At first glance, El Limon in the Dominican Republic looks like any other Latin American mountain village at the end of a dirt road. It is picturesque, with thatched roofs and donkeys in the streets set against the rugged scenery. Behind the scenes, however, technology is breathing change into the village. The village communicates with the outside world using e-mail, farmers coordinate an organic agriculture project via the internet, children learn using CD-ROMs, and older children and adults have started back to school.

El Limon is an isolated farming community with just 350 citizens in the arid south-west of the Dominican Republic, and like many mountain communities lies beyond the reach of the national electric grid and telephone system. Villagers earn a living by producing low-value cash crops. The nearest telephone, until now, was in the small city of Ocoa, a half-hour drive from El Limon. Even there, postal service is marginal, and fax use is inconvenient.

See The Digital Revolution - Information and Communication Technologies for an overview on the global picture on ICTs.

Getting Connected

In 1997, an external organisation, EcoPartners, was working with the village to install a micro-hydroelectric scheme. A computer project was added to this cooperative development effort, with the objective of connecting El Limon to the internet when a planned mobile (cellular) phone link became available. However, the mobile phone service did not reach El Limon, and another solution had to be found.

In 1998, with a minimal budget, donated equipment and plenty of volunteer labourers, the villagers set about getting connected using FreeWave 900 MHz digital radios, to connect El Limon to its modem six miles away in Ocoa, via a hilltop repeater.

All photos are courtesy and copyright to Jon Katz

After some difficulty, including the necessary clearing of trees, the repeater was erected along with the serial line extension, antenna and battery. Theft was a potential problem, so it was placed in an iron box out of reach on top of a post. The repeater connected a village laptop to the modem at the nearest phone line, six miles away. This provided the village with full internet access, making El Limon the first isolated rural community in the Dominican Republic to have public internet access.

After the initial excitement, villagers overcame a limited education and lack of confidence and began using the internet as a functional tool to communicate with people and find useful information. The benefits were manifested quickly.

Milo Echavarria, a 30 year old farmer born and raised in El Limon, had always wanted to be a teacher, but his family was too poor to continue his education beyond the sixth grade at the village school. In two months, Milo taught himself the basics of Windows 95, and organised a series of computer classes that eventually introduced about a third of the village's residents to computer use.

E-mail enabled the villagers to build a direct relationship with development agencies. They have become self-reliant and able to secure further resources to develop the village whereas, in the past, the regional development agency had acted as an intermediary.
Internet became a major tool in providing informal education to teenagers and adults.
Teachers received constant requests about government, social and physical sciences, and various other topics. They are now able to distribute information from the web to villagers.
Outsiders, who tend to see e-mail access as vital, particularly if they are staying in the village for some time, are encouraged to undertake development work.
Farmers can access information to support their livelihood.

In total about one-third of the village's population (350 in total) have had at least some hands-on computer experience.

Recently the radio connection to El Limon was upgraded to broadband capacity using 'Wi-Fi' microwave technology. Originally designed to wirelessly connect computers in an office, Wi-Fi is increasingly finding its way into rural and developing-world situations, often in links of several kilometres. The hilltop repeater has been replaced with a commercial 'access point', and the radios in El Limon and Ocoa with 'client bridges'. This equipment is cheap and with some computer and radio experience is reasonably simple to install. It is approved in many countries for unlicensed use, since many users can share the same band. With the new broadband capacity, the wireless network will be extended to at least three more villages. Another benefit will be the installation of telephone services using the same radio infrastructure, allowing calls between the villages and on into the telephone network in Ocoa. Before Wi-Fi appeared on the market, radio equipment with this capacity would have been prohibitively expensive; now internet and telephone access are feasible in countless villages around the world.

Bringing About Progress

Building the centre

The skills of the computer-literate soon began to outgrow the traditional activities in the village. It was imperative to use these skills or face the possibility of migration to the cities. Dealing with this issue and capitalising on the new skills of the villagers, a Rural Alternatives Centre was built. The centre would employ village residents to produce educational materials using CD-ROMs, the web and video, in addition to traditional print media. Using funds from the InterAmerican Foundation and labour from the community, land was purchased and construction commenced in 2000. The rural centre has become the hub of multiple activities expanding the usefulness of information and communication technologies in El Limon, and the following activities are taking place which will spread their knowledge to other villages.

El Limon youth, with the help of a consultant, have prepared an introductory computer course to be delivered in other rural communities
The advanced students are teaching computer skills to villagers.
The village is using the technology to establish distance learning. The school in El Limon, like most of the rural Dominican Republic, only goes up to sixth grade (age 11), and few children can afford to travel to town to continue their education. The combination of internet and wireless networks is making regional distance learning networks technically and economically practical.
The internet project in El Limon will soon be extended to three nearby villages, and could grow into a demonstration project extending the network to many of the Ocoa region's 60 schools, with a distance learning classroom at the high school in Ocoa.
The network could provide basic teleconferencing as well as e-mail and web access at the schools.
Sale of regular telephone services will be tried as a way of partially subsidising the educational use of the infrastructure.
Recent developments in digital video technology have reduced the cost of a basic production set-up (including camera) below $3,000, making video production practical in low-income rural environments for the first time. The centre has produced a very successful video for other rural villages about El Limon's experience in building its hydroelectric system.

