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. We are so spoiled in the West.
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.
Which is why, naturally, the American Red Cross is the gold standard for NGO donation efficiency.
They can’t even operate efficiently in the USA was that intended as sarcasm
Shouldn’t people stop helping further entrench these shady practices?
If Ugandan decision makers know the people will effectively always be underwritten to receive some bread and water… no matter what happens…
Then what exactly is stopping them from piling on more and more nonsense?
The boundary on this is kind of fuzzy. You obviously wouldn't donate if 100% of it was stolen, but also if you wait until the world is in a perfected state before helping anyone you'll never help anyone.
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Better 20% of your money reaches a starving child than 0%.
> 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)
As a Brazilian with a love for electronics and DIY, I feel this pain every day.
the 80% tax on electronics since the 80s was because brazil had a few chip foundries.
two of them started cloning cpus designs (8080 and 68k iirc). they sold well all over the (1st and 2nd) world (still no local market). until one company did a publicity stunt lying they had a full mac clone (it was an actual mac, but they did have something else).
then apple and others pressured the US state department, which pressured the brazilian gov with tarifs on oranges (most of the new elite created in the millitary coups were now big land owners and orange was the cash crop). They were so afraid of the tarifs that they closed both factories as requested, and added the import tax as a good will gesture on top!
and many (30%) brazilians today think another military coup will sort things out
I was going to snidely ask what Argentina's excuse was for its import tax on electronics, but it's been a decade since I lived there, and it appears they dropped the tariff to zero at the start of this year (2026). Really, talk about holding your economy back for the wrong reasons: Making it wildly expensive for people to get the tools they need to bring money into the local economy. Besides, all it did was open a black market.
Did you guys got your eletronics from Paraguay too?
I wish we replace this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Duke_of_Caxias with a statue of a smuggler bringing computers from paraguay (they where sold two streets down this statue). It is much more heroic and positive outcome symbol to the country than some old military nobody on a horse.
Haha that's not a bad idea for a statue ;)
I'm a US citizen so it wasn't that bad for me unless I needed replacement parts without physically traveling to get them. We would just trade gifts of laptops with people when anyone was going to the US, but nothing in new packaging. At that time IIRC there was a $500 limit on how much Argentines could spend on a bank card outside the country for the entirety of a trip abroad, and obviously cash controls to prevent taking cash out and import controls on anything you brought in. The normal pattern for rich Argentines was to go to Miami and open a US bank account, then use that to buy stuff and bring it into the country in your suitcase. Fueling that US bank account was where things got very interesting (and also was the best use case I've seen for cryptocurrency, where someone in BsAs would take your cash, buy local Bitcoin with it, send the Bitcoin to their partner in Miami, who would change it to USD and deposit it in your bank account there). It was a clever economy.
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In regard to number 1, it really is such a hard problem to get money and aid to those that need it. Autocrats and every person with power along the way is happy to pocket it.
All governments.
And if you bypass their abuse, you're a "smuggler", shamed on by the press.
> We are so spoiled in the West.
This can happen in the West too.
I volunteered at a homeless shelter, and we helped those who had lost everything get important documents like their Social Security card and s state ID, and the bureaucracy was atrocious. Sometimes we literally had to beg a senator's office to help.
At least they didn't ask for bribes, but I wonder if that would've made things easier.
> We are so spoiled in the West.
We are the beneficiaries of the imperialism that leads to places like Uganda being dragged into a global marketplace to then be exploited.
Django's gratitude isn't noble, it's sad. Look at the quality of life difference between him and the average Brit whose nation held his as a protectorate until the 60s - the only industrialize tolerated for nearly a century being cotton and coffee cash crop export infrastructure.
It's still commodity dependent this day, and imbalanced power structures established by the colonial government means that there's a prize of total national power for anyone who can take over the government, leading to near endless conflict.
Most African countries were decolonized at the same time as Singapore.
How long will the white man be blamed for every single thing happening in Africa today? Will a century be enough? 200 years? More?
Aren't Africans adults with agency who are ultimately responsible for the state of their countries?
Are you under the impression that western activity in Africa ceased with the end of colonialism? No fomented coups, conflicts, revolutions, arms and funding for rebel groups, continuous bribes and support to corrupt government officials to secure the flow of oil, minerals, etc. out of those countries into western hands? No proxy wars between the west and the USSR?
Read more about the history of the continent.
What's the solution?
Arguably, just to leave them alone, neither exploiting nor trying to "help". It sucks and it hurts, but outside interference does not seem to help a society heal itself. This has been argued by more informed people than myself-- https://www.uvm.edu/~jashman/CDAE195_ESCI375/To%20Hell%20wit...
Have you seen how active China and to some degree Russia have been in Africa? When there is vacuum someone will fill it.
