In 2002, in the midst of the so-called “information revolution,” Kofi Annan wrote an alarming letter to Silicon Valley executives: “The new information and communications technologies are among the driving forces of globalization...At the same time, however, the gap between information ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is widening, and there is a real danger that the world’s poor will be excluded from the emerging knowledge-based global economy.” He urged these executives to make new technologies available and affordable to the world’s poor. Six years later, I myself visited Ghana to help set up a computer lab in one of the country’s poorest towns, and it was then that I discovered that the results of Annan’s urgings have been mixed.

As in most developing countries, in Ghana, cell phones are everywhere. Head into the bustling marketplaces in Accra and you’ll be hard-pressed not to notice dozens of pedestrians and shopkeepers chatting on their cell phones. In this sense, the information gap between the developing and developed worlds is virtually nonexistent. Indeed, calling even the United States or Britain costs a mere 15 cents per minute.

Access to the Internet, however, is a completely different story. Computers generally cost double what they do in the U.S. Add that to the fact that Ghana’s per capita income is only a fraction of the United States’, and it’s clear that this technology is prohibitively expensive for most Ghanaians.

Still, many of Ghana’s youth have had some experience online. If they can, they access the Internet in one of the many web cafés that have popped up around the country, even in fairly remote towns and villages. Despite an unreliable electricity supply and Internet connection, most students are familiar with the same software as American students, such as Windows XP and Mavis Beacon.

Few Ghanaians are concerned about piracy and copyright infringement, but during my work in the country, I hoped to keep things honest and avoid software piracy. We discovered this was easier said than done. Although Microsoft has a number of programs to provide cheap software for labs like ours, the approval process takes months. Our Linux setups—partially designed by a South African— were loaded with free educational software, but it was nowhere near as good as other more expensive programs.

While large corporations often don’t assume any humanitarian responsibility to help bridge the information gap, some entrepreneurs have filled the void. Most notably, Nicholas Negroponte, brother of Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, proposed his now infamous “One Laptop per Child” (OLPC) project, known for its green “bunny ear” antennae that link the $188 laptops to the Internet.

On my last night in Ghana, I managed to get my hands on one of these laptops. The screen was amazingly legible, and the machine seemed durable. The keyboard was cramped for my fingers, but I have no doubt that kids have much greater ease typing on it. It wasn’t flawless, though: I had trouble saving files, and the wireless reception was at times frustratingly slow. Nonetheless, considering that the computer’s next biggest competitor, developed by Intel, costs twice as much, it’s still an impressive project.

NComputing, the favorite of the Ghanaian and Macedonian ministries of education, has developed an alternative to the OLPC project: one desktop PC and several connected boxes are hooked up to monitors and keyboards, enabling seven users to use one machine at the same time. Although this program is more economical than OLPC’s, it seems to me an inferior learning mechanism.

At this point, any plan for giving a laptop to every child is something of a pipe dream. The sad reality is that, as ingenious as Negroponte’s plan may be, it cannot succeed without legitimate financial commitment from a major government or corporation. Until that is obtained, OLPC will remain a media favorite only for its “bunny ear” antennae and idealistic proponent, but it will fall short of its true goal—to finally bring the children of developing countries to the same level of media literacy as their developed world counterparts. And until that happens, the term “globalization” will remain a cliché misnomer, as hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest citizens remain off the server.

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