Ee-aye-ee-aye-ee-aye oh, up the World Bank Income Classifications we go!
Yay! The land of my birth gained promotion to "Lower middle income" from "low income" last week - this is the development economics equivalent of getting from the Conference to League Two. Zambia were promoted alongside fellow perennial resources-state battlers Ghana.
As the Guardian article points out, although this has a lot to do with the copper boom (and Chinese investment), it is also the case that foreign aid increased as a proportion of Zambian GDP, and the authors are correct to note that this is a palpable win for the "aid works" lobby.
Also interesting: pop-up solar powered internet cafes. One of the Great Lost Posts from "project Zambia" three years ago was going to be an explanation of why I was much more sympathetic to the "one laptop per child" idea than most of my mates - stripped of the child-related mawkishness it was a great big ICT development strategy. And as we noted, the thing about human beings is that we really like communications technology, and we're often surprisingly good at using it.
What is it about computers that people think they're magic. Short answer, no OLPC was a terrible idea. Slightly longer idea - it was an idea from Nicholas Negropante, the Thomas Friedman of the computer world, are you out of your fucking mind?
ReplyDeleteSlightly longer version. It was basically typical of a naive western approach to doing technology development for Africa. There's a long history of it, and along history of failed projects, wasted capital. OLPC was particularly bad, because the people behind it hadn't actually bothered to do any research into the environments they were supposedly designing for, but instead made a bunch of assumptions, and then injected new and untested technologies into it. They didn't prototype it, didn't do field testing in Africa. Didn't work with people with experience of doing IT development in Africa, or roll out of IT systems (yes, they exist, even in Africa).
That kind of approach doesn't work in the west. It really doesn't work in Africa (and I know people who do this, and have a lot of experience of doing this).