Google hiring in developing markets and education reform

I just read an interesting Fortune article about Google hiring in India, and thought "wow that is a lot of money." Google has gone to the extreme to hire quality human capital for R&D operations in India. Perks for working at Google India include: taxi service, health care for parents, and etc.

Google is hiring in Africa, but mostly in Kenya and South Africa. Google is not doing this because of pure development/need goals. Google sees Africa and other developing markets as an opportunity. As soon as we get some reliable communications infrastructure: WiMax, fiber, other microwave technology Google will be scaling it's workforce in Africa.

One thing I realized reading this article is that, India is attractive because of it's huge graduate pool of students in the universities each year in Science and engineering. India graduates like 50 million students a year! What we need, and what is lacking is more technical education in science and engineering. One person leading the charge in technical education in Africa is Patrick Awuah from Ghana.

Patrick is President of Ashesi University; even though Ashesi is located in Accra, Ghana a good percentage of it's students are from neighboring countries. We have 53 countries, imagine each country having a dozen quality university or technical schools. This could be very attractive to a company like Google to hire and train African programmers or computer scientists.