This initiative intrigues me, Ben. Inveneo's involvement catches my eye - I met some of their folks at the WSF in Nairobi last January, and I'm interested in what they're doing with sustainable ICT, including low-power gear, renewable energy sources, and open-source IT platforms.

I also like that they focus on education - I believe this is a good approach. I also think the way you are networking coops together makes sense.

I can't offer much from my own nascent experience yet, but I'm interested in following your progress. Keep doing what you're doing!

(edited by Jon A - removed typo)

We are considering trying something new on the ICT side - a rural mobile wireless internet service, which can drive around from village to village and offer internet connectivity perhaps on one morning or afternoon per week. Clearly there are some challenges with this on "line of sight", but does anyone have a view on potential pitfalls on implementation or examples of where this may have been tried successfully?

What an interesting idea. Kind of reminds me of the old "Book mobiles" that brought the library to my neighborhood once a week when I was a kid.

What kind of vehicle will you use?

I am anticipating this to be a converted minibus or similar. The technical details are just being researched.

Cooperative unions seem really difficult to me. One of the reason I perceive them difficult has a lot to do with me not really being educated enough. Another reason has to do with sort of being in the loop of a couple of projects that hope to grow this way. One involves a plan to improve incomes of families caring for AIDS orphans by supplying inputs for maize growing, post harvesting handling, and marketing. The hope is to develop a critical number of the small working groups so that maize can be bulked and sold at top dollar. (That's the thumbnail). In practice the growing runs up against the people involved attending to the future benefits from the larger coop.

In reading the discussion in the <Ned> Uganda Group How to Start a Cooperative I was struck by some of the similar difficulties.

Opportunities Industrialization Centers International is not a cooperative model, but somehow my mind turned to it when thinking about your proposal. Also I'm impressed with how Rotary International Chapters are often quite successful with projects. Somewhere there's a sweet spot between local and community organizing and larger structures. OIC is an interesting case of local initiative growing into a larger entity, and surviving the process. What's interesting is how the International participation emerged quite early on. Here is the Nigeria page.

I suspect you're already aware of Greenstar. It's pretty darn slick with all the working parts of technology, business planning, and communications working together. It's a bit hard for me to tell which came when. Here's a page that tells the story of Greenstar's partnership with IConnect in Ghana.

Oscar Blayton has reproduced some of the text from a UNESCO series on developing sustainable telecenters. There's a link on the page for the full set of articles in PDF.

I was very interested in the mobile telecenter idea. The problem with me is not having much sticktoitiveness. A while back I saw an article about Anywhere Books. That was a mobile platform for a mobile facility to print books available off-copyright in villages. It doesn't seem their Website is up anymore--in fact Halliburton seems quite insistent in putting a TM anywhere where Anywhere Books comes up in search. Timbuktu Chronicles wrote about them in 2004. What seemed like a good idea didn't turn out so well, not the least of the problems was that librarians in Uganda hated the project.

The thing that struck me about the project was the cost. Even though the books could be produced for as little as $1.00, even that seemed too expensive. So as a thought experiment I tried to imagine the cheapest book of some value could be produced and marketed. What I came up with was Cracker Jack Books I still think there's a kernel of a good idea to it, but I haven't really tried to hammer out the details.

Part of the Cracker Jack Book idea was that since they could be sold for pennies and are small enough, I figured that even school kids might be able to sell them. The profit might be enough to pay for their school meals or something small like that. Since I started thinking about Cracker Jack Books, the popularity of iPods took off. I'm slow on technical things and don't have an iPod. It might seem really funny, but I was blown away when I saw friends use a tiny transmitter to "play" their files on the iPod onany radio. What a great way to share digital information in areas where electricity is scarce.

There's another piece of technology which is really great from the perspective of digital information in low electric situations and that's the AlphaSmart Neo As computers go, it's pretty primative, but gets at least 70 hours of use with three regular AA battery cells! I figured that as newer, more powerful devices promulgated that Neo's would be sold for a song. Unfortunately, that's not the case. They have a rather solid niche market. There's a lively discussion forum at Flickr.

Global Voices is an organization which aggregates blog content from around the world. They have an outreach called Rising Voices which is giving micro-grants for community media outreach projects. Some great ideas are swirling around and it's worthwhile checking Rising Voices out.

I'm sorry to ramble so, but here's my point: I envision that people can make a business of connecting others with digital information and providing a way to create digital information without owning a computer and having their own Internet access. So instead of one mobile bus, a fleet of independent operators on bikes.

What tools and services the operators have might vary. Some might have a selection of printed materials, including Cracker Jack Books, a camera, phone, Alpha Smart Neo, recording device, iPod and radio. The job of the news carrier would be to connect people to information and a means to produce it. The village connection to the Internet would be through the news carrier.

