Computers for Africa?

An article in the UK Independent newspaper describes how recycling your computer helps developing countries.

Like a lot of aspects of development, this is open to debate. One opinion is that "you can't eat computers", i.e. the priorities should be clean water, food, healthcare.
Another valid issue is that of pollution; computers contain a lot of dangerous substances, which need to be carefully disposed of. A cynical (but perhaps realistic) view would be that the big computer manufacturers and sellers see developing countries as a dumping ground to get rid of this waste at little or no cost, (or even at a profit).

My own experience is that both computer hardware and the skills to use it can be very valuable. When I was in Abuja I visited NAFDAC. Actually I was invited by an employee who had learned that a "computer expert" was working at GTZ. At the NAFDAC offices I found rooms full of paper files; I wrote a report suggesting that a basic computer network and document management system could improve their efficiency by a huge amount. If the documents were scanned into a database, any particular file could be found in a few seconds and displayed on screen, compared with 20 - 30 minutes spent manually searching through roomfuls of paper files.

I was also involved in designed and mentoring a training scheme for young graduates to work as IT specialists in community finance. The training was done by a Nigerian institute, to a high standard and at reasonable cost. At the start of the training we focused on basic hardware support and maintenance; there are a lot of stories about schools and colleges in Nigeria who have computer labs full of computers that don't work, or work very slowly.
Another issue is software, especially which operating system to use. If you are using Pentium 2 or 3 processors with 64 or 128 mb RAM then results with Windows XP are going to be poor; you are going to get much better results with Linux.