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."
Does anyone remember this (or is it just my imagination), and if so, what became of it?
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
Indeed! Thoughout my travels in Asia I have found that Internet cafes function as a social gathering place for people to hang out, meet others, and exchange ideas. This is exactly the kind of thing people need more of in remote and isolated settings such as Africa. There are COUNTLESS uses of the internet than just posting to /.! --> tracking the weather if you are a farmer, keeping up to date on the news, contacting specialists such as doctors, facilitating growth of local industry - the possibilities are endless really.
I think some people have lost sight of the real power of the internet and its role in encouraging the exchange of ideas!
Folks who say "let's get infant mortality below 20% first" may think they're being hard-headed (Senegal has an infant mortality of 62/1000, just to clear up that point), but the truth is that they're woefully behind the times in development economics.
Developing nations are hardly the hellholes we often think them to be: life there isn't as pleasant as our own upper-middle-class lives, but it's not a constant struggle for survival in most nations. (Places like Sierra Leone excepted, of course.) People in developing nations may not have every modern convenience known to Americans, but -- thanks in no small part to the Peace Corps and other NGOs -- they at least have acceptable levels of sanitation available to them. (And am I the only one who hears the faint strains of "Rule Britannia" in those statements -- a kind of disdain for those poor savage souls who can't even be relied upon to clean themselves properly?)
What developing nations need is capital for their domestic entrepreneurs, and telecommunications is a critical part of that. One of the great success stories in development economics is the Grameen Bank, a microcredit bank that lends to impoverished rural dwellers. One of their success stories was a loan to a group of women who created a cell cooperative: they would rent celltime to other villagers, allowing the locals access to telecommunications without having to purchase unnecessary private lines.
For another example, in the West African nation of Mali, the Peace Corps has helped set up a trading cooperative for artisans across the nation -- artists ship their goods to a store that caters to both walk-in trade (mostly from French tourists) and international dealers. They even have a website (which, of course, I don't have the URL to ATT) that you can order from. Imagine how much more effective such networks could be if locals could communicate immediately across the region.
Furthermore, telecommunications give developing nations access to services not easily available -- local businesspeople could not only use Excel to keep track of their cash flows (as opposed to having to hand-rule ledger books in many rural areas), but they could get immediate access to groups and individuals to help them with their businesses. Instead of PCVs spending their two years giving lectures on basic accounting principles, small businesspeople could get that information over the Web, leaving the Peace Corps to stay hands-on.
Finally, anytime you can expand opportunities for people in the villages, you're doing a service. The traditional Harris-Todaro migration model effectively demonstrates how unemployed underclasses and grey markets develop in urban areas within developing nations. If you can increase educational and economic opportunities for people in rural areas, you decrease the wage disparity between the two sectors, and lower the explosive demographic pressure that characterizes so many developing-world cities. Arguably, technology can also have a feedback effect: as literacy and basic education is necessary to take advantage of the benefits of the telecommunications centers, the incentive to obtain that education grows.
So, there you go: some perfectly rational, hard-headed, economically-grounded reasons to give the developing world computers. It comes down to simply giving these people the power to effect change in their own lives: they're as capable and able as any of us, they just need the infrastructure to take advantage of it.
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
Give them both, preferably. I'm just saying the Internet isn't as worthless as you seem to think it is. Sheesh, follow my advice and most of the links you will find will need nothing more complicated than a plastic cup to contain the filter in.
As for learing to read on a written medium: most villiages will probably have at least one person who is mildly literate. Give them access, and they can (and will, since it will be something they can sell to the rest) improve their reading. They may even teach others (if only as apprentances).
As I said, you may be surprized at how useful and practical they would find it. If nothing else, they can exchange gripes, solutions, and problems with the next village over.
'Sensible' is a curse word.