Shifting power through community-led connectivity
When digital access lies in the hands of users
By Alice Schaus, Associate Regional Innovation Officer, UNHCR Innovation Service
Have you ever had the feeling of being thrown into the deep end of a pool?
That’s how I felt when after one week of working with the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) Innovation Service, I attended the Internet Society’s fourth African summit on community networks in Dodoma, Tanzania. New to the topic, I turned to the internet to fill gaps in knowledge and attempted to put together a general understanding of what community networks are and why a whole summit was dedicated to them. Defined as “telecommunication infrastructure deployed and operated by citizens to meet their own communication needs”, community networks represent an alternative way of providing internet access to local communities, one that involves their active participation and which is often said to be inclusive and more effective in providing connectivity to otherwise hard-to-reach people or locations.
Rather than a top-down approach where a large telecommunication companies provide connectivity to a local community, a community network is usually governed by a community based organization which ensures that the community needs are met. As a result, prices for connectivity are often a lot lower than those offered by existing operators and the service adapted to the context.
Despite the broad definition, these decentralized and “do it yourself networks built by people for people” sounded like an interesting solution, or a different one at least, to internet provision as we know it today: a service that benefits most but still leaves out many because of cost, availability and other issues that can limit access.
I started imagining the potential of community networks in situations of forced displacement. What if refugees would self-organize and be able to run a network in places where companies don’t provide service, or the service is too expensive and leads to exclusion?
Hands-on community networks
Operating a community network requires more than some technical skills and the idea of the summit was to create a platform to collaborate, share resources and exchange practices among participants. In the group — over 130 people from 19 countries — 24 already operating commuting networks were represented and this complemented the ‘curious’ and ‘keen to know more’ ones in the crowd. Certain things are learnt best first-hand and this seemed to apply to community networks. Rather than focusing on the engineering side of things, the discussion focused on scale, sustainability, regulatory barriers and other factors that can hinder access. How can civic networks become sustainable? Is scale a desired outcome or a contradiction to the very essence of community networks? Are these networks inclusive and accessible as they claim to be? What are the policies and regulatory assistance required for community networks to thrive?
Impressed by the energy and enthusiasm in the room, I traveled back to Nairobi with a lot of new ideas and thoughts on how the Innovation Service could contribute to the community network movement.
What’s next?
Often what matters most to a conference or workshop is what comes after and how you can invest in the learnings and people you encountered along the event. If four days were far from being enough to learn everything about community networks, what became immediately clear is that the power of community networks lies in more than just a simple telecommunication infrastructure which is built and operated by citizens. Community networks could be a tool for communities to grow and develop, take ownership of the infrastructure, and shift a discourse very often focused on technology to put people where they should be: at the centre of the technology making process.
UNHCR’s Connectivity for Refugees initiative explores how to work with communities to improve access, inclusion and participation of refugees in the digital space. However, recognizing the importance of refugees in defining and shaping solutions to their own challenges is one thing, putting this into practice is another. Surprisingly, none of the projects supported by the initiative had worked on community networks so far.
For UNHCR’s Innovation Service, the journey to community-led connectivity seemed to have just begun. After the summit, we initiated a partnership with the Association for Progressive Communication (APC) to conduct an initial scoping assessment and research the applicability of community networks in refugee settings in East Africa. We also visited a local community network in Kenya, and had a workshop to see how community members can actively participate throughout the research process, the design and piloting of this connectivity model in 2020.
Community networks seem to be one of the most obvious examples to illustrate what innovation can look like when it comes to digital connectivity. The community networks’ approach to connectivity is not innovative due to its technology components, but rather because of how the model can help us rethink the way networks are governed, the power imbalances that are ingrained into this process, and the role of communities in this shift.
My question about a future where refugees would self-organize and be able to run a community network is still there but somehow it seems less far-fetched than the first time it crossed my mind.
