The Raspberry Pi, Community Development, and Equitable Growth

This week’s social innovation topic is “Solutions and Enables to Deliver Basic Human Needs.” Natasha Lomas’s April 2013 article in TechCrunch titled “Where in the World are the 1.2M Raspberry Pi Microcomputers?[…]”[1] is one in a series of articles on the Pi Foundation’s innovation and its potential in the world’s emerging and developing regions.

Lomas’s series focuses on the Pi Foundation, a U.K.-based organization that initially created the Raspberry Pi microcomputer in an effort to fill an educational void in the U.K. computer science space by providing a learning platform for those interested in learning how to code. As Lomas cites in her April article, the Raspberry has experienced widespread adoption with more than 98% of global sales recorded in the world’s developed and wealthiest countries. This makes sense to a large degree as the device was created to cater to higher education audiences, or at least to populations who have regular access to ICT technologies. However, Lomas also highlights that the Foundation’s initiative may have contingently provided a low- cost computing solution for a range of learning communities throughout the developing world.

Priced at $35 a piece and used to power spreadsheets, word-processing, games, and deliver high-definition video, the Pi Foundation may be an enabler of real change in developing countries. Combined with new educational curricula like Salman Khan’s Khan Academy learning platform, the Raspberry may still be able to “disrupt the living rooms and schools” of those in the U.K., but also those in the rural communities of sub-Saharan Africa. Lomas cites a Belgian volunteer project that recognizes the enormous potential of the Raspberry and has used it to bring computing power to rural Cameroon.[2] What we are seeing here with the Raspberry is the scale of social innovation. Where one organization sees a local or regional social issue and decides to tackle it with an affordable, innovative approach, it provides an opportunity for others to become enablers of change.

One example of how social entrepreneurs build on initiatives and solutions like the Pi Foundation’s initial vision for the Raspberry, is South Africa’s RLabs. Marlon Parker is the founder of RLabs, an organization that empowers and reconstructs communities through innovation (www.rlabs.org). After learning about social innovation and the Raspberry Pi through President Obama’s Young African Leaders Initaitive (YALI) in 2011, Marlon returned to South African to help communities connect, learn, and grow with the aid of a number of mobile and internet solutions. For Marlon, the Raspberry Pi concept provided the model for community engagement and learning that his organization uses to bring communities together and drive social change with the use of technology.

Both examples above show us how technology is dramatically changing lives – or has the potential to change lives – in developing countries where possibilities used to be scarce. With a range of technologies from mobile phone applications, new farming aids, solar technologies, and mobile medical devices, it is clear that technology will play a transformative role in the developing world. Here is the question to ponder; Is technology the solution to equitable growth in the developing world or will it only widen the divide between vulnerable populations and those who learn to use technology in their daily lives?

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[1] Lomas, Natasha. “Where in the World are the 1.2M Raspberry Pi Microcomputers […]”. Friday, April 12^th, 2013.

techcrunch.com/2013/04/12/raspberry-pi-global-sales-spread

[2] Lomas, Natasha. “Turn the Raspberry Pi Microcomputer into a Low-Cost Laptop […]”. Monday, May 27^th, 2013.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/27/pi-laptop