kafui.com

The oneVillage Foundation, Ghana team (led by Kafui) is working as part of an Africa wide Wireless networks initiative spearheaded by Meraka Institute (Center for Scientific and Industrial Research) of South Africa (http://www.meraka.org.za/) called the Wireless Africa project. Website - www.wireless-africa.org. The project funded by International Research Development Center (IDRC) of Canada, has the underpinning philosophy of developing business models that support community owned networks whereby the infrastructure is owned and/or operated locally…….and traffic aggregated at the community level to save cost through bulk purchase of bandwidth. The aim of the project is to research different business models and technologies that will overcome obstacles to achieving economic sustainability for Community Owned Information /Wireless (COIN) and VoIP Networks.

So far, the ten participating countries around Africa have benefited from 3 workshops being the

• Kick Off Workshop in Merak Institute, South Africa, June 08
• Outcome Mapping Workshop, Winneba Open Digital Village, Ghana, August 08
• Technical and Business Workshop, Colonial Guest House, Irene, Centuriom, South Africa, November 08

The project facilitated by the Meraka Institute, IT46 (http://www.it46.se/) , KwantuMedia and Wire.less.dk (http://wire.less.dk/) is expected to be completed in 2010.

Its exciting to see participation from these ten (10) Africa countries (http://www.wireless-africa.org/partners/projects) and the knowledge that has begun to be shared. We foresee the formation of an African Wireless Alliance called the “Wireless Africa Alliance” which has already been accepted by the participating teams at the Tech. and Biz. workshop in November. As a member of the steering committee with Houda (Morocco), Muroro (Zimbabwe) and Ochuko (Nigeria), I foreseee the realisation of this vision as a process leading to the attainment of the MDGs and especially the Universal Access Declaration.