Day 0 Event #154 Last Mile Internet: Brazil’s G20 Path for Remote Communities

Summary

This discussion focused on the concept of “leapfrogging” in technology and infrastructure development, particularly in relation to internet connectivity and energy access in developing regions. The panelists, including experts from various countries, explored how nations can skip intermediate stages of development to adopt more advanced technologies rapidly.

Key topics included the relationship between energy consumption and GDP, the importance of reliable electricity for internet access, and the potential for innovative solutions like portable Wi-Fi batteries and solar-powered micro data centers. The speakers emphasized the need for sovereignty in technological development, allowing countries to tailor solutions to their specific needs rather than relying solely on external models.

The discussion highlighted successful examples of leapfrogging, such as Saudi Arabia’s rapid development in the energy sector and Brazil’s creative approaches to expanding internet infrastructure. Panelists also addressed the challenges faced by many African nations in achieving consistent energy and internet access.

A significant portion of the conversation centered on the role of youth and women in driving technological advancement and economic growth in developing regions. The importance of digital literacy, education, and healthcare access through technology was stressed, with examples of how internet connectivity can empower marginalized communities.

The speakers advocated for a “Last Mile Coalition” within the UN Internet Governance Forum to focus on the specific needs of remote and underserved communities. They also discussed the potential for community networks and innovative distribution models to expand access more efficiently than traditional infrastructure approaches.

Overall, the discussion underscored the transformative potential of leapfrogging in bridging global digital divides and the need for collaborative, locally-tailored solutions to achieve meaningful connectivity worldwide.

Keypoints

Major discussion points:

– The concept of “leapfrogging” in technological and economic development, where developing regions skip stages to catch up or surpass more developed areas

– The critical importance of energy access and infrastructure as a foundation for internet connectivity and economic growth

– The role of public-private partnerships and foreign investment in enabling leapfrogging, with both positive and negative examples discussed

– The potential for innovative solutions like portable batteries and micro-grids to provide energy and connectivity to remote areas

– The importance of local ownership, sovereignty and culturally-appropriate solutions in leapfrogging efforts

The overall purpose of the discussion was to explore the challenges and opportunities around providing “last mile” internet and energy access to remote and underserved communities around the world. The speakers aimed to reframe the narrative around these efforts and highlight innovative approaches.

The tone of the discussion was largely optimistic and solution-oriented, with speakers sharing examples of successful leapfrogging initiatives. There was also a critical edge at times when discussing failed approaches or exploitation of developing regions. The tone became more collaborative towards the end as participants shared ideas and made connections.

Speakers

– Jarrell James: Moderator, from East Africa, works on last mile internet access

– Okiki Famutimi: Co-founder of Parabl, from Nigeria, works on internet and energy access

– Conor Colwell: Founder of LiquidStar, works on waypoints and off-grid energy solutions

– Duaa Balawi: Head of Saudi Y20 Youth delegation, from Saudi Arabia

– Raashi Saxena: Works at Parabl, background in telecommunications engineering and internet governance

– Purnima Tiwari: Steering committee member of the Dynamic Coalition on Internet Rights and Principles

Additional speakers:

– Ahmad: Works in the energy sector in Saudi Arabia

– Alex Mora: Network engineer from Brazil, works on research and education networks

– Fouad Rwabuhungu: From Tanzania, works on rural electrification projects

Revised Summary of Discussion on Leapfrogging in Technology and Infrastructure Development

Introduction

This discussion focused on the concept of “leapfrogging” in technology and infrastructure development, particularly in relation to internet connectivity and energy access in developing regions. The panel, comprised of experts from various countries, explored how nations can skip intermediate stages of development to rapidly adopt more advanced technologies.

Leapfrogging and Last Mile Internet

Okiki Famutimi introduced the concept of leapfrogging, explaining it as the process by which countries skip stages of economic development. He provided an example contrasting the gradual progression of telecommunications in the United States with the experience in countries like Nigeria, where widespread mobile phone adoption occurred without the intermediate stage of landline infrastructure.

Duaa Balawi offered another example from Saudi Arabia, describing how the country transitioned from a nomadic culture to industrialization through oil development, challenging traditional assumptions about the pace of economic development.

The discussion then shifted to the Last Mile Internet presentation, focusing on innovative solutions to provide connectivity in remote and underserved areas.

Waypoints Project

Conor Colwell introduced the Waypoints project, which aims to deploy solar-powered micro data centers providing electricity, water, and internet access. Key features of Waypoints include:

1. AI-driven electricity distribution across multiple revenue-generating services

2. Integrated water purification systems

3. High-speed internet connectivity

4. Plans to deploy 100,000 Waypoints globally, potentially impacting about 100 million people

Parabl Project

Jarrell James presented the Parable project, which involves portable Wi-Fi capable batteries serving as gateway access points. This solution provides both energy and connectivity in areas lacking traditional infrastructure, aligning with the leapfrogging concept by bypassing the need for extensive fixed infrastructure.

Energy Access and Economic Development

Jarrell James highlighted the direct correlation between per capita electricity generation and GDP, emphasizing the fundamental role of energy in driving economic growth. He presented data showing that countries with higher energy consumption tend to have higher GDP per capita, underscoring the importance of reliable electricity for economic development.

An audience member pointed out that nearly half the planet lacks reliable access to energy, significantly impacting economic development prospects in many regions.

Internet Shutdowns and Economic Impact

Okiki discussed the challenges posed by internet shutdowns, highlighting their significant economic impact. He emphasized the need for stable and reliable internet access to support economic growth and development.

Community Networks and Caching Solutions

The discussion explored community networks as a means to optimize limited bandwidth for multiple users, potentially increasing the efficiency and reach of existing connectivity resources. Keeks and Conor discussed the potential of caching educational content locally to reduce data costs for upskilling, demonstrating how innovative approaches can address both connectivity and educational challenges.

Y20 Policy Recommendations

Duaa Balawi presented policy recommendations from the Y20 summit, including:

1. Government subsidies for devices like smartphones and laptops for students, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on education

2. Improving telehealth access, especially for women in rural communities

3. Enhancing digital literacy programs to empower marginalized groups

Impact on Women and Marginalized Groups

Raashi Saxena highlighted the challenges faced by women in accessing the internet, noting that they often have limited access to household internet connections. She provided an example of digital literacy programs helping women in rural India use the internet.

Duaa Balawi expanded on this theme, explaining how internet access enables women’s economic participation and access to healthcare information. Jarrell James shared an example of Ethiopia’s women’s health movement leveraging mobile technology to improve maternal health outcomes.

Infrastructure Integration and Partnerships

Alex Mora shared Brazil’s approach of pairing power lines with fiber optic cables, enabling efficient infrastructure development by leveraging existing networks to expand internet access. He also discussed the Brazilian Research and Education Network and recommended attaching connectivity projects to educational institutions at all levels.

The creation of partnerships between research networks and commercial providers was proposed as a means to accelerate connectivity initiatives.

Rural Electrification and Connectivity

Fouad Rwabuhungu shared experiences from Tanzania, where rural electrification paired with 4G deployment is connecting villages, illustrating a holistic approach to infrastructure development.

Conclusion and Future Directions

The discussion concluded with several key takeaways and proposals for future action:

1. A suggestion to create a Last Mile Coalition within the UN Internet Governance Forum to focus on the specific needs of remote and underserved communities

2. The importance of integrating energy access, internet connectivity, and education initiatives for comprehensive development

3. The need for innovative, locally-tailored solutions to achieve meaningful connectivity worldwide

The conversation highlighted the transformative potential of leapfrogging in bridging global digital divides and the importance of collaborative approaches to sustainable technological development.

Jarrell James: I am here. Can you hear me? Anybody named Rashi up there? A Rashi Saxena? Okay. And then a Connor Colwell. They should both have speaker rights. Okay. Hi, can you hear me? Thank you. Okay, Rashi is live. Okay, seems like we are good to go. I’m gonna get situated here. Let’s see if… I can hear myself. Is your radio turned to three? Can everybody hear me? Everybody else can hear me? Okay. Yo, yo, yo, yo. I said a hip hop, a hippie, a hippie to the hip hop. No? There’s too many things dangling from me right now. Absolutely not. My tism is triggered. All right. I’d love to be able to see Rashi and Connor’s face if possible. Rashi, Connor. Nice. Rashi, I think you’re gonna want to turn your volume up more if possible because we cannot hear you. We could barely hear you. Okay. While we wait for our two collaborators online, Rashi Saxena, very big avid personality in the IGF space and the UN space as well. She unfortunately got… Dengue fever, and so was unable to fly from Bangalore. And so we’re going to work with her online. And then we have Connor Caldwell, old friend of ours, but also a deep researcher, collaborator on edge communities, edge grids, and all sorts of crazy things we’re going to get into. So I don’t want to give it all away now. This is our presentation, Last Mile. I need to be able to see a little bit, if that’s all right. Last Mile Internet, the paths for remote communities, almost at edge communities. This is something that’s very important to us. This is something that comes to us from our backgrounds. I come from East Africa, originally. I come from a region that has been shut down from the internet many times due to either natural disasters or extenuating circumstances. I think our longest shutdown was about two years. And my friend here, Okiki, I’ll let him introduce himself.

OKIKI: Testing. Hey, everyone. My name is Okiki. I also go by Keeks. I’ve been working with Jharrel on this project for a little over a year, I’d say. And my connection to this is that I’m from a country in West Africa, Nigeria, that has, despite the fact that it’s one of the larger oil-producing countries, the grid in major cities goes down several times a year to the point where it’s seen as trivial. So yeah, that’s my personal connection. And I really want to basically work on that connection and the relationship between internet and energy access.

Jarrell James: Joined to the left here is Dua, the head of the Saudi Y20 Youth. Did I say that all correct?

DUA: Yes, sir.

Jarrell James: Yes. Dua, I believe you’re Saudi-born, Saudi-raised, and- And you come to the IGF focused on the projected futures that can be made from the youth community here in Saudi Arabia and seeing where your guys’ technological development leads you, correct?

DUA: Yeah, absolutely. And I think just a little bit about me, I’m actually from a very small village here in the kingdom. Although I didn’t really spend much time there, I was born and raised here in Riyadh. However, it was always very prevalent to me that my family back in that village struggled with connectivity and access to internet. Despite the fact that we have one of the fastest 5G networks in the world and the largest accessibility to the internet, there are still some rural areas that unfortunately have not had the access. Hence why I advocated for digital inclusivity and accessibility at the Y20 as the head of the Saudi Arabian delegation. And I think at the Y20, there were a lot of topics that we were discussing and a lot of policies that we wanted to bring to the table. And of course, in a forum as big as the Y20 that harbors 20 G20 countries, as well as nine visiting countries, it was this year in Brazil, there was a lot of things that we couldn’t necessarily reach a common ground on. But the one thing that all of us seem to agree on quite passionately is the imperative that everybody needs to have digital access, especially when it comes to its link to education, to the ability to connect with the rest of the world, to allow people to bridge that divide between marginalized communities and urban nations in that regard. So I’m here to speak a little bit about that and maybe highlight some of the policies that we wanted to advocate for as part of the Y20 group.

