Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Bringing Connectivity to Under-Served Communities
Colleagues: I have great hopes for this discussion as the topic is as relevant today as ever and perhaps more so, given the recent backsliding in rural infrastructure as a direct result of truncated privatization processes. Here in Panama we have an interesting situation. I undertook a mission on behalf of the UNDP country office to the remote Darién region to learn why the public telephones (usually only one per village of 2000 or more inhabitants) don´t work. To my surprise, I found that the basic infrastructure is not only in pretty good shape but relatively sophisticated as well (would support up to 9.6 kbps data). The problem is in the last 100 meters between the rural radio tower/antenna and the telephone booth where situations with relatively simple solutions cause 80-90% of the problems (like people getting their coins and other objects jammed in the coin slots, short circuits in the interconnecting cable because of attempts to rob service, infrequent visits by supervisory personnel to remove full coinboxes). We are now working with the multinational corporation that operates the system and various development programs in the region to come up with a win-win project design that would include community education in system care, basic technical training, and local management. Meanwhile, the government has levied a stiff fine on this multinational for similar problems throughout the country. The company maintains that rural telephones are unprofitable and cannot be easily maintained, even though they constitute a lifeline for thousands of people. This is, of course, only a specific example of a more generic situation, but it was the inspiration behind the attached draft policy position. I would invite comments on it as well as ideas from the community on which organizations/donors might be interested in developing a regional or even a global program to comprehensively address rural connectivity and access issues. (More information on PFNet mentioned in the position note is available at http://www.peoplefirst.net.sb/General/PFnet.htm). Gary Garriott ICT for Development Advisor Panama SURF - UNDP PO Box 6314, Zone 5 Panama City, Panama Tel. 507 265 8168/8153 Fax 507 265 8445 + Rural ICT Infrastructure is the Forgotten Frontier The Position In the rush to jump on the ICT bandwagon, the attention of all donors and implementing agencies tends toward increasingly sophisticated and networked health, education and governance applications in urban areas where the latest hardware, reliable connectivity and available bandwidth are taken for granted. Forgotten are the hundreds of millions of people living in poverty and extreme poverty in rural and isolated regions where fundamental physical infrastructure including the provision of electrical energy is nonexistent. Except for one-off pilot projects that tend to be special cases of donor interest and resources (and recognized for their obvious public relations value), rural-based infrastructure is seen as passé and uninteresting. UNDP and other agencies that invest in poverty-reduction strategies should look more closely at implementing strategic rural access and connectivity programmes. The Context Most bilateral and multilateral aid agencies have limited their activities on behalf of rural ICT infrastructure to assisting host governments in writing universal service and access policies to be implemented by the private sector winners of telecommunications privatization processes. And yet the common experience worldwide is that once a private franchise or concession has been awarded, the promises made to extend service to rural areas are gradually forgotten as the difficulties of installing and maintaining unprofitable rural infrastructure mount. A significant back-sliding in rural ICT infrastructure is thus occurring as privatization proceeds. The Need Reliable access to information may be just as critical in isolated rural areas as in urban centers. The basic need to communicate with family, friends and associates is fundamental, but so is the acquisition of crucial health, agricultural and market information, not to mention ready access to education and training resources. However, rural needs are more easily satisfied with basic infrastructure supporting email and file transfer rather than more sophisticated web-based technology and applications. Very few policy-makers are aware that a range of relatively inexpensive intermediate or appropriate technology solutions exist to support lower end uses, such as email. Legitimate information needs can be immediately met with simpler technologies while demand and an information culture are built up to justify the same infrastructure being enjoyed by urban areas with greater population density and disposable income. The Evidence The proliferation of UNDP-supported PFNet email stations using packet radio technology in the Solomon Islands as a way to enhance the
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Bringing Connectivity to Under-Served Communities
Dear GKD Members, I got back from Kenya after serving there as a VSO [1] volunteer for a year. I was teaching IT in a womens college in a rural place called Tala. I also trained the staff on the more advanced subjects of the curriculum. First, let me talk about the state of connectivity in the country. Connectivity in Kenya is pretty decent in the cities (Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu and Nakuru). Literacy in the country is pretty high. Many of the younger people in the 15-35 age group are becoming increasingly netsavvy in the cities. They browse the web in one of the numerous internet browsing centres and have a hotmail or yahoo mail account. Prices are competitive and range in the cities betwen 1 Kenyan Shilling to 5 Kenyan Shillings per minute (1 US$ =~ 70 KSh). ISPs charge somewhere in the range of 8000 KSh / year for unlimited activity. On top of this, dial-up users must pay applicable per-minute telcom charges. Even though there are many ISPs in the country and competition between them is fierce, there are two problems: 1. All traffic has to flow in and out of the country through the Kenya Telecom monopoly owned JamboNet [2]. This creates a single point of failure and a bottleneck. 