2004-2005 Fellows

Latin America is overwhelmed by poverty. Despite the current high level of civic participation, social co-responsibility, and community enterprising, communities can do much more. TAVOS is a new internet service that enables communities and nonprofits to self-organize to harness the abundant and available talent and resources of their communities to meet their needs and leave poverty behind. For more information please visit http://tavos.org/.

Linkage India (formerly "Ganges Delta Network") will provide for better livelihood for marginalized fishermen and farmers of India through a chain of computerized entrepreneur training and development centers. Linkage will ensure success of its graduates by combining specialized training curricula with continuous montoring of its graduates and provision of online access to capital and markets. The first prototype centers will be located in the Sunderbans region of India's Ganges delta and will be used to develop content and best practices to create a replicable and franchisable model.

Use of electronic means to simplify procedures by the introducing electronic and digital technologies in the areas of transit trade logistics in Central Asia region (CAR). A broader coverage of the study will analyze regional cooperation strategies for the creation of a framework for such regional clusters, interest groups, networks, partnerships and dialogues with participation of public and private sector institutions resulting in introduction of new technologies and conflict prevention and peace building in the Central Asia region.

Efforts have been made by policy makers, researchers and healthcare providers to identify, reduce and ultimately eliminate health disparities, yet inequities in access to preventive medicine and HIV/ AIDS healthcare continue to be an important concern in Southern Africa. This research seeks to develop a country scalable, geographic information management model that offers an opportunity to explore service accessibility, utilization and monitor inequities in resource distribution, providing capacity to implement targeted interventions that serve underserviced populations.

In many parts of the world, there are not enough doctors.

The Global Telemedicine Project's Web-based videoconferencing system allow patients in developing countries to access care by volunteer ex-patriot or in-country physicians who remain in their own offices or clinics throughout the world.

Beginning with projects in India, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam, the system will be customized to each community's unique cultural norms, health practices, and technological challenges using an ethnographic approach.

The VAPM is a virtual information center with field offices using computers in a network, which will give the opportunity to producers and traders to post offers to buy and sell agricultural products electronically. The center will serve as a virtual agricultural market that will connect farmers and traders for the purpose of exchanging information about market opportunities.

The Iranian Teachers' Network will connect teachers from all over Iran electronically. This network will provide all teachers with a user-friendly network in which they can share their knowledge with other teachers and at the same time use the resources available in the network. The Network will also empower teachers to integrate ICT into their curriculum and will help them to participate in an on-going professional development program.

In many parts of the world, there are not enough doctors.

The Global Telemedicine Project's Web-based videoconferencing system allow patients in developing countries to access care by volunteer ex-patriot or in-country physicians who remain in their own offices or clinics throughout the world.

Beginning with projects in India, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam, the system will be customized to each community's unique cultural norms, health practices, and technological challenges using an ethnographic approach.

Microcredit is a powerful means for fighting poverty. Small loans enable women to start their own businesses and increase their children's educational opportunities. Sadly, less than 10% of the 400M households that could benefit from microcredit have access to it. Technology can help close that gap by improving the operational efficiency of microfinance institutions and reaching new sources of capital.

To design an intelligent pillbox (SMS enabled) and develop a sustainable
business model to enhance drug compliance through the delivery of customized reminders. After the pilot testing in South Africa (for TB and HIV/AIDS treatment), we are investigating the possibility to market the product in the US.

Sustainable development model through the dynamic combination of Learning and Skills, Business and Services, Infrastructure and Technology. The viable and self-managed development model involves virtual communities, wireless communication, self-generated energy, networks, and Internet and puts special emphasis in bringing new opportunities to rural and marginal suburban communities. It will be developed as an open project with the active participation of technicians, consultants, and educators and people from all over the world. The concept is based on the wonderful experience of El Limón rural community and the results achieved by Jon Katz and the EcoPartners group, and combined with a new project involving young people from La Caleta suburban area in the Dominican Republic.

Project Market Light will create a brighter future for the worlds' poorest farmers by providing affordable accurate, relevant and up to date market data. For more information please visit http://www.ftce.org.

