Wiring the Developing World

The old-fashioned ring of a telephone might be a quaint sound for most people in the United States, where the static screech of an Internet connection is easily recognized in over 90 percent of households. But the world is riven by a huge digital divide, experts say. More than fifty percent of the world, for instance, has never even heard a telephone dialtone, and despite all the hoopla, only two percent of the world is connected to the Internet.

Attendants to the sixth annual State of the World Forum (SWF) heard Thursday from several gurus of informatica, who described a number of projects that are attempting to connect even poor distant villages in Africa, Asia and Latin America to the Internet.

"We have created an infrastructure that brings information to millions of people who urgently need it," said Noah Samara, chairman of WorldSpace Corp. Samara, an Ethiopian-born business entrepreneur based in Washington State, uses satellites to broadcast digital audio and multimedia programs directly to compact portable receivers. The system can operate in areas where there are no telephones, no electricity and no radio towers for regular radio signals. His company, bankrolled by $1 billion in Saudi investments, has launched two hemisphere-specific satellites—in Africa and Asia—and is preparing to launch a third one for the Americas next year.

Samara has partnered his technology in a non-profit venture with the State of the World Forum, Inc., and Solaria, a solar-energy equipment provider. The product of that partnership—Equal Access—is being prepared to launch next year, bringing information via digital radio to 133 countries.

The project is one of many championed by different organizations to close the information gap that exists around the world, enabling poor communities to obtain technical, health and other information to strengthen their economic and political development.

"We were looking for a project we thought had the promise to really have a major impact on issues of poverty, illiteracy and preventable diseases," said Tom Rautenberg, Director for Strategy and Business Development for the SWF. "We liked Equal Access because it was a solution devised by entrepreneurs from the developing world, which combined cutting-edge technology with world-changing ideas," he added.

Equal Access will provide 50 channels of digital audio throughout each continent, and one-way broadband access, which, when connected to a computer, will bring to any site around the world educational information, health education, and the capacity to send unidirectional e-mails to a closed user group.

Equal Access is getting ready to build 1,000 sites in India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Nepal to distribute information on HIV and development, in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Another program is being designed with AfriCare, also dealing with AIDS education. In a partnership with Free The Children International, the project plans to bring multi-media, health, educational and micro-enterprise materials to 100 schools around the world. And funding from the Oprah Winfrey Foundation will pay for another 100 schools to be wired by Equal Access by next year.

When Samara's satellites beam signals to areas off the telephony grid, Solaria's solar-cells power hand-held terminals, which in turn are connected to a computer. "Our system is useable in villages that have no infrastructure," said Leslie Danziger, chairwoman of Solaria. Before a village gets electricity or even running water, its children are learning about computers.

The small receivers made by Matsushita's Panasonic and JVC subsidiaries, Hitachi and Sanyo, cost between $50-$250 apiece, but are provided free for Equal Access clients.

Samara launched WorldSpace 10 years ago, in response to the AIDS epidemic in Africa. "The people of Africa need something from us: not the currency in our wallets, not the shirts from our backs…. What they need from us is information," he told SWF participants.

These partnerships in the developing world will serve as "catalysts for broader national and regional efforts to harness the full power of these technologies all over the developing world," said Denis Gilhooly, a UNDP official who spoke at the Forum.

Equal Access is only one of several private and public partnerships that are working to reduce the digital divide. The Grameen project in Bangladesh, launched by Telenor of Norway, Marubeni of Japan and Grameen Telecom, is dedicated to bringing the information revolution to the rural people of Bangladesh. Launched by the Grameen Group, which was started by Professor Muhammad Yunus, (See Muhammad Yunus, Colin Powell: Two Paths to the Same Vision, by Kevin Walter, September 8) the project provides modern telecommunication services to poor women in villages in Bangladesh, and has recently added Internet and computer capability.

"Poor people are eager to get on to the Internet and learn the new technology if they are shown how it will make their lives easier," said Yunus, a maverick who has revolutionized the way poor women are empowered in Bangladesh. "Even a woman with no education, who doesn't know what a website does, will get excited about the Internet if you show her how it will make her life easier."

copyright © 2000 State of the World, Inc.