This is a paper about the Rural Internet Kiosk and its objective for sustainable development to reach rural, remote, and isolated communities across the African continent. With the knowledge that nothing happens in a vacuum Intersat Africa and Voices of Africa for Sustainable Development are rising to the challenge to meet the information and communications needs of rural communities, using a multi-sectoral social business approach to achieve universal, affordable and equitable access through the implementation of the Rural Internet Kiosk. The Rural Internet Kiosk (RIK) is an independent, self-contained, 100% solar powered kiosk featuring three industrial design computer terminals, an administrator terminal, and broadband wireless Internet connectivity.

What is the VOA4SD Development Tag Team?

The Development Tag Team is made up of volunteers from any field studying any subject of any age who are willing to give a few moments of their time while searching online to add tags to good information sources.

The project is being done to create a Visual Tree of topics that are easy for rural Africans to utilize when searching for information from the Rural Internet Kiosks. If you are interested please send your name and email address to crystal@voicesofafrica.org and download the Delicious toolbar on your browser.

What if we continue with the web portal idea for web design (referenced in an earlier post of mine), and make it bigger, expand it.  The web design portal serves a very specific purpose: it connects people who need to get their information out (the CBOs and NGOs) to the people who can do that (the local web designers and developers), which subsequently gets the CBOs and NGOs connected to the people with the ability to provide funding or volunteers or whatnot.  The web portal will provide a mass hub to enable an e-commerce explosion in the development-support world.

First off, let me apologize if you have already read an article about Botnets in Kenya, and their potential growth do to the new fibre optic data cables that are landing and coming live (however so slowly).  I want to put a spin on it, though not a large one.  As this website's mission is to empower the people of Kenya, and Africa, to be heard on the internet, a direct result of this is teaching people basic internet skills.  Teaching internet skills means empowering people with internet connections, which are set to become inexpensive and abundant in Kenya if all of the political and corporate wrangling over the data cables eventually dies down.