Posted April 1997
by Philippe van der Stichele
and Stein W. Bie
FAO Research, Extension and Training Division
Which village in Africa or on the slopes of some Himalayan mountain does not have a communal meeting place, or an old Banyan tree where people gather to chat as dusk falls? Or a small dam where women gather to do their laundry? Which community does not have a place of worship, or a small school, or a general store, or some sort of administrative office if not a village council office where people visit to pray, to gossip, to seek advice, or to express their problems? There are still many places that do not have access to such community facilities, but this has never stopped people from being adventurous and determined in their quest for discovery of other horizons, other people and other experiences.
In spite of theories of 'in-groups' and 'out-groups', contacts remain fundamental to our biological and social lives. Without them we are doomed. Even from remote places people walk miles to reach "the others" or sometimes "civilization", be it a transit road with its dynamic economic activity, a district town with its market place, a government sub-office, a clinic or an agricultural seed supplier and quite possibly... a telephone line in an office...somewhere. Ultimately, the determined traveller will reach a point in the journey where it is possible to learn about events or people in even further places like the capital city or about the national soccer team winning in the neighbouring country. He or she may not be able to read the local paper that is lying on the table in the local tea-house but the patrons will discuss its contents. She may hear women in the market-place arguing about the poor quality of the cooking oil and she will be wary not to get "ripped-off" by the dealer when she decides to buy some.
All things considered, that time consuming trip from that remote place to the nearest township and back to the village have brought our travellers with a wealth of information to talk and think about in the days to come and they will discuss it further with their neighbours upon their return.
The technology exists and there is an increasing recognition by governments that there is no economic or moral justification not to invest in it. Indeed, many governments will regard it as being in their interest to improve communication with the countryside and to make it play a more important economic and political role in the country. It is part of a slow but steady process of democratization and liberalization of nations. The privatization and commercialization of telecommunication networks and services are rapidly gaining ground and are part of economic change. Telephone networks, ranging from overhead copper wires and optical cables to radio and satellite links, are being commercialized at an extraordinary pace. Even where political regimes may be reluctant, no political pressure will be able to suppress this trend much longer. The days of regimes attempting to jam the transmissions of others are over. And as the small towns get connected to the telephone networks, there will be less and less excuses not to connect them through computers and modems enabling to access the world of knowledge through the Internet or to communicate through electronic mail systems.
The costs of such connectivity are constantly decreasing both in terms of the hardware that is required as well as in terms of the servicing costs and robustness of the facilities. Many governments experience that liberalising such operations, even privatising them, stimulates competitiveness, and may reduce costs to their national budgets. Such public utilities operate on the basis of a large number of people each paying small amounts for usage and therefore, the more widespread the utility is made available the greater the number of users becomes, and the cheaper it becomes for each end-user. Last but not least, there is a tremendous market that the new communication technology has opened up. Hardware manufacturers, software designers and producers, telecommunication companies ranging from the large supranational to the local service provider all have an almost untapped range of clients at their fingertips to make their businesses flourish.
Some women of the Grameen project in Bangladesh take out a bank loan to rent mobile telephones with which they earn a fee for offering their clients in the villages the possibility of placing a call. In Morocco, public telephone shops manned by trained staff have flourished in almost every roadside village with the encouragement of the Government to have such services provided by the private sector. In Zambia, an initiative called HealthNet is being serviced by an indigenous Internet service provider which enables rural health centres to communicate with each other, share information, report diagnostics and seek medical advice.
The demand being evident, there is no justifiable reason why modern information and communication technology should not be applied to help reach this end. Politicians may be wary of the effects of freedom of speech facilitated through the various communication media now available, and we have seen clamp-downs on global Internet access in some countries. But we have also recently observed opposition groups using Internet for their contacts with the world, both in Central Europe and Latin America, when authorities blocked other channels of communication.