Jarrell James: Let’s get into all of that, honestly. I know these headphones are kind of difficult to operate. These are the other two folks that will be joining us. Connor Caldwell, who I mentioned earlier, is the founder of a group called liquidstar.io. You’ll learn about them in a moment. Rashi Saxena, I also mentioned earlier. I don’t know if Rashi is live now, but maybe she wants to introduce herself, and maybe Connor can introduce themselves. Go ahead, Rashi or Connor, if you can. You’ll come through on everybody’s headphones. It’s a very interesting experience here. Rashi, are you available? You are muted, if you are available. Yeah. Sir, can we unmute Rashi and Connor? Make co-host. Hold on. We’re giving you guys some access here. And then, Connor, call well, please, as well. Up top. Right there. Hey. There’s Rashi, smiling face. What’s up? Hi. How are you? Hi, everyone. I hope everyone’s well. Thank you so much for joining in. I think you’re going to want to talk a little bit louder, if that’s okay?

Raashi Saxena: Can you hear me?

Jarrell James: Yeah.

Raashi Saxena: Okay. I’m going to try to be as loud as possible. I hope everyone’s doing well. Yeah, I’m a bit disappointed for not being there in person.

Jarrell James: Rashi, you might want to try different headphones or something. We’re hearing your tones. We’re not hearing your content.

Raashi Saxena: Can you hear me now?

Jarrell James: A little bit better, everybody? We’re getting mixed reviews. Try and yell. Just yell.

Raashi Saxena: Okay. I’m going to try to be louder. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, fabulous. Hi, everybody. My name is Rashi. I work with Jarell and Keats at Parabell. I have a background in technology. I’m a telecommunication engineer, and I’ve been working on doing a lot of research on digital governance, internet governance issues since 2018. I made my debut at the IGF in 2018 in Paris, working on internet shutdowns and policy, and I’m also a steering committee member at the IFC. And yeah, I’m excited to be here.

Jarrell James: Rashi, I’m going to go ahead and summarize what you just said. If you wouldn’t mind, could you go into your settings on Zoom for me and check that your input level is turned all the way up? Rashi was saying that she is an avid member of the IGF community. She has worked on all sorts of commissions and policy initiatives by a number of different city-states, a number of different nation-states, and has worked extensively with the Bangalore community around technological innovation and really fostering general, I would say, camaraderie around future endeavors and big thinking. She’s being very modest, but Rashi is also named one of the, I believe, six women to watch by the, correct me if I’m wrong, World Bank, if it’s World Bank or the IMF, one of the two, the guys with the money. And then we have Connor Caldwell up here, who I believe is also capable of unmuting himself. Connor, are you there?

Conor Colwell: Hey, yeah, I’m here. Can you hear me all right?

Jarrell James: No, I think that there’s something about our remote participants that is not coming through at the appropriate volume level. While we have them figure that out, and hopefully we will get that figured out shortly here, let me just do kind of an overview of you as well, Connor, and then when you have your first question, feel free to jump back into it, okay? Okay, sounds good. He came through a little bit louder there, didn’t he? All right, we’ll do a test in a second, but Connor is an avid builder, just a guy who likes to get his hands dirty. couple years in Indonesia and in Djibouti and Jamaica, building out various steps in what’s known as their like waypoints pilots. And these pilots are designed to bring, basically be able to drop a mobile agile grid into any region or in the world, whether that be in a very remote desert or a very high elevation somewhere. I’m going to go on to the next thing. Connor, I hope I did you justice on that. Yeah, thanks. Okay, we heard you. We heard you pretty decently there. Okay. I’m wondering if you can hear me decently as well. Yeah, I think we’re hearing you a little bit better. Everybody? Anyone? Okay. If anyone, if you guys could shut that door back there, that would actually be really helpful, I think, for everybody. All right, let’s assume that I did that correct. Okay, let’s go and we’re gonna just start this off with a little fun exercise. If it’s alright, I’m gonna stand up because I find sitting down and turning around to be difficult. We’re gonna start us off with a little exercise. If you could minimize that chat side, that’d be awesome. So what is the last mile? It’s really hard to like just put ourselves in that experience, you know, especially if we come from regions that are not considered the last mile or a region inside of our own country that’s not considered the last mile. So let’s do an example. You are, what would you do if you ordered an Uber to Disneyland and it dropped you off 10 miles away? Imagine you’re trying to get from your home to Disneyland with your family, LA, Los Angeles, Disneyland, the real one, period. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t make it, but you know, your little community will have a pretty drastic mental health change if you don’t make it at Disneyland. So what do you do if you order an Uber Disneyland and it drops you off 10 miles away? I just can be a little bit of participation if you want, like just throw something out there. I’m sure someone’s gonna be like try and get another Uber, try and get a train, trying a number of different ways to just get a different utility. to get you where you need to go. So interestingly enough like there is a lot of parallels between that and what it means to be in the last mile. You know everybody else on the planet is really hyper connected. You know everybody else is getting mass amounts of money using the internet. You know all these different realities are happening and opportunities are happening for other people and so you’re now sit with a position of like how do I get me and my community to that next five like the last five miles. It’s made it all the way here where you can see the promised land in the court in the distance. How do we get there? And so if you look at the various oh my goodness is it difficult. Hey can you go back? Oh never mind. Can you go back to the beginning? Okay okay so we go to the UN. This controller doesn’t work too well everybody. If you go to the UN you’re gonna hear things like the sustainable development goals for Internet. Everyone has meaningful connectivity by 2030. Meaningful connectivity is defined over there by you know a very long paragraph. It’s not really well talked about the definitions of meaningful connectivity. Who currently has it? It’s mostly the global north. If we look at what their definitions of meaningful connectivity are the framework focuses on four pillars. 4G like speed, smartphone ownership, daily use, unlimited access right? This is a very classic very casual existence for many communities in the global north if not almost all of them. Dependencies, energy infrastructure, regulators, motivated partners. It’s amazing how important that one is and expensive equipment period. So when we look at the development goals of everyone having meaningful connectivity by 2030 we kind of have to acknowledge that everyone has to have these these dependencies taken care of. And so can every region around the world have all of those dependencies taken care of? Not necessarily. and not by their own standards oftentimes. So that’s what we’re going to start getting into is actually what do these dependencies look like for the last mile and what are new solutions and new developments that are being made by us and by others. Let me see, I have other notes here. Rashi, would you like to speak at all in this because I know that you are involved in the UN quite a bit and if you guys, if you, Rashi or Connor, if you guys have anything to say feel free to jump in. I’m just looking at my notes here. Okay, so this next like, this next bit will be a bit of a reprogramming and with like any reprogrammings there might be a lot of questions that come up and I encourage you honestly just to get up at the moment and just ask them or submit them in writing and hand it to my boy Keeks here. I don’t, whatever you need to do. He’s taking avid notes. So let’s go to the next. Ah, here we go. So yeah, it’s the next one. So these are oftentimes connectivity challenges. Deep dive is centralized grids are often brittle. Energy infrastructure is easily destroyed in many parts of the world through natural disasters or whatever extenuating circumstances there may be. Most major utilities are often nationalized but work is outsourced to the private sector. Sponsor nations are for expensive grid infrastructure are limited and often aren’t designed with input from average people. So you have large-scale solutions that affect many, many people’s lives but had very little input from many people’s lives. I’m seeing some head nodding there. I feel like you understand. Or no nationalization, the whole grid starts off at the mercy of outside corporations and lackluster capitalism and I say lackluster capitalism because I enjoy making up terms but there’s not a lot of incentive to create shared goals with the users that these networks are affecting. And so when you have that, you oftentimes don’t have sovereignty and a lot of these regions around in the world that we talk about are looking for sovereignty over their own connection, sovereignty over their own future projections that the GSMA or someone else might be putting out, right? So limited resources for sovereign ownership of major utilities, no ability for utility companies or solutions to be developed or owned by those who rely on them, oftentimes. And ownership of utilities ensures standards. But if there was ownership of those utilities by these local sovereign populations, standards would be improving because they’re shared goals. They’re shared outcomes. And much like the Uber driver, if this thing goes forward, we will see that there needs to be, yeah. So there needs to be physical conditions that allow people to foster for shared outcomes. So if you go to the Uber driver example, that particular Uber driver that you were trying to use to get to Disneyland, he said, I don’t have the same shared outcome as you. In fact, I’m going to drop you off here five miles away. I’m tired. It looks like there’s a lot of traffic. My wife wants me home. The dishes aren’t done. I need to go. And so he drops you off because even though he was there to do a job, he doesn’t have the same shared outcome as you. If you were driving that car and driving your family to Disneyland, you would all have the same shared outcome. And you would get there together. So let’s see. Back one. Nice. Recognizing these deeper challenges is why we coming together, Connor, Rashi, myself, Dua, and others, are really starting to push for this idea of a last mile coalition within the IGF and people that focus as a strategic collective on the reality that is seen and experienced by billions of people around the world and start to actually address these bottlenecks that we see happening. And when you see the bottlenecks that are happening, clearly because of infrastructure, lacking infrastructure, and lacking partners, countries, lacking investments, and honestly, lacking technical expertise and to create the sovereignty for themselves. So, oh my god. So go backwards. Leapfrogging. Do you guys know what it means? Does anyone want to give an example or give some kind of, just somebody summarize what you think leapfrogging is. I’m gonna bring this to you. It’s to to make a leap. Hand to the man behind you. Well, I believe leapfrogging would be to take a step forward and jumping above some of the obstacles that you may find. So you’re jumping above whatever difficulties you’re having. Yes, that is a good overview. Just kind of generality. I think it’d be awesome to hear Rashi or Connor. Do you guys have any thoughts on what leapfrogging is?

Raashi Saxena: Can you hear me?

Jarrell James: Yes, just yell a bit.

Raashi Saxena: I mean, I actually kind of agree with what Purnima mentioned on the chat and I know we have nine participants also in the chat so feel free to also give your suggestions. We do. I’m monitoring it. I would say leapfrogging would be places that have historically been under connected and underserved by by traditional telecom operators and in our case also energy operators. And they don’t necessarily have to be in regions that are impoverished. They could also be in first world countries but just not well connected or and also a lot of that the usual private stakeholders might also not be incentivized because of the limited population or, you know, challenges with terrain, things like that. That’s a long-winded answer.

Jarrell James: I think that’s a great answer. And Purnima, I really appreciate your involvement. I did not see that you had answered that question so adequately.

PURNIMA: I’m here as a steering committee member of the Dynamic Coalition on Internet Rights and Principles.

