The Habitat-Redemtech project - Bridging the digital divide: Low-income families enjoy cast-off PCs - December 16, 2010

By Todd R. Weiss

Eliana Gomez moved into a Habitat home in Columbus last December. It's the first home that Gomez, a native of Mexico, has ever owned. Her family also received a computer through the Habitat-Redemtech program, and she says that she and her three children find the machine extraordinarily helpful.

"My 8-year-old uses it more than anybody. He likes to do his homework on the computer. He knows how to use it, and he's teaching me sometimes," she says. "My daughter, she is 2, likes to play Dora on the computer."

Eliana Gomez with her son, Jacob, 8, daughter Leticia, 2, and Redemtech volunteers, Laurie and Chris Williams, who installed the PC in the Gomez home.

Gomez says her family hasn't been able to afford Internet access yet, but the PC is nonetheless giving her children opportunities that they didn't have before. And for her part, she says, learning to use the computer at home is opening doors to new opportunities at work. Her employer has asked her to be a manager, and she's working on her computer skills to reach that goal, she says.

"I didn't know how to use a computer," she says. "I go to classes. I like to do that."

Companies that donate old computers make more money through tax savings than they would by simply selling their unneeded equipment, says Robert Houghton, president of Redemtech. The companies making the donations pay Redemtech to refurbish and redistribute the equipment, at a cost that's lower than what they would end up spending if they tried to donate the machines on their own, he says.

Redemtech has set up its own internal program called the Serious Good project to promote the fact that businesses that donate their old IT equipment can enjoy increased tax benefits while helping low-income families.

How innovative is the Serious Good Program? In a recent research note, IT analyst firm Gartner Inc. said the program could truly help businesses find better ways to donate old gear. "Gartner has long advised enterprises to be cautious when donating used IT equipment to charitable organizations, because the process can be labor-intensive and requires careful planning, asset preparation and documentation," while exposing donor companies to significant liability if the recipient organization subsequently fails to dispose of the equipment properly, Gartner wrote.

The Serious Good initiative can mitigate those types of risks, according to Gartner, because Redemtech acts as an intermediary to "streamline the process from end to end, minimizing end-of-life liability risk by including no-charge recycling as a standard part of the process, and ensuring the recipient gets a high-value, working asset. These relatively low-risk IT asset donations can be attractive to an enterprise's corporate social responsibility area."

But beyond just helping with tax breaks and making companies feel good that their old computer equipment is being put to good use, the bottom line is that families truly benefit from the Habitat-Redemtech project, Houghton says.

"Habitat has changed the paradigm so that safe, affordable housing has to include a computer," he says. "They've identified that eliminating that digital exclusion is a necessary part of setting up a family in one of their homes."

Source URL: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9200984/Bridging_the_digital_divide_Low_income_families_enjoy_cast_off_PCs?taxonomyId=64&pageNumber=2

Habitat for Humanity
URL: http://www.habitat.org/

Serious Good Project (Redemtech own internal program)
http://www.redemtech.com/seriousgood/default.aspx
Redemtech has set up its own internal program called the Serious Good project to promote the fact that businesses that donate their old IT equipment can enjoy increased tax benefits while helping low-income families.

SOUTH ASIA: Digital Divide Sharpens Rich-Poor Gap - Jul 21st, 2010

NEW DELHI -- South Asia has emerged as the most promising region for sourcing information technology (IT) expertise, but this is an achievement that is of use only to the rich nations, say critics.


The so-called digital divide between industrialised and developing nations is being replicated within the region, widening the already big gulf between the majority poor and an English language-speaking, Internet-savvy elite, they point out.

On average, less than one out of every 10 of the 1.3 billion people in the subcontinent have access to computers and only a small fraction of these use the Internet.

The region's emerging prominence as an IT 'superpower', best seen in the case of India, is said to be accentuating the sharp contrast between an educated white-collar 'elite' and the rest.

Increasingly, the new sub-continental Internet-using elite identifies less with their digitally-deprived compatriots than with what Kenneth Keniston, expert on South Asian software at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), calls the global 'digirati.'

In the past half century, South Asian nations have done little to raise living standards of the majority poor who are a world apart from a microscopic, English language-speaking elite that is close to the centres of political and economic decision making.
The big Indian names in the global IT industry such as Sabeer Bhatia, creator of Hotmail and Azim Premji, rated by Forbes magazine among the world's five richest people, belong to this class.
Says New Delhi-based education expert, Kirti Jayaraman: ''The Internet is very much a big-city phenomenon and confined to the elite classes who may as well be living on a different planet with access to the Internet from their homes, offices and schools.''
According to Jayaraman, the digital divide can be seen quite clearly in schools in India's big cities. Here, the children of rich and middle class families go to English language-medium schools stacked with computers linked to the Internet.
On the other hand, the urban poor send their children to government schools that instruct in the vernacular language and lack tables, chairs and even roofs.

The situation is worse in India's vast rural hinterland. Barely 25 km from New Delhi is India's most populous state Uttar Pradesh which according to U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) estimates will take all of this century to make all its 170 million people literate......view more