informage

The BBC is running an article criticising schemes that donate old computers to African teaching projects. Apparently inconsistencies in the supplied software and the level of hardware make the teaching task difficult, potentially creating more problems than are solved.

"You have maintenance problems, you have to constantly upgrade your systems," said Theo d'Souza, of the Dar es Salaam headteacher's conference. Of course this problem isn't limited to recipients of donated equipment, but the whole upgrade cycle is harder to deal with if you have limited resources. Microsoft's "Regional Director for Community Affairs for Africa and the Middle East" Garry Hodgkinson says in response "The digital divide is too important not to get bogged down in the debate over software". I'm not sure that's what he meant to say, but in any case I believe that use of open source software, rather than Microsoft's offerings, can help overcome this hurdle. I wrote a piece about this while I was working at UWC.

I feel strongly both about providing access to technology to under-resourced nations - I attempted to set up a project doing much what the article discusses in 1996. The project was called OCNI - Old Computers New Ideas - and we provided a couple of PCs salvaged from British Telecom to a university in Ghana. I didn't quite have the energy to deal with the project and it died a death, but the wide variety in quality of the computers we got suggested to me that providing consistent technology was going to be the big problem.

Now I'm planning to work with a community development project in Khayelitsha, Cape Town's biggest and poorest township, to create a PC resource center. This is very tentative at the moment, but the more and more benefit I derive from my use of IT, the more incentivised I am to work to make it available to people who have transformational uses for the stuff.