I've shipped electronics and Laptops for Work quite a bit, and OP is right, the system is broken, it stays this way because a lot of corrupt individuals benefit from this mess. However, OP showed a degree of Hubris here, a mistake lots of us make when dealing with foreign countries, just because it works this way here, so it should work that way in XYZ.

OP would have saved themselves lots of time and money if they'd asked Django what the best way to get that laptop shipped to them was. Lots of Ugandans in Austria ship things back daily; they just do it differently, simply hand it to someone travelling back home, there are people travelling back daily, willing to help or just pay a shipping agency a small amount and they'll handle everything.

This is a good act of charity and I applaud OP for that; however, the first mistake they made was Google "How to send a laptop overseas" , a message to Django, asking the best way to get them the laptop would have saved them time and money.

We all fall into this trap of giving people in need what we think they need instead of asking them how best we can help. Local knowledge goes a long way.

All in all, I applaud OP, not many of us would have done this.

They know the thicket of rules and petty fiefdoms, what rules apply and which don't, what to pay and to whom... Regular post just acts as if everything works by the book - and that doesn't fly. Use word-of-mouth to find the good couriers, trawl through your local community of people from the destination country - it is a very common service, so you'll soon find a good provider. Test it with a couple of low-stakes deliveries and you'll have a solid channel.

Meet your guy in a metro station, or find the shop in Barbès that smells like a marketplace across the Mediterranean, hand over your package with the recipient's name, destination city (Addresses ? Where we're going we don't need addresses !), your phone number and the recipient's phone number scrawled on it with a felt-tip marker (make sure they are Whatsapp numbers), pay in cash, don't get a receipt (lol) - and there you go !

Operating in Africa will soon tire you if you attempt to force European ways. Going with the flow (with appropriate caution - a nose for issues, borne from experience, is invaluable) works and makes the experience enjoyable !

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.

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.

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.

Also makes me grateful to live in a developed nation where we can take shipping for granted.

However, in my experience, "ordinary" parcel shipping (like DHL) won't do this shipping either any more: You have to switch to the express ones (like DHL express, UPS, FedEx) even if you don't intend to do any express. The difference is easily 40€ vs 400€ for shipping a shoe box!

If you ship anything slightly larger then a shoe box and slightly more expensive then a notebook, think twice whether you don't want to accompany the freight with a seat in the commodity class in some airplane. It can easily be cheaper.

Fedex informed me that my laptop was stuck in customs. This wasn't a pay-a-fee-and-get-your-stuff kind of stuck. I couldn't pay any amount of money to get the laptop out. I had to find a local import partner which could take weeks or months to do just to get this stupid computer out of customs. And that's assuming they didn't destroy the laptop before I could claim it. There was literally no way for me to just pay some big ol' tax to get the computer.

Eventually I asked if I could have the laptop shipped back to the USA, and they were happy to do this. So I shipped the laptop from the USA to Mexico, from Mexico to a friend's place, and then I bought my frienbd a roundtrip ticket to Mexico to enjoy a vacation on the condition that he brought my damn computer with him.

> 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."

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.

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.

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.

There's a lot of luck and bad luck in the story.

Years ago, during the COVID-19 crisis, I wanted to send a laptop to my domestic helper's son who lived in the countryside of Mindanao (island), the Philippines. It was very difficult. It tooks weeks to find a willing shipper (denied by many!) and find/fill the correct paperwork (many shippers didn't know the correct process and Philippines customs agency was zero help). I still have no idea how he paid the customs fees and received the laptop, as he lived hours away from the only FedEx office on the whole island. I just heard from his mother: "Oh, he got the laptop." As a point of comparison, Mindanao is roughly the twice the size of the Netherlands. At the time, FedEx (the only carrier willing to attempt the delivery) only had a single internal postal code for the whole island. Incredible.

It got smashed by customs. Literally.

This is by all means amazing. Kudos.

Everything is within the EU.

For sending few shirts I ended up paying about EUR20 each just for shipping! (I've wanted to ensure it gets to their house and not a pickup point).

Initially I've went with regular post office, but they've wanted so many documents I've used a 3rd party shipping company.

It always ends with compliance and regulations which shipping companies are being (and charging you) for.

It's crazy that things from china can come at ridiculous price or Amazon in specific region/countries and they 'hacked the system'.

We also had similar headache when my wife forgot her bag (with her work laptop!) on a train to the airport back home while visiting my parents in our home country. The bag was found and my parents took it. but sending it ended up being so complex we eventually found someone kind enough to travel with it. (or you need to have so complex procedures just to explain why it shouldn't be taxed as it's YOUR equipment).

TL;DR - personal shipping is broken. it might be cheaper to visit a friend in Uganda and give him the laptop in person.

China would have 50$ laptops for all.

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.

(Please note: im explicitly saying this about the governments. Not the people. The people, in most/all situations, have little to no power to remove this corruption, other than civil war.)

I really think its the mixture of the Global North, and along with the worst of the worst people is why there isnt an African Union, with African single currency.

Its also the reason im not (cant) buy African products locally. The supply chain is nearly non-existant. I couldnt buy even if I wanted to.

There are charities that move used electronics to developing countries in bulk somehow.

Some could argue corruption is an attempt to equalise on that.

- 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.

Also you can certainly ship batteries via UPU network (Australian Post) but there are strict packaging rules you need to follow[1].

You don't really go into any detail as to why they didn't accept your package. Did you attach properly filled out CN23 label?

[1] https://auspost.com.au/content/dam/auspost_corp/media/docume...