Rural internet - offline but still connected

United Villages realised its services needed to help villagers generate or save money. So it began to sell email subscriptions to jobs databases and offered travel booking. Later it began a service called “infoguru”. A villager submits his question to an infoguru in the city via email. The guru searches the web and returns an answer in a pdf in the inquirer's local language.

More recently, the organisation has branched out into e-shopping. Villagers can consult a catalogue at the computer kiosk, wirelessly order goods they would normally travel to the city to buy, and have them delivered back, often on the next bus.

This has been incredibly successful, says Hasson, particularly for local businesses that can now buy goods cheaply and not lose revenue while they travel to the city. For every US$1 that United Villages makes, says Hasson, its customers save an average of US$1.34.

But little of what United Villages now does is about the Internet, and none of it is about the web, says Hasson. It's more about creating a useful local digital network.

"We're building a digital channel to a very difficult to reach population," he says, adding that his organisation has changed tack from an "Oh we came up with this cool technology, now let's get people to use it" approach to "What is it that people actually want and need that this technology can address?"

The real disappointment, he says, has been that the web is irrelevant to so many people. "[The web is] almost all in English and the content is not local to [the villages] for the most part. There are not a lot of sites that cater for the interests of these communities."

Schools get connected

But if the adult population can’t see a use for the Internet, schools can. The web offers a variety of educational resources, and learning how to use the Internet and ICTs should benefit children's future careers, says Dave Wood, systems engineer for the US non-profit organisation Wizzy Digital.

In rural KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, Wizzy Digital has helped six schools set up Internet access, either with their digital courier option (employing a USB memory stick) or with delayed dial-up.

Using relatively old - often second hand - cheap computers linked to a single server using technology known as a "thin client" system, some humble apparatus has been used to great effect.

With delayed dial-up, schools with a telephone Internet connection can send stored emails and download the material they need at night, then work offline during the day.

Approximately 200MB of data - about 40,000 text-only emails or 1,600 web pages - can be downloaded overnight for about seven South African rand (about 70 US cents).