Slashdot Mirror
More Thoughts On How to Wire Senegal
An anonymous reader submits "Last month Slashdot published a story on the Peace Corps' plans to wire Senegal. Now Peace Corps Online has published an article by a volunteer who taught computers in West Africa for two years who recommends that the White House's Digital Freedom Initiative abandon the Western paradigm of 'a computer on every desk' and borrow a lesson from telephony in third-world countries. Since a residential telephone line is a luxury item in West Africa, the 'communication center' has flourished as a private business even in the smallest of towns where it generates profits while sharing the high cost of telecommunication among the whole community. This user model coupled with deregulation of VoIP can be the key to implementation of computer technology in poor countries."
And what better way to help them read but to give them the Internet?
Seriously. Do a google search for home-made water filters, see if there is anything they could use. Or on learning to read.
Info can help anyone. They may not use it the way you expect them to. How about using it to work around the corruption in the local school system? Or to just decrese its cost? (A good high school may not even be avalible in some villages.) Let them decide if it is worth using.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I was in Tanzania last month. As the story says is the case in W Africa, community internet access is very popular. Its patronizing and simplistic to assume that just because these are poor people, they have no other needs than food/water (as other posters have commented). If nothing else, in the Maasai village I was staying in, people were using the internet to get farming/weather information that was otherwise unavailable. More relevantly, they were trying to contact the Houston company (http://www.tgts.com) that was shooting the leopards, lions and buffaloes on their land without permission. They were also starting their own school, using internet as a tool. All of this can be seen in a community context, which might explain why community-level internet access might be successful.
Done right, technology will provide the information that will allow people to help themselves - much better than the normal aid dependency syndrome.
Reply to another comment: I don't think Quake is so exciting for Maasai who have to kill a lion with a sharp stick before being allowed to marry.