I agree with you. Large US owned companies will pocket the difference. But what can you do? Ghanains will be in a better position than they were before, and that is the important thing. Changing the world economic order will have to wait for another day.
C
Yo. I am a geekcorps volunteer here in ghana. I'm not certain that your comment qualifies as "insightful". It is the obvious thing that everybody says.
Clearly, there are huge problems here associated with poverty. The way to combat them is to try to boost the economy. Computers here are relatively cheap. There is an opportunity here, particularly if the infrasrtucture is improved (and alot is being done in that direction) to create at the very least a viable industry in offshore consulting and so on, much as there is in Bangalore. We hope there will be knock on effects in the rest of the economy as more money comes in. It has worked extremely wel in, for example, Taiwan or India - also places where very large numbers of people are subsistence farmers and need more basic things.
The argument that the money automatically needs to be spent in areas other than technology seems to me only to have force if you accept its corollory - which is to say that until we have sorted out poverty, gang violence illiteracy and so on in US and EU cities, we should spend money only in those areas.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you. Large US owned companies will pocket the difference. But what can you do? Ghanains will be in a better position than they were before, and that is the important thing. Changing the world economic order will have to wait for another day. C
Yo. I am a geekcorps volunteer here in ghana. I'm not certain that your comment qualifies as "insightful". It is the obvious thing that everybody says.
Clearly, there are huge problems here associated with poverty. The way to combat them is to try to boost the economy. Computers here are relatively cheap. There is an opportunity here, particularly if the infrasrtucture is improved (and alot is being done in that direction) to create at the very least a viable industry in offshore consulting and so on, much as there is in Bangalore. We hope there will be knock on effects in the rest of the economy as more money comes in. It has worked extremely wel in, for example, Taiwan or India - also places where very large numbers of people are subsistence farmers and need more basic things.
The argument that the money automatically needs to be spent in areas other than technology seems to me only to have force if you accept its corollory - which is to say that until we have sorted out poverty, gang violence illiteracy and so on in US and EU cities, we should spend money only in those areas.
Colin Reveley, Geekcorps Ghana