ICTworks by Inveneo

In the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake, Haitian citizens and the use of technology, particularly mobile and GIS technologies and social media, proved critical to response and recovery efforts. Ushahidi, NOULA, OpenStreetMap, and other volunteer-based efforts gathered data from multiple sources, including Haitian citizens, to produce timely information on the ground and around the world. Beyond the crisis, however, the work done by the open source software community and volunteer technologists has begun filling gaps in Haiti's outdated and incomplete spatial data infrastructure (SDI) - providing some of the most accurate and current information about Haiti's human and physical geography.

Thus, contrary to popular belief, I, Alexandra Morgan, believe that Haiti has tremendous assets that can be leveraged to rebuild the country. Among these are the aforementioned data gathered in the wake of the earthquake as well as an expanding technological infrastructure and technology-based services - personal computing devices, broadband networks, mobile telephony, etc. - and the Haitian people, the nearly 10 million of them who possess knowledge critical to making decisions about how to reconstruct the country. Unfortunately, to date, these resources - particularly the latter - remain largely untapped, underutilized, mismatched, or marginalized in reconstruction efforts.

Without question, reconstructing Haiti, in part, means restoring and improving education - which involves building schools. Yet, a host of unknowns exist that negatively impact the capacity of the Ministry of National Education and Professional Training (MENFP), or any domestic or international entity, to effectively improve the educational infrastructure. Mobile and open source GIS technologies and VGI present new opportunities for data collection and can play a key role in supplying needed data for school construction, renovations, and investments.

MENFP and partners, for example, could customize a standard questionnaire for schools to complete and submit via SMS or other electronic service, and engage the public to crowdsource information about schools in their areas, surrounding resources, and other types of information that cannot be captured through automated means (e.g. GPS or remote sensing) or due to resource constraints. As a starting point, this VGI can be combined and mapped with more credible i.e. verified sources, such as the breadth of data collected to map urban to rural migration as well as data related to the ever-changing Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) and spontaneous settlements that have reconfigured urban spaces.

Such an approach can at once begin verifying the credibility of the incoming VGI and help the Ministry visually begin to identify types and locations of various educational infrastructure needs. The Ministry and their partners then can use this information, along with other pertinent data, to determine candidate sites for new schools, and use the government's limited human resources, as well as those of their partners, to conduct more manageably in-depth assessments and analyses of sites to determine optimal locations.

The new data gathered and added to the spatial data infrastructure through this process would yield near- and long-term local and national benefits. In a sense, this approach would embed a sort of feedback loop whereby the existing SDI is used to inform the reconstruction process during which more data is created, collected, and added to the SDI, thus broadening it and making it more useful for further reconstruction.

Two years after the January 2010 earthquake, it's time to move beyond the crisis and towards an asset-based approach to reconstruction. GIS and VGI can be used to help establish a research-based framework that guides domestic and international reconstruction decisions and investment.

Position Summary:

Inveneo is seeking a Senior Technical Project Engineer who will be under contract to lead the continuing technical rollout for Inveneo’s Haiti Rural Broadband Program.

This position will require strong technical (networking), project management and relationship management skills and the candidate must speak fluent French. The candidate will report to the Program Director and also dotted line report to Inveneo’s CTO, who will lead the network architecture design.

Major Responsibilities:

Participate in the design of the Haiti backbone in close cooperation with and under the leadership of the CTO

Manage the deployment and stability of the Haiti backbone network based on program goals and key milestones set by the Haiti Program Director

• Contract and manage Inveneo in-country Inveneo Certified ICT Partners (ICIPs) to deploy and repair portions of the network backbone
• Perform quality checks on the network infrastructure deployed by partners
• Provide technical guidance and day-to-day responsibilities to in-country technical volunteers
• Quarterly reporting for the Haiti Connected Cities project (for network deployment)
• Manage equipment logistics and inventory management with Inveneo staff

Build capacity of local Inveneo ICT Entrepreneurs (the Inveneo BATI Program)

