Cellphones Leapfrog Poor Infrastructure in Mali

Hugh Pickens writes "CBC News has up an article by Peace Corps volunteer Heidi Vogt, a woman who served in the small village of Gono in Mali five years ago and remembers letters dictated and hand-carried by donkey cart or bicycle to the next town. Vogt recently returned to see the changes that cellphone communications have made in a village that still doesn't have electricity or decent drinking water. 'Gono's elders say the phones can keep them in touch with their village diaspora,' writes Vogt. 'Villagers depend on far-off relatives to send money in time of crisis — if someone is sick, if a house has caught fire, if there's been too little or too much rain and the harvest is poor. There's a new sense of connection to a larger world. In a village where most people can't read or write, they can now communicate directly with far-off relatives.'"

Comments

Re:Preemption

[kanweg]

Sorry, but your post will not help. In my country we have a newspaper called the Telegraph. If people have brains, they avoid it. If they don't have brains, they don't have the brains to understand any explanation why they should avoid it. Catch 22, I believe.

Bert

Literacy is needed more than anything else.

[chris_sawtell]

So what they _really_ need is knowledge - that, btw is information which has been transferred from the transport medium into the brain - about how to look after their health. First they need to learn to read and write in whatever language they use. In this situation it would be a really worthwhile investment because texting is so much cheaper than talking.

How to persuade the illiterate that it's worth while putting in the effort to learn how to read and write is another, and very difficult question to answer. Even the so-called first-world nations have yet to find the answer.