[OLPC India] [Fwd: [APC Forum] One Laptop Per Child - Solar Powered in Senegal]

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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [APC Forum] One Laptop Per Child - Solar Powered in Senegal
Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2008 10:51:38 -0700
From: Mark Graham <mgraham at mail.ivillage.com>
Reply-To: A general information sharing space for the APC Community. 
<apc.forum at lists.apc.org>
To: apc.forum at lists.apc.org

I am at a "meetup" in San Francisco:

http://www.olpcnews.com/use_cases/user_groups/olpc_san_francisco_meeting_august.html

About to learn more about a project in Senegal using Solar Powered
Wi-Fi and OLPC devices for education.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/16/BUA712BH1O.DTL

Solar-powered Wi-Fi a gift to Senegal
Deborah Gage, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, August 16, 2008

(08-15) 20:27 PDT -- By day, Bruce Baikie works at Sun Microsystems
as an engineer specializing in telecommunications.

On nights and weekends, however, he has a side job - a small company
that he started called Green Wi-Fi, where all the employees,
including himself, are volunteers.

They work to bring the Internet to schoolchildren in small, remote
villages around the world - children who don't always attend school
and who live with intermittent or no electricity and who may have
never seen a computer.

"We're just engineers and software people out of Silicon Valley, with
mortgages to pay and kids in school," he said. "But we want to do
something besides sell products to the West - more than just the next
gizmo that goes on a cell phone."

Green Wi-Fi is developing solar-powered, wireless antennas for
laptops that are specially designed to handle the dust and heat and
other inconveniences of life in remote areas.
In May and again in June, Baikie went to Keur Sadaro, a village in
Senegal, to try to get laptops donated by the One Laptop Per Child
project hooked up to the Internet. The laptops are also solar-powered.

That effort was only partially successful: In New York, the
Transportation Security Administration held up his Wi-Fi solar units
because, he said, "They saw this thing with battery connections and
circuit boards and wouldn't allow it on the flight." In Senegal,
meanwhile, customs seized the laptops and wanted $5,000 in import
taxes. After two days of meeting with officials, Baikie said, he got
to a manager who understood the project, gave Baikie his business
card and let the laptops go. Also, the solar charging station isn't
finished, due to problems with the local telephone company, so he
will return to Senegal in September.

Still, obstacles are routine when Westerners try to bring computing
to developing countries, and Baikie has plenty of people he can rely
on to help him out.

He is one person in an ad hoc network of people in the Bay Area -
high school students, university professors, Silicon Valley engineers
and marketing specialists - who believe so strongly that the Internet
and computing will change the world, because anybody now can use
computers to start a business or help an organization solve local
problems, that they are devoting their time and money to make it
happen.

"This is so close to our hearts and so important that we're stepping
out of the high-tech startup field" to do this, said Mark Summer, the
co-founder and CEO of Inveneo, a San Francisco nonprofit that gets
computers into sub-Saharan Africa.

Summer calls Baikie a friend and said the two plan to work together
when Green Wi-Fi's technology is more widely available. Now, all the
antennas are built by hand, Baikie said, but soon they will be
produced in volume in Taiwan.

In the project in Senegal, the village school, which is also a health
clinic, was built by high school students from two San Francisco
schools - Drew School and Lick-Wilmerding High School - who saw Green
Wi-Fi's Web site and asked Baikie for help.

Working under the direction of the village elders, the students
refurbished a building that had been abandoned by the Peace Corps,
digging trenches and laying pipes for running water and installing
solar panels on the roof so computers can charge at night, said Sam
Cuddeback, Drew's headmaster.

Drew's relationship with Keur Sadaro began three years ago because a
French teacher at the school, Daouda Camara, grew up in Senegal in a
neighboring village. At first, the idea was to have students visit
and share cultures, Cuddeback said, but now they do community
service. The students plan to return to Senegal for two more summers
to help the village build a library, start businesses and bring light
to public places - using solar energy, of course.

"It's amazing to watch (them) from a distance, the enormous growth,
the sense that (they) can make a difference as a kid," Cuddeback said.

Meanwhile, Baikie's managers at Sun Microsystems have "bent over
backward" to give him time to work on the project, Baikie said, and
he's recruited other Sun employees to help.
Today, he will ask for help from the One Laptop Per Child user group
at San Francisco State University.

Although the computers in Senegal have already made an impact - more
children in Keur Sadaro are attending school now, he said, because
their parents think it's important - he needs help loading the
network with curriculum in French, which the students speak.

Some day, Green Wi-Fi might make money. Baikie has incorporated it
and applied for a patent on the technology. But money isn't his goal.

He hears from people all over the world about projects that could use
Green Wi-Fi, and he said he finds great satisfaction in giving people
tools they can use to help themselves. "If you do it for them," he
said, "nothing ever changes."
-- 
================================================================

Mark Graham

SVP, iVillage Inc., an NBC Universal company
GM, Astrology.com

http://www.ivillage.com

Office: (415) 447-6193 Ext. 830 * Cell: (917) 697-0110
================================================================

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