That’s true in order to truly change a society you have to no longer be an outsider, but that’s a level of entanglement that NGOs rarely do now adays.
The ones that do it though are all religious institutions so their goals are more social/moral rather than economic or geopolitical.
What would help is to buy their products and resources for a fair price.
How do you determine what's a fair price?
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Yeah, because surely 1 only happens in "developing countries" /s
What does this reddit-esque whataboutism add..?
EU just implemented a new customs tax law that will be coming to member states on july 1st.
Until now, items below 150eur (bought by private citizens) were not a subject to customs, and some time ago not even for VAT if below 22eur. From july 1st, it's becoming painful, in slovenia for example, 3eur per TARIC code + customs fee + vat.
So, for example you go on alixpress, you buy a silicone phone case for 1eur, a screen protector/foil for 1eur, a phone "sock" for 1eur and a stylus for 1 eur (+whatever shipping, often free).
A few years ago, you'd pay 4eur and get the package. Then they implemented IOSS, so aliexpress has to report the 4eur order to EU, and they charge you 22% VAT on that, so you'd pay 4.88eur directly to aliexpress and they'd pay the tax. Ok, a bit more expensive but doable, unless you want to go outside of eu and order the stuff there and just bring it in with you.
And now? Since they're 4 different items, that's 4 TARIC codes, and that's 3eur per each separate item, so that makes 4eur for items themselves, 4x3eur for customs (16eur together with the item price), then you pay VAT on the full price (including customs!), that makes it 19.52eur + whatever the post office decides to charge for "processing" (used to be ~4-5euros, but usually avoided by aliexpress shippers).
So, instead of 4euros, you'll pay 20-25euros for the same thing, the government taking 20 euros of tax on 4euros of items (even less total worth, aliexpress + chinese shipping has to earn their share too).
I mean sure, they want you to buy locally from dropshippers, but it's still cheaper than that, or from amazon, which will probably be the biggest winner here, and it's not even a european company.
Good thing the EU is a democracy and we can repeal this bs! Because we can, right? Right, guys?
I think so. But I exclusively consume EU-approved media outlets as decided by the European commission under the leadership of democratically elected Ursula von der Leyen.
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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 DHL reliability delivers to her so I help my wife with getting a shipping label. Holy shit, I'm just sending a tshirt, mug, and some pens. Why do I need to list out the contents and their international categories like I'm trying to send a shipping container full of rifles? Also addresses for people living in villages in PI are weird, the address was relative to the town hall. Luckily the other person lived in a gated community with a more familiar address formatting. Finally I figure everything out and she buys the label and pays the tariffs (more expensive than the gifts but it's too late now). Luckily there's a DHL near my work so I go to drop off the two very carefully wrapped packages. Of course she wraps both like an actual gift with cute tissue paper and of course the DHL agent has to open it and inspect it, ruining the care my wife put into the wrapping. Overall the experience was mind boggling bureaucratic. Sending via USPS would likely have been a bit easier but the warning of unreliable local mail was concerning. The next year, she just had the CEO send them an extra bonus instead.
~$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.
Wait, how the hell can Australia Post charge you the full AUD 111.60 for a failed shipment when it seems to be the fault of the clerk who approved the shipment against their own rules? And sounds like the package didn’t even leave Australia so even if you should pay for the full mileage it would be 20% at most?
I help a good friend run a small business in Africa, and this story is exactly why, every time I go visit, I fill my luggage with stuff she needs. Laptops, car engine turbos, espresso machines, fryers, bottles of shampoo, printers, anything. The cheapest and most reliable way to deliver things there is to take a plane yourself and carry the things with you. This whole mess is why, despite being a poor continent, the price of goods is actually much higher than in rich developed countries, which puts a huge brake on the development of the countries.
It is also quite sad that the western NGOs, which all have their own very functional and heavily subsidised delivery channels, keep it to themselves, instead of making it available to the general public and businesses of the countries. Their monopolies on efficient import is weird and counter productive.
> It is also quite sad that the western NGOs, which all have their own very functional and heavily subsidised delivery channels, keep it to themselves
For every dozen people mailing in a laptop, there'll be someone mailing in guns. They don't want that liability. It would damage their ability to do what they do.
The NGO delivery channels are privileged because they are charitable. That's why they get to bypass the country's restrictions. You can't open that channel up, the country would object at humanitarian exemptions being used as a backdoor for commercial imports.
The most amazing thing about my travels in Africa, specifically Uganda, is that things I would never expect to work, work. The people are so innovative and resourceful that I think things that would be scams (handing a laptop to a stranger to hold) are pretty common and work.
Also makes me grateful to live in a developed nation where we can take shipping for granted.
