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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.'"
Perhaps we can start by stopping our selling of weapons to them. It is revolting to the point where I almost want to cry that the American weapons manufacturers get rich off of essentially helping people kill each other easier. If the same materials and energy went into providing them with infrastructure instead of weapons then I couldn't imagine the world we'd be in now.
This however is another paradoxical example of where it is impossible to tell if it is demand driving supply or supply driving demand, just as with news media and entertainment. I always prefer to go on the assumption that the supply is driving the demand, because if I'm wrong, at least I'm erring on the side of reason and intelligence.
Nice article. Positives and negatives, with the mum worried by her sons who do not call.
The effect of cell phones is to allow a village to remain much the same village, despite the children dispersing. Over time, the kids will marry away, but the blow gets softened, and the children are stabilized by contact with home.
So it is a good thing over all. The interesting bit is: who pays for the village phones. Just the children. When you think that this is a force for stability, and how cheap phones are compared to machine guns, it is a pity that some military dollars didn't go into these phones.
I know it doesn't seem like it, but most of us feel the same way over here. Apparently though, the ones with mod points are the ones that disagree with me. (Current score: -1 flamebait)
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From the article they charge them by connecting them to their car's battery.
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan
Ok, if you are going to be the first person to post "what do they need cellphones/computers/internet for, give them food instead" type of post in this thread, I have something to say to you. You are an idiot. Please try to understand that you are an idiot and shouldn't be posting your idiotic opinions on slashdot or anywhere else. Instead, try to improve yourself somehow, take some classes or whatever. It won't help, but at least it will keep you busy.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
No, but that's mainly because I've got a limited budget, and existing business interests in other places in northern and western africa, eastern europe, and latin america.
I've a feeling I've seen similar villages to the one discussed in the article, though.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. One of the biggest shocks to me in my life was when I visited a small village in Ethiopia dominated by a former communal farm. One of the middle level farm workers asked me, in English, why the U.S. maintained such high subsidies on cotton and rice; why wouldn't the U.S., master of free trade, import Ethiopian cotton and rice?
They didn't want aid; they didn't want "education". They wanted to know why we refused to buy their products, even though their products were produced more cheaply than ours.
How do you answer that? Coming from someone who makes less in a month than I might spend in a night.
Maybe it is just me, but there is only one answer; abject shame, apologies, and a decision to try one's hardest to pursue business in the forgotten realms of this planet.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
People have been killing each other in the absense of American weapons for millennia. All that's needed to kill is a rock. Sometimes not even that. The abundance of rocks suitable for killing probably doesn't cause the demand for weaponized rocks. The same with pointy sticks. I think it's basic human nature. People with any sort of power are willing to kill to keep it. Others wanting power are willing to kill for it. The same goes for resources. It's quite a vicious feedback loop, but the availability of a weapon isn't the root cause.
I also really don't think it's fair to single out US weapons suppliers when probably every country that makes weapons sells them too. Russia, China, France, the UK and maybe every other "major" country exports weapons.
I'm in favor of microloans but you need infrastructure to distribute such loans. If the diaspora keeps sending money and returns to their villages there will be signs of progress.
Cell phones and communication with the diaspora will help in the future, look at Armenia and the Philippines where their diaspora are a big help to their economies.
Then again the deportation of American rejects to El Salvador (MS-13) was not a good idea either...
I'm part of a large movement to remove all rocks from third world countries.
Some say, rocks don't kill people, only people do...
Without a rock it becomes just that much more difficult to slay another person.
Once this is completed, we are moving onto our next project... removing hands... I know... fucking brilliant... I can't believe we didn't think of this earlier.
I'm forgoing using my shiny new Mod-points to say- ^^This^^
Look at Kenya, once a bastion of African stability (corruption not withstanding). Pretty much the nicest, most progressive and most developed sub-Saharan country in Africa, second only to SA (and what Zimbabwe once was)
In the space of a few weeks, they went from stability to killing each other with pangas, bows and arrows. Guns aren't the problem.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
Not as impressive if you consider that there is little to no spectral interference either.
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I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in a rural part of Tanzania from 1999-2002 and I went back to visit this last summer. When I arrived in 1999 there was one cell network in the country. It was in the (then) capital and most populous city of 2 million people, it had a capacity of 50,000 and was maxed out. A couple of competing companies starting setting up towers and by the time I left they had covered the major cities and arteries of the entire country. When I went back this last July the companies had moved out into the villages and most people in the country had local cell coverage. The area where I had lived was very hilly and somewhat remote so I thought that they would never get coverage out there but they had it.
You don't buy a plan like in the US, you buy a phone ($30 for a cheap model) and then you buy minutes (leading to some of the shortest phone conversations I have ever heard). People who live in areas without electricity find ways to charge them. Someone might buy a generator and set up a side business charging phones. Some people have to bike hours to the nearest town with electricity.
The difference in how people communicate was astounding. Kids away studying could keep in contact with their families back in the villages. Kids who had met in school but lived in different places kept in touch (I reunited a number of my former students by passing cell phone numbers around). Farmers could keep in touch with people in the markets. It was an amazing change.
but I lived in an African Village with no running water or electricity (90% of the time ) for 2 years. (Raise your hands RPCVs)
I had 3 (count them, one two THREE!) cell phone towers within sight of my house, and I could always hear the diesel generators at night if the winds lulled.
Would I have traded the cell phone for reliable electricity or running water?
HELL NO.
