ICT for Development
Have you ever seen a business performance ranking that lists Armenia, Nigeria, Egypt, Philippines and Lithuania in the Top 5? Me neither. Nonetheless, these countries appear to have the largest growth in people using Opera Mini, a web browser designed for mobile phones (report). Will developing countries, poorly equipped with other Internet infrastructure, lead the way in this sector as their mobile phone market continues to grow rapidly?
Katrin Verclas (who is German) from mobileactive.org wrote an interesting report on wireless technology and social change for Vodafone and the United Nations.
Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use was written by Sheila Kinkade (ShareIdeas.org) and Katrin Verclas (MobileActive.org), and commissioned by the United Nations Foundation-Vodafone Group Foundation Technology Partnership. The report examines emerging trends in “mobile activism” by looking at 11 case studies of groups active in the areas of public health, humanitarian assistance and environmental conservation.
This week’s issue of The Economist (January 26th 2008: page 62) contains an article on auctions of spectrum by the FCC in the U.S. And surprisingly these high bandwith spectrum licences contain an open access obligation: ”[...] licence-holders will have to accomodate any mobile device or type of service, provided it does not harm to network.” Furthermore this article says that there are already similar rules applying in Europe! Perhaps this might be also a model for developing countries enabling local or small scale providers or SMEs to gain access to wireless networks.
Below I attached the article as TIF file in which the most important paragraphs are already highlighted.
Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of working at the Water Resources Management Authority in Embu, Kenya, as a short term consultant on behalf of the GTZ Water Sector Reform Program (WSRP). My main job was to install and maintain a hydrological database software which provides the modeling of the water discharge in Tana River – Kenya’s longest river. [Read more →]
Telecenter Peru (Rural Telecom)
Many rural regions in Peru are disconnected from the world of telecommunication. Calling a relative or surfing in the World Wide Web still impossible for the majority of rural population living in the remote areas of the Andes or Amazon. But that is about to change now. Already in July the government has published a tender on the implementation of a countrywide broadband connection. Finally in early October President Alan García Pérez charged a Peruvian telecommunication company with the realization of the project. Within one year Rural Telecom is instructed to establish conections to 2000 villages in eleven districts. The aim is to enable more than a million Peruvians to obtain access to telephone and broadband connections. For a period of five years the Peruvian government is going to subsidize the project with 8, 8 million US-Dollars.
Among public and private telephone extensions it is supposed to establish public internet access points in each village. Signing the contract Rural Telecom commited itself to offer capacity courses for using computers as well as the internet for the Peruvians. In addition each village is supposed to obtain an internet page promoting relevant regional information, which will be designed and maintained also by Rural Telecom in co-operation with municipalities. CIM-employee Peter Wolf is supporting Rural Telecom in the implementation process.
In co-operation with mine owners Rural Telecom is about to extend the project. While the telecommunication company provides the infrastructure, the mining companies will pay for capacity courses.
The implementation of new technologies like CDMA-wireless in the 2000 villages offers a wide range of cooperation possibilities in value-added services for the international development cooperation. Public private partnerships will play an important role to support these additional services.
Contact: peter.wolf@ruraltelecom.com.pe
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Posted by Nikolas Napierala