That's pretty cool. I've also realized that even a small amount of money can solve a lot of problems for someone. I've been helping people in the SF Bay who are fighting cancer by giving them laptops. So far, I've assembled and donated three using parts I already had, and I bought a few more online specifically for this purpose. One more (the fourth) hasn't been given away yet.
It reminded me of when I was a student. I used to repair laptops and resell them. Going through cancer in my family these days, I understand how important it is to help people when you can. It makes you a slightly better person, at least in your own eyes.
So many characters worthy of an epic story. The last one would be the Good Samaritan, or some sort of elderly sage...
> Before leaving, I asked him whether he even knew what was inside the package.
> He answered very casually that he had no idea and that he did not need to know.
> I then asked whether he at least knew which company had entrusted him with the delivery. He replied that it was simply "a friend" who had asked him to temporarily keep the box until someone came to collect it.
> I switched it on briefly, and that was actually the moment when the hardware shop owner himself suddenly became excited[...] Seeing the Apple logo appear on the screen, he immediately smiled and said something along the lines of, "Ah… a MacBook is a MacBook. Apple is still Apple."
The goodness of the people in the chain make me think that the rider would have had a much greater than 50% chance of following through properly. But it's good that Django decided to further increase the odds by taking matters into his own hands.
I tried to do the same from USA to Turkey. Can't ship lithium. So my brother took the laptop to Germany, and then shipped it to Ankara.
The laptop was never released from the customs. The Turkish reps were rude and expected bribe and pretended they don't understand english. After few months it was returned back to Germany. My cousins' laptop had a keyboard issue and local shops would not replace it and the HP agents on the ground also didn't want to help.
I admire people that just get shit done: especially in an environment of misdirection.
There's a lot of luck and bad luck in the story.
I’m glad it basically worked out but damn do we take free next-day delivery for granted.
It's pretty much like trying to get something shipped to Argentina, a royal pain in the ass.
The laptop would pay a 50% fee over the (declared value + shipping cost).
Couriers will mostly deal with that on send, but if sent through regular mail you need to declare and pay before you get it.
If you didn't include your tax number as part of the address (doesn't matter in which field), there's a non-zero chance that the package will be lost, held indefinitely or returned to sender.
It's great that there are people willing to help even in these conditions.
Really makes you appreciate infrastructure. Great story. Maybe one day everyone will have Zipline style drones that can drop off stuff anywhere.
I recommend the documentary "Empire of Dust" if you would like learn more about the difficulties of doing business in africa.
This was a great read, and a bit of a break from the noise. Kept me engaged the whole time. You’re a good guy.
Really like how Django writes his response. Well written and very polite. Feels like I only see that sort of genuine writing from penpals
reading this article while listening to billie eilish made me feel something i've never felt before, what a blogpost
It’s a great writeup, thank you. I wish there was a better way to send the laptop or source a new one. I wonder, how far does $400AUD go in Uganda? Is that like enough for him to bribe his way out of the refugee camp?
I know a lady with four children who’s in a refugee camp in Jordan and could really use a laptop. It would allow her to teach language online and maybe get some side jobs and I think it could help her get out of the camp. If anybody has any ideas or wants to send her one please let me know.
If you're asking about logistics, try reaching out to your country's embassy in Jordan and see if you can get in touch with an aid/development worker. They know how to make things happen.
I have a really really old laptop (1gb ram intel atom dell inspiron mini which my father had bought back many years ago) which can run tinycorelinux and I also have run modern firefox on it.
Its really small and I am more than happy to ship it to her, please do note that it can't run youtube or the likes but can run python and firefox and pdf browsers.
The battery is interchangable so it can be fixed.
Honestly I would be more than happy to help with these things, wishing nothing but good for her & hope she finds a decent laptop that she needs and hopefully others might chime in too but let me know if you are interested, more than happy to help :-D
I don't want to sound too noble (because I am not) but I was also thinking of going to any nearby orphanage and giving it to them. It can let them play retro games or programming and i was thinking of spending time with them teaching them terminals but I doubt the usefulness of the teaching part as I certainly have so much to learn and I am unsure if it might be the best use case of their time too or something and (this was just a thought which had come, I haven't given too much thought about it but I might have some spare time recently)
Anyways, let me know if there is any help needed, Also I am more than happy to share my servers/vps's that I have with the lady, I have two small vps's of 0.5 gb ram (each for 7$~ish per year)
Anyways this message got long but waiting for your response and have a nice day dude and feel free to mail me if you might need (any) help in (anything)
Edit-1: thinking of just making a small video to showcase to ya what my old laptop is but I think that programming is possible on it. and perhaps it might even help given its tiny and battery upgradable and something which can help her more perhaps
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
I wish governments would realize that the more barriers and friction they put between their citizens and good tools, the worse their economy will probably be.
