Slashdot Mirror
Crowdfunded Afrimakers To Bring Arduinos, Raspberry Pis To African Tech Hubs
An anonymous reader writes "There's a chronic shortage of tech savvy teacher all over Africa, and at the same time a strong belief that the tech economy is vital to growth. Enter Afrimakers, a crowdfunded project to visit tech hubs in seven continents and leave behind Arduino boards, Raspberry Pis, soldering kits and — most importantly — the smarts to use them. The Indiegogo fund opened up a week or so ago, and they've managed to raise enough for the first two countries so far."
The Raspberry Pi is great for software hacking.
The Arduino is great for both software hacking and hardware hacking.
The Pi can be expanded to add effective hardware abilities, but it's more of a software platform. The Arduino is much better for hardware hacking.
I'm glad to see they are both being offered. Just don't offer a soldering iron kit with the Raspberry Pi. That's for the Arduino.
Kriston
That's nasty
My opinion on Africa is that the currently-modern countries are fine; the starvation-level countries need feudalism in the short term; and the type of technology to deploy in many of these places will be different than what we use here. That is to say: more sustainable, self-sufficient technology that needs less infrastructure will suit underdeveloped countries in that region better, but porting that same tech here would just get lots of greenie-weenie gum-flapping and high implementation fees to little benefit. Major infrastructure in the poorer regions of Africa of course would just devastate their economy; while actually providing sanitization and food distribution and education at an acceptably high level without requiring a multi-mega-bajilliotrillion-gold-pieces bootstrap they can't afford to maintain, much less implement in the first place, would give them a vehicle for economic prosperity.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
It's possible that this program will produce some enthusiastic and talented programmers in Africa... but when those programmers realise that it's frustrating writing programs when there's only a few hours of power a day, internet access is flaky, corrupt and predatory government frustrates their efforts to set up a business, and some big company overseas beckons them to work, they probably won't remain in Africa for very long.
Not all of Africa is impossible to do business in. Kenya's government, while not good, is at least stable and mostly functional. Botswana has seen very dramatic economic growth and is starting to emerge in the global markets as a viable place to do business.
Sure, Somalia's too unstable, Nigeria's too factional and Zimbabwe is too corrupt, but there are parts of Africa that could potentially benefit from better tech in schools.
The Gospel according to lolcat