Internet from on high

Just connecting people up won’t empower them, says Aviva Rutkin WHAT will it take to get the developing world online in a meaningful way? Simply hooking people up to the internet may not be enough. Last week, news emerged that Facebook will shell out $60 million  for Titan Aerospace, a company in Moriarty, New Mexico, that builds  high-altitude, solar-powered drones. Facebook intends to deploy the company’s Solara 60 craft to provide wireless internet access in remote areas. It follows on the heels of company founder Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement last year that he and other major tech firms plan to connect up “the next 5 billion people” through the internet.org partnership. It’s a noble aim. People  who  cannot use the internet are at a  huge disadvantage when it comes to acquiring knowledge and skills. Some countries, such as France and Greece, have formally declared internet  access to be a basic human right. But asking how people will get online – be it via drones or highaltitude balloons, as Google’s Project Loon aims to do – may not be as important as asking how they can make the most of the internet once they are online. “Providing access isn’t everything,” says Ken Banks, a software developer in Cambridge, UK, who builds mobile products to suit the needs of users in the developing world. “Clearly, anyone building any kind of service there needs to understand their end user, economically and socially. Quite often people charge ahead and build things that simply don’t work because they haven’t taken the time to do this.” One problem is whether users can take advantage of online commerce, “ Millions of people in Africa have a way to pay but cannot use it to access the merchant sites that exist” given that in many parts of Africa, for example, people are unlikely to have a credit card, let alone a PayPal account or Bitcoin stash. In Kenya and Tanzania, a mobile payment system called M-Pesa has filled the gap. It allows people to store and exchange money using just their cellphones. However, most websites don’t allow you to pay with M-Pesa and are unaware of its very existence. Later this month, the World Wide Web Consortium will hold a workshop Watch as world’s first 3D-printed house appears–Will surfing really take us places?in Paris, France, to explore the issue. The goal is to find efficient and secure ways to make online payment available in the developing world. “You can open the world of online commerce to these hundreds of millions of people in Africa, who have  a way to pay online but cannot use it to access the merchant sites that exist,” says Stéphane Boyera, an information technology consultant and one of the workshop’s organisers. In short, high-flying projects aren’t going to lift millions of people out of poverty without addressing the challenges that apply to them particularly. Only by involving local people can start-ups and innovation hubs build products that will ultimately make connectivity meaningful. Kurtis Heimerl, a graduate student who works on technology for the developing world at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees. His team has built low-cost cellular towers in places like rural Papua New Guinea, and makes a point of holding community meetings to hear locals’ thoughts and ideas before proceeding. “You need to know the community you’re building for before you can build things for the community,” he says.