Eradicating world poverty – one crazy way

[Sean Lew]

I have been very passionate about this topic since I was young. It struck me when I was a five year old boy traveling to the depths of China and I experienced first hand what is the meaning of poverty and trying to survive in the cold, harsh winter. The people (especially kids) did not even had enough to eat, let alone study or learn a skill. I remember I had a chocolate bar and some lollies. I gave it to a kid and the smile on his face is just incredible.

I had a crazy idea a while back. I thought of building a computer community centre in the poorest areas of the world. This is based on a few concepts, one laptop per child, web 2.0 and IT outsourcing. The following are a few reasons why and how to deliver this idea.

1) Kids can learn from the best teachers around the world. One good example is MIT’s Open CourseWare. Something can also be worked out for the younger children. Its not easy to get quality teachers to these areas and instead of trying to get more teachers into these poor areas, why not bring the kids to the teachers?

2) Outsourcing has seen tremendous growth in the last decade and as we all know, there are many kinds of outsourcing. I was thinking that some of the low level tasks can be outsourced to the adults of these areas or work out an arrangement like the Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. It could even be that an organisation can “adopt a community” and train them to do the work necessary for that organisation?

By keeping people occupied, learning and producing something, they can make their own living. We must remember that many of the poorest people in the world do not even make a dollar a day. If they can make some money out of it, even $2 a day doing some monotonous work, it will really help the community to grow and develop into something better. I am not looking for a solution that can give them thousands a month, just something to help them along and progress.

I also understand that many of these people have never seen a computer before and I won’t blame anyone who is skeptical that people would not know how to use computers. Interesting enough, TechCrunch had a blog post about how children in India’s slums could work out computers without assistance and training extremely quickly.



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