Fascinating. At 12:26 PM +0000 12/02/2004, Pamela McLean wrote: > - Early 2002 CAWD UK (me - Pamela McLean) came across Biodesign (Graham > Knight) on the internet. http://www.biodesign.org.uk
We (The microPower Initiative, in India) are also in touch with Graham (through the Net) and have adopted some of his ideas and look forward to working closely with BioDesign going ahead. > - 2003 CAWD started to link with RUSEL (Victoria Adetona, also in > Oke-Ogun, via OOCD) and Fantsuam Foundation (John Dada, also in rural > Nigeria, but further north <http://www.fantsuam.com/> via the > Internet). RUSEL and Fantsuam Foundation (FF) both have experience of > successful micro-credit schemes. Fantsuam had contacted us (Radiophony) maybe a year ago for assistance in starting rural radio station projects. If they are still interested, so are we, and with TmPI's associated work with Graham, I think we can now talk in terms of self-sufficiency for electricity too, essential for the broadcasting side. Basically, I am of the philosophy that development cannot take place sustainably unless it involves and engages the people of the area where development is sought. Certainly, such people are quite unlikely to welcome ICT's unless they are sufficiently exposed to the advantages of gathering and sharing information. The ethos of information is one of the facets of human society that is lost in the economic divide, and this is I think a major reason that there is often a gap between the efforts people put in to help themselves, and that put in by groups of external facilitators and contributors. This may also be a major reason that ICT investments in themselves do not reliably deliver a measurable ROI. Radio has some advantages, as an introduction to pre-ICT. Micro-radio (my own area of interest) is exceedingly cheap - so much so that damaged transmission equipment (it is electronics, after all) can be very easily replaced outright (see www.radiophony.com for a circuit diagram that can be constructed for less than two dollars in India). Micro-radio (a few hundred meters in radius) is so very local in nature, it almost naturally generates simple methods for changing the communication paradigm to many-to-many (from the one-to-many of traditional broadcasting). Micro-radio can be powered by very cheap solar photovoltaics, and combined with rechargeable batteries, brings the unit cost of electricity to extremely affordable levels, while making it universally available (see the BioDesign website). The audio medium is completely language independent, and is also (alone among media technologies) literacy independent. This is true both for audio programme producers as well as listeners. Audio programmes can be easily designed and disseminated for local production. Production equipment can be sourced from just a handful of dollars upward (as expertise and demand for complexity of programming increases). Simple audio programmes can be used to whet the appetite and the desire for information. Self-help facilitators can pro-actively encourage people to take charge of their own lives. -- Vickram ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
