I never realized of how difficult is to get (or repair) a computer in Africa until the laptop that I brought from home died suddenly. How did that happen I am not sure, probably a storm cooked my hard disk, but it doesn’t start anymore. It would not bother me that much if I was in Europe, since it was a quite old machine and needed a replacement, but here, even old crappy laptops are precious, luxurious items. I looked in the few stores that sell laptops in Blantyre and the prices were ridiculous, at least double that in Europe!! If you consider that our salaries are probably 10 times lower here, you can guess that laptops are not accessible at all. And yet laptops are really useful for teaching and research. Books are too expensive but you can find everything in the net!
I started to search in internet the different ways to obtain computers in Africa and I found several projects that talk about building cheap computers for developing countries. One of them is computer-aid, that refurbishes and sends cheap computers www.computer-aid.org their service is quite good I think, most of the computers at work come from them.
Other interesting projects try to provide cheap laptops. One of them is the one laptop per child (OLPC) http://laptop.org/ that with the help of the MIT has designed a USD100 laptop (although the price is still much higher than that) that could be distributed in the schools of developing countries
There are now several competitors of the original low cost laptop, and there are juicy gossips in the net about Intel splitting up from the OLPC project, and creating his own product http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/cheap-notebook-battle/intel-classmate-reviewed-verdict-olpc-killer-334261.php
Another laptop that is getting much attention is the cute Asus eee pc http://eeepc.asus.com/ , a mini laptop equipped with a 7” screen for about 300-400$.. This kind of product would be very useful here, but God knows when it will be distributed in Africa, and at what price. I am lucky I am going to South Africa in a couple of weeks and I hope to find something affordable there, I don’t think I am going to wait for the OLPC to arrive…
2 comments:
Antuan,
I really sympathise with all of your comments about buying and repairing computers in Malawi. I work for a small heatlh project that 'twins' health centres in Scotland with Malawi clinics: http://malawiclinics.org/ . In order to afford the Malawi healthcare staff an equal access to resources, we supply shared computer and Internet facilities. We have been working with Globe Malawi in locating Internet singal points. However, whenever a spare part or update is needed, a normally simple matter becomes a project in itself.
We would always prefer to support the local economy (and save transport costs) by buying local but IT infrastructure in Malawi makes this difficult. Have you found that other countries in the region are better?
I note that you work at the College of Medicine. Several of our clinics are in the Blantyre area. It would be very beneficial if you could share any tips or lessons learnt along the way. You might consider visiting Zingwangwa Clininc as it is already fully functioning with IT.
Jemma
HI Jemma,
thank you for the comment! yes, it will be nice to visit Zingwangwa Clinic, where is it exactly?
regards,
antonio
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