Creating Community Wireless in Africa

There is no shortage of efforts to improve Internet access in developing countries. What makes the Association for Progressive Communication's (APC) Community Wireless Connectivity Project unique is that rather than just providing wireless technology, it teaches the community to build the technology itself.

APC's project partner, Onno Purbo, a community wireless expert from Indonesia, describes the traditional telecommunications model as having Internet access "licensed by the government, invested in by the investors, run by the operators, for the people." The APC project, he explains, aims to show people in Africa a new model, one which uses wireless technology in a community-based way, where "access is from the people, by the people, for the people."

Wireless has two major benefits in getting developing countries connected to the Internet -- ease and cost. The absence of cabled infrastructure makes it easier to provide access for remote locations. Wireless can also carry Internet traffic more cheaply, and often more reliably, than traditional telecommunication equipment.

But the lower cost and further reach isn't all that is needed to bring a meaningful result to a disempowered and disconnected community. APC's project aims to teach communities across Africa how to build, own, maintain, and develop wireless networks themselves.

To do this, the Community Wireless Connectivity Project provides training workshops in communities throughout Africa. Each workshop is specialized for different environmental, regulatory, language, and climatic conditions. The goal is to train up to 100 people at each of four scheduled workshops. Each person trained can then train other members of the community. APC also produces materials in various languages to help the workshop attendees train other members of their community.

The materials developed for the training are structured in units that follow the Multimedia Training Kit (MMTK) format being used by APC, UNESCO, and others, providing the training community in general with a set of materials with a highly flexible structure.

The International Development Research Centre ( IDRC) and the Open Society Institute ( OSI) are funding the project in Africa. With the support and involvement of APC members in other regions, the organization hopes to work on developing similar projects for the Latin American and Asia-Pacific regions.

The first workshop hosted thirty-five participants from Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Sudan and Nigeria, and drew participants from a range of community ICT projects, engineering and computing faculties of universities and colleges, and NGOs engaged in information technology work. The week-long, hands-on training was held in Mtoni, Zanzibar, and covered everything needed to plan, budget, set up, manage, maintain and develop a fully-functioning wireless network.

Attendees learned how to configure access points, climb towers safely, calculate radio links, survey their sites, source appropriate equipment, budget for projects, and secure their networks. They were able to build antennas out of recycled tin cans, and later use them to wirelessly connect Grave island – an atol 1.25 miles (2 kilometers) across the sea from the workshop venue.

Building the link was the culmination of the workshop, and tested the group in all aspects of the training. It was a particularly exciting moment when the voices of the mobile unit at sea came through clearly to the rest of the group at the base station in Mtoni – carried by radio waves using wireless technologies.

At the end of the week, it seemed a shame to dismantle the wireless set-up that took a week to perfect, but as one participant explained, that was just the beginning of the real networking.

"One big network was formed from the first day we met, and that was a human network," said Ashraf Mohammed from Zanzibar's Linux Users' Group. He came away from the five-day training with a commitment to staying in touch with the other trainees, keeping them all up-to-date with his progress in connecting local communities to the Internet.

And, like Mohammed, they are all hoping to set up wireless networks in their communities and workplaces. They will support each other through online collaboration, so in a sense, the workshop never ends.