Öðruvísi þróunaraðstoð

Þetta er virkilega þarft verkefni og ef á að koma löndum eins og Rwanda til bjargálna þarf tæknin að koma þar við sögu.

Þessi frétt rímar mjög skemmtilega við grein sem á las á vef Spiegel í gær, en þar er fjallað um Bandaríkjamann sem er að byggja upp "state of the art" þráðlaust net í Rwanda.  Með fartölvur í höndunum og þráðlaust net um allt landið opnast gríðarlegir möguleikar á uppbyggingu í landinu.

Nú þegar Íslendingar eru að tala um að stórauka þróunaraðstoð sína, held ég að vert sé að gefa því gaum hvort það borgi sig ekki að fara aðrar leiðir en hingað til?

Nokkur dæmi af www.spiegel.de :

"Africa offers many investment opportunities," says an enthusiastic Greg Wyler, a boyish-looking man in his mid-thirties. "We simply have to bring the Internet into each of these huts, and the rest will fall into place." Wyler, an American entrepreneur, hopes to launch an "African Renaissance" with his project. His recipe for success is simple enough: free software, high-speed fiber-optic networks and unrestricted entrepreneurship."

"With his company, Terracom, Wyler hopes to transform an entire country into a sort of open-air laboratory for a novel form of development aid. His idea is to use computer networks to empower more than eight million Rwandans to free themselves of poverty. It's a daring proposition, the idea that a society in which more than 90 percent of the population consists of families farming small plots of land can leapfrog into a knowledge-based society -- and that in only a few years' time.

 

Wyler wants to turn Rwanda into a regional internet hub. One element of his strategy involves a local factory which will assemble inexpensive South Korean mobile phones starting in 2007; they will retail for $30 apiece. And in January, Nicholas Negroponte, the legendary co-founder of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) near Boston, is expected to visit Rwanda in connection with his latest project, called "One Laptop per Child," which would provide inexpensive laptops to millions of children in developing countries. Some local patriots already dream of Rwanda becoming an "African Silicon Valley.""

"The man complained to Wyler about the prohibitive cost of Internet access in his country, for which a state-owned monopoly called Rwandatel was charging about $1,000 a month. Wyler had suddenly found the challenge he needed. He raised capital from investors and simply acquired Rwandatel. He fired half of its employees, installed state-of-the-art technology and lowered the cost of Internet access to a small fraction of what it was under Rwandatel.

 

The move triggered an avalanche. Practically overnight, what had been a tiny group of 22 Internet users with broadband access turned into thousands. Almost a third of a million Rwandans now have mobile phone service, provided either by Terracom or its competitor, MTN."

"Barefoot workers dig up the ground in front of the presidential palace. Freddy Kamuzinzi, a giant of a man, is supervising the work. Wyler's nickname for Kamuzinzi is "Freddy Fiber." A former fighter in the rebel army, he now manages up to 3,000 cable installers. "Machines are useless here. They require too much space, and we have to be extremely careful when we dig, because we're constantly running into power and water lines that were installed haphazardly in the past."

Kamuzinzi's men have already buried more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) of fiberoptic cable. In the coming weeks, his army of workers will install four times as much cable, finally providing Rwanda with a broadband connection to neighboring Tanzania and Uganda and eliminating the expensive satellite detour.

This is good news for Terracom. East Africa's Internet island is growing."

Greinina í heild má finna hér.

Rúanda bætist í hóp landa sem fá 100 dollara fartölvur