Cell phones improved my life and the life of the other people there tremendously. Electricity is about 1,000,000 times more expensive to cook with than charcoal, and kerosene lamps and candles make plenty of light. Water was scarce, but I had a no-flush pit toilet and an in ground rain-catch cistern for water. I only really used about 60l a week. The real problem was that not enough people had big enough cisterns (20% maybe), and many people had none. Water ran out in places at times, people suffered when they couldn't wash or bath as often, but no one ever died of dehydration for lack of a drink. If 60% of the houses had big cisterns, it would solve that problem.
Life without electricity and running water can be just fine. What is really needed is healthcare.
The hospital didn't have a single actual doctor after the foreign volunteer left. Pretty much everyone who walked in was told they had malaria and treated for it regardless. People suffered and died frequently from stupid, easily treated things. THAT was -IS- a tragedy.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
BIngo!
That's why whenever I see protectionist liberals, I call them selfish bastards. Globalization is the *most* efficient tool of wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor, worldwide. Just look at the Western (EU + US) trade imbalance with the Asian tigers & India.
Vastly more wealth has been transferred from the hands of the rich to the poor due to the last 15 years of globalization than the 50 years of Foreign Aid offered by the West AND the USSR.
Socialism (especially International Socialism) absolutely fails in attempting to redistribute wealth. Globalization *is proven* to be the answer to world poverty. The only important points are to keep it fair (no monopolies or corruption, please), and to open up closed states (I'm looking at you, Africa, and North Korea.)
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Why add fuel to the fire though? If the end result of any action is supposed to be peace (I can't imagine an argument against wanting peace at large), and all people are equal, than how can you accept knowingly that there are businesses around you built on perpetuating (Or at least de-incentivized to stopping) a violent cycle for the sake of taking the resources of a land which should be used for the betterment of the people of the nation.
All I'm saying is that the economic wealth we enjoy (and if you're using a computer on the internet right now, you're probably one of the "we" I am referring to) is built solely on the pain and suffering of many throughout the globe.
Furthermore, just because something has been going on for a long time doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to make things better. Is this the ideal world you want? Is this the kind of world you want to hand down to the next generation? We all have different desires, and we all in our own way try to push the world around us in the direction of these desires, be it wanting to get a good job so you study hard or wanting to get up to get a drink. But peace is a common desire we all share, and this isn't something we should laugh about, or mock someone for being an idealistic hippie.
I acknowledge that violent conflict is sometimes unfortunately necessary to achieve peace, however. But pursuing violent conflict which doesn't have the immediate intention of achieving peace is an assault on the dignity of human kind, a blow to the single thread which gathers together all sane, reasonable men.
I was going to put the obligitory "sure go ahead mod me down" thing here, but this is really what I believe, so if you don't like it, then maybe I'm the crazy one.
While I admire your idealism here, I was never endorsing the idea that selling guns is fundamentally good in any way, I don't believe that. I was simply saying that you cannot take away or prevent the guns and expect the result magically to be peace.
Guns are tools, tools that can be used for murder, but as Africa in particular has shown us, people can and do commit murder and atrocities on epic scales without guns.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
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As much as I like to blame America for what's wrong in the world these days (And they are to blame 99 % of the time).
Where I'm from (Somalia), weapons are probably where you see the least American influence. The most common weapons you find are Chinese, Libyan, Russian made AK-47's. Although the M-16 was becoming popular when i was there last time. especially for it's light weight.
And similar to what the Original poster noted, our Telecommunication infrastructure is one of the top in East Africa, it is a True free market, absolutely no regulation, no taxes.
But aside from Telecom everything else in the whole, completely unstable, 17 year civil year, puppet interim governments (we have our version of Hamid Karzai).
Now you may have been joking, but as a former Peace Corps Volunteer, I think I can safely speak for all Peace Corps Volunteers, past and present:
UP YOURS!
That kind of bullshit, paranoid thinking reared it's head at me and some of my friends through our service. Rumors get spread, and some un-trusting chap would come up and confront one of us for being an "agent" of the USA, and accuse us of plotting nebulous, vague "bad" things in projects like, oh say BOOKS FOR THE SCHOOL, or TEACHING PEOPLE TO MAKE JAM. It didn't matter that the person couldn't make a logical connection between JAM/BOOKS and EVIL, their trust was broken.
Trust that is hard enough to earn in the first place.
Trust is what keeps a volunteer safe.
(Not to sound melodramatic, but off the top of my head I can think of at least one situation I was in where my life might have been in danger had some paranoid-ass started saying I was CIA.)
The Peace Corps goes to great lengths to distance itself from any inkling of spying. If a person has ever been in an intelligence gathering position, they can pretty much kiss their chances of volunteering goodbye. After you have volunteered, you are PREVENTED from taking any job in the intelligence services for something like 5 years at a minimum. Volunteers are not allowed to make political statements relating to the host country, and are discouraged from pretty much anything political in nature i.e, do it and you could go home. There is no fucking spying going on in the Peace Corps.
If you still don't believe me, let me clue you in on a non-secret: Peace Corps volunteers by and large get sent to rural areas. Why the fuck would the CIA or NSA give a rats ass about what is going on in some forgotten backwater of a country, let alone care enough to put a covert agent there for extended time? As for the few volunteers who go to large cities, there would be no need for a "Peace Corps cover" with all the other options (State Department, USAID etc), and a Peace Corps cover would be a pretty shitty one at that, because you probably wouldn't get a ton of useful intel out of schoolchildren and aids patients.
Sorry, but that really touched a nerve.
"Cheeze it!" - Bender