Alphachimp Studio > Pop!Tech > New Solutions > Ethan Zuckermen

From Joho the Blog:

He puts up the GeekCorps business plan:

• To benefit from the Internet, you need geeks
• There are few geeks in Africa
• Geeks beget geeks ("Geekery is one of the last apprenticeship industries")
• Geek + plane ticket = Geek in Africa

We need to spend on both plantains and PCs, he says — the immediate issues of feeding people and building a connected economy.

"Electricity turns out to be a massive part of the digital divide." Likewise, so is conectivity — there are 12 phone lines per 1000 people in Ghana, compared to 700 per 1000 in the Us. Plus, 78% of web content is English, but only 12% of the world speaks English as a 1st or 2nd language. This all ends up making a "relevancy divide": What is a rural farmer in Ghana going to get out of the Internet?

Zuckerman's Blog:

In my opinion, talk radio in Ghana has been one of the most profound forces for positive change I've ever seen in a developing nation. When I lived in Accra in 1993-4, radio was a dead medium. You'd walk down a street in Accra and hear the same music coming from every single radio - it was oddly Orwellian. A year or two later, there was competition to GBC, and when I returned to the country in 1999, there were dozens of competing stations in Accra, including several dedicated to news and public affairs.

The importance of this became clear during the 2000 elections, when a number of my geeks in town reported that citizens used radio talk shows to help monitor polling places. When people saw violence, or people being prevented from voting, they used cellphones to call radio stations. The stations aired the reports, which precented the police from being able to claim they hadn't heard about possible voting rights violations. So the police showed up and ensured people could vote. The result: a free and fair election in which the opposition won. Which, historically speaking, is quite amazing for an African nation.

 

Read Zuckerman's presentation.
Listen to podcast of the presentation.