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Peace Corps to Wire Senegal
An anonymous submitter wrote: "Peace Corps Online is reporting on the White House's Digital Freedom Initiative that will place volunteers from the Peace Corps, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco in a pilot program in Senegal where they will leverage nearly 200 cybercafes and 10,000 telecenters to provide opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs. The idea isn't new - David Rothman proposed an Electronic Peace Corps in 1984, the Geek Corps has been doing this kind of work in Ghana for years, and the Peace Corps already has about 1,500 volunteers working in information technology."
We've got no food, but now we've got BROADBAND! (First post?)
Maybe it's because most entrepreneurs and small business owners in Senegal can't afford a computer, and would be better off renting small amounts of time as needed. According to the world bank Senegal's GNP per capita for 1996 was only $570. I doubt it's gotten much higher.
Because it's realistic? if you electricity and telecoms already then it's going to be much easier to set everything else up. Plus an Internet Cafe is a good place for people to meet, get training, etc.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4657
The "Senegalese Minister" scam overtakes the "Nigerian Minister" scam as the leading scam spam theme.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Well at least Cisco and HP are branching into new market and away from the saturated ones.
Now I will get twice as many BUSINESS PROPOSALS from DR ZUNAGA MBASAWA in SOME RANDOM COUNTRY trying to get me to help him wire $75000000USD from his recently deceased father's offshore account.
I certainly hope Peace Corps intends to use open source for these projects. One of the most import tenants of Peace Corps projects is sustainability from a host country's perspective - a perfect dovetail for open source code.
From the Peace Corps website: "Currently, 6,678 Peace Corps volunteers are serving in 70 countries, working to bring clean water to communities, teach children, help start new small businesses, and stop the spread of AIDS. Since 1961, more than 168,000 Americans have joined the Peace Corps, serving in 136 nations." These people most likely dont have the skills to combat cyber terrorism and are using the skills they do have to set up small networks and get people on the internet.
Worst. Sig. Ever.
Hippie: "Make love, not war"
Yuppie: "Make lan, not war"
In a similar vain people might be interested in NetAid which apart of the UN in helping out online less developed countries
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Besides, the people in this country can't afford Coke as a general rule -- even when they can, they return the glass (yes, glass!) bottle right away to get the deposit back and put the Coke in a plastic bag to drink. There are already enough cybercafes in Dakar; perhaps this cash should be going towards helping the little Muslim boys that run around the streets, forced into virtual slavery (via begging) in order to make a few bucks for their master.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
However long range wireless solutions might be very suitable for many of these countries for bringing internet access to the cafes, because the poverty levels means that even phone lines get stolen quite often for the copper many places (some countries have even had cases of people cutting down power cables to sell the scrap metal).
Securing a number of wireless routers might be easier than securing miles and miles of cable. Additionally, putting up phone cables is expensive, and many African countries have extremely under developed landline networks, and it's not a given that setting up wireless connections won't be cheaper.
training for what, exactly? how are IT skills and improved communications going to help free impoverished countries from the grip of corrupt administrations and natural resource leeches such as Shell or deBeers?
what do these businesses sell, in any case? last i heard, putting your small business on teh internet was only useful if you are producing something someone in [affluent country here] wants - and sadly, outside of big business concerns such as oil or diamonds, that doesn't amount to much.
<B>note to self:</B> <I>post as html</I>
they will leverage nearly 200 cybercafes and 10,000 telecenters to provide opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs.
Great. Now AOL will be intercepting 2 billion spams / month, from a new country tld.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Word #234:
leverage (vb): means "use"
Alternative trendy buzzwords and phrases:
enabled
facilitate deployment
fixed resource empowerment
consolidate operational dynamics
foster tangible goals
When does the Peace Corps come to my neighborhood, here in the US? This would be so...*ring* Hold on... call coming in...
What's that? Peace Corps? Yes. Overseas only? I see. Nothing inside the US? Aha.*click*
Never mind.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
Yeah , I can just see all those starving people begging for food at the side of the road
whipping out their Pocket PC once they hear that a wifi node has been set up on top of the local
rubbish heap.