The average citizen does not have the income to even afford stuff like that. Anyone who is able buy a laptop like that is wealthy by local standards. And in particular anyone importing stuff from outside. And that wealth is being taxed. If they didn't do that then there wouldn't be may people left to tax at all.
Sure, Django here is the exception, but not taxing imports would generally not benefit people like him, but the actually wealthy people who can otherwise afford the tax.
> Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi have adopted a three-tiered duty structure for imports from outside the East Africa Customs Union under the terms of the Protocol on the Establishment of the East Africa Customs Union, which became fully operational in January 2010. Most finished products are subject to a 25% duty, while intermediate products face a 10% levy. Raw materials (excluding foodstuffs) and capital goods may still enter duty free. Imported goods are charged a value added tax (VAT) of 18% and a 15% withholding tax, which is not reclaimable. Combined, these taxes effectively charge a 33% tax on all foreign goods and services. Imports are also charged a 1.5% infrastructure tax to finance railway infrastructure development. [0]
"Effectively charge a 33% tax on all foreign goods and services." Not just Macbooks. I don't know if this is the final definitive tally of the tariffs but I believe almost everything has a high tariff, so people effectively pay 33% more for the same goods plus shipping. Fair, can't really get rid of shipping, but a 33% or even a 15% penalty on tools means people get worse tools. Computers, mobile phones, cars, motorcycle helmets, medicines (if imported perhaps?), hammers, fans, showers, whatever tool you might use that is a finished good coming from another country, you pay 15-33% or whatever more, so you get a lower quality product for the money you have. I just would prefer my people get the best deal on the best tools (that we as a country don't think we need to make for security reasons) so people can improve faster. Less smog, better roads, fewer things that break...would be quite nice at all levels.
Most economists think that tariffs are not a good way to collect tax, because it distorts incentives far more than e.g. a tax on wealth or property.
but how would that benefit those in government?
More to steal?
Django has strong honey badger energy!
I wonder how much the laptop costs in a Ugandan store
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.
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?
You could also try your local schools as well. Many children have no access to one.
Bram Moolenaar tips his hat
What's with the downright brigading?
seems to mostly be one person with multiple accounts, but they are getting rightly buried.
We have a couple co-op members in Uganda and their billing addresses are always distinct. Along the lines of "Behind the Gas Station, SomeCity, Uganda."
They're also extraordinarily good engineers so idk wtf is going on in Uganda. A lot of folks from there come work in Taiwan, I guess the pay and quality of life is better here.
While spending a year in southern african countries (Uganda included), and befriend few locals and lots of people from UN and pieces of EU bureaucracy (and EU bank GMs), I learned two interesting things:
- even the UN (which pays 1/4 of what the EU pays) cannot ship work laptops to these countries. The either vanish or have to be shipped to very central DHL offices.
- Informal remittance from family members to their communities is exactly the same amount of all the money the country gets from external sources as Aid. e.g. Angola had USD$2bi given by EU and UN. Remitances where the same 2Bi. I don't know if there are mechanisms to keep that this way, but that was the case for all the countries i could get the number that year and the year before.
This is a very western approach to a very Ugandan problem. A trivial amount of money (for a Westerner) could have saved a lot of time and pain.
Can you please expand what you mean? It's not clear how money would have solved this problem better.
Specifically I was talking about this part
> "At some point, one man quietly pulled me aside and suggested that if I "gave something," they could help solve the problem more easily.".
You can pay that fee/bribe and things will go smoothly.
But more generally my thought was that the western idea is that bureaucracy rules are something to be followed and, even if painful, are the path to getting the state to provide the services. In Uganda, it's better to model bureaucracy as a system that exists to enable bribes and following the rules to the letter and expecting state services is fighting the system.
If you want to get goods to someone in Uganda, don't talk to the Australian Post about the rules, talk to a Ugandan importer who knows how to actually work the system that exists in practice.
Caveats about broad brushes of course, but that's the realistic approach IMO.
It was the local, not the Westerner, who refused to pay, right?
It was Django. But he had a very different financial situation. And a potentially fraught one as a refugee and foreigner. I would pay the bribe, but I would try very hard not to put the recipient in a position to have to do so (no criticism to the author).
It would have been easier and cheaper to send money to Django than to send the laptop.
Although, I'd say there is a certain charm in physical gifts.
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Looks like he could have bought a used laptop locally for the price you paid for shipping alone.
There are charities that move used electronics to developing countries in bulk somehow.
remarkable that even without what we would think of as basic infrastructure they can still produce an impoverishing level of bureaucracy. it's like an emergent force of its own.
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. We are so spoiled in the West.
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.
