[Air-L] help on africa and computer donations

[nsenga at mediom.qc.ca]

Dear Denise,

In 1995, you "donated" 66 computers, and 2 years later, only 4 were
operating...What happened to the 62 others? where are they now? 

The same to Alex: what has been the fate of the "huge pile" of junk of Macs
given to his terrain worker to lure the local police?

Francois
Montreal



Original Message:
-----------------
From: Denise N. Rall denrall at yahoo.com
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 07:34:10 +1000 (EST)
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org, cristian.berrio at gmail.com
Subject: Re: [Air-L] help on africa and computer donations


Dear AIR-ers - 

I actually organized a computer donation to Ghana in
1997. It was very difficult on many levels. It was
almost impossible to secure grid power to the research
centre at any given moment in time. When the
generators kicked in, all the computers would re-boot.

As one of my participants said, "well we come to work
and if there is power we do work otherwise it is back
to pencil and paper"

I will note that despite wind-up batteries there are
other issues - heat, humidity, dust and at my site
ANTS. I toured an IBM computer lab at the Kumasi Inst
of Technology. In 1995, IBM had donated 66 computers,
and in 1997 only four of them were still working.
Before people scoff at IBM, their machines held up
better on this research station than any other brand.
Particularly the keyboards. Laptops in particular were
fairly quickly overwhelmed by heat, humidity, dust and
insects. I kept some of the residual moisture at bay
by zipping up my laptop case tightly with a hot
machine inside. Floppy diskettes of course could be
opened and washed to remove the mold.

I NOTE that Computer donations to Africa have been
going on for decades. Many of the issues presented in
this classic text:
Lewis, S. G. and J. Samoff (1992). Microcomputers in
African development. Boulder, CO, Westview Press.
	
are still active today. For instance, the Lewis &
Samoff discussions of cross cultural misunderstandings
and miscommunications about what computers should
accomplish are still spot on. The role of women and
computing is still hugely problematic. The theory has
been explored by Jules-Rossette:
Jules-Rossette, B. (1990). Terminal signs: Computers
and social change in Africa. Berlin, Mouton-de
Gruyter.

"The more things change the more they stay the same" 

Those donating laptops to Africa should spend the time
to understand the micro-climates and entomology of the
sites where they expect to donate. It's easy to
discuss the theory, the hard facts are the insects. My
supervisor (former) just returned from Thailand
without his internal keyboard as he was on aan
archelogical dig and the dust destroyed it. Since
cockroaches have recently eaten the circuit boards in
both our dishwasher and television recently, I guess
that also goes for northern New South Wales. (yes we
spray but not often - it's the environment, stupid!)

Cheers, Denise



Denise N. Rall, PhD
Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA 
Tues: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Mobile 0438 233 344 
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/
Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK
http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html


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