The first of the Last Mile Initiatives in the Latin American region, the LMI project in Guatemala gave birth to the innovative Micro-Telco Franchise business model, which responded to each of the five challenges put forward by USAID. Extracting lessons learned from the USAID Contacto project with Agexport, the national exporter's guild in Guatemala, Alexius developed the project's conceptual construct by redifining the space in which telecommunications operated in rural communities. In Guatemala, even communities with populations between twenty to thirty thousand do not have basic telecommunication services beyond spotty cellular coverage. Accessible Internet, dial-up or broadband is simply not available. Major carriers do not consider operations in these rural locations to be operationally or financially viable, particularly when there is still a great deal of "cream skimming" to be done in major cities due to low levels of Internet prenetration.
However, through Alexius International, USAID's LMI project sought to do a proof of concept deployment in the town of Tecpan, a community almost 60 miles from the capital city. The project was executed in partnership with local NGO, Planeta en Linea, that specializes in rural technology integration. In addition, alliances were established with Motorola and local telecom company Unitel to deploy a WiMax-based solution in Tecpan to provide broadband wireless service. The connectivity component incubated both a franchise organization as a business unit within Planeta en Linea along with a franchisee entrepreneur who operates the rural Micro-Telco.
The project execution integrated the deployment of complementary content based services to ensure that adequate demand (answering the question "what do I need connectivity for?") was dealt with upfront. These content projects included:
- Deployment of a community portal for both the Municipality and the promotion of key sectors of the economy
- Connectivity and teacher training for the largest school in the community with over 1200 students
- Digitizing the municipal registry - changing the response time from six to eight hours to minutes for the request of birth certificates (a document required each year from children's school registration)
For more detailed information, please follow the link to the project's Factsheet.