Which is why, naturally, the American Red Cross is the gold standard for NGO donation efficiency.
They can’t even operate efficiently in the USA was that intended as sarcasm
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...
Do you mean the ICRC?
If the implication is true…
Shouldn’t people stop helping further entrench these shady practices?
If Ugandan decision makers know the people will effectively always be underwritten to receive some bread and water… no matter what happens…
Then what exactly is stopping them from piling on more and more nonsense?
The boundary on this is kind of fuzzy. You obviously wouldn't donate if 100% of it was stolen, but also if you wait until the world is in a perfected state before helping anyone you'll never help anyone.
Better 20% of your money reaches a starving child than 0%.
> 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)
As a Brazilian with a love for electronics and DIY, I feel this pain every day.
the 80% tax on electronics since the 80s was because brazil had a few chip foundries.
two of them started cloning cpus designs (8080 and 68k iirc). they sold well all over the (1st and 2nd) world (still no local market). until one company did a publicity stunt lying they had a full mac clone (it was an actual mac, but they did have something else).
then apple and others pressured the US state department, which pressured the brazilian gov with tarifs on oranges (most of the new elite created in the millitary coups were now big land owners and orange was the cash crop). They were so afraid of the tarifs that they closed both factories as requested, and added the import tax as a good will gesture on top!
and many (30%) brazilians today think another military coup will sort things out
I was going to snidely ask what Argentina's excuse was for its import tax on electronics, but it's been a decade since I lived there, and it appears they dropped the tariff to zero at the start of this year (2026). Really, talk about holding your economy back for the wrong reasons: Making it wildly expensive for people to get the tools they need to bring money into the local economy. Besides, all it did was open a black market.
Did you guys got your eletronics from Paraguay too?
I wish we replace this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Duke_of_Caxias with a statue of a smuggler bringing computers from paraguay (they where sold two streets down this statue). It is much more heroic and positive outcome symbol to the country than some old military nobody on a horse.
Haha that's not a bad idea for a statue ;)
I'm a US citizen so it wasn't that bad for me unless I needed replacement parts without physically traveling to get them. We would just trade gifts of laptops with people when anyone was going to the US, but nothing in new packaging. At that time IIRC there was a $500 limit on how much Argentines could spend on a bank card outside the country for the entirety of a trip abroad, and obviously cash controls to prevent taking cash out and import controls on anything you brought in. The normal pattern for rich Argentines was to go to Miami and open a US bank account, then use that to buy stuff and bring it into the country in your suitcase. Fueling that US bank account was where things got very interesting (and also was the best use case I've seen for cryptocurrency, where someone in BsAs would take your cash, buy local Bitcoin with it, send the Bitcoin to their partner in Miami, who would change it to USD and deposit it in your bank account there). It was a clever economy.
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In regard to number 1, it really is such a hard problem to get money and aid to those that need it. Autocrats and every person with power along the way is happy to pocket it.
All governments.
And if you bypass their abuse, you're a "smuggler", shamed on by the press.
> We are so spoiled in the West.
This can happen in the West too.
I volunteered at a homeless shelter, and we helped those who had lost everything get important documents like their Social Security card and s state ID, and the bureaucracy was atrocious. Sometimes we literally had to beg a senator's office to help.
At least they didn't ask for bribes, but I wonder if that would've made things easier.
> We are so spoiled in the West.
We are the beneficiaries of the imperialism that leads to places like Uganda being dragged into a global marketplace to then be exploited.
Django's gratitude isn't noble, it's sad. Look at the quality of life difference between him and the average Brit whose nation held his as a protectorate until the 60s - the only industrialize tolerated for nearly a century being cotton and coffee cash crop export infrastructure.
It's still commodity dependent this day, and imbalanced power structures established by the colonial government means that there's a prize of total national power for anyone who can take over the government, leading to near endless conflict.
Most African countries were decolonized at the same time as Singapore.
How long will the white man be blamed for every single thing happening in Africa today? Will a century be enough? 200 years? More?
Aren't Africans adults with agency who are ultimately responsible for the state of their countries?
Are you under the impression that western activity in Africa ceased with the end of colonialism? No fomented coups, conflicts, revolutions, arms and funding for rebel groups, continuous bribes and support to corrupt government officials to secure the flow of oil, minerals, etc. out of those countries into western hands? No proxy wars between the west and the USSR?
Read more about the history of the continent.
What's the solution?
Arguably, just to leave them alone, neither exploiting nor trying to "help". It sucks and it hurts, but outside interference does not seem to help a society heal itself. This has been argued by more informed people than myself-- https://www.uvm.edu/~jashman/CDAE195_ESCI375/To%20Hell%20wit...