Jarrell James: Oh, nice. Thank you so much for joining. Glad to have you. I think we have a quick video that helps us tell you what we think leapfrogging is, and hopefully this doesn’t blow out your ears, to be honest. I’m going to walk out of the way. So, Keeks, I mean, you’re from Nigeria. What do you consider leapfrogging to be? How would you define what it means for a region to leapfrog? And what does that actually look like in practice compared to the West? Great question. Leapfrogging, as I understand it, basically what happens when a country skips stages of economic development. When you think about how in the U.S. you had telegrams and telephones and cell phones, you kind of see that as like steps, right? But in countries like Nigeria, for example, you didn’t really have widespread landlines and telephone lines before everyone in the country had a cell phone. So I look at that as leapfrogging, right? You skip steps. But I’m preaching to the choir. JJ, you already know all this. What are you thinking in terms of like how to quantify that? What are some hard numbers for leapfrogging? I don’t know. for me the base factors of a society or people that defines leapfrogging is as simple as kilowatts per hour per person megabits per second per person in relation to GDP per capita and like the greater consumption that you have as an individual and that energy supply meaning that you have access to more internet connectivity on a regular basis and that internet connectivity is all faster more megabits per second the reality is you’re going to be the larger shares of your country’s GDP that’s just how the metrics go and if you look at any developed nation they simply have the highest kilowatt per hour per person to GDP per capita that’s what it means to really be a developed nation when they talk about developing that’s what they’re talking about developing that’s it that’s leapfrogging and it’s an emergent property displayed by china india and others and fucking thailand and this emergent property is taking things the west may have introduced or the west may have nationalized and resold them but saying actually that’s not really going to work for us here’s what we need we’re going to take these parts from you we’re going to do this ourselves see you in 50 years and this is like an endeavor made by many many global south countries that we call leapfrog regions and this endeavor is made earnestly most of the time and originally earnestly but also it’s pretty easy to fucking stop man it’s pretty easy to stop with foreign direct investment uh natural disasters if you do that you just you’ve removed those people from what it means to be a modern society modern societies develop and they thrive and flourish upon the most efficient consumption of energy across the board for the most people and how that energy affects just the general GDP and economic growth of a region year over year you take out the energy grid you take out that cool that’s my boy um so let’s just take a pause here now that like what we’re framing and what we kind of are acknowledging is that there’s plenty of examples of leapfrogging. We’ve seen whole countries like Singapore and others just like dig down deep and completely restructure their entire society around advancement and focusing everybody’s attention on advancement. Now I would actually like to ask the audience and also our own panelists and Dua and Keeks, examples that you’ve seen in your own countries, I don’t know where everyone’s from, but are there any examples you’ve seen in your country of leapfrogging? Like have you seen whole sectors almost change overnight due to maybe greater energy access? Maybe somebody built a hydroelectric dam that suddenly provided a ton of kilowatts to a much thousands or millions of more people? So I mean I would love to just give a little bit of a moment because this is a long workshop, we have to do a little bit of participation. I know you’re Italian? No, where were you from? Huh? Brazil? Please let us know. Do you have any? I met him in the Italian Airport, that’s why I thought he was Italian by the way. We met days ago, I heard him talking about lower radio modules to his friend and I was like what do you know about lower radio modules? Let’s talk. So I’m glad to see that he showed up for the workshop, this is huge. This is how friendships start. I’m gonna bring you the microphone, I would love to hear because I know examples of how Brazil leapfrogged in certain ways, or is leapfrogging. I’d love to hear if you have any examples of your own. No? You don’t know? Can I ask you a question? What is the main transportation route tool in Brazil? Huh? Roads that are used, that have what on them? The large-scale vehicles that are called buses? The main tool of transportation in Brazil is a bus and it’s what moves like the majority of the population from place to place, which also makes your transportation quite slow. The interesting about Brazil is that originally it was an entirely, there was a huge a huge plan focused from a sovereign national level on doing a train system. And there was outside influence that had certain lobbies around developing cars, petrol, those types of things that pushed for the Brazilian population to make buses and roads and cars their main forms of transportation. So in the concept of transportation actually, Brazil almost leapfrogged and then decided to take it a little easy. Can I ask where’s everybody from? If everyone’s from Saudi Arabia, that would be very surprising. I’m gonna start pointing at people. Where are you from? Brazil. Brazil as well, yes, I’m loving this. Oh man, we got lots of Brazilians in here. Do any of you guys have any examples of Brazil leapfrogging?

AUDIENCE: No, I’m just thinking about, but I can’t remember a case.

Jarrell James: Give me some minutes, then I will think more. Okay.

AUDIENCE: I’d like to call on my colleague Ahmad right there on the back, if we can just hand over the mic to him. So my colleague Ahmad works in the energy sector and I believe he could probably speak on some leapfrogging that has been done here in the kingdom specifically in the energy sector and the new renewables.

Jarrell James: So yeah, thank you very much. Just to get a context for the question, so leapfrogging in terms of sustainable energy and development in the transport sector specifically or are we talking in general?

AUDIENCE: In general.

Jarrell James: Yeah, so in terms of energy, we’re looking for alternative energy sources and how we can really translate electricity, which can be abundant in Saudi in terms of solar and wind. Can that be translated into long-term storage? Short-term storage in terms of batteries is something that’s already growing, but the medium and long-term storage in terms of chemicals, storage to chemicals, I think that’s something we’re really seeing developments in there, how you take ammonia, for example, as an energy carrier and transport it internationally. There’s been issues with ammonia utilization. How can you turn it back and crack it into hydrogen, which is what you want to get from it? You get some difficulties with the efficiency, but then how can you use ammonia itself as a fuel? And so there has been a lot of development and leapfrogging in that sense. E-fuels, sustainable fuels, aviation fuels, there’s been a lot of work on developing these fuels that can be used within the existing infrastructure and that can really support the transition. I think that’s one of some of the major efforts that we see happening in Saudi. Shut that door, please.

AHMAD: So that was very, very helpful. Perspective that I had not heard at all do what do you want to speak to that at all or I mean? I have many questions and things to talk about with that But it seems like you definitely knew where we you wanted to go with this

AUDIENCE: I Personally don’t necessarily have a specific take on the matter given that I’m not a subject matter expert by any way shape or form however, I do want to say that it has been one of at least in the past five years one of the most inspirational development stories for me personally to see the the strides that Saudi has made in the renewable energy sector in a very short amount of time and I I think that as Ahmed has mentioned, you know, our existing infrastructure could already be be leveraged, but there’s also you know a push for building new infrastructure for harboring international investments in order to not only develop energy here in the kingdom, but also provide access to neighboring countries through Expanding the national grid and selling electricity and helping, you know support developing nations in that transition as well

Jarrell James: That makes so many things go off in my mind. Let’s start from the first start just real quick I had no idea that you guys were pushing so much into like chemical battery storage and like trying to figure out Where because I mean there’s innovations to be made there like huge innovations to be made there What I’m hearing though is it sounds like Saudi Arabia is aware of we’re a major energy powerhouse now We’ve brought the standard of living up for our whole country like everyone’s doing well, right? We’re all loving it. But like I mentioned in the video, which I think you might buy here right after that It’s actually like for many places around the world that are leapfrogging and they are developing and they are creating these new grids for themselves it’s a matter of Keeping that momentum going and you don’t know how if you can’t keep the momentum going you have to basically accept that There’s a whole population percentage of your community that’s going back They’re going back to the way things were they’re going to lose access and I don’t know how many of you guys have children or have ever dealt with People who don’t like to lose access to things people who like don’t enjoy like once you once you see the promised land You’re not gonna be told to go sit in purgatory. That’s kind of essentially how it is, right? And so the point for a lot of these nation states that have sovereign control over their leapfrogging technologies, is to maintain the standard of living. And like I said earlier, when you have a shared goal, you make sure the whole family gets to Disneyland. Like you’re trying, and where you have outside corporate influence oftentimes is like, well, if we get 20% of everybody, if we had 20% of the population at Disneyland, 20% are going to have a great time, right? Like that’s all that matters. And that’s where you want to see sovereign developments and neighborhoods, essentially I say neighborhoods, nations that are neighbors being like, oh, look what Saudi is doing. Look what others are doing. We can actually work together and create a non-monopolistic approach to energy that is sustainable. So it sounds like what we’re saying here is, Saudi Arabia going towards solar is its plan for leapfrogging its own community, its own entire community, everything from the internet to cars, to basic household critical needs. Do the panelists have any thoughts on that or any questions for Ahmed, Connor or Rashi? I know Connor, you have, Connor has worked extensively with solar energy and has built all sorts of things. I could show you his credentials real quick. It might help everybody. See, we’re going to go all, we’re going to skip this part for a second. Don’t read it. Ah, there we go. Sir. Wow, this controller hates me, I’m going to be honest. Everybody stop looking at the head, the head, all right? Here we go. This should be it. Can you click play? Connor, I’m going to do a little overview right now. Feel free to talk afterwards. In 2018, we saw a problem. Nearly 1 billion people lack access to electricity, water and internet. Traditional mini grids. only address one of these needs, requiring expensive wires and serving only people nearby, limiting their potential payback, struggling to make money because they only sell electricity. So we got to work on prototyping a better solution. Waypoints. Waypoints are solar-powered micro data centers that reimagine mini-grids using AI to efficiently distribute electricity across multiple revenue-generating services. They don’t just provide electricity, they unlock its potential. Waypoints change sunlight directly to electricity, generating revenue from multiple sources, renting batteries, selling clean water via atmospheric water generation, providing internet access via Starlink, hosting AI training and computing services, storing data, and running cloud-like services. No electrons are wasted. So how do those local communities use waypoints? They use the electricity to power fans, to power lights, to power commerce, and to power the party. The waypoints also use that electricity to deliver more electricity up to 15 kilometers away from where they’re located with electric bikes, allowing for better price discovery and increasing the range of electricity access, enabling people to charge phones who might be far away. Globally, for the first time ever, individuals, companies, and local SMEs can access the waypoint’s micro data center hardware to run and fine-tune AI models. Okay, so I’m just going to pause us there. Maybe this is helpful to go back. Come on now. Conor, I’ll let you give some, I guess, color to that, but I think with regard to Achmed’s statement, I think that was a good time to show that there is obviously a ton to be done with solar, and when we talk about sovereignty earlier, and how does a community really leapfrog, they have sovereignty. sovereignty over their electric grid. They have sovereignty over their connectivity. They have sovereignty over the steps that make a proficient and efficient population inside of a nation-state. Then, like, these types of solutions, what we’re talking about here with the waypoints, is dropping this into a region and allowing those communities to run the waypoints. Going into, we’ve been going into universities, talking to people who are like PhD students in electrical engineering and telecoms, and it’s like, hey, you, would you like to man and operate this thing? We’ll do some training, and as we, as I know, Conor, I’ll let you speak for yourself, but there’s a lot to be said about connecting communities that are many kilometers away from each other through technology like this. Conor, do you want to jump in here and see if you can talk? Yeah, just talk a little bit louder.

