Cheaper Computers the Only Answer
THE world is inexorably being flattened, which simply means that the international competitive playing field is being leveled. One result of this has been the empowerment of individuals to collaborate and compete globally. The power comes from information and access to the Internet is the key to that power.
THE world is inexorably being flattened, which simply means that the international competitive playing field is being leveled. One result of this has been the empowerment of individuals to collaborate and compete globally. The power comes from information and access to the Internet is the key to that power.
The coming decades are sure to be driven more and more not only by individuals but also by a much more diverse – non-Western, non-white – group of individuals. The lever that is allowing individuals and groups of individuals everywhere to find a place in the playing field is not horsepower, and not hardware, but software – all sorts of new applications – in conjunction with the creation of a global fiber-optic network.
A recent survey by the Mongolian Press Institute says that more than half the above-12 residents of Ulaanbaatar use the Internet for between 2 and 3 hours daily and regularly. This sounds somewhat anomalous as the survey also says that a little less than half the households in Ulaanbaatar have personal computers and only 10% — either of these households, or of the total population, it is difficult to be clear about this from the report — of them have access to the Interne. It can of course be that Internet cafes or some other public places are much more patronized than is apparent.
In any case, nobody should be misled into smugness by taking the capital city’s figures to be representative of Mongolia as a whole. A very recent study, conducted jointly by UNICEF and the Ministry of Education among 96 schools in Ulaanbaatar, aimag centers, as well as in soums, do not give an encouraging picture. Of the 576 teachers included, 39.2 percent said they did not have computers to use in teaching, 4.5 percent had computers that did not work, 6.3 percent did not know how to use theirs, 39.6 percent said computers “are of shortage”, whatever that means, and 10.4 percent said they were “not allowed” to use computers, for whatever reason. Students whose teachers used the Internet in teaching were found to be achieving more than others.
None of all this should come as a surprise. A developing country must use more and more computers and for this their price has to be brought down. In Mongolia the minimum price for a PC hovers around US$500 and this is way too high for ordinary people. With China, and to some extent, India showing how things can be made cheaply why should a fully featured low cost computer to bridge the digital divide in the less developed world comtimue to remain elusive, despite remarkable advances in computing technologies?
When the non-profit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project was presented to the World Economic Forum in 2005, outlining the goal of providing a US$100 laptop to every poor child, it received a rapturous welcome. Children and teachers who got the first bright green XO laptops under the project during trials in countries such as Nigeria were thrilled. Few will argue about the laptop’s virtues: it has no moving parts; can withstand hot weather, rough handling, humidity, and dust; sports a backlit screen visible in daylight; runs on open source software; and wirelessly connects to the Internet. For these reasons the OLPC product, which is yet to reach its aspirational price point, enthused digital divide campaigners, including the then United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. Fifty countries have shown interest. But true scaling up is an arduous exercise and needs massive manufacturing facilities. To make things worse, the recent exit of chip-making giant Intel, which joined OLPC last year, is seen as a serious setback to the project.
Mobile phone penetration has grown by leaps and bounds in Mongolia. An Indian manufacturer has offered the world a four-door, four-passenger car for US$2,500. Why then cannot the masses in the developing world have access to low-cost computers, to help them bridge the digital divide? The right devices with a good value proposition are assured of success. If the IT industry sets itself a benchmark of, say, US$125 and achieves scales of manufacture, it could surely come up with a computer of inestimable educational and social value in all areas of the world where deprivation on a gigantic scale is a reality.
The advantages of running thin computing systems, where the bulk of the software resides in a server and not with the user, make it technically possible to produce low cost but versatile and quality machines. Next generation mobile networks with higher bandwidths can provide wireless Internet connectivity. Only such bold, technologically and socially imaginative, out-of-the-box approaches can connect Mongolia’s underprivileged, above all children, to the knowledge economy.
The UB Post
