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Can technology ease Africa`s woes?

By Reuters
Dipichi, 16 Nov 2005

It is hard to believe that 19 shiny flat-screen computers can cure the ills of this tiny community in SA`s arid north where people battle every day against poverty, AIDS, illiteracy and hunger.

Yet US computer giant HP 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 favour as countless ill-conceived rural IT centres went unused.

Sceptics 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 SA and elsewhere on the continent, they are touting technology as a panacea for development. HP says the Dipichi project will help create jobs, improve farming and educate.

"I saved someone from a poisonous snake bite after I learned 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 learned 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."

Gadgets for gadgets` sake

HP`s former CEO Carly Fiorina and Mbeki launched the i-Community project - one of only two in the world - in 2002 at the World Sustainable Development conference in Johannesburg. The other project is in Kuppam, India.

The project is being run in the Mogalakwena municipality in Limpopo province where 53% of the population is jobless and more live below the poverty line.

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