NEWS POST: Child Beggar To Hero: Videogame Shows Suffering Of Senegal Street Children

The adventure you don't choose. (Image via Cross Dakar City)

Barefoot, a bucket under one arm, Senegalese child beggar Mamadou dodges cars, taxis and buses on the chaotic streets of Dakar as he searches for his parents in the hope of going home.

Mamadou is the fictional star of "Cross Dakar City", a mobile videogame which aims to raise awareness of the plight of tens of thousands of children in Senegal who are exploited and forced to beg in the streets by teachers at Koranic schools.

Some parents in Senegal and neighboring countries including Guinea-Bissau, who lack the money to bring up their children, send them to Islamic schools, or daaras, in Dakar - expecting them to receive food, shelter and teachings from the Koran.

But rights groups say the children, known as talibe, are largely exploited by abusive teachers as a way to make money.

Ousseynou Khadim Bèye studied software engineering in Dakar and created the game in his spare time from his job for an energy firm in Paris

"I wanted to highlight the dangers facing the talibe - they face beatings, kidnappings and sexual abuse," the game's creator Ousseynou Khadim Bèye told the Thomson Reuters Foundation ahead of International Day for Street Children on April 12.

"They also live in terrible conditions, lack access to electricity or water and have very little food," said Bèye, 32, who studied software engineering in Dakar and created the game in his spare time from his job for an energy firm in Paris.

The game, modeled on the 1980s traffic-dodging arcade hit Frogger, sees players guide Mamadou across Dakar's streets while avoiding getting struck by yellow taxis, horse-drawn carts and car rapides - Senegal's iconic colorful mini-buses.

"Cross Dakar City" has been downloaded 50,000 times by mobile users since it was released in May 2015, and Bèye hopes it will foster fresh debate among politicians and the public.

More than 50,000 children are estimated to be in abusive daaras in Senegal, and face punishments such as beatings with whips, wood and rope if they fail to bring in 2,000 CFA francs (US$3) per day, according to Human Rights Watch.

50,000 People Have Downloaded This Mobile Game About Street Children In Senegal

In Senegal, in Dakar alone, there are 50,000 child beggars. Many of them are Talibé children, or children who are studying in daaras (Koranic schools), who often become prey of exploitation, and are forced to work and beg on the streets. Their life is terrifyingly challenging—so much so it became the subject of an action game.

Cross Dakar City, is an mobile game created by Ousseynou Khadim Bèye, a 32-year-old engineer from Senegal, to raise awareness of the tragic conditions of Senegal’s child beggars. In the game, which is free to download, one of them has to escape the city’s street and walk all the way to his parents’ home, in the country.

The user plays Mamadou, a child beggar who has to cross 16 levels of water bodies, forests and—what’s hardest—city traffic, to get home in one piece. Through the game, he can get gifts that increase his strength, as well as encounter further perils, such as land mines. At the end of this little hero’s journey are his parents.

“Avoiding traffic is just one of many difficulties that [Talibé children] face,” Bèye says in a video presenting the game. “As in reality,” he says, Mamadou’s “chances of surviving such a journey aren’t quite in his favor.” So far, Cross Dakar City has been downloaded nearly 50,000 times across platforms. It’s a finalist of Best of Online Activism awards in the section Tech for Good.

Bèye—who, Reuters reports (STORY 1), created the game in his free time while working at an energy firm in Paris—says he wants to use Cross Dakar City prod international NGOs as well as the Senegalese government to help the child beggars. The engineer, who plans to develop a 3D version of the game, wants to capitalize on the visibility gained by this project to build a game design studio that creates games inspired by African culture.

Originally published in Reuters (STORY 1) and Quartz Africa (STORY 2)

GUEST BLOG POST: 4 Critical Mistakes That Inventors Make — Steven Johnson

Image of Benjamin Franklin

The history of innovation isn’t a straight line, but a squiggly, winding path. In How We Got To Now, my book and PBS documentary series, I highlight some of the creative mistakes that helped shape our world.

By Steven Johnson

Like most history, the narratives of innovation tend to be written by — and about — the victors. The traditional timeline of historic breakthroughs will almost surely include the Wright Brothers and the invention of the airplane in 1903 and Tim Berners-Lee and the advent of the World Wide Web in 1989. But the history of invention is filled with just as many heroic mistakes and creative failures. Here are a few of my favorite missteps and lessons:

Invention: The Phonautograph.