Have you seen how active China and to some degree Russia have been in Africa? When there is vacuum someone will fill it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47978386
That’s true in order to truly change a society you have to no longer be an outsider, but that’s a level of entanglement that NGOs rarely do now adays.
The ones that do it though are all religious institutions so their goals are more social/moral rather than economic or geopolitical.
What would help is to buy their products and resources for a fair price.
How do you determine what's a fair price?
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Yeah, because surely 1 only happens in "developing countries" /s
What does this reddit-esque whataboutism add..?
EU just implemented a new customs tax law that will be coming to member states on july 1st.
Until now, items below 150eur (bought by private citizens) were not a subject to customs, and some time ago not even for VAT if below 22eur. From july 1st, it's becoming painful, in slovenia for example, 3eur per TARIC code + customs fee + vat.
So, for example you go on alixpress, you buy a silicone phone case for 1eur, a screen protector/foil for 1eur, a phone "sock" for 1eur and a stylus for 1 eur (+whatever shipping, often free).
A few years ago, you'd pay 4eur and get the package. Then they implemented IOSS, so aliexpress has to report the 4eur order to EU, and they charge you 22% VAT on that, so you'd pay 4.88eur directly to aliexpress and they'd pay the tax. Ok, a bit more expensive but doable, unless you want to go outside of eu and order the stuff there and just bring it in with you.
And now? Since they're 4 different items, that's 4 TARIC codes, and that's 3eur per each separate item, so that makes 4eur for items themselves, 4x3eur for customs (16eur together with the item price), then you pay VAT on the full price (including customs!), that makes it 19.52eur + whatever the post office decides to charge for "processing" (used to be ~4-5euros, but usually avoided by aliexpress shippers).
So, instead of 4euros, you'll pay 20-25euros for the same thing, the government taking 20 euros of tax on 4euros of items (even less total worth, aliexpress + chinese shipping has to earn their share too).
I mean sure, they want you to buy locally from dropshippers, but it's still cheaper than that, or from amazon, which will probably be the biggest winner here, and it's not even a european company.
Good thing the EU is a democracy and we can repeal this bs! Because we can, right? Right, guys?
I think so. But I exclusively consume EU-approved media outlets as decided by the European commission under the leadership of democratically elected Ursula von der Leyen.
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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 DHL reliability delivers to her so I help my wife with getting a shipping label. Holy shit, I'm just sending a tshirt, mug, and some pens. Why do I need to list out the contents and their international categories like I'm trying to send a shipping container full of rifles? Also addresses for people living in villages in PI are weird, the address was relative to the town hall. Luckily the other person lived in a gated community with a more familiar address formatting. Finally I figure everything out and she buys the label and pays the tariffs (more expensive than the gifts but it's too late now). Luckily there's a DHL near my work so I go to drop off the two very carefully wrapped packages. Of course she wraps both like an actual gift with cute tissue paper and of course the DHL agent has to open it and inspect it, ruining the care my wife put into the wrapping. Overall the experience was mind boggling bureaucratic. Sending via USPS would likely have been a bit easier but the warning of unreliable local mail was concerning. The next year, she just had the CEO send them an extra bonus instead.
~$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.
Wait, how the hell can Australia Post charge you the full AUD 111.60 for a failed shipment when it seems to be the fault of the clerk who approved the shipment against their own rules? And sounds like the package didn’t even leave Australia so even if you should pay for the full mileage it would be 20% at most?
I help a good friend run a small business in Africa, and this story is exactly why, every time I go visit, I fill my luggage with stuff she needs. Laptops, car engine turbos, espresso machines, fryers, bottles of shampoo, printers, anything. The cheapest and most reliable way to deliver things there is to take a plane yourself and carry the things with you. This whole mess is why, despite being a poor continent, the price of goods is actually much higher than in rich developed countries, which puts a huge brake on the development of the countries.
It is also quite sad that the western NGOs, which all have their own very functional and heavily subsidised delivery channels, keep it to themselves, instead of making it available to the general public and businesses of the countries. Their monopolies on efficient import is weird and counter productive.
> It is also quite sad that the western NGOs, which all have their own very functional and heavily subsidised delivery channels, keep it to themselves
For every dozen people mailing in a laptop, there'll be someone mailing in guns. They don't want that liability. It would damage their ability to do what they do.
The NGO delivery channels are privileged because they are charitable. That's why they get to bypass the country's restrictions. You can't open that channel up, the country would object at humanitarian exemptions being used as a backdoor for commercial imports.
The most amazing thing about my travels in Africa, specifically Uganda, is that things I would never expect to work, work. The people are so innovative and resourceful that I think things that would be scams (handing a laptop to a stranger to hold) are pretty common and work.
Also makes me grateful to live in a developed nation where we can take shipping for granted.
