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."
Trying to put a computer in every home? Try getting clean water in every home first. For now lets work on that. We can put in computers once we can help them READ.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
In impoverished countries, why don't they just feed these people instead of trying to get them to try q2 deathmatch? Who cares about this shit?
I'd say FEED ME before FRAG ME any day.
I swear, the priorities of Governments...
A computer on every desk does indeed sound like somebody has warped priorities.
Let's look into getting the infant mortality below 20% first.
Does anyone remember this (or is it just my imagination), and if so, what became of it?
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
I imagine seeing children in tattered clothing, sitting reading /. complaining about "that damn microsoft"
I just returned from a three-week backpacking tour of Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. In general, they're not in as bad of shape as Africa, but some parts still suffer the same difficulities with access and utility availability.
I told folks I'd keep in touch via e-mail, but was careful to always caveat that with "as long as I can find internet access". Next time, I'll drop the caveat. Places with phones have an "internet cafe". And they're often full.
In my constant pursuit of fluent spanish, I thought I'd have to find another bilingual computer professional to learn the spanish translation of computer-centric terms like e-mail, web, internet, scanner, mouse, instant messaging and the like. If you find yourself in the same situation, ask a kid on the bus. The older generations aren't there yet, but the kids have it down. I was amazed.
The Economist did a good article recently on [somewhat] related issues of access, business and money. Instead of working to deliver telephones, they give an account of the beer man. It's a good read. Trucking in Cameroon
Cheers,
J.J.
Having lived in Africa for a short period, I can say that "a computer in every home" is NOT what those people need.
To repeat some of the previous posts, they need clean water, food, medical supplies, and other basic humanitarian goods.
This is not to say that they have no use for computers. For this is certainly not the case. Something along the lines of an internet cafe (but not so trendy) is what they would benefit from. Just as the article says, the people can share the cost of an inexpensive comm link. Combine this with a few donated PC's running Linux and bingo - the towns people will begin to become computer literate.
These people have a genuine desire to learn, but things like this must fit within the economic and humanitarian reality of their locale. A "community" net enabled PC would fit the bill nicely.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
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.
Senegal has a successful chain of cybercafes, the Joko Clubs, where internet access is available to everyone. It was started by a popular Senegalese singer, not by the government or outsiders.
The community "Computer & Communications" idea is fantastic, not only does the cost get shared on a user pays basis, it also brings together like minded individuals where they can teach/learn from each other, rather than struggle to learn alone.
Contrary to what many of you believe, Senegal is not one of the most impoverished nations in Africa (try Sierra Leone)...
As much as I applaud foreign aid, the way we've been doing it DOESN'T WORK. When we go in and feed people, guess what happens when we leave (and leave we will!)? They starve again. If anything, they're worse off, because they've gotten used to a steady stream of aid.
This is why we need to educate them, and computers is a good way to provide maximum education/$. Right now, in the third world, there is no meritocracy - so there are, quite likely, very intelligent people who don't have any means of improving themselves. However, they could do very well with some investment in education in these countries.
So, what we need is to educate the populace while we feed them. Give them a chance to learn either a trade skill, or to go to university. Then, the educated can help rebuild the country. Admittedly, computers aren't the sole answer to this, but it would be a part. Those who have the intelligence and literacy would be able to teach themselves, and as other posters have said, Google is a better textbook than nothing for schools that lack resources.
Yes, Africa needs food....but it might need civil engineers even more. That's why we need to work really hard to educate them. If you wait to educate until no one is starving, no one will ever be educated and everyone will starve when we stop spoon-feeding them. That's why it has to be a concerted effort.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
... they start getting spam for dick extenders, realise just how pitiful the rest of the world is, and go back to beating the shit out of each other over which goat pissed where.
Well, maybe Microsoft can save them.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I thought someone was trying to wire seagulls.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Who is regulating VoIP? To what specific problems does this phrase apply?
I don't see where the Digital Freedom Initiative wants to put a computer on every desk. In fact, their agenda sounds pretty much the same as the proposed alternative, namely to leverage the Internet cafes already there.
When you're talking about computers in Africa, every city is a village.
This is a nice line. Nice in the style of political campaign slogans. Bumper Sticker Verbiage. All I get from it is that Africa is behind in computer technology.
The Peace Corps has got to stop acting like Christian missionaries. The way to help African countries is to help those who manage the country. Let them manage their own lives. The conservative politics of the current administration assume that we Americans -- including the Peace Corps. -- are better equipped to run things than the people we are supposed to be helping. That approach is doomed to fail -- see the history of colonialism.
I was especially offended by the pro-commerce tone of the DFI web site. Classic conservatism, use taxpayer's money to further "private" enterprise:
The Digital Freedom Initiative (DFI) will help meet the challenge by promoting free market based regulatory and legal structures and placing volunteers in businesses and community centers to provide small businesses and entrepreneurs with the information and communications technology skills and knowledge to operate more efficiently while competing in the global economy. These objectives can be achieved in partnership with U.S. business entities whose voluntary, innovative and entrepreneurial participation in the DFI provides access to new markets and competitive opportunities for developing products and services in emerging economies.
Whatever happened to population control, sanitation, natural resource management, and basic education? Since when is it my government's job to help business entrepreneurs in other countries get to market? So Walmart can sell more cheap clothes? The Peace Corps needs to get back to basics of helping to ensure a fundamental level of safety, health, and liberty for every human being.
Fear Pox Americana.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
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."
Every time i read something like this i think of George Washington, the man who would not be king. The more and more we see of democracies, the more we see how hard it is to start them up (at least starting through a violent revolution) without the leader of that revolution seizing power and smashing the democracy. We can thank Washington for our stable democracy(the man, not the city ;-) .