Ericsson is partnering with The Earth Institute and with pan-African telecom MTN to bring mobile broadband connectivity to the Millennium Villages, beginning with the village of Mayange in Rwanda, with plans to extend to all seventy-nine Villages across 10 countries, reaching approximately 400,000 people.
According to the article, there will be a toll-free phone service for medical emergencies, connecting patients with on-duty personnel at the Village’s health centers, and mobile sets will also be used as a tool for training community health workers in collecting and sharing basic health information.
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...if in five years Ericsson doesn’t come back around and give out new phones, and if no one continues to maintain the mobile broadband connectivity indefinitely for free, will that service still be there for you and your kids? If you came to rely on that service, would you suddenly be able to afford it yourself?
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For people in the Millennium Villages, free may be the only price they can pay right now. But if Ericsson is really looking to get long-term bang for its philanthropic buck, it should also be looking to construct service models that do not just lay the groundwork for increased economic activity, but are models of economic scale in themselves.
Perhaps superfluous to note but -
- creating communities of practice,
- integrating new practices into communities, and
- creating online communities
3 comments:
Interesting post, Jacob. Could you clarify a comment you made that I am not quite following. You said, "But if Ericsson is really looking to get long-term bang for its philanthropic buck, it should also be looking to construct service models that do not just lay the groundwork for increased economic activity, but are models of economic scale in themselves." What do you mean by "models of economic scale" in this context? Also, do you have any examples? Thanks!
Those aren't my words - they're from the blog post.
I was presenting at a conference on literacy and service-learning a couple weeks ago and was shocked when the keynote speaker nonchalantly declared that "Africa has no Internet." This from a guy who develops networks of non-profit social justice groups! I mean, don't some major cities have fiber or at least satellite-based Internet access?
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