The end of the year approaching invites us to take stock of our collective work. This reflection allows us to appreciate the achievements, moments and gatherings around community-centred connectivity initiatives. For those committed to this work, we acknowledge these special moments to hear each other and to some extent address the challenges of the existing gaps in unserved or underserved territories. These snapshots and stories are nurturing a growing movement and create spaces that bring together people aligned with advancing the agenda on meaningful connectivity for grassroots communities.
In 2024, community-centred connectivity initiatives and multiple stakeholders have coordinated specific spaces of dialogue and have started to create common agendas around how to strategise and build an enabling telecommunication ecosystem for their communities. These agendas and strategies are taking into account each community’s realities, structures, scope, possibilities and potential. A diversity of activities are being developed in countries like Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, that involve convening communities, social organisations, small internet service providers, cooperatives, researchers, members of governments and regulators. Across these countries, various strategic focuses are seen as common: enabling regulatory environments and policy compliance, ownership of the decision-making processes by communities, empowerment through capacity building, peer-to-peer learning, the advancement of partnerships and innovative thinking around sustainability, and the promotion of the participation of women and other diverse groups.
But this is not the end of the year for us. At the global level, two opportunities remain for this growing work towards common agenda setting and to raise their voices even more: the AWID international Forum and the global Internet Governance Forum (IGF). Moreover, we will be working on a special edition of this newsletter for December to share updates on emerging developments aimed at strengthening and highlighting our community-led connectivity efforts.
Welcome to the 75th monthly round-up of developments impacting your local access networks and community-based initiatives.
The stories gathered in our Routing for Communities podcast narrate the experiences of communities forging their own paths towards meeting their connectivity needs and gaining access to technologies for their digital inclusion. Fostering women’s voices is a challenge for enhancing equity and inclusiveness for them.
We invite you to listen to some of these stories that address the intersections of gender and technology from the different journeys that led them to their commitment to the digital inclusion of their communities.
In episode 7, Daiane Araújo, from Casa dos Meninos, reflects on community-centred connectivity, gender, race and class and Luísa Bagope from Nodes that Bond focuses on the women’s circles and care. Listen to it here. This episode is also available in Portuguese, here. In episode 8, Harira Wakili reflects on women’s empowerment and Josephine Miliza reflects on the importance of women in building and enabling policy and regulation. You can listen to it here. And in episode 11, you can learn about the pioneering adventure of Professor Kanchaná Kanchanásut, who took the internet to Indonesia, by listening to it here.
We hope you enjoy these inspirational stories of women in pursuit of digital inclusion for their communities. You can also learn from women’s participation in the other episodes of the podcast series.
The Routing for Communities podcast is available on this page, as well as on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The first season features 12 episodes, describing experiences of communities from around the world.
This repository is a collective online space to store and exchange resources that can be useful in training processes, focused on materials made for and by community networks.
In this issue we invite you to consult Technological autonomy as a constellation of experiences, a guide to collective creation and development of training programmes for technical community promoters.
The guide shares practical recommendations for the implementation of relevant and contextualised training programmes for technical community promoters that favour the creation and consolidation of community communication and telecommunications projects, especially for community networks. The methodology proposed is that followed by the National Schools of Community Networks. The team that gathered these experiences and developed the methodology aimed for the guide to serve as “a call to continue weaving technological autonomy by sharing our experiences and knowledge in these training programmes.” It is available in Spanish, English, Portuguese and French.
We renew the invitation to share on this platform any resource in any language that you or your organisation have developed for capacity building of communities for their digital inclusion.
Find out more!
This newsletter is part of the Local Networks (LocNet) initiative, an initiative led by APC in partnership with Rhizomatica that aims to directly support the work of community networks and to contribute to an enabling ecosystem for the emergence and growth of community networks and other community-based connectivity activities in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. You can read more about the initiative here, here, and here.
Previous editions of this newsletter are available here.
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Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 2024.
Unless otherwise stated, content on the APC website is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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