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by freefrog1234 411 days ago
I saw many projects while working in Cambodia, including One-Laptop-Per-Child, projects designed to share market information with farmers, etc and none made an impact like mobile phones.

One project that was semi-successful were USAID sponsored internet cafes that were supposed to enable access to political information just before an election. The USAID staff were annoyed to find most Cambodians used them for international VoIP calls.

Never assume you know better than the end users what they want from the internet. Now mobile companies move in so fast to conflict countries (from my experience in Afghanistan and Iraq), internet access is up there with electricity on the list of requirements.

1 comments

Nail on the head! Glad to hear this in between the technical tangents here in the comments. Also, what is the OLPC XO image doing on that page? Is this project related?