OLPC and Economic Development

Tue Jul 3 03:21:20 CST 2007

I just contributed the following article to OLPC News:

OLPC
<http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/business/olpc_xo_economic_development.htm
l>  and Economic Development

Posted on July 02, 2007 by Guest Writer in Commentary
<http://www.olpcnews.com/commentary/> : Academia
<http://www.olpcnews.com/commentary/academia/> , Use Cases
<http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/> : Business
<http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/business/> , Sales Talk
<http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/> : Donors
<http://www.olpcnews.com/sales_talk/donors/>  

 <http://www.netevents.org/bryan%20upload/Nicholas%20Negroponte19.JPG> 
OLPC
<http://www.olpctalks.com/nicholas_negroponte/negroponte_netevents.html>  is
about eliminating poverty

Nicolas Negroponte's claim that One Laptop Per Child is an education
project, not a laptop project is well known and often discussed. What is
less well known is his
<http://www.olpctalks.com/nicholas_negroponte/negroponte_netevents.html>
claim that OLPC is about eliminating poverty: 

"But what One Laptop Per Child is, it's about eliminating poverty. And
that's the reason we do it, that's why everybody who's involved in the
project is involved with it. And the belief is very simple. 

That is that you can eliminate poverty with education, and no matter what
solutions you have in this world for big problems like peace or the
environment, they all involve education. In some cases, it could be just
with education and in no case is it ever without education. And we
particularly focus on primary education."

As I mentioned in my last posting, OLPC
<http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/education/one_laptop_per_child_education.
html>  and Education Reform, I am Robert <http://robertkozma.com/index.html>
B. Kozma, Ph.D., an international consultant on technology in service of
developing countries. I have just returned from Kenya where I had an
opportunity to reflect on the claim that OLPC is about eliminating poverty. 

For the past two years, I have been working with the Education Committee in
Sauri, a set of rural villages of about 5,500 people in western Kenya. I
have served as a pro bono (or should that be pro-Bono) consultant to the
Committee members as they formulated their plans for a community learning
resource center. I have also supported their efforts by donating a dairy cow
to the school lunch program, providing scholarships, and purchasing
equipment and supplies for the center, including books, a digital camera,
and a laptop.

Sauri education committee

Approximately 67% of the people in Sauri live on less than $1 a day. Most
are subsistence farmers, growing maize, beans, tomatoes, onions, and kale.
Until just a few months ago, there was no electricity in Sauri. There is now
an electrical line to the clinic and soon there will be one to the learning
resource center.

Economic development efforts in Africa will have to address the needs of
people like those in Sauri because 70-80% of the labor force in most
Sub-Saharan countries is in rural areas. And poverty is the highest in the
rural villages of Africa. 

Furthermore, the dramatic increases in economic output and standard of
living that we are seeing in countries like China and India were built on
twenty years of increased farm productivity in the rural areas. Africa has
yet to experience this Green Revolution. In fact, during the last twenty
years, agricultural productivity in Africa has actually dropped each decade
and hunger has increased. 

Given this context, it is perhaps not surprising that members of the
Education Committee in Sauri want to build a community learning resource
center that can help them increase the productivity of their farms and
improve their lives. 

The Committee's emphasis on this learning center is particularly appropriate
since 90% of the students in Sauri do not go beyond primary school-not
because they are incapable or unmotivated but because their parents can not
afford the tuition and uniforms. So the Education Committee sees the center
as a means to provide education for out of school youths as well as adults. 

Sauri community radio station

In planning their center, the Committee members wanted to know how
technology might be used to achieve their goals. In response to their
interests, I visited eight community telecenters in Uganda, Tanzania, and
Kenya; interviewed the managers, staff, and community users; and then
returned to Sauri to report what I learned and make my recommendations to
the Committee. 

While technology was a common feature of all these telecenters, the key was
the role that it played in providing villagers with access to needed
information and the means to communicate it. 

I found computers in all the centers, but bicycles, books, cell phones,
community radio stations, and video tapes were also used to obtain and share
information. This information often related to farm practice and
productivity: information on seeds, planting, fertilizing, weeding, and
harvesting, as well as animal breeding, feeding, and treatment of diseases.
Information on current market prices was also highly valued. But desired
information also included that on water harvesting, energy efficiency,
education, health, nutrition, culture, local news, and even national sports.

Like Nicolas Negroponte-and the villagers of Sauri-I believe that technology
has a role to play in supporting economic development in Africa and reducing
poverty. But my conclusions about how technology should be used are quite
different than those of Negroponte. 

Based on my research in other rural villages, I recommended that the Sauri
community learning resource center be equipped with a variety of means of
obtaining information that was needed by the community. This included books,
magazines, videos, and a single computer with access to the Internet. 

Nakaseke village telecenter

In addition to making these resources available to villagers as a means of
distributing information, the center should also use a low-wattage radio
transmitter. They should also set up small satellite centers in various
locations across the geographically dispersed set of villages that
constitutes Sauri and equip them with a radio receiver and a cell phone that
villagers can use to call into the telecenter with their questions. 

Finally, a key to the success of the center is having a manager who is not
only technologically skilled but familiar with the informational needs of
the villagers and is capable to searching the vast resources of the internet
to meet these needs.

So to return to the issue of OLPC and economic development, it is important
to start with an understanding of what people need and their context rather
than what the technology can be made to do. Taking this perspective, it is
not clear that the widespread distribution of computers to children is the
way to eliminate poverty in Africa. 

Rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on XO machines,
wouldn't it be better and cheaper for national governments to support rural
villages in their efforts to set up and staff internet-connected community
telecenters where villagers have access to the information they need to
improve their livelihoods and their lives?

____________________

Robert B. Kozma, Ph.D.

Emeritus Director and Principal Scientist

Center for Technology in Learning

SRI International

2151 Filbert St.

San Francisco, CA 94123

USA

CTL Website:  <http://ctl.sri.com> http://ctl.sri.com

Personal Website: http://robertkozma.com

Phone +1 415 292 2471

Mobile +1 415 623 4340

Fax: +1 415 651 9954

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.g1to1.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20070702/7d16d40e/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 10483 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.g1to1.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20070702/7d16d40e/attachment.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image002.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 15285 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.g1to1.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20070702/7d16d40e/attachment-0001.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image003.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 37006 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.g1to1.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20070702/7d16d40e/attachment-0002.jpg>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image004.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 36624 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.g1to1.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20070702/7d16d40e/attachment-0003.jpg>