Donated PCs become African multimedia centres

(Photo credit: Glenn Edwards)

The answer is to embrace the trend for multimedia PCs that has seen Microsoft and others trying to position the PC as an all-in-one entertainment centre. But this being Africa – where, despite the commoditisation of PCs in the West, price is still an issue — the answer is to crack open the monitor and attach a TV card to create a cheap and reliable TV.

These CRT TVs are then sold locally to add to the charity's war chest to enable it to continue distributing PCs to the hundreds of Kenyan schools that badly need computers but don't have the budgets for the latest models from Dell or HP. CFSK has even gone one step further, adding a radio card to a desktop machine and bundling it with a CRT TV, creating a hybrid, reconditioned, multimedia desktop.