Microsoft: Using Innovation to Bridge the Digital Divide.

Microsoft’s Digital Citizenship Footprint 2014 includes 131 countries around the world where research conducted for GRID has found digital citizenship or online safety and similar activities to have taken place. In the last blog, we highlighted the major 4Afrika initiative and in this piece we look at what one smaller part of that means for the community of Laikipia County, Kenya.

The announcement was made in February of 2013 that Microsoft had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Kenyan Ministry of Information and Communications and Kenyan Internet Service Provider, Indigo Telecom Ltd, to bring low-cost electricity and broadband to some parts of rural Kenya.¹ ‘Mawingu’(Kiswahili for cloud) is the first time² that solar-powered based stations have been used together with TV white spaces, to deliver high-speed Internet access to areas which were not connected to the electrical grid.

TV ‘white space’ (TVWS) is unused analogue spectrum on frequencies set aside for television use and partly developed by Microsoft. Broadband delivered in this manner can travel further and has a stronger signal than traditional wireless methods, with the signal also passing more easily through buildings and some of the obstacles that the terrain may provide.  The base stations also enable people to charge their mobile devices so that they can keep them running, even if they do not have other access to power. Since around 70% of Kenyan households are not connected to the electricity grid, charging devices is an important consideration and future plans involve using solar-powered charging stations which could be run as co-operatives, putting profits back into the community.

By January 2014, seventeen wifi hotspots had been deployed in Laikipia County, with a total of 50 planned in all.³  Laikipia County has around 60,000 inhabitants and the project aims to initially handle a subscriber base of around 6,000, with increased capacity to follow.  So far, county offices, the local office of the Kenya Red Cross, Gakawa Secondary School and a community cybercafé have all been connected to the Internet.

It is planned that one primary school and two secondary schools will benefit from Mawingu in Laikipia County by the end of the project.⁴ Schools are equipped with solar panels, hardware, software and the training needed to ensure that children benefit from the project.  Pupils learn to use tablets and eReaders, as well as commonly-used software products, helping to equip them to join the digital economy.

In another education-related project, WorldVision’s Be the Spark, Microsoft is joining with it, the British Council and Intel, to create community centers where children across Africa will gain access to technology, learn skills and benefit entire communities.⁵ The pilot phase of the project will be rolled out to ten primary schools in Kenya, before launching in other countries.

Bridging the digital divide is just one way in which Microsoft’s citizenship activities work to make the world better.  The global approach also extends to the online safety community, and its Safer Online Twitter channel surpassed 100,000 followers earlier this month.⁶ With social media having an increasing impact on people’s lives, the company’s online safety advice and messages will now reach more people than ever before and facilitate common dialogue between Twitter users based all over the world.

To learn more about this and many other digital citizenship, online safety and digital literacy initiatives, visit the country pages on GRID.

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Sources

¹ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft-green/archive/2013/02/04/thanks-to-solar-energy-microsoft-provides-broadband-access-to-rural-kenya.aspx (last accessed June 18, 2014)
² http://nethope.org/programs/global-broadband-and-innovations/mawingu-project (last accessed June 18, 2014)
³ http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Microsoft-links-remote-areas-to-the-Internet-using-solar-power/-/1248928/2213556/-/ni5n7dz/-/index.html (last accessed June 18, 2014)
⁴ http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2013/02/04/bringing-low-cost-off-the-grid-broadband-access-to-rural-kenya.aspx (last accessed June 18, 2014)
⁵ http://www.britishcouncil.org/organisation/press/expand-microsoft-partnership (last accessed June 18, 2014)
⁶ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/securitytipstalk/archive/2014/06/12/microsoft-is-building-a-global-online-safety-community-one-tweet-at-a-time.aspx (last accessed June 18, 2014)

SID 2014: Research Highlights – Part 2

Safer Internet Day (SID) 2014 was celebrated on February 11, with the theme ‘Let’s create a better internet together’. This annual event has spread, so that in addition to being widely celebrated across Europe, more than 100 countries around the world now mark the day.  Many countries undertake campaigns and initiatives throughout the month, using Safer Internet Day as the focus.  Throughout February and beyond, GRID will be updated regularly with information about new activities and initiatives, and some of these will be showcased on the blog.

In the Netherlands, SID 2014 saw the release of new research  from the Dutch Safer Internet Centre.  The research measured the responses of just over 600 children aged between 12 – 16 who were users of social media.  Children were asked how long they spent online, and how they accessed the Internet.  Most children accessed the Internet on a PC (46%) but smartphone access was the next most popular method with 37% of children accessing the Internet most often via their phones.

The research found that 43% of children had either experienced something unpleasant online, or knew someone who had.  The majority (78%) of these experiences took place on social media, such as Facebook and Twitter: the sites that children reported visiting most often.  The most commonly reported negative experience was bullying, with unspecified unpleasant experiences the second most common response.

Children who had reported having had unpleasant online experiences were asked whether they had ever experienced any of four categories of issue. These were:

• Bullying: 47%
• Harassment: 23%
• Abuse: 15%
• Sex: 11%
• None of the above: 30%

Children who reported experiencing bullying online were then asked the nature of the bullying they encountered. The most commonly experienced form of bullying was unpleasant gossip or arguments, with 68% of children reporting that they had encountered it.  The next most common response was bullying via the use of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as other online forms of communication such as Skype.

The most commonly experienced forms of online harassment reported by children was online approaches from strangers, with 84% of children who had encountered harassment online reporting that they had experienced it, and girls more likely than boys to have encountered it.  The second most commonly-reported unpleasant experience was stalking, with 17% of the respondents to the question reporting that they had experienced it.

The most commonly experienced form of online abuse was hacking, with virtual theft (which was ruled unlawful  by the Dutch Supreme Court in 2012) the second most commonly-encountered problem of that type.  (Further information on the details of the test case which determined this can be found in the country’s Legislation section on GRID.

The research was accompanied by the announcement that the Dutch Safer Internet Centre had been given ‘trusted flagger’ status. This means that the reporting tool, Meldknop.nl, has been given access to escalation procedures and priority contact access to the major social networking sites, to ensure that reported content is removed as quickly as possible.  Facebook, Google and YouTube are all among the social networks who have agreed to work with such reporting systems to see illegal or distressing content taken offline.

The report found that fewer than 20% of children ever reported content to the websites on which the problem occurred.  A ‘one click’ reporting button was launched for common web browsers for SID 2012, and can be downloaded here.  However, 45% of children said that they had not reported the thing that had upset them online, because they didn’t think it was serious enough to do so.  Only 1% of the children surveyed had reported something to a helpline or law enforcement agencies.

Additional research into the usage habits of children and young people in the Netherlands, going back several years, can be found on GRID, in the country’s Research section.  More detailed information on the SID 2014 activities which took place in the Netherlands can be found on the DigiBewurst website, which covers a range of online safety topics.