Doing More With Less - Access To Education In Developing Countries

Kids doing what kids do - or rather what they should be doing; learning.

The picture above is another picture from Bigue, Haiti showing children learning using computers. Nothing particularly new or Earth-shattering about this, except that people here do not have the luxury of on-demand electricity. Access to grid electricity is around 12% and even then there are frequent power outages. The outages are generally the result of load-shedding, where the demand is too high for the creaking infrastructure, and large sectors of the population have to be cut off for hours at a time to prevent damage to the network. This means that many services, such as hospitals and schools have to make do with Diesel generators. Running generators is a costly business, and takes a substantial slice of the available resources. Since electric power cannot be delivered reliably and consistently, services suffer. Education suffers, further marginalizing an already fragile path to development.

Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as saying "You can either light a candle or curse the dark". Paraphrasing slightly and applying to this particular issue, the choices are either fix the infrastructure or do more with less. This is where low-energy, or sustainable computing has a role to play. This entire lab has an energy budget of approximately 350 Watts; considerably less the older, refurbished computers that it replaced, with immediate cost savings for the school. Apart from the running costs, there are cost-savings resulting from the fact that smaller batteries can be used, rather than the substantial battery banks that would otherwise be necessary. if the batteries are to be recharged using solar panels, smaller panels can also be used. Finally, there are downstream savings because of the transport cost of the batteries, which becomes even more significant the more remote the community.

Whether in rural Pakistan, Haiti or the seven countries in Africa where we currently have customers, low-energy computing opens up access to healthcare and education to people living in remote areas at very low cost.