Features

Developing nations have been battling for access to the technology afforded to the West for decades. Now, the West's technology gurus and companies are battling for access to developing nations. There are countless schemes aiming to extend computing to every corner of the globe, and none of them are reading from the same Rough Guide.

The scope for computing in emerging nations is huge. According to figures from Internet World Stats, there are only 33 million African web users from a population of close to one billion - penetration of just 3.5%. Even Asia, whose massive internet population is approaching 400 million and dwarfs all other regions, has only 10% penetration. No wonder philanthropists champion the possibilities technology could bring to the planet's poorest, while the world's computer giants are salivating at the idea of such a huge, untapped market.

The supply of computers to emerging nations has, consequently, become an ideological battleground. On the one hand, there's an army of well-intentioned charities and organisations keen on supplying technology to developing nations, provided it will help the recipients pull themselves from the poverty trap. On the other are the familiar multinational giants - Intel, Dell, Microsoft and others - who are pushing low-cost equipment and software into these markets with hawkish anticipation.

Which approach is better? The philanthropists might claim the moral high ground, but is sending old, recycled PCs or new low-powered models helping to bridge the technological divide, or simply widening it? And while the big corporations might be offering superior equipment, are market forces going to encourage the digitally deprived to catch up with the West, or leave them wide open to exploitation? Consumers might not even want PCs; the rapid emergence

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of mobile telephony in the third world could make conventional PCs redundant.

Digital missionaries

Third world aid is nothing new, but whereas food and medicines have been the traditional supplies, the new wave of charity is electronic. For orphan Vincent Amukumbi, the recycled PCs donated by Computer Aid provide a chance to escape the poverty trap. The computers were sent from the UK, and are the first PCs the children at his school - Kenya's Our Lady of Fatima Secondary School - have seen. Vincent has three brothers and sisters, but they are forced to live with his grandparents, because Vincent does "not have the money to care for their basic needs," he says. "That's why I'm working very hard so I can make a good future for them, I'd like to do computer sciences when I leave school, so being able to use a computer is vital."

Computer Aid has donated 80,000 computers to 107 countries, and is only one of a fleet of organisations squeezing as much useful life out of hardware as possible. If only more of the 10 million PCs decommissioned each year were donated, the digital divide would be far less daunting, the charity claims. Critics say such schemes simply allow the West to dump old machines on the third world, leaving a legacy of toxic waste, but Computer Aid International chief executive Tony Roberts denies the claim. "The computers we supply are all good for another three or four years," he says. "They're all perfectly serviceable and give thousands of people and NGOs computers they otherwise wouldn't have, and we have a zero landfill policy."

The most ambitious computing charity project stems from one man's vision to put a laptop in the hands of every child on the planet. When Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte first floated the concept of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), it was dismissed as a fantasy, but two years on and the first models are rolling off the production lines. Rather than selling direct to end users, Negroponte's scheme relies upon governments buying batches of a million units to guarantee economies of scale. That requires serious investment, currently starting at $138 million, which is a huge sum for developing nations. Nevertheless, the OLPC scheme's progeny, the XO, has already been snapped up by countries including Libya and Rwanda, and is under serious consideration in several others.