There are about 296 million non-literates in India, despite advances in science, technology, and agriculture. SchoolChalo is focused on understanding the economic, societal and hidden factors behind the widespread illiteracy among the extremely disadvantaged. Our aim is to develop a concept/strategy to help and persuade such parents to send their children to school.

Indigo is a radical proposal to develop a micro-private equity fund whose source of capital comes from profits generated by a remittances service business targeted toward the US Mexican diaspora. Inspired by Working Assets, the remittances service provides a sustainable business model that allows the Indigo fund to invest in SMEs and take more risks in this underserved market.

e-Mobilizer is a project applying mobile technologies with innovative solutions to empower micro-business entrepreneurs in developing countries, and help them leapfrog economic and technological gaps and provide opportunities and tools for them to help themselves.

Many small businesses and individuals in developing countries do not have computers and cannot access the Internet. However, a large portion of them own cell phones due to their low cost and infrastructure pervasiveness. This project examines the feasibility of using SMS (Short Messaging Service) and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) technologies to help micro businesses and entrepreneurs to sell their products and services onto the Internet marketplace such as eBay, Yahoo!, Froogle, and Alibaba.com, etc.

Shared purpose and social contracts provide the economic and social framework for cooperation in the production of value that greatly exceeds the sum of individual efforts. Building on the success of Linux, Apache, and the Public Library of Science in the production of intangible goods, and the traditions of Ashoka and ThinkCycle.org, I seek to provide practical models for successful community ventures that address economic incentives, social contracts, and intellectual-property. These models will be tested and demonstrated through pilot ventures focused on creating sustainable solutions for currently underserved communities including a "documentation kiosk" to support the exchange of social services information, and "open informatics" methods to gather clinical data while preserving control over personal information.

e-Mandi, an agricultural exchange, is an application of the free market mechanism that when applied to agriculture would increase the income of more than 700 Million farmer families in India by 50%. It will also create value for other participants by reducing the amount of wastages from the current 10-15% (food grains) and 45% (Fruits/Vegetables) to 5% & 10% each.

There is an urgent need for new approaches to financing and building of information and communication infrastructure in Africa. My project is to address this through the implementation of Open Access Models in Africa with the creation and development of a repository of academic and practical knowledge. I would work with African governments, regulators, policymakers, private sector and consumers on how to implement Open Access Models in their countries. For more information, please visit www.openaccessforafrica.org

Introduction
Originally I applied to the DV Program with an Open Communication Policy Initiative Project, upon acceptance into the programme in 2004 I was at the same time invited by the WorldBank through her Information for Development Programme (Infodev @ www.infodev.org) to join two other colleagues to conduct an Open Access study within the framework of “Leveraging New Technologies and Open Access Models: Options for Improving Backbone Access in Developing Countries (with a Focus on Sub-Saharan Africa)” under the auspices of Spintrack AB, a Swedish consulting firm @ http://www.infodev.org/en/Publication.10.html.

Discussions with the DV leadership led to acceptance of my change to focus on Open Access for Africa and afforded a long term affiliation with the Program as a Visiting Fellow and Scholar because my project has a long term life cycle.

Open Access in the context of Communication (Open Communication) means that anyone, on equal conditions with a transparent relation between cost and pricing, can get access to and share communication resources on one level to provide value added services on another level in a layered communication system architecture.

The concept of Open Access to Communication Resources is central in the ongoing transformation of the communication market from a "vertically integrated" market with a few operators owning and operating everything between the physical medium and the end-user, to an "open horizontal market" with an abundance of actors operating on different levels and providing value added services on top of each other.

This means creating competition in all layers of the IP network allowing a wide variety of physical networks and applications to interact in an open architecture. Put plainly, anyone can connect to anyone in a technology-neutral framework that encourages innovative, low-cost delivery to users. It encourages market entry from smaller, local companies and seeks to ensure that no one entity can take a position of dominant market power. It requires transparency to ensure fair-trading within and between the layers based on clear, comparative information on market prices and services. It seeks to build on the characteristics of the IP network to allow devolved local solutions rather than centralized ones.

Open Access is also about broad approach to policy and regulatory issues that starts from the question: what do we want to bring about outside of purely industry sector concerns? It places an emphasis on: on empowering citizens; encouraging local innovation, economic growth and investment; and getting the best from public and private sector contributions. It is not simply about making micro-adjustments to the technical rules of the policy and regulatory framework but seeking to produce fundamental changes in the outcomes that can be delivered through it.

