So it was all the more shocking when, one sunny day last year, a military helicopter descended from the sky and disgorged Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and technology guru Nicholas Negroponte and American philanthropist Bernard Krisher. They had come to announce that something called the Internet had arrived at last in the village. “You probably will not understand what I am telling you today,” said Krisher over a squeaking public-address system, “but in six months you will.” The assembled crowd of sinewy, bare-chested farmers, who had no electricity or telephones, listened in fascination, and also befuddlement, as Krisher elaborated on the benefits of telemedicine and e-commerce.
Robib had just become the latest battleground in the war against the so-called digital divide. This is the discrepancy between rich countries, in which a third to half of the citizens have Internet access, and poor ones, in which one in a hundred do. By the United Nations’ tally, half the world’s population is shut out of cyberspace. For residents of most rural Third World villages, the chance of stumbling upon the Internet is zero.
In the past few years, scores of scientists and policymakers have begun trying to change this equation by linking up isolated villages in the developing world. They are motivated in part by the ready availability of grant money for the purpose. The United Nations is backing several Third World Internet projects. Hewlett-Packard recently announced an initiative to donate computers to such projects. The Soros Foundation is setting up Internet centers in Eastern Europe.
Cheap technology is another driver. It is now possible to package the computers, modems, solar panels and satellite-dish antennas cheaply enough to hand them out to remote villages. Researchers at MIT, for instance, have developed a high-tech remote Internet community center called LINCOS (Little Intelligent Communities). It is a discarded steel-shipping container stocked with computer equipment and dressed up with a nice white awning. In January 2000 MIT sprang the first unit on the Costa Rican village of San Marcos, and since then it has installed seven more in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic.
These programs have plenty of critics, who ask, “What is the point of giving computers to people who lack adequate food, and whose countries are being ravaged by AIDS and wars?” This argument, promoters counter, could also be used against literacy programs. And if developing nations don’t connect, they risk missing out on their share of the $7 trillion it’s estimated will be circulating in cyberspace by 2004. “We’re notsaying everybody should have a computer,” says Sarabuland Khan, director of the U.N. Economic and Social Council, which plans to raise $1 billion to deploy Internet hookups. “We’re talking about community access–a computer every three or four miles. A poor woman who is trying to get food might not need to use it. But the man who is taking care of that woman might need to use the computer for crop information, weather information or access to doctors.”
Internet access may allow some disenfranchised Third Worlders to bypass political turmoil and spotty infrastructure and join the global cybercommunity. The experiments are providing glimpses of what’s possible: medical consultations with big-city doctors, digital marketplaces where natives peddle their wares to wealthy suburbanites thousands of miles away and educational opportunities that help overcome ignorance and isolation. Since most programs are only now getting started, it’s too early to tell whether they’ll work. But it’s worth taking a look at how the first ones are faring.
A lot has happened in the year since Krisher and Negroponte came to Robib. Not far from the town center, a satellite-dish antenna sits on hard-packed earth. To keep away the water buffalo that graze at a nearby tree, the locals encircled the dish with a bamboo fence, as they might do for a shrine. A four-room brick schoolhouse sports twin solar panels on its roof. Inside, two personal computers have a 64,000-bits-per-second connection to the world at large.
In the past year Van Thavi, the farmer, hasn’t been able to find much time to log on. “I can’t understand it, and I’m too busy farming anyway,” he confesses. “But my kids love it, and I believe it will help them to get a better job. For years there were only two occupations for people in Robib: be a farmer or a soldier. Now I think our children will have more opportunities.”
“The Internet computer is the most interesting thing in the village,” says Prum Dara, 14, a farmer’s son. He and some 50 students, ages 10 to 16, huddle around the computers, horsing around like typical adolescents. The boys take turns at one computer, the girls at the other. At the moment, both groups are riveted by the same spectacle www.Thailandstar.com, a Web site showing seductive photographs of neighboring Thailand’s hottest movie stars, pop singers and models. “I know I can’t be a movie star,” says Meak Sok Daphin, 13, “but I love to look at the stars’ fashions and their lives.”
Tith Van Soeurn, a Russian-educated computer instructor recruited in Phnom Penh, admits it’s difficult to get the children away from celebrity sites. But that doesn’t bother him. The experiment, he says, is still in its early stages. At first the kids were reluctant even to touch the machines. Now they freely navigate the Net and send notes in English to students in Russia. “We don’t know much English,” admits Daphin. “But it’s fun just saying ‘Hi, how are you?’ to a foreigner by e-mail.” Souern plans to nudge them on to more academic pursuits.
