Smart Villages, Sustainable Well-being

Smart Villages for the Sustainable Well-being is a free satellite connectivity project promoted by the Ministry of Infrastructure, Communications and Transport of Mexico, for public places in rural areas or locations without telecommunication services coverage. The goal of this project is to promote digital access with sustainable and viable purposes to improve quality of life and well-being of the population and contribute with the achievement of the WSIS Action Lines and the Sustainable Development Goals.

It is a public policy model based on 4 phases:

1. Access: Connect public places with productivity projects of each location. The connectivity is provided by a satellite operator as compensation of the State Reserved Satellite Capacity.

2. Use: The productivity projects are related to the public places and impact economic, health, education, cultural and tourism sectors of each community.

3. Appropriation: Involve the growth of the economic, social and cultural activities based on connectivity, with the goal to generate innovative ideas for the improvement of the productivity projects.

4. Well-being: Allows the reduction of the social gap through enabling access to other human rights, such as health, education, work, etc., through the Internet service; those actions will be a contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals.

https://coberturauniversal.gob.mx/aldeas-inteligentes

• Mexico

• The poor
• Indigenous and nomadic peoples, migrants, Remote and rural communities, Women, Youth.

The Project is a public policy model that consists of a cycle of 4 phases. It starts with “access” which means internet service provision, that can be provided by any existing technology. What is relevant about the model is that connectivity is used for the purposes that the community chooses, considering productive projects that can be economic, educational, health, tourism and so on.

Therefore, Smart Villages, Sustainable Well-being is a model based on the real community network, so it can be replicated in any geographical area that is willing to join forces to make technology the enabler of its economic and social development.

Smart Villages, Sustainable Well-being promote, in the beneficiary communities, values of freedom, solidarity, equality, tolerance, responsibility and respect for nature, because it is the communities who choose the productive project to connect considering the greatest social and economic benefits, which are measured through indicators that are also designed by the communities themselves. With collaborative work, the values of the Information and Knowledge Society are promoted.