Connecting a displaced community in Colombia

Identifying opportunities for sustainable, community-owned connectivity solutions to transform lives, facilitate greater inclusion, and boost self-reliance. The first in a two-part series.

By Erika Perez, Innovation Officer

Challenge: Forcibly displaced communities face connectivity challenges, leading to low social inclusion, heightened vulnerability.

Innovation: Implementing a community network to break down connectivity barriers and build a better future.

At Colombia’s northernmost point, the turquoise Caribbean Sea meets a golden expanse of sand. This is La Guajira, one of Colombia’s 32 departments and home to the country’s largest desert. Multiethnic and multicultural, this narrow, seemingly barren promontory is enriched by the diversity of its inhabitants: Indigenous peoples (predominantly the Wayúu, for whom La Guajira is ancestral land), as well as Colombians of African and European descent.

To La Guajira’s east lies Venezuela, where ongoing social, economic, and political crises have prompted many to flee their homes. La Guajira is a natural entry point for the displaced — some of whom are ethnic Wayúu from across the border — and the number of arrivals over recent years has posed challenges to the already weak local infrastructure. Informal settlements have proliferated in areas where basic services are unreliable or nonexistent.

Tres de Abril is one of these settlements. Officially founded in Uribia — known as the indigenous capital of Colombia — on 3 April 2014, Tres de Abril grew slowly and today houses approximately 500 Wayúu families. For infrastructural and financial reasons, these residents struggled to access basic connectivity services via private operators, making it hard for them to communicate with loved ones or access ongoing regularisation processes to access, for instance, temporary protection status. The lack of internet access also prevented at least 250 children from continuing their education online.

Connectivity problems were holding this community back — limiting their self-reliance, preventing their inclusion in society, and amplifying their vulnerabilities.

Displaced people have the right to be part of a connected society and to have access to the tools they need to build a better future for themselves and their families. Addressing such connectivity gaps is a key goal of UNHCR’s Connectivity for Refugees efforts under the Innovation Service’s Digital Innovation Programme. Connectivity for Refugees not only aims to support better infrastructure in contexts of forced displacement but also to ensure that improved internet access results in better education, health, and livelihood development opportunities for these communities.

Having identified the connectivity challenges facing Tres de Abril’s residents, UNHCR — with the backing of the Digital Innovation Fund — started to explore the potential for community-led internet services in the settlement.

Finding the best possible solution for this community required, first, identifying the best possible partner. Enter Colnodo — a member of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), a local organisation brought to the table broad expertise in the design and implementation of community networks in Colombia.

With Colnodo on board, UNHCR set about leveraging existing partnerships with local organisations, like Hermanos Sin Condiciones, and brokering new ones — with Ericsson Response, which provided on-site technical support and networking devices, and the Siemens Foundation, which contributed equipment.

Consultations with Tres de Abril community members were vital to conceptualising and realising a solution that would work for them. With a bit of innovation — as well as the hard work of UNHCR staff on the ground, invaluable expertise from our local and international partners, and the generosity and insight of the community — the Weinüin Walapüin community network was launched in early 2022.

“Weinüin Walapüin” — or “weaving our dreams” in Wayuunaiki, the Wayúu language — conveys the main objectives of the network: beyond providing a lifeline, this project works to empower individuals, strengthen community, and promote Wayúu culture and traditions.

Why community networks?

Community networks are telecommunications networks owned and managed collectively by communities, operating on a not-for-profit basis and for community purposes. They often focus on supporting excluded groups — those who, like the residents of Tres de Abril, live in more remote areas without access to traditional infrastructure. This agile network model can find synergies with community structures and values, contributing to educational, economic, health, and political processes in order to meet communication needs.

Research published by the Innovation Service, undertaken in partnership with the Association for Progressive Communications, has found that specific benefits of community-led connectivity networks include increased local control over the network and content elaboration, creation of livelihoods opportunities, retention of more funds within the community (thanks to low usage costs and the income generated by residents working to support the network), and fostering a sense of agency.

Breaking down financial barriers

Community networks can address the need for internet services in places where more traditional connectivity is not commercially viable. Unlike commercial networks, community ones can start at a very small scale and enjoy a wider range of models for financial sustainability. For the Tres de Abril settlement — which was struggling with the unaffordable, unreliable services of local operators — a community network constituted a viable, sustainable option to facilitate digital inclusion.

While some community networks operate much like traditional commercial networks (with users paying fees to cover costs), others do what they can with volunteer labour, donations of equipment or bandwidth, subsidies from government and commercial sources, and geographical advantages (for instance, elevated features that can host towers and antennae). To make the network sustainable, all benefits it generates are reinvested in the maintenance and improvement of existing infrastructure and services.

From the community, for the community

Adopting a bottom-up approach, community networks require the active participation of communities in the design, management, implementation, and sustainability of the network. The existing community structure in Tres de Abril made an ideal foundation for this type of connectivity initiative. Socialisation sessions with community members about the project are essential to promoting its rapid acceptance. Identifying, early on, the community members who will be actively involved in the project is another key to success.

Becoming self-sustainable is one of the main objectives of community networks. After an initial accompaniment phase — with partner and implementing organisations walking alongside the community to establish the network — the community must then assume the maintenance of the infrastructure, operational expenses, and everything else necessary for its efficient management as a common good. This is made economically feasible through effective cost-recovery strategies, codesigned with community members, to cover all associated costs.

Promoting local culture and traditions

One of the main barriers to improved connectivity and social inclusion of marginalised communities is a lack of relevant digital content. Ensuring the relevance, accessibility, and community ownership of content can underpin the community’s early adoption of digital technologies and facilitate greater connectivity. Thorough engagement with community members and detailed analysis of community needs can guide the creation and dissemination of such content. An intranet, for instance, can allow community members to collectively produce content that promotes their own interests, values, culture, and traditions.

Weinüin Walapüin provides the Tres de Abril community the opportunity to co-create content drawing on and celebrating their rich Wayúu cultural heritage, ensuring the network offers spaces made with and for community members and enabling them to fully inhabit their role as free, sovereign, empowered, and creative subjects.

In the next post in this series, we’ll dive deeper into the different phases of the project and reflect on the learnings from this community initiative in Colombia.