Bringing the net to developing countries

TechSoup blog points to a recent article in the Economist on the challenges of bringing the Internet to developing countries. I've been watching efforts such as the "One Laptop Per Child" project and curious what others know about other Internet development projects. What ways do you think the obstacles of bringing the net to developing countries can be overcome?

--Megan

The most problem is electricity and cost to get connection. the poor will not see internet as important as their food on the table. most problem come from the gov itself. corruption play a big role as well as monopoly provider. Fiber is not a big concern because they can utilize cell tower to connect to internet.

Anthony,

Have you seen any successful projects? What works best to make internet access more available?

Best wishes,

I don't know of any successful project. What I saw is politician use it as way to make money. They gave computer to every public schools around the country but some school the got it doesn't even have electricity or know how to use it. And the government purchase it with at least double the cost of normal market price.

You may be interested in ours, though we're talking about a transitioning economy rather than a developing country. Poverty is however, still the issue.

In this mixed component model we describe as a microeconomic 'Marshall Plan' social and technology components combine for a nil overall cost strategy.

it was delivered to Ukraine's government and the US Senate Foreign relations Committee in 2006.

http://www.p-ced.com/projects/ukraine/national/ A 'Marshall Plan' for Ukraine

I don't know too much of other projects, but I do know that the One Laptop per Child project has some very large obstacles to overcome itself. The first is cost of internet, which is so high it cancels out the low-cost laptop's purpose. The only way that I could think of to lower the cost of internet would be to introduce more competition into the broadband/internet market in developing countries, which would increase supply. I know investors are hesitant to do so though because of the lack of demand right now, but if the project suceeded in making laptops more common.. the networking would be absolutely neccessary.

Second is the issue of "technology dumping", in that many times we take new technologies, laptops in this case, and set them in a country without much prior instruction on their proper operation. Thus, the technology doesn't do its purpose and its a great loss for the project and the country. This could be more simply addressed that the cost of internet by merely training teachers or counselors on the use of the laptops, and providing them the knowledge of how to make them most effective to the young students.

--jessie

The cost pf providing the internet is certainly significant, but don't discount their desire for it. HelpingTulsa provided 150 Pentium level 3 computers to a school in Haiti in a shipment that usually contained bags of rice to feed the children what may be their only good meal of the day, and we made sure it was loaded with plenty of educational programs that did not need the internet, and when we came back the next year we found they had come up with the money to install a satellite internet service with a router to serve a number of the machines. You could not do any significant uploads or downloads, but they could access the internet, and most of the children had Facebook pages.