It is all very simple actually....
You can find practicly anything on the internet, no need for expensive books, all you need is a little curiousity.
As for fighting big business and governments all you need is to set up a 'poor-villages-against-whatever' mailinglist and you can organize.
That is the power of the internet: spreading information at practicly no cost.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
COMMUNICATIONS
-
Telephones - main lines in use:
234,916 (2001)
-
Telephones - mobile cellular:
373,965 (2001)
-
Telephone system:
general assessment: good system
domestic: above-average urban system; microwave radio relay, coaxial cable and fiber-optic cable in trunk system
international: 4 submarine cables; satellite earth station - 1 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean)
-
Radio broadcast stations:
AM 10, FM 14, shortwave 0 (1998)
-
Radios:
1.24 million (1997)
-
Television broadcast stations:
1 (1997)
-
Televisions:
361,000 (1997)
-
Internet country code:
.sn
-
Internet Service Providers (ISPs):
15 (2002)
-
Internet users:
40,000 (2001)
Lesser-developed countries flock to cell phones to get around there out-dated, out-moded, out-period telephone communications, I guess.Sounds like the Peace Corps needs to Wi-Fi Senegal rather than wire it.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Yes. It's exactly like if you argued they don't need a postal service at all in third world countries. Now matter how starved they are, postal service is useful. Likewise for communications. For the record, many of those countries have numerous emmigrants, and considering the price of international phone communications, you'll understand why email and cybercafes are such a success there. The emmigrant-whose-plane-ticket-was-paid-by-the-villa ge-and-who-sends-back-money is not uncommon. There are other uses too.
In addition, in almost all third world countries, have a very rich upper class, with the lastest technological toys, and which doesn't know what to do with its money (investing is boring - culturally speaking this isn't US/UK self-made-man dreams etc..., using money to get power isn't always necessary, as there is more social corruption). At the very least, those demand a good Internet access.
I think not. Sure 1559 volunteers may be "promoting" IT in their roles, but there certainly are not 1559 Peace Corps volunteers working in IT. The vast majority of these people are English teachers who have a secondary project of trying to improve their school's computer lab, often using "creative grant-writing" techniques to appropriate funds marked for women's health or community development.
Until "IT" is a Peace Corps job category like Education, Agriculture, Health, and Environment, Peace Corps will not be taking IT seriously.
I speak from experience.
-JB (Volunteer - Poland 15, 1999-2000)
WTF? Why are we wiring Senegal when I can't even get DSL to my neighborhood? %&*%$#!!!
Are there any Internet cafes in the developed world that use long-range wireless technologies? We can't even make 3G cell phone networks a reality here in the US, so I don't see how we can expect that to happen in developing countries. And if you're referring to Wi-Fi, then that's also not feasible, since 802.11b only goes about 10 miles max, even with a line-of-sight high-gain directional antenna. You'd have to put repeaters all over the countryside.
When I served with the Peace Corps in Ghana, some of the "luxury" Internet cafes in the capital were using specially-licensed microwave links to a shared VSAT Internet link, but spreading that kind of access throughout the rest of the (mostly rural) land just isn't economically possible.
What I noticed in Ghana is that any town that had been wired for electricity, no matter how small, was also wired for phone service. Unfortunately, the government-owned phone company (Ghana Telecom) has a monopoly on the entire phone industry, and they aren't interested in competition because they don't want to lose their cash cow. The result is that dial-up Internet access from small towns is already availble but extremely expensive due to the per-minute long-distance charges.
The solution, I think, is not technical but rather economical. Instead of building some fancy wireless mesh network, developing countries should work to deregulate the phone industry and open it up to competition, thus lowering the cost of Internet access everywhere.
I think this is very worthwhile but would only work in cities where you have electricity - for part of the day at least...
