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Bridging the Digital Divide In Uganda, By Freight
jtrust27 writes "Slow or non-existent Internet connections have meant that the people of Uganda have not been able to harness the many advantages of the online economy. This social and economic exclusion of the poorest of the poor was further accentuated by the impossibility for a Ugandan to obtain a credit card or make PayPal payments — a simple requirement to be able to pay for goods and services online. Most merchants and payment gateway providers automatically block all credit cards from Africa, and it is not possible to get a verified PayPal account in many African nations."
Now, a Ugandan company called EasyPayUganda is helping people sidestep these restrictions, by allowing customers to make online payments by proxy in order to pay for services and goods. EasyPayUganda is also providing a logistics solution, forwarding customers' shipments to Uganda, as most online merchants will not ship to Africa.
It's interesting that people complain how Africa is a third world country and how we should help them, but interestingly everyone sets artificial restrictions on them and restricts them from the other world. Many countries in the world ship food help and money there but if African countries are banned from using the services the rest of the world uses their region will never develop to the same level.
Instead of spending billions dollars to help Africa every year, what about if we open the services and let African countries develop normally like rest of the world?
Obviously theres the danger of fraud single they're still developing countries, but it's better to think long term. We can use the aid to cover the cost from frauds, and maybe in a few years we can stop spending so much money to help them. It will save us a lot more, especially in the long run.
I'm glad theres those single individuals who fight for it and try to make the world a better place.
That's the way international ordering used to work. You had to order stuff through some import company or freight forwarder, which had business relationships with foreign suppliers. You paid the import company, they ordered, handled the shipping, and sold the item to you with a markup. That's how it worked back in the days of sailing ships.
Note that this Ugandan company doesn't have a posted price list. You have to ask for a quote before they tell you how much they're going to mark up your Amazon.com order. So they're probably expensive.
Funny, what you describe sounds exactly like the United States. Projection much?
Africa is not a place, you know. It's an entire continent.
I've been there several times, and Uganda - like most former colonies in Africa - isn't so much fucked up as it was fucked over. Faced with the lack of a middle-class (since of course they didn't want to stoop to being middle class, nor did they want any of the Africans to rise to that status) the British empire imported Indians by the score. Post-independence, there was all kinds of unrest, eventually culminating with Idi Amin kicking out all the Indians, which of course failed to solve anything because it wasn't like the locals were ready to take over their jobs or anything. Cue another 10-15 years of unrest, a couple coups, Museveni lets the Indians back in, they go right back to business and become more wealthy and powerful than ever, and aside from lingering problems with transboundary rebel groups in the far northwest near the borders with Sudan and Congo, the place has actually been relatively peaceful and stable for 25 years.
Unfortunately, given the history 1960-1985, development was starting from a pretty bad position - but it's been developing crazy-fast. The African Union's NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa's Development) project has been pushing good governance, anti-corruption, computers in schools and all that stuff, and Uganda's national planning authority just released a 5-year development plan, written by development professionals without consulting the parliament (which the parliament are pissed about, hehe!), and emphasizing electrification, high-tech industry, mass transit, and a bunch of other good ideas.
Of course, Uganda's still less developed than anywhere in the US except for maybe some back-woods hillbilly shack - my fiancée helped with editing the 5-year plan, and her apartment, just a few km from downtown Kampala, is at the end of a dirt lane, off another dirt lane, off a dirt road, off a paved road. And it's more surprising if the power stays on all day than if it doesn't.
The good news, though, is that thanks to some development aid partners (like Norway), it's being given development options other than "get as much oil as possible and build your economy around it" (a.k.a. the US-China model). Norway is huge on hydropower, and Uganda has a lot of potential in that area. Straddling the equator, there's plenty of solar potential too. So there's hope, at least, to preserve some of the environment, which of course is being exploited through eco-tourism.
As far as getting goods to Uganda, though... sheez, this is dead on. Never, ever try to mail anything there. I don't know whether it's customs or the postal service that's corrupt, but it's like mailing things into a black hole. I think one or two postcards I sent might have made it through. Even Express Mail doesn't get any respect. If you want to get anything to anyone, it's FedEx/DHL or bust.
The goods sold in stores have pretty much been shipped overland from Mombasa (in a barroom, drinking gin *weeps for Warren*). Former UK colony, so they're all UK-spec electrically. In '05 or '06, a clock-radio you'd pay $19 for at WalMart cost $100 due to all that shipping. Thankfully, things have gotten a little better now, but an unlocked iPhone 3G S is still $1200+. Oh, yes, there are iPhones. There's an Apple authorized reseller right downtown in Kampala, although there's an unhealthy lag for them to actually get each new revision of things in-stock. Some of the bigger regional supermarkets even carry US brands.
But credit cards... yeah, they're a novelty over there. Ugandans hardly use credit. A young man will bust his ass to get through school, then work like crazy and live on almost nothing, until he saves up enough cash to buy land and build enough of his dream house to live in. They're insanely hard-working. So basically you either meet people who have nothing (because they're working and saving) or you meet guys who are 25 and already have a large house, nice car, etc. Not so much in-between. And not on credit.
4 years ago, you could walk aroun
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Aha, but we don't let them. Immigration into the land of milk and honey is nigh impossible for these third-worlders and in case they start uprooting the rainforest, we make that a preserve (except where we do the uprooting in our own interests). We plunder their natural resources and cut them out of the loop, often by controlling their resistance through helping the oppressive regimes. Telling the people of Africa to "move to where the food is" is cynical at best. Besides, food isn't the biggest problem in most parts of Africa. It isn't all a desert, you know?
