Microsoft Helps Put Soweto On Line American Software Giant Opens ‘Digital Village’ In South Africa

In this sprawling black township where a computer can cost as much as a house, few people can think of going on line.

Billionaire Bill Gates, chairman of computer software giant Microsoft, hopes to change that.

Gates, 41, on Friday opened Soweto’s first free-access “digital village,” a computer center designed to give the township’s poor residents a link to the information age.

Microsoft, along with local computer hardware companies and a U.S. development organization, Africare, put together a $100,000 computer package housed in the Chiawelo Community Center, on Soweto’s southern edge.

“Soweto is a milestone,” Gates told a crowd of 200. “There are major decisions ahead about whether technology will leave the developing world behind. This is to close the gap.”

Just around the corner, horses grazed on a tether, goats huddled in a cage and Sowetans walked mud pathways to and from small houses.

But inside the center, a smiling Gates watched 30 students from the local Elsie Ngidi primary school play with Magic Bus and Creative Writer programs. None of them had seen a computer before visiting the center Thursday.

The Chiawelo center is a model for 99 others Microsoft plans to organize in South Africa.

In areas with few textbooks, whole chapters can be downloaded from the Internet, according to Lungi Siqebengu, social responsibility manager for Microsoft South Africa.

But the computer centers also will serve the adult community to help increase job skills and encourage small business development.

“This will teach our children the basics of the computer,” said Dorothy Nkau, 40, who is unemployed.

Africare provided the catalyst for the digital village by getting Soweto’s librarians interested in computers. After the community agreed to provide space for the computers, Africare sought help from Microsoft for software and training.

Tokyo Sexwale, premier of Gauteng Province, said he wants to make sure Africa, after lagging behind in the industrial and electronic revolutions, is not left out of the information age.