You only use 2% of your DNA
The Fallacy of Other People's Misappropriated Volunteer Efforts comes up on slashdot quite frequently, though predominately concerns itself with open-source software development: There's all sorts of complaining about branching and competitive overlapping software projects when all programmers should be working on project y, where y is the software the whiner (who probably doesn't contribute to anything) would most like to have an improved version of. Programmers aren't a fluid resource that can be thrown at anything for proportional result (remember Mythical Man Month), and a lot of mature software projects are intimidating or unappealling to the unexperienced or differently interested.
Here, there's the misappropriated tech support for the third world:
Most countries need better laws, courts, banks not IT infrastructure.
I would also prefer it if the U.S. had better courts and laws- they're currently better than most countries, but could also stand a lot of improvement. I'm not volunteering as a lobbyist, political activist, or even writing my representatives about those issues. Instead, I do some network administration and general tech support for a couple local non-profits. Are my efforts better spent elsewhere?
The short answer is no:
-I want to build on the knowledge I already have.
-I want to feel satisfied at the end of the day for having solved some small network problem, gotten a donated computer up and running, etc.
-I want an external and personal source of motivation: other volunteers and employees who immediately appreciate and recognize my efforts (and they couldn't have done it themselves) because it helps them do their job.
-I might want to get a paying job doing something similar with the references and skills I've built volunteering.
Large scale societal and infrastructural issues take lots of time, money, and effort beyond the abilities of volunteers to fix alone. It's good to be aware of efforts in those larger-scale issues and support them, but it's easier to get volunteers to do something they already know and want to do. (Contrast with "Hey guys, let's dig a latrine in Cambodia!" recruitment method)
If someone were to go to Senegal or other country with IT work in mind, they may come into intimate contact with the more fundamental problems and shift their efforts accordingly, where as reading a speculative slashdot post about the 'real' problems may put them off from volunteering altogether.
Senegal is a great place to mount an initiative like this because they have access to some serious bandwidth. The SAT-3/WASC/SAFE undersea fibre optic cable landed in Senegal last year, delivering multiple gigabits of internet bandwidth. This is in contast to the previous situation, where basically all of Africa had less bandwidth than the headquarters of my former employer.
But the idea of wiring Senegal is all wrong. What's needed is wireless. Wireless internet (e.g. 802.11b Wi-Fi) is a far more appropriate solution in a country like Senegal where traditional wireline infrastructure is going to be subject to harsh environmental conditions and being destroyed by political unrest. Wi-Fi long-distance links can span 30 km in a single hop, and the towers like cell towers can be powered with generators. Wi-Fi delivers true broadband, 802.11b is 10Mbps, and 802.11a and 802.11g can deliver more like 30Mbps.
Broadband is essential. With broadband you can deliver the killer app (yeah, I said killer app) of the rural internet which is Voice over IP. People in Senegal, well, the literacy rate isn't so high, and VoIP is what's really useful to people as it allows them to call members of their family who may be off making money in other parts of the world, to call into town to check crop prices, to call their relatives in the city. Of course this requires policy to make sure that VoIP is legal and that the national telco doesn't try to block it to protect their own profits.
If you're interested in wireless long-distance links, you might be interested in a mailing list on the subject, wireless-longhaul@openict.net. You can subscribe here, and the mailing list home page is here.
home page
The best answer is in an article I wrote, available here: More than one way to make a difference
You can also find more info about my Peace Corps experience here: Two Years, Two Months
The requirements you listed are spot-on. Note that if you don't have knowledge of Spanish or French, having a science or engineering degree can do just as much to help get you in to the Peace Corps. (Most applicants are liberal arts majors without any technical skills that the Peace Corps needs.)
I could see 3 or 4 months, but 2 years of my life to be a volunteer?
Two years is nothing -- a small fraction of your normal life span -- especially when you consider the impact those two years could have on your life. Think about it: What would you do with those two years in the U.S.? Work a nine-to-five job so you can buy that new computer and a big screen TV? I'd prefer to spend the time traveling the world, making friends, learning a new language, and discovering places I've only seen in National Geographic. But that's just me. If you can only commit three months, try the GeekCorps.
Peace corps only uses US "recruits", therefore I cannot bring my contribution through peacecorps! I wonder why!!
http://ebgp.net/ccc/