internet

A renewable boost to the Internet cafe

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Development projects come and go. They are replaced, neglected, restored, discarded, rejuvenated, and/or dismissed. The ruins of past development projects littered the community of La Plata in Bahía Málaga: the remnants of a concrete pedestal that had been used to elevate a rainwater collection barrel, a run-down and un-utilized school latrine, and a solar panel that had been abandoned after another project left the satellite phone it powered irrelevant.

The new project was an Internet kiosk built by Compartel – an initiative of Colombia’s Ministerio de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones (MinTIC). While I was able to benefit from access to the kiosk all summer, it was officially inaugurated just this month to “give 110 families access to Internet without having to travel to the urban center of the municipality.”

Without a doubt this project will have a lasting and significant impact on the community, providing them with daily Internet access and phone service, overcoming the nearly non-existent cell phone signal (I had to stand on the dock in order to make/receive phone calls).

The kiosk does have a few limitations, however.

Compartel "Vive Digital" Internet Kiosk

Solar Pannel Installed on the Internet Kiosk in La Plata-Bahía Málaga

First, the available bandwidth can barely handle one computer playing a YouTube video, let alone five Ubuntu computers with children playing flash-based Internet games. For basic applications like checking email or using Facebook the kiosk worked just fine, but as soon as more than one computer began to use data-heavy websites the whole system became unusably slow.

Second, while the kiosk uses WiFi instead of Ethernet cables to communicate with the Internet, the password was strictly controlled so that they can charge for access and recoup some of the costs of operating and administering the kiosk. This was a bigger problem for me than for your average user, but it basically meant that I could not connect other computers, tablets, or smartphones to the Internet, forcing me to use the limited capabilities of the five Ubuntu computers and only the programs that came pre-installed (install rights had been restricted). Luckily, (for me, but not the bandwidth usage) Ubuntu lets you uncover the WiFi password in network settings and I was able to connect the Internet with my computer and other devices (shhh, don’t tell Compartel).

Finally, the kiosk depends on electricity generated by the community’s gasoline-powered generator, which only runs from 6-10pm every day (the official hours of operation posted outside the kiosk were 3-9pm). For me, this meant that I could only use the Internet during peak bandwidth-usage time or steal an hour here or there when the kiosk was running on battery power. Luckily, a few weeks into my field placement, a worker from Compartel came to decommission the solar-powered satellite phone. He took only the microwave transmitter, leaving the solar panel, cables, power inverter, and battery (everything we needed to jerry-rig a solar system for the Internet kiosk). After some amateur electrical engineering, and some acrobatic rooftop maneuvers by Santiago (the administrator of the digital Kiosk and my supervisor for my field placement), we managed to install the panel on the roof of the kiosk. But after attaching the panel to the system we got…nothing.

The power inverter that came with the system only put out 100 watts, enough to power a lightbulb or charge a basic Nokia phone, but not enough to power the satellite dish and wireless router. Santiago did a little searching and came up with another power inverter (this one put out 300 watts) and voilà: six more hours of Internet a day. The solar panel could not charge all five Ubuntu computers, but with direct sunlight during the morning hours it was more than enough to power the Internet. The extra six hours of Internet time allowed me to use the full bandwidth during off-peak hours and complete a new website for Ecomanglar (the main deliverable of my summer field placement).

 

Canvassing for development

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The New Media Taskforce here at SIPA is holding an “Innovating Mobile Tech for Development Competition,” where students are given the chance to pitch their idea for innovative mobile applications that seek to address specific political, economic, or social needs in international development to a panel of industry judges. Here is the idea that I may submit:

Village Well, Jombo village, Malawi

Village Well, Jombo village, Malawi by Flickr user Bread for the World

One of the major failures of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is a lack of timeliness and completeness of data measuring progress towards achieving the goals. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Lancet:

One of the biggest drawbacks of the MDGs is that the data are often years out of date. Accurate published information from the past 12 months is still not available for most low-income countries. This timelag was inevitable when data were obtained by hand in household surveys, but in the age of the mobile phone, wireless broadband, and remote sensing, data collection should be vastly quicker.

Dr. Sachs is spot-on in suggesting that mobile technology will make data collection more rapid, but I would also contend that mobile-technology-enabled crowdsourcing will increasingly make traditional statistical surveys irrelevant. This is already happening in the arena of American politics. President Obama’s canvassing app enables citizens to volunteer their time to help register voters, build a massive database of registered voters, and ultimately organize voters out to the polls on election day. The app uses information about your location to suggest nearby households that you should visit and questions you should ask when you get there. I believe same model can be applied to the realm of international development.

Let’s say you have a database of 1,000 water projects spread across Malawi. You know the location of the water projects but do not have the resources to send an employee to monitor them on a regular basis. Water For People has built a platform called FLOW that enables field workers monitor water projects using a mobile app. While replacing pen and paper with a smartphone and Internet connection is a significant step forward, I believe that FLOW still doesn’t take the concept far enough because its capacity limited by its reliance on paid professionals to conduct the surveys.

The next-best thing to a trained monitoring professional would be a citizen armed with a smartphone. Bringing up the app, the citizen would be given a map of water projects in their immediate vicinity. They would then “check-in” at the water project and complete a simple survey about the state of the project. If the idea is expanded even further, this app could potentially supplement or replace the statistical surveys currently used to track progress toward achieving the MDG. And because the data would have no time lag it could be used to identify regions that require intervention in real-time, such as a village with an abnormally high maternal mortality rate.

Effectively, crowdsourced development data could turn the MDGs from an out-of-date snapshot of past development status into a tool for development practitioners and governments to detect issues with development while they are still relevant and actionable.