Intel wants Africa Wimaxed up
INTEL HAS THE emerging African market in its sights and in efforts to win it over, says it will train 150,000 African teachers in tech by 2012 in the “Intel Teach Programme”.
So far, 20,000 Nigerian teachers and 15,000 educators from other African nations have been indoctrinated by the firm according to Devan Naidoo, General Manager for Intel Africa.
Naidoo said it is Intel’s aim "to reach 16,000 teachers in Abuja in the next few months." But Intel’s aim may actually have much more to do with spreading Wimax strategically across Nigeria and Africa at large.
Nigeria already has the foundations of a Wimax network, but Intel reckons it needs a little push in taking off.
“We at Intel believe in taking a holistic approach,” noted Naidoo, adding Intel was, “working with governments, telecomms regulators, NGOs and market players to develop the ICT landscape in Africa”. So the holistic approach boils down to “we’ll train your teachers but you’re going to have to use our Wimax”.
In Nigeria, Intel has also managed to muscle OLPC out of the market, with the government giving out of Intel-powered classmate PCs in 200 schools instead. µ
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Wimax might actually be the best (the only?) solution to bring broadband to a large percentage of Africa.
...if Intel was also paying for textbooks in the 3 R's.

3rd world market primary and secondary textbooks are about a dollar a pop. Second world univeristy textbooks are about $5.00 dollars a pop. How about Intel sets up an annuity with $50e6 funding to buy a couple million textbooks a year for the next couple decades?

OLPC is great PR for Negreponte, but OLPC in fact will not be a reality in Africa until Africa has a decent functional economy.

Decent functional economies require an educated populace. 

Start at the beginning, Intel. You'll get a bigger better richer market in the end that way.