Tackling poverty with technology is the theme of an article which is in a special CNN series devoted to Life-saving Technology.
DIPICHI, South Africa (Reuters) — It is hard to believe that 19 shiny flat screen computers can cure the ills of this tiny community in South Africa’s arid north where people battle every day against poverty, AIDS, illiteracy and hunger.
Yet U.S. computer giant Hewlett-Packard Co. and South African President Thabo Mbeki are promoting Dipichi’s smart new IT lab as a blueprint for how technology can trigger growth and tackle poverty across the world’s poorest continent.
Bridging the so-called digital divide in Africa became a popular mantra among aid workers and government officials during the tech boom that started in the late 1990s but it fell from favor as countless ill-conceived rural IT centers went unused.
Skeptics asked what use a computer was when people were hungry, dying of AIDS and too poor to send their kids to school?
But as multinationals start to invest in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent, they are touting technology as a panacea for development.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) says the Dipichi project will help create jobs, improve farming and educate.
“I saved someone from a poisonous snake bite after I learnt about first aid from the computer,” said Rosina Ledwaba, a 39-year old home-based carer who lives in one of the village’s tiny thatched huts with her five children and husband.
Next to the brightly painted shipping container that houses the IT lab, Viviane Marakalala proudly showed off the village vegetable garden, which has been packed with leafy cabbages since a group of women learnt about drip irrigation from a computer program.
“I had never seen a computer in my life but now I know how to use it,” said Marakalala, 27. “We looked in the computer and it told us in our language how to use our water better.”
Until 11/30 Find the remainder of this article at: http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/11/16/technology.africa.reut/index.html
