THE IMPACT OF TELEPHONE NETWORKS ON RURAL AND EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT: EXPERIENCES OF THE AID RURAL SATELLITE PROGRAM by

Telecommunications has had a powerful impact on development in rural areas of Peru and Indonesia. The AID Rural Satellite Pro­ gram demonstrated new ways of providing telephone service and transformed the telephonce into an educational tool through the addition of simple audioconferencing equipment. INTRODUCTION The tremendous growthi in worldwide telecommunications services in the last few decades has caused revol.itionary changes in the conduct c. business, banking, trade, and politics in both the domestic and international arenas. The economies of industrial na­ tions increasingly depend on telecommunicalions networks for a multitude of services. The dozens of satellites orbiting the earth have created a vorldwide communications sys­ tem that truly makes the world a "global village" for those people with access to this system. The vast majority of the world's real villages, however, are generally cut off from domestic and international systems, not y choice but by circumstance. Telecommunications services have been slow to reach into most rural areas of the world for several reasons: high costs, technical problems, and lack of a gus: anteed return on investment. It is both cheaper and more profitable to develop telecommunications infrastructures for urban rather than rural areas. There is also the feeling among some planners that rural areas do not need or cannot really use telecommunications facilities and that the p-sitive effects of providing such facilities does not justify the expense and effort. Some would say that basic telepione service cannot be provided until the users are abic to pay for the costs. However, there is now a growing realization among , xperts that telecommunications is an essential ingredient that hastens development and is not merely a result of it. A reliable telecommunications infrastructure can facilitate economic growth and promote national development aims. Telephone services to rural and remote areas can stimulate econornic development and bring the rural resident closer to the mainstream of national life. There is also a growing feeling that access to communications facilities should be viewed as a social service to be provided by gov­ ernments as they provide schools and not merely looked at in terms of the bottom line of a balance sheet. The Rural Satellite Program (RSP) of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) experimented with a variety of ways to provide basic telephone service to rural areas and has repeatedly demonstrated how the ordinary telephone can be transformed into a powerful educational tool at …