Conor Colwell: Okay. Yeah. No, thank you. I mean, there’s definitely a lot to talk about regarding that. I mean, I think, suppose one interesting angle to follow up on the previous thing is, yeah, I mean, when I think of leapfrogging, the example that comes to mind immediately is, I suppose, like what China, how China just skipped the whole desktop computer and went straight to laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. So, I think that that from like a technological perspective, it’s pretty interesting. I mean, just to follow up with the comment on, I suppose, like Saudi skipping or skipping ahead to renewable energy, I think the point there, I suppose, I see a lot with leapfrogging is that it usually involves an entrenched incumbent technology or infrastructure layer that is, you know, probably was like best thing in the world when it got installed. But then, like since then, technology has moved forward and or the, you know, the existing incumbent was extremely expensive or like resource-intensive to put in place and so that’s what has prevented it from like entering a lot of different communities or ecosystems like globally or slowed it down but then when a new technology comes along it’s able to like skip a lot of that in part because the infrastructure from the incumbents isn’t already there which you know usually usually that there’s sort of I guess more pressure to slow down that change if the infrastructure is already there or it just requires a replacement of it but in certain areas where there is no infrastructure that that makes it like sort of a very good opportunity to put the latest technology in and skip ahead so yeah that’s that’s all very interesting yeah for a while

Jarrell James: I think you spoke a little bit about the no worries I think let’s pause there for a second I don’t want to give Dua and Keeks a chance to talk about their own regions and I want to give you guys also a chance can anybody tell me what the average megabits per second is at your house where you live like how fast is your internet I don’t know I want to say 130 anyone anyone topping 130 are we topping 130 fiber is pretty nice I mean if we take it back I’d be curious Brazil what is your what is your megabits per second average hundred you are you both live in cities correct yeah as well yeah okay do you guys know the megabits per second of your rural communities by chance average I do know them I do know it like two three yeah it’s about two to ten for some of the rural communities Saudi Arabia is making very large strides towards trying to connect those in more rural communities I think it’s ninety eight point six percent density on five megabits per megabits per second, trying to move it up to 10 megabits per second. In Brazil, the average megabits per second of the cities is quite high for about 40% of the people. And then when you get to below that, when you get to the other 60%, even in the cities, you are ranging between 5 to 20 megabits per second. And then in the outer areas, obviously the rural communities, actually it’s really, really cool. There’s a lot of people who have, there’s not a lot of people, there’s a lot of people who are really interested in that. The value proposition of a Starlink is making a lot of sense, but not in the way that many of us would think. And I’ll pause there because I’ll go into that in a second, about how we’re seeing cultural evolvement, cultural evolution around Starlinks and satellite internet. But I want to give you an opportunity. In Nigeria, what’s your guys’ average megabits per second? And what’s your average grid per person, kilowatts per person?

AUDIENCE: Oh, kilowatt hour per capita is, it’s definitely below a thousand. It’s strange because, right, it’s an oil producing country, but for some reason, the electricity is cheap because it’s just so unreliable that people are just using generators all over the place. In terms of megabits per second, I mean, I was there last year and I averaged maybe like five megabits per second on like a good day in a part of town that didn’t have a ton of people in it. But even there, people were walking around with multiple phones just because you could have service in your house and then you go to work and whoops, you got to pull out the second phone just because the cell phone provider that works for your house just does not have coverage 20 minutes away from where you work.

Jarrell James: Yeah. Any other countries that aren’t Brazil or Saudi Arabia or Lagos or Nigeria? Anyone? You’re Brazilian as well? I’m glad that all the Brazilians showed up. Nice. Feel free to join if one of you wants to join up here. You’re a cybersecurity expert. We can make something work. But I think when I think of megabits per second in rural communities, I’d be curious how many of you know what a community network is? Like the concept of a community network? You do? Nice. Do you want to define it, or do you want me to define it and just tell people that you said that? So my friend here is mentioning that a community network is oftentimes one, two, three, four gateways, which are the access points to the greater internet. And these gateways can be like star links. They could be fiber internet. But you’re taking these gateways, and then you’re spreading that signal across many devices and many unique users. And those unique users, while all using the same bandwidth, are actually being optimized with a protocol that’s saying, OK, you have this much bandwidth use coming from this person, this person, and this person. We have three gateways, so let’s call them three star links. How can we optimize making sure that that guy’s loading his video, those people are texting their family, and that person’s FaceTiming their mom? So that’s where a community network and community network algorithms really come into play. And oftentimes, if you actually put the infrastructure in place to make a self-sustaining community network, it’s actually faster, and the connection is better than sometimes if you just have a single fiber connection because of the way that protocol sharing goes and the way that package data can be transported across a network. So also, Rashi, stop me if there’s any good stuff coming into the chat. I was going to give you a moment to talk about community networks and anything you’ve seen in your experiences. I know you’ve been traveling all over Africa right now, and you’ve been traveling, and you have a lot of experience inside of the continent of India. Want to know if you had anything to say, or if there was anybody in the chat before? goes on now they have 100 megabits per second and they’re vibing they’re chilling but it’s actually one guy who bought a Starlink package one guy and he runs a cafe or he has a house and there’s hundreds of people coming to his house or his cafe and they’re just kind of sitting around operating off of a honor system of like oh we’ll give you like 10 cents per hour 20 cents per hour something like this and it’s just a cash or digital cash honor system right but it’s because one man or one person one woman could afford a Starlink and so the cultural evolution of the entire community wasn’t oh that’s your Starlink that’s not my Starlink the cultural evolution of the community was oh we’re a community network of people already before the internet got here you bought a Starlink that’s our Starlink like we’re all gonna be a part of this and so there’s actually a lot of interesting opportunities to instead of going at it from a classically Western perspective where it’s like every single house is gonna have to have a Starlink your car has to have a mini Starlink your house like your fourth other house has to have a Starlink or about no I live here my people live here I’m here I just need this meaningful connectivity standard which with the folks that we were talking to in Brazil and you can I feel like you guys invalidate this whatsapp it was like we would talk people like oh yeah are you using the Starlink to like watch Netflix and are you using it for this and that and this and it’s like no we’re just what’s happening everyone in the world at all times we’re sending voice memos like candy it’s just that that’s what we’re here to do and so we can talk about the use of cultures in the way they evolve around connectivity as a form of leapfrogging because once again you’re able to kind of redefine and deprogram your expectations you’re not trying to be the United States you’re not trying to be Britain or something like this you’re trying to be Brazil and you’re just trying to go online so for example I don’t know does anyone have any thoughts on how Singapore leapfrogged? It’s a little bit different Singapore leapfrogged in a different way, obviously they have fast internet, but they decided they were going to be a technology powerhouse. They were going to be a financial technology powerhouse. They burrowed deep on one leverage point, one aspect. Instead of saying, oh, we’re gonna try and create all these different sectors, we don’t have the land to create all these different sectors. What we do have is multinational partners and we have strategic leverage to push all our resources into a financial technology sector right next to Hong Kong. And that was a big move for them, but it’s also like what you see Taiwan doing, where they burrowed down deep on processors and superconductors and different computing modules that were needed for all of the major Western nations. And so we are talking about, oh, like energy, we’re talking about, oh, access to internet, but also leapfrogging is taking the sovereignty of your own community and your own resources and saying, hey, everybody, we’re gonna focus on this for 50 years and we’re gonna see everybody else later. And I want to give a chance, can you go to the Zoom? Rashi, keep me honest on this chat. I feel like Purnima has probably got, yeah, three chats in there. Can you bring up that chat for a second? I don’t have any responses from the chat yet. Okay. Oh, 160 megabits per second. Purnima is in which country? Purnima, so India is actually quite large.

AUDIENCE: So Purnima is, I think, based in Northern India, but Purnima would be able to tell you exactly where she is in India.

Jarrell James: Okay. Delhi, nice. So yes, another urban center, another urban core. I would like to, don’t make me do this. Passwords. Now I wanted to try to pivot to the kind of outside multinational stakeholder corporate influence that can come into how a country can leapfrog. And there’s both positive and there’s sometimes negative examples. Would you mind? Going back to the presentation. Third parties and leapfrogging, positive examples. I think, sorry, I think there’s a lot to be said about giant contracts like NAFTA, right? NAFTA being a large contributor to GDP of most North American countries, but at the same time Mexico, by being a part of NAFTA, was able to start bringing in multinational stakeholders from its neighboring countries and developing its own city grids and its own infrastructure around connectivity and energy. They had better access to deals around energy providers. They had better access to taxes and all these sorts of things. And I think another positive example would be South Korea. South Korea, out of a defensive position to some extent, we don’t need to go in all that stuff, but they had outside stakeholder access to the United States. The United States financial development sector got there and was like, hey, do you guys want dynasty families that run the hell out of a smartphone company or run the hell out of a fashion clothing company or all of these things? Let’s try and make that happen. And you see real sovereign development of these sectors because they made strategic deals with outside parties and multinational stakeholders. You can see some negative examples in Brazil, like I mentioned earlier. You guys should have tons of trains by now. You should have high-speed trains. You don’t. You have buses. And that was because the petrol lobbies of other countries were very interested in selling you their petrol and selling you their cars. And how long does it take you? Hey, what city do you live in? Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro? Huh?

AUDIENCE: Brasilia.

Jarrell James: Brasilia. Nice. What’s the nearest city to you?How far away is that by car?

AUDIENCE: From what?

Jarrell James: From Brasilia.

AUDIENCE: From Brasilia, I guess 500 kilometers, something like that.

Jarrell James: When you drive in a car, it’s about three, four, five hours?

AUDIENCE: No, I guess it’s like 12 hours, 10, 12 hours.

Jarrell James: Monetary advantage, would you say? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so a train would have evened that playing field. A train would have provided quick, fast transportation for everyone. Everyone would have been in the same Uber car.They would have all got to Disneyland at the same time. That’s kind of what we’re talking about when we say negative examples. And you can see this in the energy sector. You can see this in the communications, telecommunications sector intensely. I would be curious to know from the positive examples, some stuff from Saudi Arabia. I know that you guys have, what you said, energy sector and all this stuff. Feel free.

AUDIENCE: I want to call on Ahmed again to take us back to Saudi history and how the Saudi Aramco Oil Company came to be, because I think that’s a very good, positive example on the topic. So if we could just have a mic handed over to Ahmed, that would be excellent.

Jarrell James: Ahmed, if you want to chair, you guys get up here. Well, I’m chairing from this side, so that works too.

AHMAD: So in terms of collaboration with third party countries, so with the history of Saudi and how oil was first discovered in Saudi, that was late 60s, early 70s. And a lot of the work was done through U.S. collaboration. California Oil Company was the name of the company. And then Saudi started getting involved in collaborating with them and buying shares over time until it became Saudi Aramco, which is Saudi American company. So Aramco is, this is the history of how Aramco grew. And then that became the sovereign company that handles the energy sector within the country. So this is in terms of the positive third party and leapfrogging. And I think in terms of potential for future leapfrogging, what we’re seeing in collaborations, in terms of bringing technology. and having the collaborations in NEOM, in Riyadh, you see a lot of growth, a lot of people coming in from outside with their funding, with their technologies to grow the region in this sense. I think this is also another positive example that we want to collaborate further on and learn also from other countries and how well and how bad they did it as well.

