This is a paper about the Rural Internet Kiosk and its objective for sustainable development to reach rural, remote, and isolated communities across the African continent. With the knowledge that nothing happens in a vacuum Intersat Africa and Voices of Africa for Sustainable Development are rising to the challenge to meet the information and communications needs of rural communities, using a multi-sectoral social business approach to achieve universal, affordable and equitable access through the implementation of the Rural Internet Kiosk. The Rural Internet Kiosk (RIK) is an independent, self-contained, 100% solar powered kiosk featuring three industrial design computer terminals, an administrator terminal, and broadband wireless Internet connectivity.

NTV has done a small feature on the Rural Internet Kiosk.

http://www.ntv.co.ke/News/-/471778/875910/-/view/DEFAULT/-/13v7ogwz/-/in...

Although they did not get the fact straight, it was nice to have media attention. Here are the basic facts: The Rural Internet Kiosk is the "brainchild" of Intersat Africa, an African internet service provider. Jawahar Patani is the creator of the RIK. To ensure implementation success, Intersat Africa has partnered with Voices of Africa for Sustainable Development to provide the programming and manage the project implementations. This implementation is being run by the local community based organization, Voices of Diani, a group completely comprised of local youth. Negotiations are underway with the Youth Enterprise Development Fund for a wider scale implementation as they seek to empower the youth by making the access to finance available for these small businesses.

Information and communications technologies have the power to change the way we practice both business and development throughout the world. The digital divide, defined by a lack of access to information for a specific population, symbolizes the largest difference between developed and developing countries: the opportunity to obtain and utilize information. The digital divide runs much deeper than hardware and software. The real heart of the digital divide is that those without access to information resources often suffer needlessly while the solutions to their problems are floating in the air.

Dear Friends,

I am glad to be able to write to you with good news. With the roll out of the Rural Internet Kiosks created by Intersat Africa, ICT in rural areas for long term sustainable development is closer to reality than ever before. VOA4SD’s work is finally gaining ground as we will be implementing a RIK in Msambweni Constituency at the Kwale local library with Voice of Diani, community based organization. This community based organization has been created and lead by youth with a desire to serve the community with emphasis on providing service to those infected and affected by HIV and AIDS. This project is funded by the Internet Society as part of its community grants program. This project is being implemented by Mariel, a volunteer who is working on her Master’s degree in Communications at American University, Jon, a US PeaceCorp volunteer specializing in Open Source software for development, Jeff, a US PeaceCorp volunteer who will lead the community training, and three leaders from the Voice of Diani CBO, Faith, Gideon, and Crispo. We are in the process of preparing the baseline study with implementation scheduled in the middle of February. Please keep looking to the website for more information and updates from our Msambweni team.

What is the VOA4SD Development Tag Team?

The Development Tag Team is made up of volunteers from any field studying any subject of any age who are willing to give a few moments of their time while searching online to add tags to good information sources.

The project is being done to create a Visual Tree of topics that are easy for rural Africans to utilize when searching for information from the Rural Internet Kiosks. If you are interested please send your name and email address to crystal@voicesofafrica.org and download the Delicious toolbar on your browser.