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South Africa
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Category:
A Global Village
Vision, objectives and goals:
The main reason for the introduction of ICTs to Manguzi was to facilitate access to
opportunities and information. The children in the area can Now do research,
communicate with others and are able to better equip themselves in terms of careeroptions and empowerment. We also wanted to create a local ICT capacity by training
young people Nominated by the community to support and manage the Telecentre and
schools network.
They are also capable of training other members of the community to
make productive use of the facilities. To make a tangible difference in the lives of learners
and teachers in an area where educational support is extremely hard to come by. To use
the Internet as a means of training teachers and to enable collaboration and sharing of
learning between them. This project is unique / inNovative because of the combination of
existing techNologies used to provide Internet access to the schools, as well as the very low
cost of the implementation per school. In addition the monthly recurring cost to the schools
is nil. This is due to the fact that the radio link between the schools and the Telecentre
does Not cost anything. The cost of the telephone call from the Telecentre to the ISP is
covered by the income generated by the Telecentre's activities. This project was
implemented in a very poor area. Had money Not been an issue we could have installed
VSAT at each of the schools.
How ICT contributes to the organisational objectives:
The main reason for the introduction of ICTs to Manguzi was to facilitate access to
opportunities and information. A mission in which it is succeeding. The members of the
community are actively using the facilities offered by the Telecentre to do word processing,
desktop publishing, send and receive e-mail, surf the Web and perform numerous other
activities. Training teachers in the utilisation of ICTs in education accompanied the
introduction of the techNology to the schools. This was done in cooperation with the
KwaZulu Natal Education Department and SchoolNet SA (a NGO with a Government brief
to introduce Internet into South African schools). Teachers, who had never seen a PC
before, gained basic web literacy within a week. These skills will be maintained by the
establishment of professional networks and support groups between teachers in Manguzi
and elsewhere.
User needs:
Manguzi is a rural community in the Maputaland region of the KwaZulu Natal province of
South Africa. It is situated about 15km south of the Mozambique border en route to the
Ponto Do Ouro border post. The area is 60 km2 in size with about 100 000 inhabita
Summary:
Providing a remote rural community with Internet access can be a challenge at the best of
times. If the intended target audience does Not have access to telephones or any of the
other traditional telecommunications infrastructures, the challenge becomes even greater.
The Information and Communications Unit of the CSIR (Mikomtek) did just that in a project
in Manguzi, a rural community in South Africa's KwaZulu Natal province. The initial part of
the project consisted of the establishment of a Telecentre in the centre of town. The centre
is managed by a member of the community who was trained by the CSIR as part of the
project.
The Telecentre offers various services amongst which is Internet access (web
browsing and e-mail) using a dial-up link. It should be mentioned that the area is
characterised by a near total absence of a telecommunications infrastructure and that this
is one of the few telephone lines in the area. The community's desire was that the facilities
offered at the Telecentre should be available to the largest possible audience, including
the students.
However, walking (cars are an extreme luxury, there is No public transport such
as busses and trains, most people don't even own a bicycle) the 5km to the Telecentre on a
regular basis was Not practical. At a community workshop we were approached by one of
the headmasters with a request to connect his school to the Telecentre, in order for his
students to have access to the facilities from his school, eliminating the need to walk to the
Telecentre. There are unusual challenges in providing Internet connectivity to a sparsely
populated rural community separated by vast distances from the nearest urban
development. We soon found that for various reasons the "Normal" solutions (telephone,
cellular telephone, VSAT, ISDN, Leased Lines, spread spectrum techNologies) weren't
appropriate in this situation. An additional requirement was that the solution implemented
should be cheap, suited to the specific regulatory and geographic environment, robust and
suitable for a particular application, namely web browsing and e-mail.
The solution we
implemented consisted of a combination of radio communication and satellite broadcast
techNology. Two schools were identified by the community to participate in this project.
Each school was provided with a computer. Attached to this computer is a radio with its
antenna, as well as a satellite receiver card and DSB dish. The Telecentre has a small
local area network and serves as the hub of the network because it already has Internet
access. A computer was connected to the Telecentre network to act as router. This machine
has an Ethernet card installed and a radio connected. When a user at one of the schools
wants to access the Internet, the request is relayed to the Telecentre via the radio link
where a Unix fileserver dials on demand to execute the request. The requested information
is then downloaded directly to the user's PC using satellite broadcasting techNology. The
solution is feasible due to the asymmetric nature of the data requirements of Internet
applications. In addition to providing the schools with the infrastructure, the teachers were
also trained in how to use a computer, utilise the Internet as educational tool and to
contact colleagues using e-mail
Competition year:
2000