AUDIENCE: And I think just adding on what Ahmad said and maybe also touching on a concept you mentioned earlier on maybe finding shared and mutual interests. So you mentioned in the Singapore example, land was very much a limitation and one thing we have very abundantly here in the kingdom is land. And especially when it comes to foreign investments in whatever field it may be, whether it’s an energy, whether it’s an advanced manufacturing, Saudi Arabia has a lot of let’s say incentives to offer to foreign investors, hence giving them the opportunity to try and explore different regions when it comes to expanding their portfolio. But also I think the Middle East as a region in general is a very central region in the sense that it connects you to Europe, it connects you to Africa, it connects you to Asia. So from a strategic point of view it’s also a very lucrative opportunity for foreign investments to come here and move their businesses to the kingdom.

Jarrell James: The stability being a huge factor of that. Stability of energy grids, like the deterioration of the resources that outside parties would be depending on is not likely. It’s a high likelihood it will be stable, which is oftentimes by design and oftentimes the opposite is also by design. So I want to give on that topic, could you turn it back, or no sorry, leave it here. Connor, I know you’ve spent, Connor has spent a really long time, many times in Djibouti pioneering these waypoints, working with the Ministry of Energy in Djibouti and working with a number of different stakeholders on building out a waypoint with rentable batteries that are providing about six charges for a cell phone, and if you look at the kilowatts per hour cost of charging a smartphone in many of these countries, it is orders of magnitude higher. than charging a smartphone in any of the developed countries. The concept of charging a smartphone is your gateway to the rest of the world. So if that costs a lot of money, you are going to automatically gravitate towards solutions that offset that cost for you. Because you need a critical, it’s a critical need. So Connor, your experience with, maybe you would call this neutral development, outside development in Djibouti. What is, what did you see there? How is it structured with the government and outside parties? And then what did you see from a cultural standpoint on how the Djiboutian people responded to the waypoint that had Starlink attached to it?

Conor Colwell: Yeah, hey, thanks. Yeah, I mean, basically, so that project was with USAID and then also with the Djiboutian Ministry of Energy, as you mentioned. So I think, I think in terms of like, so that project, we mainly focused on electricity access and water. And I think the, I guess a couple breakthroughs that we noticed. One was that, yeah, once there was access to energy, cell phones were definitely the primary, like, choice of charging. That was what everyone wanted immediately, which I think goes to say that internet access is super valuable. Just communication, access to information, and also access to media and like, I guess just like views of the outside world. That’s definitely the most popular use of electricity immediately, besides like comfort from fans and lighting, things like that. And so, yeah, like you were saying, it’s, once that’s available, it’s pretty difficult to like, to bring that back, or reel that back in. So… You’re saying once Pandora’s box is open? Yeah, especially with electricity, it’s like, you know, people want more. electricity as soon as they get a little bit of it. And I think it’s always changing because we now have much more efficient devices, so you don’t actually need a huge amount of electricity, but then at the same time, now we have AI that consumes huge amounts of electricity, so it’s always changing. And to the other point for the breakthrough that we noticed, working with the Djiboutian government, we were able to, at the end of our pilot, generate enough revenue to, I guess, economically support the ongoing operations and maintenance at the waypoint, which we learned as we were going through this process that that’s actually a hugely difficult thing, because a lot of microgrids are installed, they don’t have a proper business model for economic sustainability in place, and so they usually end up not being able to sell anywhere near the amount of energy that they generate to the community, and then they end up falling into disrepair. And so working with the ministry there, that was sort of a breakthrough moment almost for them as well, because they said that they’ve not been able to basically solve this problem themselves, and then they haven’t been able to find a private sector company that has been able to do that as well.

Jarrell James: Which it sounds like you guys were really focused on entering into a space, figuring out what the critical need infrastructure was like, figuring out what people actually wanted and how to provide meaningful steps to create what might be called meaningful connectivity or meaningful foundation for leapfrogging. So that is kind of where it takes us nicely into this question. I know we all saw a slide earlier on what meaningful connectivity was. Does anyone remember what it said? It was 4G speeds, access all the time, you had to have above 20 megabits per second, like these are all expectations of what meaningful connectivity is going to be. So can we do the next slide please? Okay, so when it comes to meaningful connectivity, I think what happens with that term, and this is no critique of that term or the communities that made it, but I think what it does, it still does a bit of an other. It does a classic other where it’s like I have far more meaningful connectivity and you have meaningful connectivity and I’ve done my job. And when we do that, we look at the language that is used to talk about these communities and we often see stuff like Global South and we don’t think that that’s taking into account the right potential of these places. These are places with far more resources than anyone really realizes. These are places with the fastest growing populations. These are places where the hustle, like I don’t know how many of you have met Nigerians, but I’m gonna go ahead and probably bet they’re probably harder workers than you, a lot of them. Like the hustle factor that comes into these regions by just, as Connor said, getting a little bit of access. Once you get enough power that you can start to make, you know, money or charge your phone consistently and you’re communicating via WhatsApp or whatever consistently at, let’s say, 5-10% more than you were last week, what part of you wants to go back? No part of you wants to go back. So you start to make demands of your region that, hey, like, let’s pick this up a second. Let’s leapfrog a little faster, which as Connor, I don’t think you mentioned, but I’ll embellish for you there. Connor was not mentioning that, like, the Ministry of Energy worked with them, but also then the police departments started renting batteries. The police departments were not being provided enough energy by their own governments to do their jobs. or charge their phones or charge any of their devices. So then you had these subsidies coming where the government themselves started to rent these batteries because like Connor mentioned, nobody had come in as a private company and actually managed to solve the problem and create a revenue model that that had an equitable exchange for the Djiboutian people. And I mean I think if we all know anything about this land the scope of Djibouti there is a there’s a bit of a culture around coming in and just doing what you want. So what’s the future of leapfrogging for many? Well I think we should ask ourselves questions right now. Are private businesses and government actors effectively achieving the connectivity SDG metrics like all of them? Because the UN has only hit 17% of its SDG goals with only five years left on the clock till 20 to 30 and meaningful connectivity has actually gone backwards not forwards. We’re seeing more internet shutdowns, we’re seeing more natural disasters that are destroying grids, we’re seeing those grids in turn destroying the connectivity infrastructure, we’re seeing a lot of push towards really low upward mobility tech jobs wherein these people are becoming oftentimes in Kenya we could have an example where the second they get meaningful connectivity it’s not meaningful connectivity in the sense that maybe many folks in the West would have it where it’s like oh I have jobs opportunities coming my way. It’s oftentimes put into developer sweatshops what I call them and as a developer and engineer I do believe I can say that because what you have are people who do all the work to learn Lagos Nigeria is a really good example learn programming they get a laptop through the programming school that they’re attending that programming school brings on a thousand people gives them a thousand laptops across the board and then the top hundred people are chosen to join the programming like boot camp and then when they graduate that means that those hundred people get to keep the laptops 900 people don’t get to keep laptops they go backwards they go back in time right but when they get those jobs or when they get the the work workshops, then they’re working for outside corporations, like OpenAI. 60 Minutes has a really solid segment they just did on OpenAI. Sir, can you turn this back on? OpenAI, they have a really good segment, I encourage you all to look it up, on how OpenAI is using Kenyan labor to do data labeling inside of Nairobi and paying people very minimal wages. In case anyone’s wondering, I would like to continue watching. And this is kind of where we see development going for communities around leapfrogging or people who get that base, that base level foundation. It’s like, cool, how can you be a tool for multinational corporations that have never heard of you or heard of your region or anything to do with you? Is there like a button I need to push? Because I will. Are we, is this, am I getting the hook right now? I think I have 40 minutes left. Let’s, I think I don’t really need the next slide for what goes here, is now we’ve talked a lot about connectivity and I want to like hand things over to Rashi real quick here, because I think it’s awesome to talk about connectivity and the infrastructure that goes into it and the energy demands and really building an understanding behind like, okay, unless you have something to plug a modem into, it doesn’t matter that you have the modem. If your energy doesn’t turn on, you can’t have internet access and these are parallel relationships. Now if we acknowledge that we’re doing that and we’re creating a foundation for people to build on by acknowledging those dependencies in that critical access, what are we actually insulating and what are we protecting and how is that providing any value to the community? That might be the next question we have. And so I think I’ll hand this over to Dua and Rashi, if we can get them back on. Sir, is there two seconds? I don’t think, I would imagine that the people… who are online and participating are not able to hear me right now, so it’s pretty pointless of me to ask them questions. No, I can’t hear you. I can only hear you in pockets, actually. You can hear me in what? I can hear you in pockets. In pockets. Okay. Well, then, let’s see if you can hear this in a pocket. Let’s talk about women’s, the existence of women in a connected community versus a non-connected community, and the safety around community. Did you hear that? Yes.

Raashi Saxena: No, I did. I did. It is. So, we do, in India, in many parts of the world, we do have, I would say, gendered access to the internet where you have low income households. Can everyone hear me?

Jarrell James: Yes.

Raashi Saxena: Okay, great. So, we do have a lot of households that usually have access to one internet connection, and what usually happens is that you have women who probably will have or get access to their side of the activities in terms of any tasks or even their businesses once the internet has passed on from the man to the child and then them. A lot of women also, as I said earlier, use it for informal businesses. We’ve seen this in parts of Northeast India and Northern India to carry on their businesses or to carry on their work and have internet shutdowns. And again, internet shutdowns in India don’t happen for a few hours. Some of them can be as long as over 100 days, 50 days, 40 days. Someone who is, for example, advocating for internet connectivity wants to send in a report or someone has committed to an order that they need to fulfill or even with telemedicine facilities during COVID especially, having frequent internet blockades erodes that. And there are very frivolous reasons for internet shutdowns in India. Someone shut down the internet in India because there was a university paper leak and someone was caught shooting. So, I think there really need to be ways in which how internet can be given. There are some interesting programs that are there on ground with Google, Internet Saathi, where they’re doing very interesting digital literacy programs on how to understand internet and how to train women to use internet in rural communities. I think they’ve trained around 5,000 or 6,000 women across states in the northern parts of India. There are also some interesting programs that are now taking place for cyber scams as well. But yeah, it’s usually women to women and women also are more likely not comfortable going online because of a lot of the cultural aspects, I mean, women like staying indoors and sometimes their freedom of speech and expression could get curtailed by, you know, of normal behavior online, so women are more culturally sensitive towards taking part in online activities. Of course, there’s interest, they have cultural and mobility challenges, but there is a lot more to gain in terms of all the remote opportunities and I’d also like to talk about how the internet can also be an equalizer for a lot of persons with disabilities as well.

