One of my daily business reads is Web Worker Daily. Today they are participating in Blog Action Day (BAD) and their post about their effort is here. The theme of this year's Blog Action Day is poverty and the folks at WWD turned their attention to Africa and I thought this excerpt to be very telling:
When it comes to web working, Africa is one of the last frontiers. In most sub-Saharan African countries, people tend to use mobile phones more than the Internet for business-related activities and communications. Factors contributing to this are high illiteracy rates and linguistic diversity. In addition, the high cost of bandwidth and lack of infrastructure are a serious problem. Many African countries also lack workers skilled enough in information and communication technologies (ICT) for web working to be a viable option. These factors are obstacles to adoption of the Internet as a tool for business, but access to computers and the Internet would contribute greatly to overcoming the obstacles that hinder their adoption and use in the first place.
Humanitarian and international development organizations know this, and are making efforts to get the continent connected with the objective of reducing poverty, as illustrated by this strategy of the UN Economic Commission for Africa:
Access to Information > Knowledge and Capacity > Innovation > Productivity > Growth > Employment > Poverty Reduction
Later in the post the author goes on to describe some initiatives like One Laptop Per Child and Appfrica International that are trying to enable Africans to use IT to better their lives economically. Very interesting stuff.
According to the BAD site there are over 11,000 sites participating in the initiative. If you see one that is doing something you think is really interesting let me know in the comments or by email at jon.lowder AT gmail.com.