LOL, so many of my ideas are half-baked. The trouble is I often can't tell which ones are worth pursuing. But if this fleet of news carriers is any interest at all to you, it's something I'd love to talk more about.

Well many thanks again, John. I will need to visit this idea with a more detailed analysis of the market, but I am sure that you are quite right about the potentials of small cheap high technology. Perhaps one day one of these high tech companies will wake up to their corporate social responsibilities and prioritise countries where their products could create the greatest social impact.

Regarding half-baked ideas - I have been known to have a number of these myself - please keep them coming:)

I thought this article might be of interest on this thread.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/busin ess/7071636.stm

It is interesting to compare the relative fortunes of different communities. Nigeria, although very rural in many places has more exposure to technology, particularly as many rich Nigerians return to their villages once in a while to put up a satellite dish for themselves, when they visit.

Items like Walkmans are highly desired by the youth, but whole large families here on average earn $400 per year, so there is never any money for these types of things.

The climate is good and the people can produce far more than they can get paid for, so finding new markets for them is important - such as the Ethanol project - and the need for some to be familiar with the WWW.

I know I've seen a description of a wireless network that uses a truck, van, or bus of some kind to provide access to remote areas - I just can't locate it by searching.

As I recall, the vehicle visits the remote area, where it uploads and downloads information traffic, then returns to a site where it can up-link to the internet. It captures anything bound for the remote area, and makes periodic return visits. Maybe it was your project I'm remembering, Ben?

Aha - I think I've (re)found the project I was thinking about.

It's called "DakNet", or perhaps more descriptively, "drive-by wireless net access".

It involves a vehicle that passes through remote ares, uploading and storing in a cache all the net activity (email, web page requests, etc.) for the locations it passes, using a wireless set-up.

The vehicle then returns to a base station, where it uploads all the cached activity to the 'Net, and downloads results of previous activities into its cache, so that they can be downloaded to the remote locations on its next trip.

I think it's administered by First Mile Solutions, a division of United Villages, Inc.

Many thanks, John - I am back in England again, not having been able to raise the money for the ICT project. Inveneo have been wonderful supports, but we need around £15,000 for the pilot Coop ICT project.

I am also very conscious that we are asking a lot of the cooperatives to become international sellers overnight and even with a strategy to bring in QC testing, some investment in time, capital and training needs to be part of the mix.

The XO laptops thread has been interesting to watch, as clearly the children given these machines have thought them to be wonderful and their minds are being stimulated by all of this new this new technology content, which we take for granted.

Justifying ICT to the rural areas on a financial sustainability basis, where their spending power is so low is nigh on impossible. However, when one considers its human social impact, in stimulating brains, broadening horizons, joining up the technology jigsaw for some, there is much more reason to do this.

Also, how does "ability to pay" really stack up in the moral argument? In our society low income people are subsidised for essentials and I see no reason why internet should be restricted to the urban centres in Africa, where every person should have an equal chance.

Investment by the World Bank in cybercafes an internet bandwidth will only widen the gap again, as their loan funding will clearly be reliant on sustainability and the minimal grant funding available for rural ICT will surely be reduced to almost nothing by the World Bank opportunities taking precedence.

I am not, of course, giving up on this and USAID are looking at the project at the moment, but I would welcome any ideas people may have on getting some grant support for a project of this ilk.

Emeka Okafur has one of his extraordinarily hyperlinked posts up about Celina Cossa the organization she founded The General Union of Agricultural Cooperatives.

I would like to divert this thread a little into a more aligned and less general area.

I want Nigerian coops to sell shea butter internationally.

I have shea nut fields available in Kaduna state and possibly in Imo state and I have an interested UK buyer of shea butter, who wishes to buy from Nigerian cooperatives.

My plan is to raise funding under the Civil Society Challenge Funding banner, which is designed to help empower people in developing Africa who do not have a voice in their society.

I hope that the CSCF funding will help support this development with both capital and capacity-building resource.

Does anyone have a steer for us on the project?

>>Does anyone have a steer for us on the project?<<

Huh? Sorry, what do you mean?

I guess what I am looking for is some pointers to enhance the quality of the project - maybe some best practice, some useful links, some advice not to go ahead:)

Any views on the shea butter market would be interesting, as well as views on QC issues.

I'm interested too in project partners or supporters. One idea too is to set up a Nigerian Shea Butter Association.

>>I'm interested too in project partners or supporters. One idea too is to set up a Nigerian Shea Butter Association.<<

I know Susan Addy has brought some Shea Butter in from Ghana recently. Perhaps she could offer some of her experience so far. Maybe many local coops (locally owned) tied into a broader collective called African Shea Butter Association.

WRT best practices, lookin at Equal Exchange and what they've done in the coffee/chocolate space and coops could be interesting.