Jarrell James: Okay, let’s pause there. I think, yeah, there’s a lot to digest there, but essentially, if I can summarize it well for you there, it’s the great equalizer, I love that you said that, it is, I think for what if you are getting properly deprogrammed here, I think we’ll have to admit that the internet is the great equalizer and megabits per second decide how much of that pie you’re actually able to get involved in, and so actual internet speeds and density and access is the great equalizer. We talk about the great equalizer, which I think we could actually open up to the floor here, is, like, obviously consistent meaningful connection is the basis for billions of dollars of local GDP unlocking, and we can give you some graphs on that. We’re going to skip that, because we’re already running out of time. So this is a really easy format to understand here. The correlation, which you can’t see the bottom here, but our source is from the website Our World in Data, a phenomenal website, go and check it out, but this is per capita electricity generation versus GDP per capita for whole continents. and the countries that are within those continents. And so if you look at South America, 1992 through 2022, we have only Paraguay, with its outside influence from the United States, managing to get above 5,000 kilowatts per person. And 5,000 kilowatts per person means that you have larger share of the GDP, which I wish we had the interactivity of this up, but I don’t have control of my laptop, so you’re all gonna have to take my numbers for what they are in my head. But the average about, if you have between 4,000 to 5,000 kilowatts per person, your average GDP per capita is somewhere around 22 to 32, $34,000 per person. And if you have, I think if you look at, we’ll go to the next one, but countries that are in the 500 kilowatts per person area, it’s like their national GDP is $1,000 per person per year. And it’s like their share, if you have 500 kilowatts per hour going to you, you’re getting a much smaller share of your country’s GDP than the person who has 100, 150 megabits, and let’s say 5,000 kilowatts an hour. Like they are most likely a 50K salary person per year. Here we have Oceania, which we also see under 5,000. And then you have the two more Western countries chilling hard at 10K, 10,000 kilowatts an hour. And so if we go to Africa, or sorry, North America and Asia, we have this interesting, same thing. You’re gonna see United States, all these folks way up here, the British colony of Bermuda, Aruba, they’re all right here, right below the 10,000. And then everyone else all the way down to Honduras and Belize are chilling at under 5,000, closer to about 1,000 kilowatts an hour. And so when you look at this data and you look. at how Kyrgyzstan and United Arab Emirates and Qatar and Bahrain, they’re all on the upper side of Asia and South Korea is there as well. South Korea got there because of outside, like we were talking about, positive multinational stakeholder support and that put them on par with a lot of these Arab states that had, like you were saying, Ahmed, mass influx of energy and efficiency by the population to develop their energy sector. And by doing that you have these states suddenly leapfrogging far beyond, like you were saying, what year were you saying that the first California oil was? Like 1962? Early 70s. So I’m pretty good at history. We were in South Korea long before 1970s and we were in Japan and we helped build up those those nations, the United States did. And yet since South Korea, with all that support, is on par with Saudi Arabia. You leapfrogged past a lot of that initial development that the United States was doing for South Korea and now you’re focused on, obviously, oil and they’re focused on cell phones. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: One thing to note, I think that’s really worthy here, the infrastructure was not really existent before that. So really the infrastructure was built with the energy transition, so that really helped with reaching up to the higher level. There were no constraints on the infrastructure early on. So I think that really is…

Jarrell James: Are you saying the cities themselves weren’t built?

AUDIENCE: Yes, the cities, the infrastructure, everything grew with this. And I think just adding on what Ahmed said, you know, going back to Saudi history, we’re very much a nomadic culture, right? We were sons and men and women of the desert, we had our tents, our camels, that was our main means of transportation. So really oil has leapfrogged us all the way into industrialization and has allowed us to… It changed our culture. Exactly, it changed our culture, it has led us through into urban development and has changed the way that Saudis live and experience their lives today.

Jarrell James: That’s actually quite beautiful. I hadn’t really given that a lot of thought. I knew that you are nomadic people by nature, but I obviously didn’t play that into my cultural riffing. We could talk about, interestingly enough, actually in that video that I showed early, we talked about the destruction of the grid, right? We talked about natural disasters and other things like that. Well, by 2022 we’d all had seen Afghanistan going through its own troubles and like through the United States exiting. And Afghanistan, major oil production company, major energy developing country, was probably far right up there with Oman and Saudi Arabia and those other folks. But because of what happened, and like I mentioned in that video, leapfrogging is a privilege and it’s a right for many folks, but it’s also like a weaponized halt. Like you can revert a whole country if you take out the energy grid. That’s just the fact. So you can read any war history, you can read any strategy book of societies throughout mankind. Take out the energy grid, you take out the progress of that community. And so I think it’s really important to look at that as we see the rise and falls of civilization and create more global awareness around that. Hey, if we want to do meaningful connectivity for people, we should probably have meaningful energy resources. And there’s no way we’re gonna get to that by 2030 unless there are meaningful energy resources. Huge, huge that you guys are doing batteries and you’re thinking about sharing batteries and that battery technology with others, because I think that’s massive. That’s something that we’re all gonna need. If we look at Africa, it’s not great for us, gotta be honest, gotta be honest. We’re not doing great over there. And there’s a lot to be said about why that is. I don’t think I should go into it, but I’m not. But I think we all know there’s a lot to be said. This is gonna skip, come on. We want to see that move, yeah. So let’s just break it down, overview. North America GDP per capita, $63,023. Energy consumption per capita across the region, 54,651 kilowatts an hour per person. Is Europe 38.5, Europe 45,997. East Asia, 19,000 195 and 19,917 kilowatts an hour. There’s a direct correlation here with this with the disattachment and plus trust me there’s plenty of people that know that. So I don’t think we’re gonna do this part. We’re gonna go back real quick. I want to give Connor and yourselves as well the opportunity to discuss like okay Connor you’ve done small infrastructure plans. You’ve done like little grid deployments. You’ve started to like help people recognize sovereignty over their grid and you’ve seen what happens when people like start to get excited by that. I would love to know what your thoughts are around actually scoping out and building that vision much bigger. I think a lot of the folks here if I was you I would feel this way. I’d be like well that’s a really cool thing that whippersnapper is doing. He’s putting shipping containers with solar panels on the ground in some communities. Seems like they’re renting out a couple hundred batteries. That’s a really fun initiative. I’d love to see that the year end. But I don’t think that’s where we’re coming from and where like Parable and Liquid Star and working on the projects that we work on are coming from. These are pilots that we are designing and strategically building to scale and focus on how it can scale and what it means to create sovereignty in that way. So I’d love to give Connor the opportunity to speak and Karneema I’d love to hear from you as well around your energy consumption and megabits per second kind of thoughts because it sounds like you have a lot to say and I’ve really appreciated that you’ve gotten into the chat. Yeah thank you.

Conor Colwell: Yeah I mean maybe take it like a little step back and explain because you know there are a number of different companies out there that have been putting like energy generation systems and containerized form factor and sending them around the world. I guess one thing that we do very specifically different from all that is that we’re very much focused on I guess just like how efficiently can we convert a raw kilowatt hour from any source ideally sustainable and in our cases it’s all solar. But how can we convert that raw kilowatt hour into as many tangible useful things for humans. So I guess traditionally with a lot of the microgrids out there right now and I think I mentioned before why a lot of them fail is because all they do is make electricity and then you have to sell that to the community and that requires wires and like all this stuff and then it also requires the community to have things to consume that electricity which you know if you just have a feature phone to begin with you could work your way up to I guess more appliances and stuff but it’s not going to start there so the economic model kind of breaks down. But yeah I mean like our broad goal is really not just like how we can solve the energy aspect because like you know that we completely see as like foundational to like uh all all sort of I suppose you could say civilization to some extent I mean maybe it’s a comp it’s some some combination of energy plus raw resources plus information and those three things allow you to build almost anything. But uh but yeah I think our our goal is is uh it’s mentioned a few times but you know we would like to see about a hundred thousand waypoints built and distributed around the world um that we estimate could impact about 100 million people. I mean that is roughly looking at the you know the raw billion or so folks who don’t have access to electricity and then the two to two and a half that don’t have access to clean water and also internet. And so yeah we’re we’re kind of taking like a I don’t want to say double leapfrog approach but um we’re looking at like the complete like sort of system changes uh when it comes to like how infrastructure um has been done in the past. I mean if you look at if you look at dense city centers not saying we’re trying to like reinvent how cities are done but um it’s a super tangled web of uh wires and and pipes and and all of this and many points along those that web for leaks, inefficiencies like electrons being lost, water being lost, like fuel even being lost. And so we’re kind of trying to rethink entirely the model of not just how that those resources are distributed to communities, but how they’re like, you know, what you can actually like generate and create on site with just like baseline electricity. So yeah, to your point, JJ, I think we’re really, we’re really trying to, I mean, approach a variety of problems and using the technology that is available now, which I know is entirely possible. Like this is the thing, like all of this is possible now, it’s just a, I guess, a matter of motivation and coordination together and coordination. Yeah.

Jarrell James: And I want to pause there and speak to coordination because I think like you guys are hearing like yeah, LiquidStar with waypoints, charging stations, trying to create droppable energy infrastructure and currently people are excited by that and they’re traveling to the waypoints because the waypoints have star links at them that the people at the waypoints like LiquidStar need that internet access to maintain their service and connection to their outside partners. But now you have people, instead of using the delivery service and dropping the battery off with the bike guy to take it back to the station, they’re like, I’m going to walk the 1.5 kilometers to that waypoint because they have a star link and I’m going to get all my internet activity done there for the day, for the week, whatever I need. So I was a big supporter of LiquidStar earlier. I run a treasury that is a grants foundation that gives out grants with some friends and we were excited by LiquidStar like three years ago. My own region in East Africa got shut down from the internet for about three years and I realized it might be interesting to go talk to my friends over there in Djibouti about a little something something. And what we realized is if people are willing to walk all the way to the waypoint just to have access to electricity, there might be something to be said about inventing for the first time ever for some reason, a Wi-Fi capable portable battery. portable battery that has the ability to be a Wi-Fi access hub itself and so if we pair those things together people are renting this battery to charge their phones six or seven times in a couple days and they’re also using it as a gateway access point and by using that that’s what I call a parable and yeah I made it look cool because I really think it’s important that the Global South or what we call leapfrog regions actually starts to have the ability to own its own design language like it shouldn’t look like it’s an NGO product going to the leapfrog regions it should look like something that represents the creativity and the capacity of those people and so this was something this is a prototype we made my friend Keeks here and I co-founder of parable and we were giving you like the blueprint we come from these regions we are admittedly quite westernized we went to school and college in the United States and we have the audacity to think like Western tech users and Western tech entrepreneurs and what we do also have is the perspective that we care about a certain community of people and we recognize that those communities of people are about 2.3 2.6 billion people large and the amount of people that have lack of energy access is a huge portion of that same community right so there’s ways to pair these struggles together and actually I’d love to hear from you Keeks on this I think who you were the numbers on energy access of the populations of the planet I think it was sorry the 40% of people yes

AUDIENCE: So I believe it was 47% of the planet doesn’t have reliable access to energy consistent energy you start consistent energy and when you look at that that ends up being billions and billions of people right and when you consider the I mean obviously the humanitarian issue there where lack of access to reliable energy could mean okay there’s a power outage How do you, let’s say there’s a power outage, somebody gets hurt, how do you navigate to the nearest hospital? How do you contact family members, what have you? And then when you kind of like zoom out and look at it from an economic perspective, right? Every day, there’s a NetBlocks, I believe is the website, and NetBlocks cost calculator to see on a per country basis if the internet is shut down, which usually comes hand in hand with a power shutdown, how much money is lost from that country’s GDP, and it’s always eight to nine figures per day. And when you take that into consideration, the lack of consistent and reliable access to energy becomes not only a humanitarian issue, because usually when somebody’s pulling the plug, it’s so that somebody can’t report a bad thing being done, but it’s also an economic issue where if people don’t think that the access to energy is going to be reliable, it’s difficult to upscale, right? It’s difficult to turn the router on, it’s difficult to basically imagine.

