At any rate I read an article titled "Can the internet make Africa wealthy?" and it brought up an interesting point, but I think it is off base. The article cites the sharing of information from better business-educated westerners as a means for creating more savvy African Entrepreneurs. Through free education, and in some cases, small grants (there is apparently a website which will even offer small grants to African businesses in the start-up phases of their companies) Africa can use the Internet to pull itself out of the muck.
The author says:
Perhaps the next step would be to invite educated, skilled people from around the world to donate their professional time to help these small ventures operate more effectively.
I think this mind frame is very short sighted and that the Author is missing out on the true value which the Internet can bring to Africa.
The west became rich and powerful in large part due to our natural resources. Our ability to mine iron, tin and coal gave countries like America the ability to create steel. Steel is what made car manufacturing possible, buildings cheap, and it pushed progress. Basically, steel created a middle class in the West.
So we got to the place we are today because of our natural resources (and our culture).
Culture is the tricky part, but since the dawn of the internet - natural resources no longer are. People can now replace goods as a country's top export. For examples of this look no further than Bangalore, India. It is full of web developers, and call centers. A country doesn't have to pay the expensive fee of exporting physical goods and shipping them all the way to the West, it simply needs to connect to the internet.
That is where the true power of the Internet lies for Africa. Africa can turn it's people into resources for the rest of the world, and in doing so, make it's top annual export not Bananas or Diamonds or Coffee, but information. Cheap, environmentally friendly, information.
