The Basel Action Network (BAN) published an interesting report, titled "The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-Use and Abuse to Africa" in which they analyse the effects of many "ship your old computer to Africa" activities.
Studying Nigeria as a role model for such programmes they found that these activites can indeed be very useful and contributes to building local skills and economy. They also found that around 50% of these activities are best described as "hazardous waste disposal" under the guise of "bridging the digital divide", bypassing export and environmental laws created to prevent that kind of thing.
The Basel Action Network demands that such initiatives need to be watched closely whether they ship working, useful hardware — or totally outdated and/or dysfunctional junk.
That is good advice and I hope people will heed it. But if our goal is to bridge the digital divide, that is not enough.
As we’ve seen during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), "bridging the digital divide" serves as a convenient catch-all justification for many activities, including the creation of dependencies on Northern proprietary software vendors.
CNN quotes Bill Gates in the following way:
"Although about three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software," Gates reportedly said. "Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
This is as clear as it gets: Proprietary software is always only under the control of the proprietor, never under the control of the user. It is in fact the user that is under control of the software. So while Microsoft of course believes that "Africa doesn’t need Free Software", this belief is obviously fueled by more than just a little self-interest.
It comes as no surprise that their statements once more confuse the question of zero price — which they can (and occasionally do) offer — with questions such as freedom of market, freedom of competition, freedom of learning and freedom of opinion — all of which they cannot offer.
Maybe they think that "we can’t offer this" translates to "noone needs it"?