Jarrell James: Speak to upscaling. I think that was gonna be my next question anyways. So I think from a Nigerian hustler perspective, and who, could you turn that mic off? Because I think we’re getting background noise. Thank you so much. Speak to that, the upscaling part, because that’s a really big part of what we’re focusing as well at Parable and LiquidStar and our combination here is like, how can we make an internet cafe out of an individual, essentially? And how can one individual with a parable have 16 connections from other people’s devices to his parable, and then that person is now enabling for upscaling throughout their community? And I think as a Lagotian and Nigerian, I think that you have a lot to say about hustle culture.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, so I didn’t go to school formally for engineering, unlike Jarrell, but throughout my career, I’ve kind of just worked my way up. But to speak broadly to upscaling. the way that a lot of the waypoints work currently is that in addition to, you know, water generation, energy generation, they’re looking at ways to basically say cool, let’s use this excess energy for compute, right? So they’re they’re setting up micro data centers within these waypoints and in addition to that they’re looking into long-term ways to cache, to cache content, right? And when you’re thinking about caching content in the context of upscaling, you could hypothetically look at the list, you can basically find and select a curriculum and find the videos tied to those curriculums and say cool, people want these jobs in this region. Instead of having people basically redundantly pay for the data to restream and watch these videos, you know, ten, hundred, several thousand times every month, you can just cache those videos and say cool, you’re going to this URL on YouTube, let’s just redirect you to a local intranet that you already have access to through the waypoint and that way you don’t have to pay for the extra data tied to this, but you can still upscale, right? You can still watch the videos, you can still learn, you can still go through the curriculum, get the, study for the certification, get the certification, learn a code, get that job.

Jarrell James: Tap in on that. And that’s where, and I’d love to kind of hear your side from like the Saudi perspective as a youth, as a youth leader and seeing that hustle culture come up in your own community, but to Keeks’s point here, it is the reality of realizing that you’re working every single day of your life to get a little bit of internet connection so you can learn a new skill like bricklaying or something like along those lines and then you could make a little bit more money so that you can be online to learn a little bit more and to get a different upskill. And so when you look at why they do this in regions that don’t have the money to be spending on data and watching the same video over and over again, if you spend 15% of your weekly paycheck on watching one video seven or eight times in some capacity in some regions, that’s always going to be the barrier for leapfrogging and upskilling for you. So when we look at these communities, we have to accept that much like Marshall McLuhan had said in the in the 70s, like challenge the assumptions with which your infrastructure or your reality is built. And like when we talk about these communities, they’re challenging, oh wait, why don’t we redefine what edge caching is? Why do we take the more Western or Northern perspectives on accessing information banks? And I think the most realistic thing that we see in our own lives around that is the library. Like we’ve removed the community aspect of the library in many societies by replacing it with the online experience, but the online experience isn’t there consistently for everyone. So I’d love to hear from you and then Rashi, as we start to, we’re getting about 20-15 minutes left, and then we’re gonna do 10 minutes left and we’re gonna open up for questions. I would love to hear from you too, and specifically on women as well, that are hustling and creating upskill opportunities for them. So it’s like, how does the internet play into this and what is the reality for you in that game?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, I’m gonna speak on youth and women interchangeably because I’m not sure if the people in the room here know, but almost 60% of all Saudi nationals are under the age of 35. So the entire nation can be lumped into the category of youth, more or less. And I think one key thing that I’ve noticed, especially across this year, you know, interacting with youth groups right here in the kingdom, is that they’re very hungry for success, they’re hungry for educating themselves, and most importantly, they’re hungry for making an impact. And you see these kids, they’re 16, they’re 17 years old, and the internet has given them the ability to connect with a much wider network of people all around Saudi Arabia, but also all around the globe to launch initiatives, NGOs, startups. I remember I was at an event a few weeks ago and this 17-year-old is going, like his company is getting bought out by this big entire, yeah, this big thing, and I’m like, wow. I need to turn up the pace. So yeah, there’s a lot of incredible things that are happening, and of course, they’re all being enabled through the internet, through AI, and through this existing infrastructure. And of course, I would love to see that knowledge transfer happen to regions here in the Middle East, specifically when it comes to regions in North Africa or regions that have been disproportionately impacted by war and international conflict, in order for us to further support those communities in achieving meaningful connectivity.

Jarrell James: You’re saying like regional coalitions. Yeah, I love it. That takes us back to the beginning, why we believe there should be a last mile coalition inside of the UNIGF. Rashi, I’d love to hear from you. Rashi runs the, I believe it’s the TED chapter, the TEDx chapter, and the Bangalore chapter for the World Economic Forum. She is responsible for fostering a ton of Indian entrepreneurs and youth that are trying to come up and make something of themselves.

Raashi Saxena: Oh, thank you so much, TJ. I’m no longer with the TEDx chapters anymore, but I am, yes, I am a part of the youth-centric chapter, just called the Global Shapers, and every year they have an election, and I am the chapter head at the moment. I see a lot of opportunities, not just for youth, but for women when it comes to the internet, especially in India, where women are the workforce. We still have a huge gap when it comes to women at the workforce formally in India. It’s a lot, surprisingly a lot larger than many surrounding countries we are neighbors with. I will always say that given how, yeah, we as women are very flexible and having access to basic means of the internet can, there are a lot of creative ways in terms of livelihoods that one could honor. So, of course, economic well-being, social well-being, political well-being is necessary. I would also say that there are very interesting programs navigating through the digital literacy of it. We live in a world of scams which have which have deteriorated our financial systems and sectors across the world. You know there are organizations that specifically work on how people can bypass phishing scams and how you can be safe online, how people can use VPNs and a lot of actors are of course also doing a lot of sensitive work so how can you protect your own identity online. Some of the some of the very eminent work that’s done by whistleblowers across the world. I feel like there’s there’s a lot to be done with access yes but then there’s also work has to be done after that in terms of how does one become literate with you know enabling this ecosystem and how do you pay it forward. On that note I’d love to kind of transition us

Jarrell James: into the Q&A because I think what you’re talking about is something that I think there’s a lot of people here from the youth 20 movements and there was many Brazilians that were here from Y20 and I think when we talk about people being under 35 the majority of the population in Saudi Arabia my own region Ethiopia and Nigeria for keeks the youth are running things like the youth are the large population that’s coming up they have the technical know-how and so I’d love to hear from everyone here on like policy outcomes that you can see around the Y20 folks leading the connectivity conversation and we have about 10 minutes left so I’d love for anyone and everyone just to kind of get involved and I would actually ma’am over there in the corner. I’d love to hear from you. You’ve been avidly paying attention, locked in the whole time. So at some point we’d love if you had a thought. But yeah, I’d love to start with you.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, sure thing. So I think, like I opened in this discussion, are the policies that came out of the Y20 that were related to digital inclusion and digital connectivity were widely agreed upon. There was no need to negotiate. There was no need to lobby. We were very much all in agreement that that is of the utmost importance for all G20 countries, as well as the nine visiting countries that were hosted this year. And I think on the policy recommendations that emerged, one was on government subsidizing smartphones, laptops, and tablets, particularly for students. And I think that emerged out of, you know, COVID-19, things moving to remote education, and how a lot of those communities were disproportionately affected, given the fact that they didn’t have access to internet, and therefore did not have access to education for the majority of the two years of the pandemic. So that was one of the things that we wanted to look into.

Jarrell James: The same happened in the United States, where you suddenly, because of the pandemic, saw that there’s actually leapfrog communities living within the United States.

AUDIENCE: Exactly. And you can also see that now, now that kids are back in school, those same children are, you know, not necessarily getting the best grades, they didn’t necessarily get the right baseline. So it’s, you know, you might think it’s not really that big of an impact. It was only two years where they were behind on school, but they really missed out on some very fundamental concepts that have impact, that will continue to impact them in the future. So that was one. And I think another one that we really wanted to focus on was telehealth, particularly for women in marginalized and rural communities, because when it comes to reproductive health care and having the right access to information on how to take care of your baby, what you need to eat, it’s really important to kind of support those communities and give them the right level of information. And that doesn’t necessarily happen through brochures or papers, you know, they need continuous access to the internet, they need to have the ability to answer crucial questions immediately and effectively in order to protect their health and safeguard the health of their children. So those were maybe two of the key themes that emerged out of the Y20 discussions this year.

Jarrell James: I love that. There’s actually a ton of historic precedent to that. I mean, my own country of Ethiopia… Ethiopia, our birth rates were one in four died. When I was born, one in four is gone. And by 15 to 20 years later, there was a women’s health movement called I think the 100,000 Women March, where without connectivity, you had 100,000 women going from village to village not 100,000, but 10,000, really, going from village to village, telling women, don’t have babies this young or don’t have babies back to back. It is very detrimental to your health. There is a best way to feed your child. And if you look at Ethiopia between the years of 1992 to 2015, 2010, somewhere around there, it’s like they go from bottom 15% to top 15% of birth rates. And it is the education of women. So I mean, I’m fully, I fully believe that like just and to the greater point of Keeks earlier, and yourself, the hustlers of all of these cultures are women. Like in Tanzania, Ethiopia, East Africa, I’ve been all over and I’ll tell you, like when we go and do distributions of parables, we are looking towards populations of women to distribute the parables to. The economic capacity and the responsibility there is unmatched in the hunger. We have a few minutes left, and I’d love to hear from any of y’all on any of the topics you want.

ALEX MORA: Hi, I am Alex Mora. I am Alex Mora from Brazil. I am actually working and living here in Saudi. I just want to leave some words about everything I heard today. It’s fantastic projects you have. And from the perspective you mentioned on like having the internet as an equalizer, I think one crucial point to equalizing the lives of everyone along with the internet access and connectivity and bringing power to everyone is to put education in everything. Because that will be the transformation of every society, of every community. So if you manage to find a way to put, to attach all your programs. projects to educational, like primary schools, secondary schools, higher education, everywhere you land that project of power, it will be, I think, the best to make things like leapfrogging the lives of everyone to make them getting better value from that. Just to mention my background, I came from 19 years in the Brazilian Research and Education Network. I am a senior network engineer. I work with network engineering projects, internet access, internet architecture. And I am in the membership team of the GNA, which is the group of volunteers formed by professionals from research and education from all the countries in the world. And we have a mission to bring international collaboration for research and education everywhere and help meet humanity’s challenges. And we want to ensure that technology, infrastructure, investments of all partners and participants are utilized to interconnect research and education networks on a global scale. So I’d like to bring this to your attention that there are other groups of volunteers working on things similar like you do. And we are pretty much working on a similar fashion. We have work groups. We have engineers. We have researchers. We have people looking to solutions like you are to bring access to connected and disconnected people.

