Tablet test: Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child, describes experiments involving children in Ethiopia at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference. With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages—simply dropping off tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing…
Posted by Elena Martin. Sugatra Mitra installed a computer in a hole in a wall on a street in Kaljaki, New Delhi to see how effectively children could teach themselves technology as part of what would become his Hole-in-the-Wall Project. The computer had a cover to protect it from the elements, an opening for the…
Wireless ‘wi-fi’ technology should be removed from schools to prevent millions of children suffering a heightened risk of cancer and sterility, teachers have demanded. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers called for classroom wireless networks to be suspended immediately until research has properly considered the threat to health. Members said they were concerned by scientific…
The “business and markets can solve everything” propaganda is not restricted to the West. When it fails to deliver, community initiatives that don’t prioritize profit could be a solution. Businesses will go where the money is. CALGARY (LC for APCNews) – Cybercafés are in decline in Senegal. Too much offer compared to demand because of…
Computer Aid has published the results of a study into the best low power PCs for use in ‘developing’ countries, carried out in conjunction with three African Universities and the ZDNet technical labs in the UK. Download the full report. (.pdf)
What do you do when you want to install a telecentre but there is no building available to house it? APC member Arid Lands Information Network has solved the problem by building cybercafe in shipping containers. These containers, known as maarifa (or knowledge) centres are fully equipped with computers and internet access and can be…
One hundred institutions in rural areas of Paraguay with access to the internet. Poor indigenous communities experiencing contact with the world beyond their local surroundings for the first time ever. These are just a few snapshots of the outcomes achieved by Oportunet, a project launched in 2007 in Paraguay that has demonstrated the potential of…
The Family Alliance for Development and Cooperation (FADECO) has come a long way since 1993, when Joseph Sekiku and friends formed an alliance to help overcome poverty in north-western Tanzania. Starting as a network of people sharing an internet connection, the small telecentre eventually became a computer literacy training station, an internet café, and has…
ENTASOPIA, Kenya: The road from Nairobi winds 160 kilometers to this town deep in Masai country, the asphalt giving way to sand and dust, until finally it is just a dirt track climbing over broken hills and plunging back to desert flats. The going is slow.
Two recent reports from Survival show how badly communications are needed by remote tribal people. Even the remotest, as yet ‘uncontacted’ tribes are facing annihilation as their forests are being destroyed. November reports from Brasil and Paraguay both tell of uncontacted people fleeing from forest destruction. It is their very remoteness that facilitates the illegal…