Inventor’s mistake: A glaring blind spot in their field of vision. In the early 1850s, the French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the first device capable of recording sound waves, more than 20 years before Edison invented the phonograph. So why did Edison get all the fame? Because Scott failed to include one key feature in his device: playback. There was no way to listen to the audio that had been recorded; you could just look at the sound waves etched on a sheet of paper. And the amazing thing about Scott’s phonautograph is that he wasn’t even trying to incorporate playback into his device; the idea simply never even occurred to him. Just a few years ago, a team of sound historians named David Giovannoni, Patrick Feaster, Meagan Hennessey and Richard Martin discovered a trove of Scott’s phonautographs in the Academy of Sciences in Paris, including one from April 1860 that had been marvelously preserved. Giovannoni and his colleagues scanned the faint, erratic lines and converted the image into a digital waveform. They played it back through computer speakers. At first, they thought they were hearing a woman’s voice, singing the French folk song “Au clair de la lune,” but later they realized they had been playing back the audio at double its recorded speed. When they dropped it down to the right tempo, a man’s voice appeared out of the crackle and hiss: Martinville himself warbling from the grave.

An 1859 model of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph.

Invention: The Phonograph.

Inventor’s mistake: Creating a device that changes the world, but for completely different reasons than they themselves imagined. Thomas Edison managed to complete Scott’s project and add audio playback with the invention of the phonograph in 1877. But he almost entirely misunderstood how the device would be used. In a famous essay published in the North American Review in 1878, he outlined a dozen different uses. “The main utility of the phonograph,” he argued, would be “the purpose of letter-writing and other forms of dictation.” In other words, people would dictate letters onto wax cylinders, and send them to friends or business colleagues through the post — a more literal form of voicemail. He also imagined the phonograph being used for audio books, talking clocks, and recording the dying words of family members. He did briefly mention what would become the dominant function for his invention — listening to music — but most of the other 11 uses he imagined turned out to be almost entirely irrelevant.

Patent drawing for Edison’s phonograph, ca. 1880.

Invention: The Audion.

Inventor’s mistake: Failing to understand the basic mechanics of their invention. In the first years of the 20th century, American inventor Lee de Forest began a series of experiments with a spark-gap transmitter, a device that created a bright, monotone pulse of electromagnetic energy that could be detected by antennae miles away. It was perfect for sending Morse code. One night, while de Forest was triggering a series of pulses, he noticed something strange happening across the room: every time he created a spark, the flame in his gas lamp turned white and increased in size. De Forest thought that the electromagnetic pulse was intensifying the flame. That flickering gaslight planted a seed in his head: maybe gas could be used to amplify weak radio reception, making it strong enough to carry the more information-rich signal of spoken words, or even music. The device that de Forest built based on this insight — the Audion — would prove to be a spectacular financial flop. Accused of defrauding his investors, de Forest sold the patent to Bell Labs for a small sum to cover his mounting legal bills. When the researchers at Bell Labs took over, they discovered something extraordinary: from the very beginning, de Forest had been flat-out wrong about what he was inventing. The increase in the gas flame had nothing to do with electromagnetic radiation; it was caused by sound waves from the loud noise of the spark. Over the next decade, engineers at Bell Labs and elsewhere modified his basic three-electrode design, removing the gas from the bulb so that it sealed a perfect vacuum, transforming it into both a transmitter and a receiver. The result was the vacuum tube, the first great breakthrough of the electronics revolution.

Patent drawing for de Forest’s Audion, ca. 1907.

Invention: Ice Shipping.

Inventor’s mistake: Failing to anticipate the response of the market. The 19th-century entrepreneur Frederic Tudor had a vision as a young man of shipping blocks of ice from frozen New England lakes to tropical areas, where they could be sold at a staggering markup. Tudor hit upon a technique to keep the ice blocks from melting during the voyage — in initial test shipments from Boston to Martinique, the ice survived the journey in remarkably good shape. But there was a problem that Tudor had never contemplated: the residents of Martinique had no interest in his exotic frozen bounty. They simply had no idea what to do with it. In 1800, the overwhelming majority of people living in equatorial climates would have never experienced anything truly cold. The idea of frozen water would have been as fanciful to them as an iPhone. Tudor assumed that the novelty of ice would be a point in his favor that his blocks would “out-do” all the other luxuries. Instead, the ice received blank stares. He posted handbills around town that included instructions on how to carry and preserve the ice, but found few takers. He did make some ice cream, impressing a few locals who believed the delicacy couldn’t be created so close to the equator, but the trip was ultimately a failure. In his diary, he estimated that he had lost nearly $4,000. Eventually, Tudor persuaded customers that there was value in ice; before his death, he assembled a vast shipping networking that delivered ice from New England to Rio and Bombay. For a stretch of the 19th-century, ice was the second biggest American export, behind cotton. And before long, inspired by Tudor’s success, other entrepreneurs set out to create artificial cold through mechanical means.

Ice Harvesting in Massachusetts, early 1850s.

Learn about many more creative failures in Johnson’s book, How We Got To Now, and in his PBS series of the same name. A companion site with news about modern innovations can be found at HowWeGetToNext.com.

Originally published in Ideas.Ted.com