[Photo: XO Laptop, One Laptop Per Child]

While on the subject of technology and development, I should direct your attentions to a recent post by Jon Evans at his World Fast Forward blog. One of the debates currently raging in development circles has been the relative merits of mobile phones vs. laptops in advancing the economic opportunities and living standards of the third world poor. Some argue that phones will prove of greater use, as they’re easy to use and don’t require literacy, while others insist that inexpensive networked laptops will empower “collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.”

One of the main protagonists has been Nicholas Negroponte and his One Laptop Per Child project. The XO Laptop, created by OLPC, has been around for awhile now but the uptake has been disappointingly low. Evans reports why, attributing much of its failure to poor design.

My hunch, which Evans shares, is that the debate will turn out to be moot in the end, as mobile phones evolve into smarter, handheld computer devices more like the iPhone and BlackBerry. So attached are the West Africans I met to their cells, I can’t imagine them embracing laptops quite so avidly. Makes more sense they’ll simply keep up with the fast-changing mobile technology. Which is what those of us in rich countries are doing anyway.

On a related note, Ethan Zuckerman at My Heart’s in Accra posts on the potential for bottom-up, community-based open-source hardware innovation.