Problem
ICT Infrastructure stalemate in Africa - because of the link between government ownership and the operation of the historic operator, policy-makers are caught in a trap: on the one hand, they are inclined to protect their asset through making choices that do not disadvantage the historic operator but on the other hand, they need to find ways of opening up the market to provide better services for their citizens. This tension has made independent regulation difficult to achieve: often both government and regulator have a natural inclination to defend the status quo in the form of the historic operator as a “national asset” and this created a stalemate in the development of ICT infrastructure.

The state of privatization in Sub-Saharan Africa - according to the ITU, only 3 historic operators were fully privatized in Africa and 34 were partially privatized or in the process of privatization. The remaining 13 were state-owned. There have also been a significant number of “distressed” privatizations (most notably Ghana, Guinea-Bissau and Tanzania) where the new ownership has created a significant number of unresolved legal issues. In 24 out 48 Sub-Saharan African countries, the historic operator maintains a monopoly on international voice.
Without privatization, Governments lack the resources to invest in network development.

The failure of SAT3 to deliver cheaper bandwidth – In the Republic of South Africa, Telkom South Africa charges $25,000 for an e1 circuit on SAT3. The Ghana ISP Association has managed to reduced this from $12000 to $5000 over the past two (2) years but in both cases the cost of an e1 on fiber is far more expansive than satellite so most operators still use the later. The government of the Republic of South Africa has not being able to get a copy of the Construction and Maintenance Agreement (C&MA) from Telkom South Africa till date, when a copy was made available to us through some other medium it was clear that the intent of the Closed Club SAT3 League was to create a “cartel” with high prices hence the massive unutilized capacity on the cable.

Solution
Proposed concept to DV and WorldBank with colleagues – the Open Access Study opened up the thinking of building infrastructure and service in a different way from the traditional closed approach of lamping them together.

The WorldBank made a public declaration for Open Access as a framework for their implementation of ICT Infrastructure development in February 2006 and then in June 2006 the Eastern and Southern African Heads of States under NEPAD also made a public declaration on Open Access as the framework for development and establishment of the East African Submarine System (EASSy).

The Open Access study and these declaration resulted in a paradigm shift in the thinking of Infrastructure buildout where most constituencies saw the need to separate Infrastructure from Services with the following generic principles;

1. Anyone can play
Particularly because of the potential for locally-provided services and network growth “at the edges” made possible by flexible technology and open network models, Open Access models should assure that any provider willing to play by the rules can “plug and play” in the network.

2. Technological neutrality
Regulation should be technology-neutral, taking into account the cost and physical properties of the technologies themselves. No one should be stopped from using a particular technology and indeed a progressive regulator would encourage cost reduction through technology innovation.

One needs to recognize that in future a wide range of applications will require higher bandwidth. But there may be no significant (order of magnitude) improvements in the performance of fibre, particularly its installation. However with wireless there will be significant improvements in performance and cost/capacity ratio and therefore wireless solutions will become more attractive in local distribution applications.

3. Fair and non-discriminatory competition at all layers
Competition should be fair and non-discriminatory. There should be no predatory pricing, cross-subsidization or aggressive cross-ownership. Regulators will need to be capable of dealing with a range of competition issues to ensure a genuine level playing field, and to prevent market strength in one layer from creating unfair competitive advantage at another layer. For all services at a given layer, there ought to be at least two providers and whenever there are not 4-5 providers of a particular service, issues of competitive position would need to be examined.

What is true for countries at a national level holds true at a regional and international level. Ideally any country should have a choice of at least two providers to connect to neighbors and the rest of the world. The EU competition policy formulation of “significant market power” provides a useful benchmark against which competitive position might be examined.

4. Transparency to ensure fair trading within and between layers
Competitive markets thrive on transparent information about market prices and service. Internal accounting processes in companies need to be sufficiently transparent to enforce fair-trading. If there is tradable bandwidth – particularly at an international level – it will allow clear comparisons to be made between different providers. There needs to be greater levels of consumer information to allow comparisons between “offers”, including offers at the interface between layers.

