Reproducing ICT4D Tanzania to a Rwandan District

Abstract: ICT based health care policies in developing countries must be targeted at the poorest most rural member of the population where there is demand but little or no supply of health care. This is achieved through ICT4RD program which mainly focus on provisioning of ICT access to rural areas. In this regard, ICT4RD Tanzania built a local broadband which pass through fifteen villages around Serengeti district to benefit health, government and education sectors. There have been a number of discussions between countries located alongside the African great lakes to build a sustainable rural community networks providing basic public services as a research infrastructure network. The main motivation is to facilitate first mile initiatives to explore and demonstrate methods and solutions that could eventually be used to commercial actors to build production networks in areas where there is demand but little or no supply. The discussion has passed all the way and become a project called AGLARBRI(African Great Lakes Broadband Research Infrastructure). At this critical time, it is of technical interests to see if rural regions around the African great lakes could benefit from previous similar projects like Tanzanian ICT4RD project. This thesis addresses the aforementioned basic interest and uses a comparative case study tool to formulate and analyze the reproducibility of technical solutions produced by ICT4RD Tanzania program to a selected district in Rwanda. Intensive study on ICT4RD Tanzania technical solutions, on-site survey and radio mobile simulation analysis has been performed. Interview with health center employees, IT support personnel’s, and stakeholders, online questionnaires, direct observation while performing site survey and online official resources are used as primary and secondary source of data. The outcome of the thesis reveals that infrastructure design proposed by ICT4RD Tanzania program using fiber-wireless technology can also be used for a rural district in Rwanda in a similar fashion after considering local telecommunication regulations. It also proves that a great care needs to be taken while reproducing services between regions. Service reproducibility has also shown a failure to some extent. This is revealed by the use of Drug Management Application (DMA) and webmail applications. DMA application couldn’t be reproduced because the two rural areas used for comparison have different work flow for drug management. Reproducibility of webmail application has also shown a filer due to the fact that webmail system is not current interest for Kirehe district healthcare system. The outcome of the thesis also proves that ICT4RD Tanzania proposed infrastructure design solutions can be scaled and extended for similar rural areas along the AGLARBRI ring. Furthermore, service demand and work flow analysis is crucial to reproduce services along the area.