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Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

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Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#41
post #9

Two main takeaways: 1. Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue (and then their corrupt representatives extract bribes on top of it) 2. Django's gratitude and positivity in the face of all of it is an inspiration. I suspect I and most everyone I know would be in tears and would have given up in exasperation halfway through his quest…

All governments.

And if you bypass their abuse, you're a "smuggler", shamed on by the press.

Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#42
post #10

I know a lady with four children who’s in a refugee camp in Jordan and could really use a laptop. It would allow her to teach language online and maybe get some side jobs and I think it could help her get out of the camp. If anybody has any ideas or wants to send her one please let me know.

I have a really really old laptop (1gb ram intel atom dell inspiron mini which my father had bought back many years ago) which can run tinycorelinux and I also have run modern firefox on it. Its really small and I am more than happy to ship it to her, please do note that it can't run youtube or the likes but can run python and firefox and pdf browsers. The battery is interchangable so it can be fixed. Honestly I woul…

https://archive.org/details/img-20260523060043 (catbox seems to be down for me for some reason so I have uploaded it to archive.org) but I have installed tinycorelinux on my laptop, installed firefox,gnumeric,abiword,micro-editor,python and others but its a fully functioning laptop.

Also, I read other discussions, I am more than happy to help out sending this laptop but I hope somebody looks at the shipping costs as the shipping costs might be magnitude more than the cost of this laptop. Looking forward for discussion if anybody from Africa might need it but yeah, waiting for GP's response and gonna show the laptop to my dad now who had also on one occassion asked me to fix that laptop and uh, I might as well write a blog post about it too running all these apps on it. This laptop can run youtube!! but it does get quite heated tho but I find it incredible that this laptop can run youtube albeit very very slowly, I didn't expect it. It does crash the browser sometimes tho in my testing, I am gonna test it more and share it with my dad! :-D

Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#43

I have old electronics, including macbook that I would like to give is there a way or an assiociation to know how ?

I'd wager the most efficient way would be to sell your electronics and donate the proceeds to a local charity that does this at scale and knows its way around local needs and regulations.

When I was a kid in Moldova a couple of decades ago, we had a lot of Americans donating their old stuff (electronics, clothes, shoes, even furniture) thinking they're being super helpful. Just had a quick search and it seems to still be happening to a small degree. It's a nice sentiment and I'm sure it makes people feel like they're making a difference, but economically it makes no sense. The cost of processing and shipping second-hand items is probably not much lower than just giving people money to buy locally, and supporting local businesses while you're at it.

Sort of unrelated, but the funny thing was these donations were often distributed by American missionaries who were using them as a pretext to hand out bibles (or rather just the New Testament). In Moldova, which by some metrics is the most Christian country on the planet after the Vatican. And the bibles were usually in English, a language almost none of us spoke.

Not to say that's necessarily the case for Uganda, but if the OP blog is any indication, they could have bought several second hand laptops for what it cost to ship one.

Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#47
post #22

My question, does Uganda not have used laptops available for sale? At the point where you're about to spend $200 on shipping, why not consider just doing a money order so the guy can find one locally. Shipping things overseas is such a convoluted process. My wife wanted to send a company Christmas gift bundle (literally just company merch and some candy) to two Filipino employees. One of the workers says that only DH…

~$200 doesn't go as far as you'd expect for good used laptop, even in Uganda. We did look into our options.

However, there's definitely a sunk cost aspect to the operation. After the first failure to send it through Australia Post, I became determined that Django was going to have that MacBook.

Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#48
post #9

Two main takeaways: 1. Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue (and then their corrupt representatives extract bribes on top of it) 2. Django's gratitude and positivity in the face of all of it is an inspiration. I suspect I and most everyone I know would be in tears and would have given up in exasperation halfway through his quest…

This is unfortunately also one of the biggest problems with donating to NGOs that operate in many foreign countries. Much of the aid money gets stolen by corrupt officials and local criminals. Donors have to check carefully that NGOs are legitimately benefiting the intended recipients.

Re: Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda

#50

I have old electronics, including macbook that I would like to give is there a way or an assiociation to know how ?

I'd wager the most efficient way would be to sell your electronics and donate the proceeds to a local charity that does this at scale and knows its way around local needs and regulations. When I was a kid in Moldova a couple of decades ago, we had a lot of Americans donating their old stuff (electronics, clothes, shoes, even furniture) thinking they're being super helpful. Just had a quick search and it seems to stil…

The lowest price for a working second hand laptop in Uganda is about half a million ugandan shillings, which is about USD130. That gets you a 10 year old second hand model with minimum specs. If you want anything decent, expect to pay at least double. The difficulty of importing and the import taxes are at least part of the reason. In hindsight, sending the money would have saved a lot of trouble, but it would not have gotten him a better laptop than the one he received.

But otherwise you are right. Not only is it not economical, a lot of stuff that is sent to Africa is junk, and that's exactly the reason why Uganda generally does not allow importing of second hand products. On the other hand, i believe second hand imports are the only way to make laptops available at that price range. I don't know how that works though. Maybe they make exceptions for importers that they verify are not importing junk?

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