Building a community wireless network

We worked together with communities to set up community-based Wi-Fi hubs in Kibera that enable residents to access and leverage critical information, use their internet network to collect, analyze, and disseminate data about their own neighborhoods, build digital literacy, and enhance their internet-based entrepreneurial and learning opportunities. A community-based internet and data hub attempts to shift the power in who designs, implements, owns, and maintains infrastructure in resource-poor communities and present new approaches by building local partnerships to co-design the network and its uses. The community was engaged to collect, access, interact and advocate with data that can shape their communities, and build a community designed, owned, and managed internet network.

Building our team

Partnerships with local institutions and communities is a key component of the project. To implement the project, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) worked remotely from the United States with partners located in Nairobi, Kibera including local Community Based Organizations (CBOs), Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), and Tunapanda Network (TNET). KDI is a non-profit design and community development organization and has been working in Kibera since 2006 with community partners on the Kibera Public Space Project (KPSP).  TNET is a non-profit social enterprise that runs technology, design, and business training courses and has been working in Nairobi since 2018. Run by Tunapanda Institute, TNET provides accessible internet to schools and organizations in Nairobi.

Capacity Building and Education

Various trainings and workshops were held to train and educate the community about the network, including network usage and installation, user management, network maintenance, business plan development, and data management. Throughout different stages of the project, these trainings were aimed at equalizing knowledge and equipping partners with the necessary capacity to understand and engage more substantially in conversations around governance, management, and sustainability of the community network. Trainings were tailored to fit the community context and needs, keep partners involved, foster community ownership and network sustainability, and adapt to emerging challenges.

Data Collection and Action

One of the main focuses of the project is to empower communities to collect data about critical issues that affect them and use that data for advocacy and collective towards improving their quality of life. During the first pilot in Kibera, we installed air quality sensors at all the sites and trained the communities on monitoring their air quality using these sensors via accessible data visualizations. We held trainings with the communities to help them learn how they could access this data, how to read the visualization and how this could access this data, how to read the visualization and how this could be used as a tool for creating awareness, action and advocacy in the community to address common sources of pollution.

COVID-19 Challenges

The travel restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of grounded partnerships in international development work, and de-emphasized the need for high-income country partners to travel internationally and spend time “on the ground” getting to know contexts at the project site themselves.  Instead, by design, the project centered the ownership and leadership of local partners in Kibera in the co-production of a community wireless network and data management platform. In this remotely coordinated process, we faced several challenges in terms of effective local capacity building and project timelines.