Culture and religion are not impervious to outside influence, but in a world of modern telecommunications they most hold their own on merit, on through communication barriers. Whilst sections of the business world may want to take advantage of new communication technology in order to encourage people to buy their products rather than those of their competitors, farmers will wish to know the real worth of their produce in the national market, not what the local trader is offering them. The bargaining position of the small producer is strengthened by this access. It remains, however, that all parties have a responsibility - and the society a need - to ensure that communication media are made available to all and at fair conditions, both economically and editorially, to facilitate and respond to the needs of all.
Simultaneously, each institution or interested investor in the connectivity at the local-level has to learn how to listen to rural people. Their knowledge, wisdom and needs count. This information must proceed upstream to their planners, decision-makers and other information producers, to be incorporated into the next batch of messages that will be down-loaded to the local area network. The new generation of electronic connectivity is not an end in itself to solve all communication problems. It should be seen as a rapid-action tool to support, consolidate and hasten the spread of dialogue within the rural area by providing the already established media and service suppliers with data and news that they need and that they can use.
Community radio programmes, local newspapers, traditional story-tellers, folk theatre groups, local agricultural input suppliers, church communities, local entrepreneurs, the bus conductor, the town council, the traditional healer or his counterpart local health community worker are ultimately all potential users. They can also benefit from the system and use it as a reference.
We now need to harness the potential of such new information super highways so that the contents of its messages is in direct response to local geographical, cultural, socio-economic and linguistic needs.
There is no point in packaging useful data on the availability of improved seed varieties if the name of the commodities are expressed in the country's official language whereas in the local area concerned a chick-pea is known as a 'phatip'. Other mass-media such as rural radio have known this for decades and attempt as far as they can afford it to broadcast programmes in the local vernacular languages. But up to now, the new technology is dominated by anglophone or "international" scientific data and few service providers are capable of adapting the software and the messages in order to penetrate other local language markets, other agro-ecological zones and other cultures.
Agricultural research stations may offer statistical data on maize seasonal fertilizer applications in such technical jargon so as to be incomprehensible even to the most dedicated district crop officer who has to pass-on the instructions to his field-staff who may have had 2 years of technical schooling in horticulture. The local newspaper editor is more than keen to print a bulletin on weekly sales prices of food crops in his area but the information he receives from the provincial government office is based on statistics from last year's harvesting season. The local animal health worker promoting the use of an acclaimed tick treatment chemical is not aware that supplies are no longer available in the district.
Only if the local town service-providers receive that sort of timely and user-friendly information on their computer at the click of a modem, would they be able to make use of it by releasing it to the local radio station, to the local newspaper, the NGO, the church group, the farmers' association, the health clinic, the local school teacher. They could charge a fee for providing such information unless their service is funded either by the community groups themselves or a governmental service. The market will decide what their price should be.
Local issues may be communicated more promptly and simultaneously to middle or upper-level government decision-makers as well as to concerned research or support institutions. Provincial or district-level governmental or private service providers will be in a position to take action in a more coordinated effort or be able to call for assistance and advice when required. Communities will be able to provide assistance and build partnerships with their neighbours. Local community groups, farmers, women or youth associations, NGOs, even individual family members, will know that somewhere in their vicinity, there is a network enabling them to reach out to the outside world for advice or guidance.
It's called empowerment. It is theirs, and it cannot be overlooked. As local telecentres and information villages develop, spontaneously as a result of local entrepreneurship or as a wider government information policy, we must appreciate that we all potentially become part of a movement of empowerment. Surfing on the Web to-day is travelling through an anarchy of information. Some is valuable, some is distinctly frivolous, some is distasteful, some is worse.
The last uncovered mile still protects the innocent and the naive from the excesses, but not for long. But this last uncovered mile is also the gap to be bridged to ensure that the people at the far end can broadcast their needs and their setting, to be part of the greater national and global society. The ultimate misuse of a covered last mile is global digital soap opera. As the industrialized countries provide the nuts and bolts for that bridge they also carry the responsibility for providing their share of data and information that inform and empower.
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