OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
models that reach low-income populations and financial services over mobile phones, especially the Philippines and South Africa, which may make them good pilots for educational experiments.[1]
Vietnam as a Laboratory. The involvement of one of the authors in a rural connectivity project in Vietnam means that more detailed information is available for this country, examined here as an in-depth case study. Eighty percent of the population is rural, and 32 percent is under the age of 15, still a very youthful population with high education needs. The economy is accelerating; Vietnam is joining the WTO this year and already has a bilateral trade agreement with the United States; and the government is ranked highly in World Bank Doing Business surveys for reforms of its enabling environment. English has been taught in schools as a second language for twenty years. In the ICT space, both ISPs and VOIP are legal, there is fully commercial VSAT service, and tentative Wi-Max frequencies have been assigned. There are two competing broadband providers, both building national optical fiber loops (in Vietnamese style, both are nationally owned entities that operate as private companies), and three mobile phone providers. Mobile coverage reaches 67 percent of the population but is quite spotty in mountainous rural areas. In practice, many rural communes do not have phone service and virtually none have Internet access, although they usually have electrical power. Most rural households could not afford mobile service, typically a minimum of $7 to $10 per month. Vietnam has just signed an agreement with Rice University to make its open curriculum platform, Connexions, the basis for the country’s effort in this area. Two new national initiatives could impact rural connectivity: a new Universal Service Fund can provide zero percent equipment financing for service to rural communities, and a new rural infrastructure effort designed to integrate rural areas into the economy that is heavily financed by a group of donors, Program 135, is looking for province-scale models to implement nationwide.
In this context, a pilot connectivity pilot is taking shape in Quang Ngai province, a poor and largely rural area of one million people in the middle of the country. The pilot, to be managed jointly by the provincial government and World Resources Institute, will implement the VSAT/Wi-Fi/VOIP model described above in three rural communes (each of which includes three to five villages of varying size) chosen to span different topographies and ethnic groups, with support from AusAID and USAID. The provincial government has made clear its intent, if the pilot is successful, to use national funds from one of the programs described above (Universal Service Fund or Program 135) to build out the entire province (156 rural communes, or about 160,000 rural households). Preliminary estimates are that the VSAT/mesh Wi-Fi
- ↑ See case studies on Smart Communications (Philippines) and Vodacom (South Africa) and other posting on Celtel (Zambia) and Whizit (South Africa) at www.nextbillion.net.
79
