Author: Bev

I am not sure if I understand exactly what we are suppose to be posting here about alternative approaches but I’ll give it a shot. While reading through some of the links I recalled reading ( I think written by Thomas Friedman) about a very successful project where women in rural areas in India were given cameras and trained to be the village photographers. While trying to find more information on this I came across the following article: Jhunjhunwala, A., Ramachandran, A. & Bandyopadhyay, A., n-Logue: The Story of a Rural Service Provider in India , The Journal of Community Informatics, (2004), Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 30-38. retrieved from the internet Sept. 27, 2009

This article discusses how an organization called n-Logue that focuses on rural India, helped to establish internet kiosks through-out rural India. Kiosks, which cost less than $1000 to set up were financed by bank loans and were established by trained entrepreneurs in the villages- mostly women. Further tech support is provided by n-Logue. It was determined in the original business plan that these kiosks would need to make around $70 per month in order to break even. This amounts to about 7 or 8 cents per person per month which the authors felt was affordable and sustainable.

These kiosks provide an amazing variety of services in these communities from training children how to type, to providing farmers access to on-line veterinary services. Many of the kiosk owners also bought digital cameras so they have also become the village photographer. At the time of writing they were proposing to add internet banking services as well.

This article does not conclude how things are going, but the authors were very optimistic about the future. I think this is a really interesting idea and with over 6 000 000 villages in India has great potential.