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Connectivity in the community: Experiences from Bolivia
IICD assist developing countries in the effective use of ICT for sustainable development. It supports partner organisations in 9 countries, including Jamaica, Ecuador and Bolivia in the Latin American region. In Bolivia IICD is actively supporting a large-scale ICT for development program www.ticbolivia.net or www.iicd.org in Bolivia since 2000. The program is operational with 15 projects at department and national levels in Bolivia in the sectors Agriculture, Governance and Education. A this moment, the program is directly reaching 50,000 end users using ICT through the 90 information centres or school laboratories operating in all departments of Bolivia. Indirectly the program reaches around 500,000 farmers, indigenous people and teachers and students through a combination of access to rural information centres, radio programmes, websites and printed information materials.
Since the start of the programme, project partners and end users have indicated that lacking access, low quality and high pricing of telephony and Internet connectivity remains a key limitation to effective and sustainable implementation of ICT for development. Despite the multiple efforts of the government to engage in rural universal services schemes and to deregulate the sector over the last years, none of these initiatives have resulted hitherto into universal access to information and communication serving development needs outside the main cities.
As a result IICD and the local partner organisations, including both grass-root organisations and NGOs bundled efforts and have searched for more effective technical and organisational models for rural connectivity. This paper describes possible technical and organisational solutions for sustainable universal services solutions in rural areas on the basis of 3 years of on-the-ground experience with a shared satellite connectivity model operational in 11 communities in Bolivia. It focuses on the lessons learned for regulators in Latin America.
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