That's pretty cool. I've also realized that even a small amount of money can solve a lot of problems for someone. I've been helping people in the SF Bay who are fighting cancer by giving them laptops. So far, I've assembled and donated three using parts I already had, and I bought a few more online specifically for this purpose. One more (the fourth) hasn't been given away yet.
It reminded me of when I was a student. I used to repair laptops and resell them. Going through cancer in my family these days, I understand how important it is to help people when you can. It makes you a slightly better person, at least in your own eyes.
So many characters worthy of an epic story. The last one would be the Good Samaritan, or some sort of elderly sage...
> Before leaving, I asked him whether he even knew what was inside the package.
> He answered very casually that he had no idea and that he did not need to know.
> I then asked whether he at least knew which company had entrusted him with the delivery. He replied that it was simply "a friend" who had asked him to temporarily keep the box until someone came to collect it.
> I switched it on briefly, and that was actually the moment when the hardware shop owner himself suddenly became excited[...] Seeing the Apple logo appear on the screen, he immediately smiled and said something along the lines of, "Ah… a MacBook is a MacBook. Apple is still Apple."
The goodness of the people in the chain make me think that the rider would have had a much greater than 50% chance of following through properly. But it's good that Django decided to further increase the odds by taking matters into his own hands.
I tried to do the same from USA to Turkey. Can't ship lithium. So my brother took the laptop to Germany, and then shipped it to Ankara.
The laptop was never released from the customs. The Turkish reps were rude and expected bribe and pretended they don't understand english. After few months it was returned back to Germany. My cousins' laptop had a keyboard issue and local shops would not replace it and the HP agents on the ground also didn't want to help.
I admire people that just get shit done: especially in an environment of misdirection.
There's a lot of luck and bad luck in the story.
I’m glad it basically worked out but damn do we take free next-day delivery for granted.
It's pretty much like trying to get something shipped to Argentina, a royal pain in the ass.
The laptop would pay a 50% fee over the (declared value + shipping cost). Couriers will mostly deal with that on send, but if sent through regular mail you need to declare and pay before you get it.
If you didn't include your tax number as part of the address (doesn't matter in which field), there's a non-zero chance that the package will be lost, held indefinitely or returned to sender.
It's great that there are people willing to help even in these conditions.
Really makes you appreciate infrastructure. Great story. Maybe one day everyone will have Zipline style drones that can drop off stuff anywhere.
I recommend the documentary "Empire of Dust" if you would like learn more about the difficulties of doing business in africa.
This was a great read, and a bit of a break from the noise. Kept me engaged the whole time. You’re a good guy.
Really like how Django writes his response. Well written and very polite. Feels like I only see that sort of genuine writing from penpals
reading this article while listening to billie eilish made me feel something i've never felt before, what a blogpost
It’s a great writeup, thank you. I wish there was a better way to send the laptop or source a new one. I wonder, how far does $400AUD go in Uganda? Is that like enough for him to bribe his way out of the refugee camp?
I know a lady with four children who’s in a refugee camp in Jordan and could really use a laptop. It would allow her to teach language online and maybe get some side jobs and I think it could help her get out of the camp. If anybody has any ideas or wants to send her one please let me know.
If you're asking about logistics, try reaching out to your country's embassy in Jordan and see if you can get in touch with an aid/development worker. They know how to make things happen.
I have a really really old laptop (1gb ram intel atom dell inspiron mini which my father had bought back many years ago) which can run tinycorelinux and I also have run modern firefox on it.
Its really small and I am more than happy to ship it to her, please do note that it can't run youtube or the likes but can run python and firefox and pdf browsers.
The battery is interchangable so it can be fixed.
Honestly I would be more than happy to help with these things, wishing nothing but good for her & hope she finds a decent laptop that she needs and hopefully others might chime in too but let me know if you are interested, more than happy to help :-D
I don't want to sound too noble (because I am not) but I was also thinking of going to any nearby orphanage and giving it to them. It can let them play retro games or programming and i was thinking of spending time with them teaching them terminals but I doubt the usefulness of the teaching part as I certainly have so much to learn and I am unsure if it might be the best use case of their time too or something and (this was just a thought which had come, I haven't given too much thought about it but I might have some spare time recently)
Anyways, let me know if there is any help needed, Also I am more than happy to share my servers/vps's that I have with the lady, I have two small vps's of 0.5 gb ram (each for 7$~ish per year)
Anyways this message got long but waiting for your response and have a nice day dude and feel free to mail me if you might need (any) help in (anything)
Edit-1: thinking of just making a small video to showcase to ya what my old laptop is but I think that programming is possible on it. and perhaps it might even help given its tiny and battery upgradable and something which can help her more perhaps
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
I wish governments would realize that the more barriers and friction they put between their citizens and good tools, the worse their economy will probably be.
