Fostering community-centred connectivity is crucial; we need greener pastures, but many are not waiting for them to grow. Adding complexity to the issue is the reality of climate change, and people are aware and pro-actively facing it. In this field and others, communications are key for communities, connecting people and territories.
Tech innovation exists in rural regions, too. Grassroots communities are capable of defining the sense of change and the directions of solutions, cultivating a telecommunications ecosystem in their rural villages and marginalised neighbourhoods. Communities are part and parcel of improving communications brought to underserved regions, in ways that reflect their needs and dreams.
Community-centred connectivity
There is not one set of approaches to community-centred connectivity – it can come in and take on different forms. It can be shaped by a group of community members organising themselves to form an entity such as a trust or a cooperative, taking on the responsibility of telecommunications governance. There are mission-driven social entrepreneurs who take it upon themselves to build and partner together, ensuring profits are reinvested and feeding back into their local communities. There are public initiatives that are community-centred, rooted in collaboration and local empowerment, making progress, acting, doing, deploying, developing and connecting.
Telling our story
Views and voices on the ground are capable of and desire telling their own stories of change, both with traditional tools or by developing new ones, using institutionalised categories or reframing them from own perspectives, naming and defining what we they doing or what they want to achieve.
In telling these stories, we reflect on our shared experiences and the knowledge that emerged from our interactions. Telling them makes us more visible and allows us to dive into deeper thoughts, to bridge existing divides and to strengthen links. By telling these stories, we move closer to what we aim to achieve: communities’ access to the technologies they need for their well-being and future.
