Colombia seeks to combat poverty by increasing internet connections

Colombia is planning to reduce poverty by increasing access to internet in vulnerable communities, the country’s technology minister told US newspaper The Washington Post.

“The main objective we have in Colombia is using technology and ICT  to solve the most important problem in Colombia — and that problem is poverty,” said the Minister for Information and Communication Technology, Diego Molano.

“When we connect, for example, a rural school to Internet, when we connect a small school in the middle of the jungle to Internet, those kids in the middle of nowhere have effectively the same opportunity to access the whole of information society — just like any kid in New York, London or Paris.”

Molana said he hopes that this new initiative will propel Colombia’s economy as well as providing children with greater opportunity.

Colombia is enlisting the services of renowned tech giants to improve the country’s internet penetration rate said the minister.

“I don’t want the money of those companies. I want them to tell me how we train people massively here. We want Colombia to have the most developers using their systems — Android, Facebook, BlackBerry, SIP, Windows applications; we want the iOS experts.”

According to the minister, there is a direct correlation between internet penetration and reducing poverty by showing that internet access has allowed people to run their business much more efficiently. Companies can now manage their inventories online and many peasants’ income has doubled.

There are future plans for the connection speed to raise to 4 Mbps and for free storage devices.

Currently, according to Molana, “almost 80 percent of Colombians are connected” to broadband internet, which in Colombia means a connection of more than 1Mbps.

Sources

• What Washington can learn from Colombia’s genius plan to lift millions out of poverty (Washington Post)
• Washington Post resalta uso de internet en Colombia para reducir pobreza (Caracol)