Internet Society Community Networks - Experiences from the Asia Pacific, 14 Dec 2021

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From YouTube: How community networks helped during COVID-19 in India and Indonesia

Description

Half of the world is still not connected, and COVID-19 highlighted how important the Internet has become for work, education, healthcare, and keeping in touch with loved ones. Community networks helped keeping people online during the pandemic in places such as India and Indonesia.

Osama Mansar, founder and director at the Digital Empowerment Foundation in India, and Gustaff Iskandar, founder of the Common Room Network Foundation in Indonesia, share their first-hand experiences working with these networks.

Learn how the Digital Empowerment Foundation supported hundreds of communities in India, using human networks to grow the Internet: internetsociety.org/issues/community-networks/success-stories/barefoot-wireless-engineers/

A

Going into this current pandemic of corvid 19, the fact remains that still half of the world is not connected. uh Tell us more about the kavit 19 situation, uh especially from the perspective of a big country. Like india, I mean how the community network space comes into into into covert 19, where the the access to this critical information of what's happening uh has helped the villagers. I've.

B

Been I would, I would say that covet 19 certainly has created a new situation of uh of of uh digital era, where the intensity of digital divide has been uh has been realized in a different parameter. You know, of course, there was digital divide. We all knew that there was a digital divide. All those numbers of people connected and unconnected and not connected are not new numbers. They were all old numbers, but why people are suddenly talking about digital data right. It is because of one simple reason: kovit 19 has pushed us inside home.

B

Okay, it has pushed us and told us that you can't travel as freely at as you used to be, and when you bring everything to home, then- and in this case, not through the infrastructure of roads and the physical infrastructure, which of course is required, but you also need digital infrastructure so that you can communicate for your requirement for your needs, and that means you are dependent on digital infrastructure.

B

Many fold more. You know many many fold more so here it is not only that you need connectivity without alternative, but you also need quality connectivity. You need what you call as meaningful connectivity, you need very meaningful access and so on and so forth you cannot live on 9.6 kbps. You cannot live on 56 kbps. You have to have 1 mbps or 2 mbps. You need video, you need e-commerce, you need payment gateway. You need audio visual classes.

B

You need to talk on on on broadband, to your teachers to get lessons you need to access, uh you know rich content and so on and so forth, all kind of connectivity, whether it's mobile connectivity or broadband connectivity or adsl connectivity or telecom connectivity or mobile or 3g or 4g or community networks. Everything is important, but certainly community network is important because it is the last mile which is unconnected.

C

So now, from the revenue that we get by financing the internet using the internet fortune, we can reinvest the money to build uh other infrastructure. In particular when the early stage of uh coffee 19 pandemic started to happen. In indonesia, we able to build additional infrastructure to some isolated village, so we can help them to send information as well as to monitor the condition in order to prevent the spread of coffee 19 pandemic in that region, so yeah in general.

C

It's very exciting process in the village and as well as the area in surrounding the village we up to now we are able to reach at least five to six village and an additional infrastructure in two other village, and in in almost every village and hamlets in that region. There is always youngsters that are taking part in our workshop.

C

So now we have at least 10 local technicians who are helping us to deploying the local infrastructure to maintain as well to have a further development and there's even 12 old young boy.

C

His name is adam and also learning how to sell, help to sell the internet fortunes to the people in the village and then now he started to make his own content and started to upload his story about daily life in the village through instagram, and then he he started to have big dreams. And I I really like that.