The average citizen does not have the income to even afford stuff like that. Anyone who is able buy a laptop like that is wealthy by local standards. And in particular anyone importing stuff from outside. And that wealth is being taxed. If they didn't do that then there wouldn't be may people left to tax at all.
Sure, Django here is the exception, but not taxing imports would generally not benefit people like him, but the actually wealthy people who can otherwise afford the tax.
> Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi have adopted a three-tiered duty structure for imports from outside the East Africa Customs Union under the terms of the Protocol on the Establishment of the East Africa Customs Union, which became fully operational in January 2010. Most finished products are subject to a 25% duty, while intermediate products face a 10% levy. Raw materials (excluding foodstuffs) and capital goods may still enter duty free. Imported goods are charged a value added tax (VAT) of 18% and a 15% withholding tax, which is not reclaimable. Combined, these taxes effectively charge a 33% tax on all foreign goods and services. Imports are also charged a 1.5% infrastructure tax to finance railway infrastructure development. [0]
"Effectively charge a 33% tax on all foreign goods and services." Not just Macbooks. I don't know if this is the final definitive tally of the tariffs but I believe almost everything has a high tariff, so people effectively pay 33% more for the same goods plus shipping. Fair, can't really get rid of shipping, but a 33% or even a 15% penalty on tools means people get worse tools. Computers, mobile phones, cars, motorcycle helmets, medicines (if imported perhaps?), hammers, fans, showers, whatever tool you might use that is a finished good coming from another country, you pay 15-33% or whatever more, so you get a lower quality product for the money you have. I just would prefer my people get the best deal on the best tools (that we as a country don't think we need to make for security reasons) so people can improve faster. Less smog, better roads, fewer things that break...would be quite nice at all levels.
[0]: www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/uganda-import-tariffs
Most economists think that tariffs are not a good way to collect tax, because it distorts incentives far more than e.g. a tax on wealth or property.
but how would that benefit those in government?
More to steal?
Django has strong honey badger energy!
I wonder how much the laptop costs in a Ugandan store
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.
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?
You could also try your local schools as well. Many children have no access to one.
Bram Moolenaar tips his hat
What's with the downright brigading?
seems to mostly be one person with multiple accounts, but they are getting rightly buried.
We have a couple co-op members in Uganda and their billing addresses are always distinct. Along the lines of "Behind the Gas Station, SomeCity, Uganda."
They're also extraordinarily good engineers so idk wtf is going on in Uganda. A lot of folks from there come work in Taiwan, I guess the pay and quality of life is better here.
While spending a year in southern african countries (Uganda included), and befriend few locals and lots of people from UN and pieces of EU bureaucracy (and EU bank GMs), I learned two interesting things:
- even the UN (which pays 1/4 of what the EU pays) cannot ship work laptops to these countries. The either vanish or have to be shipped to very central DHL offices.
- Informal remittance from family members to their communities is exactly the same amount of all the money the country gets from external sources as Aid. e.g. Angola had USD$2bi given by EU and UN. Remitances where the same 2Bi. I don't know if there are mechanisms to keep that this way, but that was the case for all the countries i could get the number that year and the year before.
This is a very western approach to a very Ugandan problem. A trivial amount of money (for a Westerner) could have saved a lot of time and pain.
Can you please expand what you mean? It's not clear how money would have solved this problem better.
Specifically I was talking about this part
> "At some point, one man quietly pulled me aside and suggested that if I "gave something," they could help solve the problem more easily.".
You can pay that fee/bribe and things will go smoothly.
But more generally my thought was that the western idea is that bureaucracy rules are something to be followed and, even if painful, are the path to getting the state to provide the services. In Uganda, it's better to model bureaucracy as a system that exists to enable bribes and following the rules to the letter and expecting state services is fighting the system.
If you want to get goods to someone in Uganda, don't talk to the Australian Post about the rules, talk to a Ugandan importer who knows how to actually work the system that exists in practice.
Caveats about broad brushes of course, but that's the realistic approach IMO.
It was the local, not the Westerner, who refused to pay, right?
It was Django. But he had a very different financial situation. And a potentially fraught one as a refugee and foreigner. I would pay the bribe, but I would try very hard not to put the recipient in a position to have to do so (no criticism to the author).
It would have been easier and cheaper to send money to Django than to send the laptop.
Although, I'd say there is a certain charm in physical gifts.
Looks like he could have bought a used laptop locally for the price you paid for shipping alone.
There are charities that move used electronics to developing countries in bulk somehow.
remarkable that even without what we would think of as basic infrastructure they can still produce an impoverishing level of bureaucracy. it's like an emergent force of its own.
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