Desktop PC for development aid is scrapThe regrettable bad investment of a school project in Kathmandu - Nepal shows, like preached by us since years the inadequacy of desktop computers for the development aid.
The prosperity citizen of an industrial country is used to a high reliability of the electric power grid. The electric power comes out of the outlet and it's only to pay a tiny fraction of the monthly salary for the electric power despite the fact that it's exorbitant wasted. Electric power and costs are something where the prosperity citizen is not concerned. This attitude makes now trouble for the initiator of a development aid project. He purchased for a school project in Kathmandu 6 desktop computers. Computers by the unreliability of Nepal's nearly unuseable. In the email from the school project is written, only 2 of the 6 computers can be used at the same time because of voltage drops.
Would the 6 desktops be used like scheduled 12 hours a day, this would be 324 kWh electric power per month costing about 80.-EUR a month. This are the monthly payments for 2 godchildren or the salary for one teacher. Notebooks or the even more power saving netbooks would use much less electric power, could be supplied by batteries in the power outage time. |
