Computers to Africa Diary: Day one

First day (Sunday) in Nairobi - arrived off the day flight from London last night to an airport festooned with adverts for Safaricom – Vodafone's Kenyan subsidiary. Last week was the twentieth birthday of GSM but although mobile networks have been a relatively recent arrival to sub-Saharan Africa – they have developed in an unprecedented way. As Rupert Goodwins, ZDNet's technical editor pointed out, the aims of the $100 laptop scheme – to provide a cheap notebook for developing countries – might be admirable but given the choice, the average African kid would rather have mobile than a computer.

I'm over in Nairobi with UK based charity Computer Aid who are taking me on a tour of their various projects that range from allowing remote hospitals to embrace telemedicine to working with Nairobi's Kenyatta University to investigate the potential of low-power PCs – vital in a country where electricity is a limiting factor. Joining me on the trip are Computer Aid's chief executive Tony Roberts, Glenn Edwards – a renowned photographer who has done some truly powerful work covering the troubles in Somalia and Rwanda amongst others, and Graham Thom, a Computer Aid fund raiser.

We are off to a rural hospital tomorrow – about 100 miles outside of Nairobi – to look at how the PCs that Computer Aid has donated to them allow them to take advantage of telemedicine. A lot of these small hospitals do not have the skilled doctors that tend to reside in hospitals in the big cities – telemedicine – basically collaborating online – is a way around that.