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Let Them Eat Mobile Phones
from the that'll-solve-everything dept
Reuters is reporting that African leaders want to buy a bunch of mobile phones because "there are more telephones in Manhattan than in all Africa." Apparently, if you just add mobile phones to a bunch of poor countries, all else will be solved. I've taken a deeper look at this story over at TheFeature, where I compare the situation to the famous "cargo cults" of the South Pacific in World War II, where a confusion over the big picture (and cause and effect) led groups of people to think they could solve all their problems by mimicking the basic actions of others, but not getting to the root causes of the situation. I do think that technology can be a huge help to developing nations, but ad hoc solutions to "just add technology X" are never going to help unless the real issues are addressed first.
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