Faculty Advisor: Eric Brewer, Computer Science

Researchers:

• Claudio Ferraz, Agriculture and Resource Economics, PhD
• Rodrigo Fonseca, Computer Science, PhD
• Joyojeet Pal, City and Regional Planning, PhD
• Manisha Shah, Agriculture and Resource Economics, PhD

The first part of our project has been to study the landscape of projects in the area of computing training and Internet access for underserved areas. In the second, phase, spread over 20 days, we studied one specific organization CDI, in great detail, a project that will include population surveys. We started our work with the Gemas da Terra group, operated by a former NASA engineer Marco Figueiredo, who has been living and working in rural Brazil for a few years now. Starting from Belo Horizonte, we went by various shapes of roadway to Curvelo, Diamantina, Rodeador, Conselheiro Mata, Sao Goncalo, Milho Verde - the last four very remote and accessible by private bus lines that run once a day.

The Gemas da Terra group aims at facilitating the creation of free telecentres in rural communities with less than 2,500 inhabitants. The five locations with GDT projects include the four mentioned and Tombadouro, which we were unable to visit. All are in the state of Minas Gerais in South East Brazil. The program received the support from the Ministry of Communications in Brazil and received the donation of broadband Internet access via satellite, as part of the GESAC Programme in Brazil. GESAC: "Governo Eletrônico - Serviço de Atendimento ao Cidadão" (Electronic Government - Citizens' Support Service - GESAC) was an effort to set up thousands of public access terminals in Brazil. At present, the GESAC program is expected to support the telecenters it has started work with for at least 2 years.

UNESCO, through its Office in Montevideo, Uruguay, has supported the pilot project by donating PCs and an all in-one-printer to four of the five telecentres, as part of the UNESCO Free Community Telecentre Network. Similar UNESCO donations exist for projects in Paraguay and Argentina. There is no information yet on whether the agency plans to continue supporting this project, though it does have a separate program to foster digital inclusion. One other major source of free computing equipment, similar to this initiative, is that of the Banco do Brasil, one of the major Brazilian banks, which will be giving away about 50,000 computers to potential users through a program of donating old PCs being changed for upgraded machines for their office.

There is by now a fairly significant movement for telecenter development in Brazil, led by a number of different agencies working in cities or rural areas. Following our field trip in Minas Gerais, we went on to Sao Paulo to a telecenter conference where we found tens of other similar initiatives in other states in Brazil and all over Latin America.

Gemas da Terra (Gems of the Earth), has been working specifically in the villages of Minas Gerais (the state is known for the ample precious stones mined here). After a 6-month process of surveying villages in the region, Marco Figueiredo picked 5 villages as the points where he would put up the telecenters. These were selected based on their demographic profile (at least 1000 people, but less than 2500), level of community organization (a certain number of groups in each village interested in the project), and a dedicated core group of volunteers interested in active operation of the project.

All the villages each had some form of tele-communications access. One village had no private landlines, though there were people who had improvised, by attaching cell phones to large antennas. Each village had electricity, and even when private phones were not available, we found television access (and satellite TV antennas) to be very widely prevalent. The general community gathering places seemed to be the bars, which were quite plentiful even in the smallest villages.

Schools were very well kept and efficiently organized in the towns we visited. One village had a sizeable boarding school (200 years old) for locals and children from nearby villages, the facilities were excellently maintained, and the students' quarters were well taken care of. The same applied to a day school visited in another village - neither school was intimated of our visit. The schools use A/V material to instruct the children, but the use of computers has not become ubiquitous yet, and most of the children (ages up to 15) were not computing-literate. The school curriculum did not have a separate computing topic. All four villages visited had some connection to a school nearby, two had faculty members directly involved in the operation of the Gemas da Terra telecenter.