Out of the blue, Boateng Neezer, Chief Technology Officer of the Wireless Ghana project sent me this 35 page in-depth case study [1.2 MB PDF], which was commissioned by and developed for the World Bank’s infoDev group.
The Wireless Ghana project, run by an NGO called the Community-Based Libraries and Information Technology (CBLit), is a rural project that was developed in 2005 in response to "the local community’s requests for connectivity to help them break their isolation and move their children and community closer to the 21st century, and be competitive with their urban counterparts". The project is taking place in the Akwapim North district in the Eastern Region of Ghana, an area with a total population of about 1.2 million people. Here are some of the project's goals:
- Promote a reading culture.
- Train rural schoolchildren and teachers in the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
- Empower rural communities by providing access to information and breaking the isolation.
- Provide and use ICT to help increase direct participation in development and decisionmaking processes at local and national levels.
- Help to make Internet access in rural communities a reality.
Whilst much of the case study has an educational and organisational focus, some of it will interest readers who understand wireless networking, with a clear description of the practical solutions being found to overcome difficulties like poor and unreliable power supplies with voltage fluctuations, and an innovative "mesh" network architecture developed by the US Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network which describes itself as "the worldwide leader of dynamic wireless mesh networking software".
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