Patent nonsense.
Most regions of Africa don't need food aid.
Most regions of African don't have ongoing armed conflict.
So you campaign for open borders?
Most of the inhabited regions of Africa are not deserts. Things grow.
Africa has problems, but it is not the starving hell-hole you seem to think it is.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Life expectancy is an aggregate, of course, and you can drag it down real fast with childhood, neonatal and maternal mortality. Sure, I know Ugandans whose kids died young, and I know ones whose kids died as young adults, and I know of people who died in their 50s or 60s, but I also know ones who are 70+ and have heard of them living to 90 or more. And of course, among the Indians, who tend to be moderately well-off, the numbers may be different. The richest man in the country, Sudhir Ruparelia (you can google him) is a hotelier who was a teenager when they were ejected; I'd put him in perhaps his late 50s now, and certainly he can afford the best medical care.
By the way, I've nothing against Uganda's Indians or Mr. Ruparelia; I've stayed at his flagship property before and my fiancée is well-acquainted with his people as well. Had the Brits handled things differently 100 years ago, perhaps the kind of perverse logic Amin espoused would never have arisen, but what's done is done.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
If some African countries don't give you problems why would you block them?
Because there is an indication that they are more likely than not to give us problems. Too many countries on that continent that aren't South Africa or Egypt fit the following pattern: We see an unacceptable rate of fraud from the country's neighbors, enough to extrapolate the likelihood of fraud within the borders of that country, and not enough complaints from people in the country.
We had war-torn countries before. Europe was in a bad mess after WW2. My own country, Holland had to build up from mass starvation in the last winter of the war to a modern western nation. But that did NOT happen at once. Dutch living standards took decades to reach American living standards. And in those decades, people did NOT have huge American cars or huge American style homes or living on credit. The post war years were spend working hard and saving lots and then buying modest AND domestic.
And that seems to be missing in your story. Granted, the working hard is there, but then they buy a iPhone and a big car... understandable, everyone else in the world has it, but it means local industry can't develop. If you buy a Chinese clock radio instead of an african windup clock, then that African factory can never develop to build clock radio's. Why do you think the tiger economies were so hot on producing cars, their own cars? Because if they had just bought American, they would never have developed their own economy long term.
The African economies/cultures seem to be close to cargo-cults.
A lot is made of the fact that Africa is skipping the landline and a lot of westerners think this is a great thing. WRONG.
What pacified the west? The telegraph. Telegraph lines were an essential part of conquering America, they had to be kept safe and so as a side result, any land with a line on it became safe. Same with the rail lines. As the network spread, the lands around them were made safer and became safer.
If landlines can't be installed in Africa because it is not safe, then installing a wireless network is NOT dealing with this safety issue. It doesn't matter wheter you attribute the taming of the west to train, the postal service or the telegraph. The building of these networks and the need to protect this network protected the lands around it.
When something is beyond the pale. What does that mean? Hignfy refreshed my mind on the recently, it refers to the old european punishment of putting wrong do'ers beyond the city limits. Not so long ago, being outside a city and its protection was a serious form of punishment.
If you can understand the difference that has come over europe were we can't even see why that would be a bad thing, we leave the city for FUN!!!!!, then you can't understand how Africa where lawlessness reigns is missing an essential foundation, an infrastructure for its development.
It is like building a skycraper on sand. It might look the part, but an essential part is missing, the foundation.
While this new service might sound like a good idea, I think it is very wrong indeed. It is shipping in western goods and skipping the development of the local economy, industry, infrastructure to truly support it. That you mention you need to use FOREIGN postal services to ship anything is telling enough.
The postal service is the most fundemental service of any country. Without it, nothing else can function. There is not a single developed country that did not have its own postal service and most still do.
Skip it and you are a cargo-cult, completly dependent on a foreign entity, who may bear you no malice but simply might one day not come around anymore. An African buying an iPhone at inflated prices is NOT a sign of progress.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What you said about blacks is the same I could say about manual laborers in Germany (and I mean locally born ones, not immigrants), having a manual labor job simply builds a lot of strength and endurance but smart people will usually take the better paid office jobs instead. As for common sense, considering the logic the ancient Greeks espoused at times (Socrates' apology... *shudder*) I don't think what we call "common sense" really is so universal to the species, it's built by the society around it. A thousand years ago (that's right in the medieval age) the average European peasant would have been equally confounded by any talk about cause and effect.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
To promote aid in most regions of Africa, you have to be prepared to deliver that aid against armed resistance, or accept that that aid might be coopted to feed the army that oppresses people who need aid. That's not really helping.
I've worked in medical/humanitarian for the better part of a decade, mostly in Africa, in some of the most active conflict areas. I have worked in Darfur, eastern Congo/the Kivus, northern Uganda, etc during some of the peaks in violence and insecurity. I have never delivered aid against armed resistance, nor do I know anyone or any organization who has. That's movie/TV stuff, not reality.
Second, of course aid will be coopted, redirected or siphoned to various armed groups. That is the nature of armed groups, to take by force.
The "not really helping" comment - actually, the entire paragraph reveals your naivety - it is impossible to provide aid without a diversion, either into the grey/black markets, pockets of armed factions, open markets.
I really do want to help these folk, and I can think of no better way to do that than to repeat the message of the great (and missed) Sam Kinnison: Move to where the food is. You're in a freaking desert where things don't grow. MOVE.
An ignorant joke that only makes sense or is funny when the listener has no knowledge of the subject.
The mostly heavily populated areas of Africa are temperate. Humans evolved on the African high plains. Think about it.