well, can he have that number. 

00:24:139 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Well I'm fine with that. Stevie. Stevie. Ohh. He's not sure. 

00:24:44 Gareth Mitchell 

Stevie might veto it. This could be our first ever veto of a subscriber number. Stevie is actually saying ‘go on then’, right? 

00:26:20 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Oh. 

00:24:53 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I've got that one through. 

00:26:28 Gareth Mitchell 

That was close. 

00:26:54 Ania Lichtarowicz 

And if you were wondering about Jimmy and Amanda, and you thought, why did I miss that? Well, you missed it because it was on the subscription version of the podcast. 

00:25:02 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. So you can miss all kinds of stuff I’m afraid folks. Jeff Donaldson wants SOEP SUD two. He says. Can I have #2, please? If it hasn't gone? Why? Because Gowri bagged number one. 

00:25:16 Ania Lichtarowicz 

No, no. 

00:27:07 Ania Lichtarowicz 

No, that's not fair. Gowri did not bag number one. She was she was anointed with it. 

00:25:21 Gareth Mitchell 

Yes, that's an important distinction. Jeff says if #2 isn't available then could I request the smallest number still available? Will that be like nought point nought, nought, nought, nought, nought. Nought. Well, I don't even want to go there. So, yes, in other words, you can have two. Jeff. Let's just make this simple for ourselves. Can we do that? Stevie? Stevie says yes. Right. Let's give you that one. 

00:25:41 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a nod. 

00:25:42 Gareth Mitchell 

Stevie says yes. Right. Let's give you that one. And how about this one? Let's go down the list slightly. Just make sure there aren't a few that we've already done, so. So, and scrolling down, Corin Patterson says. I love your podcast. I was a long time Digital Planet and Click podcast listener since 2006. I have no idea what listener number I was previously and Corin by the way, that doesn't matter. We're not carrying them over anyway. We're actually, it would be illegal under GDPR or something that I've just made-up to have done that. So we are starting from scratch. So Corin says, is #60 available in the new format. So not down to whether you had or didn't have it in the last iteration of whatever this is, it's just to make sure it hasn't already gone. I'm just checking um. So I'm actually doing a number search here. Now we can give that to you. If the committee agrees. 

00:26:33 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Is there a reason why or just just? 

00:26:38 Gareth Mitchell 

I don't think so. I'm trying to remember if it was....No, I don't know what what it was so OK. 

00:26:47 Ania Lichtarowicz 

We'll check, but yeah, that's fine by me. 

00:26:50 Gareth Mitchell 

We'll just, we'll just let him get away with it anyway, and I think Stevie's nodding. So I think that means yes from Stevie. Bernard Hunt wants listener number subscriber number, SUDS #2600. It's a famous number, says Bernard, from the formative days of phone freaking computer hacking. The phone network could be controlled by sending a tone with a frequency of 2600 Hertz into the handsets, which allowed them to make free calls, especially long distance or overseas. When computers started being networked with remote access via phone lines hackers connected to computers all over the place. I think I remember that. Actually, I'm old enough. 

00:27:24 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Well, I I was never that naughty, so I don’t. 

00:27:28 Gareth Mitchell 

I mean, I was never that naughty. I just remember that that tone, that 2600 Hertz tone. So I think that's quite a nice one, in fact a bit of background on that. I'd, not, hacking phones, but back in the old days when long before people had mobile phones you could dial the number just by clicking on the little cradle stand, you know the switch basically to emulate the numbers that otherwise would be clicked through to through the Rotary dial, so you could go ba ba for two and then ba ba ba ba for four. I think that was four. And it was so much fun. But one day my friend Donovan came in and somehow he he never told me how. But he had the number for The White House. So, and of course, especially if you're doing long distance, you'd have to put loads of coins in to sustain the call, but the phone would let you at least listen to the person the other end, obviously saying Hello White House. So we we rang the White House and just. 

00:28:34 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Well bang go any attempts to get anything from the US government on the show, now Gareth? 

00:28:39 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, sorry about that. U.S. government. I know Ronald Reagan was personally very cross about it and clearly the government of the United States has never forgiven us. I could do the other story about how I was actually stopped in passport control going into Houston once. I didn't do anything illegal, it’s alright. 

00:28:56 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I thought you were gonna say Rwanda. Can you remember that?  

00:28:58 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, Gosh, yeah 

00:28:58 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I think that's enough now. 

00:29:01 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, I think, well, you're the producer. So that's enough, until we've agreed or not agreed whether Bernard can have 2600. 

00:29:06 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Ohh I think so. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

00:29:08 Gareth Mitchell 

If Steve, Stevie says yes. So a few SUDS there. Uh, duly granted.  What a huge privilege it must be. But we love getting your SUDS suggestions. So please keep sending them in and we'll keep trying to do this and we'll get through all of them and we'll get you registered. There we are. That is the programme. The podcast for this edition. Anything else to go through Ania, or do I need to wrap it up? 

Ania Lichtarowicz: Wrap it up please. 

00:29:32 Gareth Mitchell 

Ohh, that's genuinely scary. Right? So before we go quick reminders the e-mail is hello at somewhere on earth.co. We are on social media. I'm sure you know where by now, but you can usually find us through Somewhere on Earth podcast the Global Tech Podcast or an arrangement of those words and on WhatsApp we're code 447486329484. Audio today has been by the eponymous Stevie Arnoldi at Lanson's Team Farner over here, and I think you'd probably by now know who the producer is. Shall I name check you again. 

00:32:22 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Ania Lichtarowicz. 

00:30:06 Gareth Mitchell 

You say it better than me and I'm Gareth. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Stand by for the subscription if you subscribe. 

ENDS