2. Only the bigger cities have local access / dial-up numbers. If someone is in not in one of these cities, they have to make a long distance / trunk call. The telcome per-minute charges on these vary depending on how far from a POP the user is. WAP is available on one (KenCell) of the two mobile phone providers. But, I have not seen it being used in the circles I moved in. There is a US AID funded effort to connect colleges and universities [3]. Now, let me answer the specific questions 1. What activities are endeavoring to bring connectivity to under-served communities? I am not sure what other organized activities are being carried out in the country. I am aware of two - One that I worked on and another of similar scope [4]. In my case, we got a subsidized 64k VSAT connection through UUNet. In addition to this connection being used by the students of the college, we also created a internet browsing center on campus for people from the community to use at a nominal fee. This enables the college to raise at least part of the cost of the internet connection. We also have a plan to set up a local wireless network to share the bandwidth with the surrounding community. There are many formal and vocational schools in the surrounding community that have expressed interest in this service. 2. What are the goals of these efforts? To what extent are the goals attained? The goal of this effort was to provide access to the relatively marginalized community of Tala. There is no connectivity in a 50-kilometer radius around this community. Part of the goal is income generation for the college as well as people using the wireless network. The lack of wireless networking equipment in Kenya hindered the achievement of the wireless network. At the moment I am working with another volunteer who is going to be going to Kenya in 2004. I intend to procude the equipment in the US and send it through the volunteer. 3. Who is being served by these connectivity efforts? Are the benefits widely distributed? Do some groups win and some lose in these connectivity efforts? I believe that the effort benefits the community widely. The students get connectivity, the community piggy backs on the connection at a nominal fee. It, in fact, spurs business because a privately run cybercafe business can make quite a bit of money by using the wireless network bandwidth to provide internet access at a fee. 4. How do connectivity efforts seek to ensure that all groups benefit? We involved the local town council, schools, parish and businesses early in our efforts. 5. What are the costs and constraints these connectivity efforts face? A VSAT connection is prohibively expensive. Such projects can't work till it reaches a critical mass of people willing to work together and share costs in getting connected. Thaths [1] http://www.vso.org.uk/ [2] http://www.telkom.co.ke/jambonetcontent1.htm [3] http://www.kenet.org/ [4] Chinni Tu -- http://openscroll.org/ Key fingerprint = 8A 84 2E 67 10 9A 64 03 24 38 B6 AB 1B 6E 8C E4 This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org
Re: [GKD-DOTCOM] Bringing Connectivity to Under-Served Communities
Dear GKD Colleagues, Jean-Marie Blanchard wrote: Main barriers to Internet penetration are identified as: lack of Telecom infrastructure, limitation of population income, not adequate enough content and applications, lack of local expertise and population awarenessAlcatel is participating in a lot of field experiments, all demonstrating that most of these limiting issues could be fixed, provided a relevant approach is followed. For example, funding of network infrastructure construction is quite solved when project profitability is proven thanks to offering useful end-user services with high local added value; so, it becomes possible to attract potential investors; moreover, Internet illiterates and lowest income people could afford connectivity thanks to community centers. So, universal access to Internet can be no more a dream! My apologies but this is a circular argumentation. Jean-Marie starts off by saying at first that there is insufficient infrastructure, continuing then that there is limited income, not enough content and applications, no local expertise, no awareness. In any other field of market-economy the straight-forward conclusion would be that you try to sell a useless product and that therefore there is no demand and hence there are neither sales nor much product to sell. (Unless there is some strange conviction close to secular religion as if Internet penetration as such constitutes something desirable - despite that it's apparently of no valuable use). Please don't misunderstand me: I was an Internet-pioneer already en 1988, long before the Internet-hype started and I'm still almost fulltime engaged in promoting appropriate use of Internet in a not-so-developed country, Nicaragua. Yet I would insist that -- as in any market -- the starting point should be real needs (i.e. things that can be better solved or addressed using among other Internet-technologies). Better includes more efficiency - economically - but by no means is limited to more efficiency. In Saint-Louis (Senegal), one pediatrician serves more than ten thousand children. Here, the experimental project uses the Internet as a bridge between the patients (a group of one thousand infants) and the doctor. The weight of a child can be considered a key health indicator. It is measured twice a week by weight collectors, local women equipped with scales to weigh babies and a laptop computer to collect data. The measurements are then uploaded to the pediatrician's database via the Internet. Within five minutes, the doctor is able to detect which children have odd weight curves and require further attention. When that happens, he sends an e-mail to the weight collector, who in turn informs the family that the baby needs medical attention. Just counter-productive examples: your Tele-doctor is counter-productive for Public Health Education because instead of providing the local weighers with pen and each parent with a chart where they jointly put the weight-measure and compare it against standard-curves - and by doing this increase Health Awareness not only for the parents - you just electronify the very old fashioned wise man, who - only God knows how - is capable to predict which child is going to fall ill and which not. And as the poor and illiterate paid the wise man a couple of thousand years ago when he predicted seasons and eclipses, they now pay for health-predictions ... where in both cases if they were not kept ignorant they wouldn't pay a cent. Yours, Cornelio This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org
