Technology Issues in the Developing World

My dearly departed laptop.
I had to work with it for about
a month in this condition

Who thinks it is a good idea to get computers into developing countries?

Hand's up if you agree.  Good, good...

It's hard to disagree with, isn't it?

Getting technology into developing areas is hard though.

Buyaya is a problem for us because there is no electricity in the village.  We plan to solve this with our solar-powered school.

The bigger problem however is highlighted in our Romblon program.  The computers in Romblon have problems as computers often do.  Windows spits the dummy and the computer goes belly up.

What are the people in Romblon to do at that point?

They can't fix it because they lack the technical nous.  They can't pay to get it fixed as it is too expensive.  They are left with a very heavy paper weight.

So what's the solution?  I think whenever you roll out a technology based project you need to think maintenance, maintenance, and maintenance.

The easiest way to do that is via a program like Ghost.  Once you have set up the computers in a good state, the Ghost software will allow you to roll the computer back to that state whenever you want.  Very useful and doesn't require much technical nous at all.