[UgaBYTES] Towards Village Information Entrepreneurship

[Belayet Hossain]

ASHIR AHMED
*One of the current problems is that there are few contents available that
really suit villagers at the Bottom of the Pyramid*

ICT today allows users to play active roles as information consumers,
producers and owners. However, people at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP)
have not been able to move much beyond the traditional role of passive
consumers of information. Many of the efforts to resolve this problem focus
on increasing villagers' access to facilities and on training in ICT use.
One of the current problems is that there are few contents available that
really suit villagers at the BoP. Villagers do not develop the actual
contents they use, nor do they own or profit from them. Yet it is the
villagers who have the most to communicate about their village, and it is
they who should own and profit from the information.

*The Grameen Communications Approach*
Our project at GCC (Global Communication Center) aims to build a model of
social information infrastructure (SII) where villagers can also be
producers and owners of village information. Rather than using high-tech
infrastructure and training, our model shows how villagers with their
current skill set and their own devices-can generate and broadcast
information. In order to bridge the gap between their capability and the
capability of their devices, a "BoP adaptation layer" is introduced in SII
model.

Recently GCC has conducted a series of surveys to understand the
requirements of villagers in terms of using ICT. The villagers surveyed are
Bangladeshis who are classified as belonging the BoP (Base of the Pyramid).
Among the findings of the survey, we observed that contents
are a major vehicle to popularize ICT. However, at present, there are few
contents available that really suit villagers at the BoP. We can gain
insight into why so few of the available contents really suit villagers when
we look at the answers to three basic questions:

1. Who developed the contents?
2. Who owns the contents?
3. Who profits from the content business?

Unfortunately, the word "villager" cannot be used to answer a single one of
the above questions. Yet it is the villagers who know more about their
village than anyone else, it is the villagers who can update the village
information earlier than anyone else, and it is the villagers who should
naturally own and profit from the village information. The traditional
explanation as to why villagers do not control their own information would
probably be that they are illiterate and lack other skills. Training
programs and literacy development should continue to be pursued, but does
giving villagers a voice in ICT need to depend on villager literacy,
especially in this high tech century? Villagers need ICT to spread their
voices. Indeed it can be argued that we need their voices as much as they
do. At GCC, the various projects aims more efficiently to achieve the MDGs
by seeing the villagers' world through their pictures and stories.

Our step towards finding a way for villagers to develop, own and commoditize
information is the One Village One Portal (OVOP) platform (Fig.1). The
platform is capable of handling 85000 portals for 85000 villages in
Bangladesh. However, we envision OVOP as a prototype for other BoP villages
around the world. While there are challenges to be faced before OVOP can be
widely used, our research team continues working to find creative solutions
to put, in Professor Mohammed Yunus' words, poverty and disadvantage in a
museum.

*Ashir Ahmed is Project Director, Global Communication Centre, Grameen
Communications, Dhaka. He can be contacted at ashir at grameen.com*

Regards,
-- 
Belayet Hossain
Online Coordinator
Bangladesh Telecentre Network (BTN)
http://mission2011.net.bd
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=597135861
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