It's entirely true that technology is not at the top of the list of human needs when it comes down to it. If you're starving, you don't much care if you have a mobile phone.
But it saddens me somewhat to read a number of responses that make the seriously flawed assumption that sub-Saharan Africa is this big mass of savannah with a bunch of children that have no water and food in it.
Yes, there have been, and continue to periodically be, humanitarian crises in Africa that result in people starving or dying form lack of water. But for the vast majority of the tens of millions of people who live in relative poverty in Africa now, the issue is considerably more complex than the stereotypical "starving kid on the TV commercial."
The reality is that, funny enough, a lot of people in Africa do have cell phones. They don't have electricity at their home, or running water, but they have a cheap mobile phone, because that's how you get in touch with somebody else. How do you charge it? You pay the guy in town who has a mobile charging business a few shillings to plug it in and charge it.
Or, more recently--and this is where the organization I work for has been involved--you buy a solar-charged LED lamp of some sort to replace the candle or kerosene lamp you previously used to light your house or shop, and it happens to have a little mobile charging port on it.
In many towns it has been, for quite some time, popular to buy a solar panel, a car battery, and a small TV so you can watch soccer on TV. Necessary? Of course not. But just because they're poor doesn't mean they don't want to watch sports.
See, the reality is that most people in Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, etc, don't just sit around on the street waiting to starve. They have jobs, and children, and families. They make only the equivalent of a couple dollars a day in most cases, and many of them have been spending a substantial fraction of that on kerosene to burn in lamps so they can see to work at night, or so their kids can do their homework in hopes of getting a better education.
Giving those people the opportunity to buy--not giving them, but selling them--a comparatively high-tech solar panel hooked to a rechargeable battery and white LED lamp leapfrogs a couple of generations of technology, and bypasses the electric grid entirely. It is not in any way necessary, but it is currently enabling millions of people to improve their quality of life.
That's just an example. A MacBook Pro is a long way from a $20 LED lamp, but it's a simple example of how comparatively advanced technology can and does make a real quality of life difference for the very poor. More importantly, though, it's worth keeping in mind that the kid starving in the street on the commercial on late night TV is not really representative of the majority of the population of Africa--they are still very poor, but they're not in crisis.
(And by the way, I'm not just making this up based on conjecture or fantasy; the organization I work for sends people to these countries regularly for weeks at a time to spend time in rural villages doing surveys, in addition to large-scale national studies.)
