I've been home two weeks now since training a group of developers in Rwanda how to build better software faster using ruby on rails. Because of Rwanda's recent history, they now get significant donor money to help develop the country. Unfortunately there is not a lot of transparency where the money goes and some figures point to about only 20% of the money for aid really going to help the people of the country. I normally think of aid work as being on the ground helping with starvation, clean water or something else on the ground but I realize now how much can be done to help people using IT skills. Software can signficantly improve the lives of people in developing countries by building better health systems, enabling aid work to be more efficient or making the flow of money and how its used more transparent.
Traditionally when a developing country needs software they hire some pricey london consulting firm and purchasing crazy costly licenses. Our work was to enable programmers in Rwanda to build the software themselves using free open source tools like ruby and ruby on rails. I liken it to the old proverb about "giving a fish for a day or teaching someone how to fish for a lifetime".
I believe this model of enabling local talent to build their own software cheaply has enormous potential to increase the effectiveness of aid money and improve the quality of lives of those in developing countries.
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