Our big challenge is to provide a cheap computer with internet connection, (wifi/3G) support and acceptable performance. For information, the family income for our first clients in such regions, is on average $130 per month. We love the OLPC_XO http://laptop.org/en/laptop/ project idea (worldreader.org also) but their price is still high for our target clients and we try to avoid donations as much as possible.
First we thought about low cost white label tablets (most are china ODM/OEM providers), but from experience and reviews, they seems to be less performing with intensive usage. Now we have two solutions, either we use an already proven SOCs like PINE A64, Raspberry pi or we develop our custom pc. Any pointers, suggestions or collaborations will be highly appreciated!
Based on my experiences (I work for an ISP but we have a "sister" company that's an MSP that provides IT services to, among others, several K-12 schools in such rural areas), most of these schools either 1) already have available hardware (iPads, Chromebooks) due to existing 1:1 programs or 2) have decided to not (yet) pursue that (usually because of financial reasons).
In the former case, they already have hardware and don't want to buy even more. In the latter, they simply don't have the money for it (it'll be an even harder sell if it's not "general purpose" and can only be used with your stuff). Even if you manage to get it under $50 per student, that's still a lot of money that they could likely spend elsewhere.
Develop your applications and concentrate on targeting the most popular platforms (iOS and Android) and forget about trying to sell them hardware they can't (easily) reuse. Definitely forget about cellular connectivity and stick to Wi-Fi instead.
I thought important thing in this setup is transparency. So if a particular user or teacher can not afford, you add them to a page. A donation can be old or pre owned laptop.
Can you optimize this for a cheap smartphone? I think that would probably be a better solution.
I am American. I was homeless for 5.7 years and I began learning to make money online while homeless. This is part of how I got back into housing. I have some experience with various tablets, laptops and phones. Phones have proven to be a surprisingly robust internet solution for me.
I currently have a $30 smartphone (brand ZTE). I have Tracfone service with it and I can use it on Wi-Fi. Although the screen is tiny and storage is limited, it has overall better performance than the $70 tablet I have. I rarely get on the tablet. My sons use it, but I spend almost all my time on my phone at home, plus I go to the local library to access a proper computer.
From what I have read, phones are a much bigger thing in Africa than tablets or laptops. I have read that everyone in Malawi has their own sim card even though an entire village might have a single phone.
I can do a surprising amount on my phone. I can blog, take photos, play games and do online banking. I have to be mindful of storage limits and I have to periodically clear my cache and do storage management and I have to be a little pickier about limiting my apps to the essentials. But it does a surprisingly good job of letting me do most of the things I want to do online.
When I was homeless, battery life was a big deal. Large screens on tablets really burned up the battery life. A phone or small tablet was generally better in that regard. Devices with good battery life were vastly more useful. I had access to electricity during the day most days, but I was on battery power at night. How much I could do was very dependent on battery life.
Large parts of Africa will have limited access to electricity. I have read that in some areas, one person will collect up all the phones in the village once a week and hike to the nearest paid recharging station and get them all charged.
So I will suggest that a cheap smartphone with a long battery life is probably the best solution for this project. Then design your program with those constraints in mind.
Edit: I will add that a $200 laptop was generally worse than a $50 tablet. We had to spend $300 on a laptop to get one we didn't hate.
Yes you are right, we are based in Tunisia. Really, we don't have a critical issues to access electricity compared to other african countries.
With 50$ (120 Dt) in average, you can buy smartphone and tablets, most are chineese brands either with their names or under white labeled 'Tunisian' brands, and some known brands (huwaiey, sumsing, ZTE) that provide some low-cost of their products dedicated to developing countries.
We first thought about tablets because it's provide large screen and they gave us the possibilities to develop the system. The smartphone is a great choice also but we need to adapt our apps in a responsive way so can be rendered in multiple screen sizes.
This is how I got my first computers; obsolete and broken computers cast off by people wealthier than I was. [1] It's great, because you get to learn how to fix the computer as well as whatever it is you learn on the computer. I imagine my life experience is super different from those you are helping, but I can tell you that early experience fixing obsolete computers has vastly helped my career.
It is a lot more labor intensive, because you have to have someone to teach the kids how to fix the damn things, (for me, my dad and a copy of minasi's "upgrading and repairing PCs") but once you have that skillset locally? it's probably sustainable, because the rich will always be throwing out last years gadgets.
In some ways it will be way easier for you than for me; when I grew up in the '80s and '90s, there wasn't a lot of standardization, so with my 'catch as catch can' hardware acquisition strategy, I'd have to completely change my software stack every time I got new hardware. These days? Most educational software runs in a browser (I use and heartily endorse Khan Academy for the parts of learning that can't be done from a book alone) and so you can have a diverse fleet of hardware and even operating systems, and as long as you have enough local skill to bring the things up to the point where they can run a browser, you should be good to go.