• Provide technical training to BATI in classroom (Phase I)
• Provide hands-on (Phase II) technical training to install customer links to service provider and Inveneo standards
• Train select BATI to perform low-power computing installations
• Create training materials and BATI installation documentation in French

Monitor and Maintaining overall health of Haiti Rural Network

• Ensure the technical quality of BATI and ICIP projects are to Inveneo standards
• Provide in-country second level technical support for the Haiti Connected Cities project. Proactively monitor and maintain the Connected Cities network.
• Participate in tool requirements and development (e.g. monitoring dashboard)
• Transition monitoring and maintenance to local Inveneo Certified Partners at the end of the program

Local Project Sales

• Share service provider connectivity leads and project leads to the responsible party at Inveneo or the appropriate Inveneo Partner in Haiti
• Play a technical advisory role for local computing projects

Read the details and apply today!

Closing the access gap with low-cost broadband service delivery models

Just 9.6% of the total population in Africa has access to the Internet. This is less than 1/5th and 1/6th of the rate in the Americas and Europe, respectively. But this statistic does not convey the real situation in the world’s poorest countries. Of Africa’s 48 sub-­Saharan countries, 29 (60%) have total Internet usage rates (at any speed) of less than 3%, and 15 (31%) show less than 1%. Broadband access rates are far lower still.

Thus, while wireless broadband has exploded in much of the world, as the ITU’s 2009 report points out, there remains “a dramatic broadband divide, with very few fixed broadband subscribers or mobile broadband subscriptions in Africa.”

Inveneo believes that closing the broadband gap will require new, collaborative and low-cost broadband service delivery models. Moreover, we believe that the essential components of such a model already exist; what’s needed is a well-conceived and coordinated effort to bring them together in a functioning service delivery framework.

In the Accelerating Broadband to the First Mile white paper, Inveneo and our partners are working to define and deploy a novel, locally sustainable wireless broadband delivery model, starting in Haiti.

The Inveneo­-led Haiti Rural Broadband (HRB) initiative is a collaborative program seeking to catalyze sustainable broadband access in underserved parts of Haiti. The program is founded on the idea that dramatic capital and operating cost savings can be realized through the use of ultra-low-cost wireless technologies, an emphasis on building local IT capacity to deploy and support broadband infrastructure and new approaches to cooperative network ownership and management.

HRB’s primary short-term objective is to bring affordable, reliable and sustainable broadband access to 6 regions and 20 currently un-served population centers across Haiti. The longer-term goal is to explore how the HRB model can be replicated in similarly rural and low resource areas across the developing world.

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The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Bureau for Management, Office of the Chief Financial Officer, has published a handy guide "Where does USAID's Money Go?" In that guide is a very interesting set of tables. Here are two that caught my attention:

USAID Top 10 Benefiting Countries (Obligated Program Funds) for FY 2010

1. $2,755,671,228 - Afghanistan
2. $1,351,634,685 - Pakistan
3. $701,379,625 - Haiti
4. $596,529,460 - Israel
5. $387,120,025 - West Bank/Gaza
6. $500,427,374 - Kenya
7. $462,877,610 - Sudan
8. $363,375,929 - Jordan
9. $350,258,089 - Ethiopia
10. $339,465,998 - Georgia

USAID Top 10 Vendors for FY 2010

1. $1,078,275,437 - World Food Program
2. $458,591,535 - Chemonics International, Inc.
3. $791,252,368 - Global Fund
4. $486,592,862 - Development Alternatives, Inc.
5. $432,468,295 - Partnership for Supply Chain Management
6. $418,408,445 - The Louis Berger Group, Inc.
7. $411,826,830 - International Relief and Development
8. $398,991,227 - John Snow, Inc.
9. $460,057,993 - IBRD/WBI
10. $341,205,619 - Academy for Education Development

The first table is surprising in Kenya's high ranking and Iraq dropping down to #16. The second table was surprising in that the World Food Program leads all other recipient organizations by $500 million USD. What of these tables or the report surprises you?