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."

Comments

No kidding

[toygeek]

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.

Re:No kidding

[Daniel_Staal]

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.

Re:No kidding

[cperciva]

It's not quite that simple. Internet access has some demonstrated benefits in the third world -- if a community has access to the internet, they immediately gain access to information which would be too expensive to provide them with otherwise. Information like how to recognize and treat disease, when and how best to plant their crops, et cetera.

Putting a computer in every home in the third world is absolutely unnecessary at this point; but putting a computer in every community has benefits far exceeding those which could be obtained by spending a similar amount on a water supply.

Amen

[Gefiltefish11]

A computer on every desk does indeed sound like somebody has warped priorities.

Let's look into getting the infant mortality below 20% first.

My vision:

[phyrestang]

I imagine seeing children in tattered clothing, sitting reading /. complaining about "that damn microsoft"

Not just in West Africa, but worldwide...

[J.J.]

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.

stop patronizing Africans

[tintillon]

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.

Re:stop patronizing Africans

[HBI]

I had a friend named Martin who was an expatriate from Sierra Leone. He worked with me at IBM. Talented guy, college educated. He spent a lot of his time rounding up junk computer equipment (what we'd consider junk) and shipping it to Sierra Leone. He'd go back and visit occasionally.

I asked him - if people can use these computers (implied literacy and education), then why can't they form up a westernized culture and enrich themselves, at least to the extent of getting decent housing and food self-sufficiency. His answer was that the lacking required factor was law and order. The leaders fleece the country, selling off natural resources at cut-rate to benefit western corporations. Eventually the enraged local youth (of a political bent) get fed up and revolt, and stuck in the middle are all the regular people of which this mythical culture would be fashioned.

What's the answer, I said. He shook his head. He does what he can.

Re:stop patronizing Africans

[xcomputer_man]

I completely agree.

I am from West Africa (Nigeria in particular) and it irks me every time I see one of these morons talk about the place like it's a hapless mass of poor, depraved and illiterate morons fighting with each other all the time. It is for the same reason I refused to go see Bruce Willis' Tears of the Sun.

You only need to get to some areas of Lagos where there are approximately 5 to 10 cybercafes PER BLOCK to understand what the hell is going on. Since the launch of mobile telecoms in Nigeria, the country has had by far the fastest cellphone industry growth rate ever recorded, injecting $1 billion into the economy within the first year alone, and leaving the 2 or 3 providers struggling under demand.

The point is people need to communicate. Africans are a very smart set of people (just compare the average knowledge/IQ of an american high-schooler to that of a Nigerian high-schooler and you'll see what I'm talking about). And even the illiterate ones still frequent cybercafes to send email and use VoIP phones to communicate all over the world.

I could slap the face of anyone who makes retarded comments as "let's teach them to READ first" or rubbish like that.

Technology, not toilets!

[watchful.babbler]

Yes, it's a snide title to the post (and for that I apologize). I've spent some time in Africa -- not a great amount of time, but almost all of it was spent "en buisson," out in the tiny villages beyond the hub cities. I think that anyone who insists that indoor plumbing be piped to every village and town is ignoring the fact that developing nations need engines of growth, not creature comforts.

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.