Giving blogs to the voiceless

Here's a new twist on the blogosphere: blogging for those who can't blog. Committee to Protect Bloggers founder Curt Hopkins has proposed a program called Blogswana aimed at improving HIV/AIDS education in Botswana through blogging. The idea is to send university students throughout the country to interview people affected by HIV/AIDS and then blog on their behalf. Hopkins writes:

They would create a blog for someone, say a farmer in a remote village who had neither the money for the hardware, nor the expertise, nor perhaps the time or literacy, to blog himself, or to an urban prostitute, or a nurse in an AIDS hospice, or a politician, or a minister....The idea is to bring voices from the far side of the digital divide into the global conversation and to rehumanize AIDS in a time where the west has seen AIDS-related mortality decline.

Global Voices Online, the excellent global blog index, has a roundup today on other projects bridging the digital divide in Africa.