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OLPC has been such a failure because it was designed without understanding or respect for the situation the people live in. I agree with you about medicines etc

OLPC has been such a failure because it was designed without understanding or respect for the situation the people live in. I agree with you about medicines etc. being bandages and education being the most important thing. But I think when you veer into "universities" and "cheap computers" that things become sketchy. Replacing universities doesn't help the developing world, not really, because the education would have to be tailored to them. If you want to read a book about one of these problems (sanitation) and how aid efforts tend to go totally haywire for the same reasons OLPC does, read The Big Necessity. The needs are more basic. People require self-sufficiency in the basics before having a tablet computer is going to help. Agree with you on female education… especially also business education and entrepreneurial loans. In this vein, there is a great charity here: http://www.girleffect.org/question http://www.girleffect.org/question And there is that Indian entrepreneur who developed affordable sanitary pads for women: http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/entrepreneur-a-passion-periods http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/entrepreneur-a-passion-per... Note that this wasn't a charity effort, but a social entrepreneurship effort. And pads are important. Women are not just uneducated, they are hampered even when healthy. Finally, many people in developing countries have a cell phone which they can use via SMS to determine market prices for their farmed produce etc., which is already a great boon. I personally know some folks, who grew up in Africa, who are doing great & interesting things to serve these people where and how they are, not by assuming they need somebody to come in and "revolutionize" them. (Which will inevitably fail.)

eftpotrm 15y ago
The reason replacing univeristies will help the developing world (and why I still argue for cheap computers tailored for the needs of the developing world) is that it makes access to aducation that much easier. Yes they need primary rather than tertiary education, but tertiary's the easier market to start deploying in so use it as a beach-head and work down. At present, why don't they get education? Is it that they don't want it? Aside from a few communities actively holding back education, by and large they know the benefit and want education. The present model doesn't work for them though; the communities are frequently rural and some distance from the provision of education, the families are operating in the subsistence economy and can't afford to release the children to education. Technology can help attack this from two fronts. One, it enables distance learning at the time of the student's convenience. Education need not be directly opposed to family responsibilities this way, the two can be more easily dovetailed. Education can also more easily be tailored to individual needs; by removing the need for geographic concentration to provide the required training, more appripriate education can be delivered. Two, education is a (potentially fundable) need on such a scale as to enable transformational economic change society-wide. So much of the economic disadvantage is down to lack of information and poor access to markets from the impoverished communities. An infrastructure to enable distance learning on a whole-society scale is just as able to provide general community information and revolutionise access to markets. Think eBay's had a tranformational effect on some businesses? Wait until you see what the same thing could do to third-world subsistence farmers. Transform education through technology-based distance learning. The easiest starting point for that is tertiary education in the west, which shows high demand but poor utilisation of possible technological effects coupled with high costs from the incumbents. Then use that infrastructure to achieve the really transformational change, by educating the third-world poor.

eftpotrm 15y ago

The reason replacing univeristies will help the developing world (and why I still argue for cheap computers tailored for the needs of the developing world) is that it makes access to aducation that much easier. Yes they need primary rather than tertiary education, but tertiary's the easier market to start deploying in so use it as a beach-head and work down. At present, why don't they get education? Is it that they don't want it? Aside from a few communities actively holding back education, by and large they know the benefit and want education. The present model doesn't work for them though; the communities are frequently rural and some distance from the provision of education, the families are operating in the subsistence economy and can't afford to release the children to education. Technology can help attack this from two fronts. One, it enables distance learning at the time of the student's convenience. Education need not be directly opposed to family responsibilities this way, the two can be more easily dovetailed. Education can also more easily be tailored to individual needs; by removing the need for geographic concentration to provide the required training, more appripriate education can be delivered. Two, education is a (potentially fundable) need on such a scale as to enable transformational economic change society-wide. So much of the economic disadvantage is down to lack of information and poor access to markets from the impoverished communities. An infrastructure to enable distance learning on a whole-society scale is just as able to provide general community information and revolutionise access to markets. Think eBay's had a tranformational effect on some businesses? Wait until you see what the same thing could do to third-world subsistence farmers. Transform education through technology-based distance learning. The easiest starting point for that is tertiary education in the west, which shows high demand but poor utilisation of possible technological effects coupled with high costs from the incumbents. Then use that infrastructure to achieve the really transformational change, by educating the third-world poor.