Teens aren’t the only ones sending e-mail to foreigners. Recently villagers compiled health-related questions they’d always wanted to ask. “Can goiter be cured?” “Is there any trouble for people who have the typhoid and drink water with ice?” “What symptoms do men and women show who have HIV?” Then they e-mailed the questions to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Doctors replied to most of the questions. “It turns out when you’re sick and suffering anywhere in the world, you want to know the same kinds of things,” says Joseph Kvedar, a medical doctor and telemedicine expert at Mass. General. “If you have typhoid or malaria, for instance, you want to know if you can nurse a child. It’s not hard to make that information easily accessible.”
Unfortunately, the doctors also found that not all medical advice is so easily dispensed. A man with fever and back pain wants to know what’s wrong with him. A woman who has had headaches and vomiting spells for nine months wants to know what medicine she might take. Chhuon Sakon wants to know what he can do about a gaping wound in his heel he got back in 1979, when he stepped on a bamboo stake. It never healed, and now he is so weak he can barely walk and cannot work. “I hope the Internet will make me well,” he says. Without tests, however, Kvedar says there’s little he can do from afar. Sakon’s wound “could be any one of 20 things. But I’d say there is a 90 percent chance we could cure that if we had a health intermediary–somebody minimally trained to go in and get more information and get us some pictures.” A digital camera that costs $500 can capture microscopic images, which can be e-mailed to a hospital in Phnom Penh or directly to Boston. Kvedar is talking with Krisher (a former NEWSWEEK correspondent)–who created the Robib project and finances it through his charity, American Assistance for Cambodia–about providing the needed training and equipment. “It’s quite exciting,” Kvedar says. “Within a year we could be doing half a dozen cases a month in Robib.”
If the Robib project works out, replicating it in other villages won’t be easy. The government took nine months to grant Robib a waiver so it could bypass the telecoms monopoly. Then there’s the cost. The Robib project used mostly donated equipment, but MIT’s LINCOS projects ran up a $70,000 tab. Multiply that by the number of all the villages in the developing world, and you’re talking about huge sums. And what happens to a project when funds dry up? When water buffaloes breach the bamboo fence and trample Robib’s dish antenna, as they do now and then, who’s going to pay the repairman? Certainly not the locals, who on average earn $37 a year. One possible solution is e-commerce: using the Internet to bring in revenue. To this end, Robib women have begun relearning the art of silk weaving, which was lost when Pol Pot’s Army exterminated most of Cambodia’s artisans. In recent months they’ve begun to sell their scarves abroad.
The e-commerce experiment may get better traction in the coffee-growing region of Los Santos in Costa Rica. For almost a year now, schoolchildren and adults have been attending computer classes at MIT’s LINCOS trailer in San Marcos, learning the ins and outs of its six Internet-ready computers, fax machine, photocopier, color scanner and large-screen TV for teleconferencing. The goal is to give regional farmers–who produce $33.5 million worth of coffee a year, a fifth of the country’s output–access to markets abroad without the use of intermediaries. The Internet is “the marketing tool of the future,” says Carlos Vargas, the owner of coffee grower Beneficio La Familia, who has set up a company site, www.tarrazucafe.com. So far he’s the only grower to do so, but others plan to follow suit.
The private sector figures prominently in many other remote Internet programs now getting underway. The U.N. Economic and Social Council wants to induce private entrepreneurs to set up profitmaking telecenters in rural regions. “We will mobilize resources and create conditions that would attract the private sector in ways that will benefit poorer countries,” says Kahn, the director. To what extent he and others are successful remains to be seen.
Almost a year after the MIT project was unveiled with much fanfare in San Marcos, few children had begun experimenting with the Internet on their own. Fancy equipment for testing soil and water had sat idle. Telemedicine practices hadn’t begun. “Any time you are talking about a radical change in people’s mind-sets, it will be a slow process,” said Rosario Godinez, president of a local association that is implementing the new programs. Back in Cambridge, MIT researchers were touting the success of the San Marcos project at a fund-raising event.
Of course, it would be easy to heap criticism, even ridicule, on these early efforts. A million obstacles could, and probably will, snag these projects. Try telling that to Nguon Sophieng, a 16-year-old student in Robib. Several years ago she lost both her mother and her father to illness, and the relatives who took her in are chronically ill. The village’s telemedicine experiment piqued her interest. “I hope I can use the Internet to help sick people someday,” she says. A year after the helicopter landed so ostentatiously in Robib, Sophieng realized she’d found her calling.