What Has Been Learnt?

Five years on, the Rural Alternatives Centre in El Limon, Dominican Republic, has provided community internet access in its own rural base community and has taken a major role in bringing internet access to five other villages. This experience has led to identification of the following major barriers to broader replication:

Most rural communities lack infrastructure for telecommunications and electric power.
It is much easier to obtain funding for infrastructure installation than for ongoing connection and maintenance costs.
Operating and maintaining computers can be very problematic for rural residents.
The laptop computers generally used for off-grid access are particularly difficult and expensive to maintain.
Commercial operating system and application software is expensive, difficult to maintain, and lacks flexibility.

(Source: http://home.earthlink.net/~jgk5/Proposal.htm)

In partnership with CRESP-EcoPartners Centre for Religion, Ethics, and Social Policy at Cornell University and CAREL, the rural centre is participating in delivery of the following rural access strategy, which is intended to accelerate the currently slow and expensive process of setting up internet connections in rural areas.

Start from existing clusters of 5-10 villages.
Use wireless networking to share one broadband Internet connection.
Maximise the connection's efficiency with a cluster server.
Design an appropriate village computer.
Use open-source software and generic hardware.
Pay for the internet connection by selling voice telephone calls.

Appropriate village computers would be built to these design criteria:

Very low power mainboard
Field replaceable, generic monitor, keyboard, pointing device
2-4 workstations per school
More than one workstation per cpu
Diskless operation (using flash memory and cluster-server disk storage)
Open source operating system
Basic software suite (office programs, web browser, chat, educational games)
Additional software downloadable from cluster server and/or flash cards
Simple software replacement and upgrading
Current target is 15 watts per user, due to limited electricity supply

The village clusters are typically within a couple of hours' walking distance, and linked by intermarriage, transit, and commerce. With an average of two computer workstations at each village school, there would be 10-20 computers per cluster. This is a comfortable number for sharing today's typical broadband connection (ADSL or satellite), and for connecting the villages by generic low-cost wireless networking technology. Generic wireless networking technology is cheap and reasonably reliable. It works well in the distances between villages in a cluster (under 10 km or six miles), and can be fairly easily extended to at least 25 km (15 miles) for an internet link using a nearby DSL or satellite connection.

Each cluster will have a server to manage the internet connection. This will include file caching and bandwidth shaping. The server will also provide a firewall, which blocks unwanted information getting into the network by filtering all information to determine whether to forward them toward their destination; and store files for the village computers, which are currently expected to be diskless workstations. The server will be located in the cluster centre, in the village chosen as the focus of the cluster's activities. This would generally be the most developed village in terms of road access, electric service or hydroelectric potential, educational level, and so on.

Youth from each participating village would come to the cluster centre to learn computer skills, and experience shows that every village has at least one or two bright, motivated young people who could learn the technology rapidly. Various technical elements are also addressed in the strategy, to reduce infrastructure and connection costs, and to lower the amount of technical support needed to keep a village computer running.

The project in El Limon is clearly a living example of how ICTs can transform a village, bringing livelihood, education and communication to even the most isolated of villages. What remains now is to continue building on their success, finding mechanisms to pay for shared internet connect and to harness the power of technology to more and more rural areas.

Acknowledgements

ITDG would like to Jon Katz from CRESP at Cornell University for helping to produce this case study.

Further Information

CRESP at Cornell University
E-mail: ecopartners@cornell.edu
http://www.sas.cornell.edu/cresp/ecopartners/
Project details and rural access strategy proposal
www.sas.cornell.edu/cresp/ecopartners/comp/NetCur.htm
Account by the villages of El Limon of installing the digital radio
www.sas.cornell.edu/cresp/ecopartners/updates/
Update.html

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/virtualvillages/
story/dom.rep/
Article by CNN about the project

Spanish website about the El Limon project
http://www.el-limon.org/

Technidata
http://www.technidata.com.mx/pdf/3com/
wl_B2B_bridge.pdf
Information about building to building bridges

Wi-Fi Alliance
http://www.wi-fizone.org/zoneFinder.asp

TVE/ Practical Action gratefully acknowledge support for the HANDS ON programmes from the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), the European Commission (EC), the UN Foundation and UNDP/The Equator Initiative in collaboration with the Government of Canada, IDRC, IUCN, BrasilConnects and the Nature Conservancy.