(OT) Ghana's digital dilemna

[astaines]

Ghana's digital dilemna - a recent piece on Slashdot and Technology Review set me thinking. There are some obvious benefits to developing countries in adopting new technology. There are some serious obstacles too, as clearly outlined in this article. Of course, some of these are outside our scope, for example the electricity supply..

Anyway, one issue identified by several of the people interviewed for this piece was a need for training - to bring people from understanding computers fairly well to being able to write programs. It occurred to me that I would be very happy to, say, pay for a second Safari subscription to faciliate someone in Africa, who would find the cost and logisitics of making such a payment prohibitive.

There would be obvious benefits if this was centrally organised in some way, perhaps through some African NGO's working with O'Reilly and others.

Does this sound like a good idea? Let me hear your thoughts!

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Anthony Staines

Edit kudra, 2002-06-23 Marked OT

[gumby]

Korea is probably the most obvious benchmark of these projects (and shows they can succeed), we should be heeding the advice of that old adage 'give a man a fish...' etc.

[chaoticset]

Oh, I don't know. I think it would be really amusing to see Sally Struthers on television, talking about how "just a dollar a day can provide support for an underprivileged programmer..."

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You are what you think.