The big problem with this plan is power; Nicer gear from the aughts ought to run a browser just fine, but it will chew up a lot more power. If you have to pay for unsubsidized electricity, more modern gear might make more sense.
[1]There was also this really juicy (for me) sense of acquiring "means of production" - I owned these computers that others had cast off as worthless or broken, and I turned them into a useful resource for myself. I think that if you could work something out so that the kid in question gets to keep the computer they fix... that might be extra gratifying. I know it was for me.
In recent years, a significant portion of the items listings I've seen are about old electronic stuff that people have moved on from and want to give away.
As for now? well, let's put it this way; I've still got two and a half working iphone 5 units in my parts drawer. I mean, none of them work, but I've got the parts for two and a half of 'em. I spent some time on it and decided to go buy a new iphone 7 instead (I kinda wish I went for the SE; the form factor of the 5 was superior, I think.)
Hell, I'm typing this on a macbook; I used to buy stacks of old thinkpads and just replace parts as they broke, but the thinkpads with the good keyboards are too old (the new thinkpad with the classic keyboard is too expensive, at least for a thinkpad sans ecc, and I always liked the X not the T) but... I got tired of that, too.
On the other hand, the macbook is kind of terrible. The keyboard is tolerable (better than the chicklet lenovo keyboards, but still only tolerable) and the wifi cuts out as if I had damaged the antenna in a fall, something i could totally repair on an old thinkpad.
But my point is that at this point I make too much money and don't have enough time to really have a good computer repair hobby.
I used the ifixit guides for my iphone 5 adventures; I personally think their toolkits aren't great (last one I got, for replacement of an iphone screen felt like it came with phillips rather than JIS drivers, and I think the iphone screws are JIS) -- but their videos and instructions seemed pretty good. On the other hand, none of the iphones I performed surgery on are fully functional, so...
In general I've had good luck with just looking the thing I'm doing up on youtube.
A while back, a friend of mine (a ce/ee) had a bad keyboard on her viao. Not having experience with the parts of the computer industry that don't require college degrees, she took it apart, and when she couldn't get it back together, she brought it to a computer repair shop.
The shop, of course, thought that the computer never worked; they also couldn't get it back together. (the wisdom here is to do all or none of the repair. The shop probably could have replaced the keyboard if she brought a working viao in with a broken keyboard... but because it wasn't working when they got it, aside from not seeing how it was put together, they probably thought it was broken more deeply than just the keyboard.)
So, on my thinkpads, I would download the manual and puzzle about in the exploded parts diagrams until I saw what was what. Thinkpads were pretty simple, though, doing this with the viao was just a giant tangle of wires.
Anyhow, I looked it up on youtube, and there was someone who had a real clear video showing how to take apart and put together a viao. Following the video, I found that the connector with the power button was plugged into the wrong place, and the viao worked perfectly.
My only real piece of advice comes from my working with servers. Go buy a ESD wrist strap and workmat. Ignore it when your friends make fun of you. It makes a difference.
The machines we ended up with were 2GB of RAM/16GB storage devices with 11" screens. Basically they were the reference designs Google released a while back when they opened up Chromebook manufacturing. And for the 4th-12th graders we gave them to, they were amazing.
One of the concepts a related project explored was using live / persistent USB disks to preserve student ownership and facilitate unscheduled explorations.
Multiplexes hardware across students at different times, facilitating students using a consistent environment at home on old P4 desktops and at school on whatever's available.
Even large (32+GB) portable storage devices are available under $50.
Check out "sugar on a stick" and "open1to1" for related trains of thought.
We are also working closely with a local NGO who do coding workshops for rural communities.
Would love to chat and explore possible collaboration opportunities. Email is Samson [at] localelectricity [dot] org
This project was propsed 4 five years ago and i started by talking to education responsables who thought that's 'unmanaged and hard to set up'. The idea is simple, we believe that every child 'should' access to learning ressources in a virtual way regardless his location. For the sustainablity part, i think that the average age of a large numbers of electronics is limited, and may be recycled after that. We are talking about a game like tool.
We started developing a story editor with basic images, texts, and sounds (so we can add effects in the story). We also developed a small version of a simple sheet music editor with a virtual piano and sounds. For geographic, historic and animals anatomy illustrations, we use a map-like editor, so the teacher can draw shapes, add voice, timelines ...
For the internet access, there are many places that already covered by 3G service, What's good for us, is that the area size of the country is small, so, network providers can extends theirs services without huge investments.
Tell me if i replied your question or missed something !
Affordable rural internet access might be a bigger hurdle.
