Almost half of Tanzania population remains unconnected to benefit from the current digital economy with the current traditional Internet access approaches. A study that was carried out by Research for ICT Africa (RIA) in Tanzania reported that 86% of rural dwellers remain unconnected to the Internet services (RIA, 2017). RIA further reported that when comparing Internet access in term of gender then fewer women than men have access and use of Internet in Tanzania. This project has been designed to build a pilot using TV White Space equipment as a community network solution to bridge the identified Internet access gap between rural and urban areas.

A population of about 2,287 people is served by this project. Three Educational Institutions are involved. They are located about 160 km from Dodoma with limited access to Internet services. Kondoa Girls High School has a population of 810 students and 46 staff members. The maximum bandwidth capacity that has been achieved is 4.70 Mbps for download and 4.75 Mbps for upload. This is a remarkable speed for rural dwellers. The project gives students and teachers access to online resources to support their learning. We aim to improve the life of rural communities also to reduce the migration to urban areas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hFwjvZod9s

• Kondoa District - Tanzania, United Republic of Tanzania

• Women
• Remote and rural communities

The lesson learned from this project can replicated in other areas facing Internet and gender gaps. It will also help to improve the community network concept in real environment sharing similar geographical features. The use of TV White Space technology can be recommended to various locations especially in developing countries with limited Internet access and sparse population density where commercial internet service providers does not see values.

The network will be owned and operated by community-based secondary schools in Dodoma Region. In order to sustain the project, various sustainability models will be used including:
1. Engaging Universal Communication Access Funds (UCSAF) in Tanzania.
2. Leveraging on Ujamaa (socialism) concept where a certain group of people can pay for Internet services to benefit those who are not able to pay for the service.
3. Host schools will be encouraged to allocate funding for Internet services from various economic generating activities.
4. Introduce solar power solution to serve community members around host school as an alternative source for income generation.

This projects addresses several WSIS values for example GOAL 5: Gender Equality and GOAL 4: Quality Education. According to Research ICT Africa statistics, 86% of rural dwellers remain unconnected to the Internet compared to 44.6% in urban areas. Moreover, when the comparison is based on gender, fewer women than men have access to the Internet. This project provides a solution proposing to decrease the digital divide between rural and urban areas. The deployed network helps the connected schools to access online educational resources and help to improve student-book ratio using the installed high-speed Internet connection