The different roles of players need to be transparent. In order to create trust in the market, infrastructure providers need to be clear that they will not enter service markets to compete with their customers. The regulator exists to encourage competition rather than restrict it but to do so in a way that genuinely encourages increased investment and lower access costs to communications technology. Where appropriate, regulation becomes “light-touch” rather than prohibitive or restrictive. Government exists to create the legal framework through which competition issues can be mediated.

5. Everyone can connect to everyone else at the layer interface.
In order for a competitive market to function, everyone must be able to connect to everyone else. Service providers would be able to get access to infrastructure from the local to the international level, whether they were small or large entities.

There will be inevitable interconnection rate issues where the interests of the infrastructure provider in keeping re-investing in the network need to be weighed against the opportunities that can be created for greater levels of new business.

6. Devolved rather than centralized solutions
It is important to ensure that the “intelligence” in the network is to be found at the edges of the infrastructure rather than at its centre. In other words, the infrastructure provider should not be allowed to reserve for itself all of the functions that create value in the market.

In practical terms, it should be possible to create a local entity that can operate on the small or medium-scale and can “plug into” the network without needing to cede control over its activities to the infrastructure provider. Local operators need to be able to own and control a significant level of “intelligence” in the system (eg billing, features, etc) to encourage open access.

Suddenly there is the emergency of the Open Access church with some of the believers being the incumbent PPTs who would have wanted EASSy in a closed club manner like SAT3.

Implementation in Africa
EASSy Cable – The East African Submarine System (EASSy @ www.eassy.org) in adhering to Open Access must align with the structure and principles below in order to ensure that all the believers are believing in the same principles and adhering to same;
1. Within the structural framework, the cable must differentiate “Infrastructure” from “Services” where Infrastructure is seen more in the “Ownership” realm whiles Service is seen in “Access to capacity”.
2. A set of principle would hold for the ownership of the cable and those principles would be different from those for access to capacity.

The most distinguishing feature of the Open Access approach is that, ownership of the infrastructure DOES NOT GUARANTEE any access (discriminatory or not) to capacity on the value chain for the provision of service to the market.

Infrastructure ownership principles for the cable include;
1. The ownership of the EASSy cable must be in a public private partnership involving Government, PTTs, ISPs, Educational Institutions, Civil Society and Consumers.
2. A fair distribution of these constituencies from the member countries in an equal sub-regional distribution leading up to the Board of Directors of the enterprise.
3. The same set of rules must be established to identifying the various shareholders from the various countries in the different constituencies
4. For the purposes of this exercise a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) must be a legal entity with an African wide structure, which must have a majority Africa ownership in order to trade in the various countries.
5. The SPV must have a public interest combined with a private sector approach in it’s business model in order to ensure a “regulated return on investment” to ensure cheap and affordable bandwidth to the end-user.

Value Chain access to capacity for Service delivery principles for the cable are;
1. The SPV must sell capacity to all entities who meet the legal and regulatory requirements in each country directly, non-discriminatorily.
2. Service Providers shall be offered Transport Infrastructure Layer access to different capacities depending on their requirements.
3. End Users shall be free to choose any local Service Provider connected to the Regional Network.
4. The SPV shall not compete with Service Providers (its customers) by offering services at the Services Layer directly to End Users.
5. All countries must create a regulatory structure that recognizes the SPV.
6. The SPV shall be formed, owned and operated in such a way as to facilitate competition and to foster innovation at the Services Layer, and where practical and commercially viable at all levels, with a view to maximizing usage of the network and benefits to the End Users.

My project is now at this stage where we need all the Open Access believers to adhere to these principles in the EASSy cable build out. This would enable the multi-stakeholder approach to leverage existing examples like Level3 – www.lelvel3.com, which according to Stuart Gannes is an example of a US build out within which my ideas fall based on the principles of the structural paradigm.

To provide a mechanism for Diaspora from developing countries to participate in capacity building in their countries of origin by collaborative academic and research activities. They would be motivated to link up with local counterparts using appropriate Information and Communications Technology (ICT) tools and platforms. This is expected to promote the philosophy of forming a community of collaborators with interest in the developing world.