UK charity Computer Aid International has created a portable, solar-powered cyber café to help rural Africans get online.
You probably take your Internet connection for granted these days. Every morning, you grab a cup of coffee and log on to check out your latest email, the weather, your Facebook page, and the news (including Gimundo, of course). If you need to look up a fact, Google can help you find thousands of pages on your topic of choice. And thanks to communications services like Skype, you can talk to relatives on the other side of the world without paying a cent for the privilege.
But for people who live in rural Africa, it can be much more difficult to stay connected to the rest of the world, or even to talk with relatives in distant villages. Only 5 percent of Africans have Internet access—a stark contrast to the 74 percent availability in North America.
Thanks to UK-based charity Computer Aid International, more Africans may soon have the chance to log on to communicate with friends and family, take advantage of research opportunities, and learn about current events. The organization has just completed a prototype of a portable solar-powered cyber café, made from a 20-foot shipping container with built-in solar panels.
On March 30th, the cyber café was delivered to Macha, Zambia. It’s equipped with a client network of 11 monitors using a Pentium 4 PC. “At the far end of the container, there is a counter and you pay the man there for access to the Internet,” Computer Aid International’s CEO, Tony Roberts, told eWEEK Europe UK. “Users can also charge their mobile phones, and there are ten workstations that the user can sit at. The entire operation is powered by the solar panels on top of the sea container.”
While the prototype is intended for individual use, there are countless possibilities for organizations, as well. “This concept is suited to a wide variety of uses, such as emergency relief uses, where connectivity is required at short notice,” said Roberts. “It can also be used in schools, or MPs dealing with their local constituents, as well as rural hospitals to provide online training for health workers for example.”
So will we see rural Africans creating Facebook accounts too? It could well be—though we’re pretty sure they’ll be too busy with their real farms to spend much time playing Farmville.