I’ve been mulling over this topic in my head for quite awhile. Yesterday, Dibussi provided the inspiration I needed when he tweeted a story about the impact a community radio station has had on a remote village in Cameroon’s North West province. London-based social enterprise RadioActive worked with the local council to build the radio station, Donga Mantung Community Radio 105.0 FM, which reaches more than 600,000 listeners. “For as little as a £1,000, you can set up a station that reaches people up to 25 miles away in every direction,” says Max Graef, RadioActive’s founder. “In places where there are no roads, no electricity, no phones and low literacy rates, radio is the cheapest and easiest way to reach people.”

Community radio is an enormously powerful ICT4D tool for the developing world. The BBC World Service Trust has worked with NGOs on a range of these projects, from emergency response following disasters such as Cyclone Nargis in Burma last year, to post-conflict zones like Sierra Leone, promoting government transparency in Nigeria, training reporters, and improving women’s rights in Afghanistan. It’s often a two-way exchange—engaged listeners call in with news and opinions and some host their own programs.

Staying connected to the outside world
One of the best case studies of a community radio project enhanced with Internet was recently revisited by Matt Berg (born in Cameroon, incidentally), who helped build Radio Beeray with Geekcorps Mali. He describes how their project leveraged Internet with radio with a weekly connection to the outside world. Using a Desert PC coupled with an R-BGAN Satellite Modem, the station was able to periodically connect to the Internet to collect local and regional news of interest to their audience. Says Matt, “Using a lot of clever engineering, we were able to limit the radio’s bandwidth consumption to about 200K/day or $6 (1MB) a week, which the Radio Director was able to use to connect his community to the outside world—certainly a lot of ‘bang for the byte’.”

This “bang for the byte” is the key to sustainability, and one of the principal reasons satellite-based connections fall short for rural connectivity projects. VSAT stations can be potentially transformative in bridging the digital divide. There was a recent inspiring account of bringing Internet to a remote Kenyan village, but this was an experiment backed by Google, who covered the equipment costs and monthly subscription fees.

The costs of a dish and related hardware (minus the solar equipment used in the Google experiment) can be upwards of $10,000 with monthly fees starting at $700 for a 128 kbps connection. Google itself is uncertain whether VSAT stations can pay for themselves in rural areas, given these prohibitive costs. Communities may surely benefit from the connection, but at these rates affordability is out of the question.

Surely mobile is the future, but until cheap iPhone knockoffs and WiFi penetration arrive in remote villages, something is needed to fill the gap. One promising cost-effective alternative for rural areas involves asynchronous Internet access.

Good dog, Fido
I’m probably exposing my age here (waiting for the comments), but back in the day before Internet there was FidoNet. For die-hard BBS users in the 1980’s like yours truly, FidoNet did something extraordinary; it enabled the exchange of emails & attachments between bulletin boards. This was achieved by using a point-to-point, store-and-forward WAN that used dial-up modems and plain old telephone (POT) lines. Later on, FidoNet was connected to the Internet, typically with the UUCP protocol. Interestingly, FidoNet and UUCP became popular for bridging the digital divide that once existed in remote parts of the United States and Europe.

                   __
                  /  \
                 /|oo \
                (_|  /_)
                 _`@/_ \    _
                |     | \   \\
                | (*) |  \   ))
   ______       |__U__| /  \//
  / FIDO \       _//|| _\   /
 (________)     (_/(_|(____/

Original FidoNet ASCII logo.

FidoNet solved the “last mile” problem of Internet access for BBS users in rural communities. Today, this store-and-forward concept has been modernized and adapted for the developing world. The pioneer in this space is United Villages, who has commercialized their “drive-by WiFi” service. The service uses what they term cached WiFi intelligence, which relies on couriers who act as digital postmen by carrying queued data (emails, web searches, downloads, etc.) between rural telecenters and access points. Motorbikes equipped with a mobile storage device serve as a mechanical backhaul alternative to miles of cables or a costly VSAT connection. It’s an elegant and cost-effective solution.

Not online, but still connected
Asynchronous Internet may not be instantaneous, but it’s capable of moving gigabytes of data to rural communities at a fraction of the cost of an always-on connection. What’s most interesting, in my view, is how communities have responded to the service. Katherine Nightingale reported on an innovative use of United Villages’ service in rural India.

Rather than use the service for sending emails and surfing the web, villagers “prefer to email their questions to someone who will do the surfing for them and return the answers in a pdf (portable document format) file.” This is not unlike how Question Box is used, which also had its origins in India.

Implications for Village Diary
As we prepare for our work in the community, I anticipate that we’ll leverage a combination of asynchronous Internet, SMS, community radio and citizen journalism to help bring stories from the village to a global audience. Our primary focus remains on empowering women by recording cases of abuse and providing access to social, legal and health services. At the same time, we hope to help provide a window into cultures, communities and individual stories from the village that might otherwise go unnoticed.

We’re actively looking for partners, so if you or your organization is interested feel free to drop us a note. You can also grab a button for your blog or website.

In the meantime, comments are welcome.