Jarrell James: Stick around then, because I want to talk to you.

ALEX MORA: And yeah, like our friends from Brazil, we’ve been doing a lot of things in Brazil that are very creative. For instance, the research and education network there made a public partnership, public private partnership with support for government. They made sure that everyone understood that education and science are not competing with incumbents or providers. So they managed to have agreements, for instance, that’s an amazing job, to power grids in the country. They have fiber optics running across the country through the power line. and one pair of that fiber can be shared, so most of the national Brazilian research and education backbone today runs on top of that infrastructure of the power grid lines of different regions in the country and they managed to bring the backbone capacity to 100 gigabits per second to connect higher education and now they are connecting the primary level in secondary, so schools, universities, everyone is benefiting from that and then also the project in the commercial providers there in Brazil, they also have managed to make agreements with commercial providers, so they are swapping capacity, they are swapping dark fibers and they are bringing access to low interest communities or places where the incumbents don’t have the incentive, the monetary incentive to bring access and then with that sharing capacity and sharing dark fibers, they managed to bring access to research and education to connect schools, to connect universities and they are also making good business with the commercial providers there, the small ones from Babrint.

Jarrell James: I want to tap into that real quick and then give someone else a chance to also respond, it sounds like you would like, sir could you give it to him? Thank you. What he was saying with the fiber lines and the power lines together, I mean in Brazil it’s forest, there’s a lot of forest, if you’re gonna deforest something, you’d rather not do it twice, so from a stakeholder perspective on the people doing the infrastructure, the decision to pair those two utilities quite closely in the dark fiber makes a lot of sense, that’s what I’m hearing as well and I want to just real quick, all of Wikipedia could probably fit on, if any of you have like a little stick in your pocket, it’s like eight gigabytes or whatever, all of Wikipedia can fit on that, like this is what we’re talking about and the perceptions, the assumptions we have around the internet is that that can’t fit on. on it, that Wikipedia is some giant database that has to be maintained by some internet gods. Sir, introduce yourself and let us hear what you have to say.

FOUAD RWABUHUNGU: Thank you very much. My name is Fouad Rwabuhungu. I’m from Tanzania, I just mentioned my country now. I’ve learned it, I love Tanzania. Thank you very much. And I want to talk about the story of leapfrogging in our country. It’s basically on rural electrification, where we collaborate with the World Bank, European Union. They are helping us to do the rural electrifications. But at the same time, we use the universal funds to deploy communication 4G sites to the village. So almost all villages are now covered with electricity, but the issue now is connectivity. But that’s done through the collaboration between the World Bank and the European Union.

Jarrell James: Oh, no, we’re actually talking to your technology minister right now. We’re trying to get a pilot going in Tanzania.

FOUAD RWABUHUNGU: OK, OK, that’s fantastic. I think he was in Riyadh, maybe I still hear him.

Jarrell James: Hey, you go ahead and throw him my way.

FOUAD RWABUHUNGU: OK, thank you very much. That’s my short story.

Jarrell James: Well, thank you all. This has been awesome. I really appreciate everybody coming. This has been a really solid showing by Brazil and Saudi Arabia, thank you. This is what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the parallel relationships between energy and connectivity, and we’re talking about ownership and sovereignty by taking those utilities for what they are and taking leadership when it comes to those developments for your own regions. We believe in leapfrog regions, and we think that everyone should take a moment to stop letting themselves be called the global south and maybe start letting themselves put themselves in that mindset of, oh, we could go beyond the West. We could take this further than the West has taken this, and that’s what it means to leapfrog. Thank you to everyone. Thank you to Dua. Thank you to Keeks. Thank you to Connor and Rashi up on top. Purnima as well. Thank you. And to everyone that participated we’re gonna be around here for a moment And we’ll be here for the rest of the week. We’d love to talk

Agreement Points

Importance of leapfrogging for technological and economic development

OKIKI

DUA

Jarrell James

ALEX MORA

Leapfrogging allows countries to skip stages of economic development

Saudi Arabia leapfrogged from nomadic culture to industrialization through oil development

Leapfrogging requires challenging assumptions about infrastructure and development

Brazil leapfrogged in internet connectivity, skipping landlines and going straight to mobile

Multiple speakers agreed on the significance of leapfrogging as a means for countries to rapidly advance their technological and economic development by skipping intermediate stages.

Correlation between energy access and economic development

Jarrell James

AUDIENCE

There’s a direct correlation between per capita electricity generation and GDP

Nearly half the planet lacks reliable access to energy, impacting economic development

Speakers highlighted the strong relationship between energy access and economic development, emphasizing how lack of reliable energy access hinders economic growth.

Need for innovative last-mile connectivity solutions

Jarrell James

Conor Colwell

FOUAD RWABUHUNGU

Community networks can optimize limited bandwidth for multiple users

Portable Wi-Fi capable batteries can serve as gateway access points

Waypoints provide solar-powered micro data centers for electricity, water, and internet

Rural electrification paired with 4G deployment is connecting villages in Tanzania

Multiple speakers presented innovative solutions for last-mile connectivity, emphasizing the need for creative approaches to bring internet access to underserved areas.

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers emphasized the importance of improving internet access and digital literacy for women, particularly in rural areas, to enhance their access to healthcare information and economic opportunities.

DUA

Raashi Saxena

Focus on telehealth access, particularly for women in rural communities

Women often have limited access to household internet connections

Digital literacy programs are helping women in rural India use the internet

Both speakers highlighted the importance of integrating internet connectivity with education, either through infrastructure projects or device subsidies, to empower youth and enhance learning opportunities.

ALEX MORA

DUA

Attaching connectivity projects to educational institutions at all levels

Government subsidies for devices like smartphones and laptops for students

Youth are leveraging internet connectivity to launch initiatives and startups

Unexpected Consensus

Importance of local content caching for education and cost reduction

AUDIENCE

Jarrell James

Caching educational content locally can reduce data costs for upskilling

Community networks can optimize limited bandwidth for multiple users

There was an unexpected consensus on the importance of local content caching and optimization for education and cost reduction in areas with limited connectivity. This approach challenges traditional assumptions about internet access and content delivery.

Overall Assessment

Summary

The main areas of agreement included the importance of leapfrogging for rapid development, the strong correlation between energy access and economic growth, and the need for innovative last-mile connectivity solutions. There was also consensus on the importance of improving internet access for women and integrating connectivity with education.

Consensus level

The level of consensus among speakers was relatively high, particularly on the fundamental issues of leapfrogging and the importance of energy and internet access for development. This consensus suggests a shared understanding of the challenges and potential solutions for improving connectivity in underserved areas, which could facilitate more coordinated efforts in addressing these issues.

Different Viewpoints

Approach to leapfrogging

OKIKI

DUA

Jarrell James

Leapfrogging allows countries to skip stages of economic development

Saudi Arabia leapfrogged from nomadic culture to industrialization through oil development

Leapfrogging requires challenging assumptions about infrastructure and development

While all speakers agree on the concept of leapfrogging, they emphasize different aspects and approaches. OKIKI focuses on skipping economic development stages, DUA highlights Saudi Arabia’s rapid industrialization through oil, and Jarrell James stresses the need to challenge assumptions about infrastructure and development.

Unexpected Differences

Focus on energy vs. internet connectivity

Jarrell James

FOUAD RWABUHUNGU

There’s a direct correlation between per capita electricity generation and GDP

Rural electrification paired with 4G deployment is connecting villages in Tanzania

While both speakers discuss infrastructure development, Jarrell James emphasizes the importance of energy generation for economic development, while FOUAD RWABUHUNGU presents a more integrated approach of combining rural electrification with 4G deployment. This unexpected difference highlights the varying priorities in different regions.

Overall Assessment

summary

The main areas of disagreement revolve around the specific approaches to leapfrogging, the prioritization of energy vs. internet connectivity, and the methods for improving digital access and education.

difference_level

The level of disagreement among the speakers is moderate. While there is general agreement on the importance of connectivity and development, speakers offer diverse perspectives and solutions based on their regional experiences and expertise. These differences in approach could lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the challenges and potential solutions for last-mile connectivity and leapfrogging in various contexts.

Partial Agreements

All speakers agree on the importance of improving connectivity for education, but they propose different methods. DUA suggests government subsidies for devices, Jarrell James proposes community networks to optimize bandwidth, and ALEX MORA advocates for attaching connectivity projects to educational institutions.

DUA

Jarrell James

ALEX MORA

Government subsidies for devices like smartphones and laptops for students

Community networks can optimize limited bandwidth for multiple users

Attaching connectivity projects to educational institutions at all levels

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers emphasized the importance of improving internet access and digital literacy for women, particularly in rural areas, to enhance their access to healthcare information and economic opportunities.

DUA

Raashi Saxena

Focus on telehealth access, particularly for women in rural communities

Women often have limited access to household internet connections

Digital literacy programs are helping women in rural India use the internet

Both speakers highlighted the importance of integrating internet connectivity with education, either through infrastructure projects or device subsidies, to empower youth and enhance learning opportunities.

ALEX MORA

DUA

Attaching connectivity projects to educational institutions at all levels

Government subsidies for devices like smartphones and laptops for students

Youth are leveraging internet connectivity to launch initiatives and startups

Key Takeaways

Leapfrogging allows developing countries to skip stages of technological development and potentially surpass developed nations

There is a strong correlation between energy access, internet connectivity, and economic development

Last mile connectivity solutions like Waypoints and portable Wi-Fi batteries can help bridge the digital divide

Internet access has a significant impact on marginalized groups, particularly women and youth

Policy interventions and public-private partnerships are crucial for expanding digital inclusion

Resolutions and Action Items

Proposal to create a Last Mile Coalition within the UN Internet Governance Forum

Plan to deploy 100,000 Waypoints globally to impact about 100 million people

Initiative to distribute Parable portable Wi-Fi batteries, focusing on women as key economic drivers

Suggestion to attach connectivity projects to educational institutions at all levels

Unresolved Issues

How to achieve the UN’s goal of meaningful connectivity for all by 2030 given current progress

Balancing the involvement of multinational corporations with local sovereignty in infrastructure development

Addressing the potential negative impacts of leapfrogging, such as job displacement or cultural shifts

Ensuring long-term economic sustainability of community-based connectivity solutions

Suggested Compromises

Partnering with existing power grid infrastructure to deploy fiber optic networks, as done in Brazil

Using community networks to optimize limited bandwidth across multiple users

Caching educational content locally to reduce data costs while still providing access to information

Collaborating with international organizations like the World Bank for rural electrification while using universal funds for communication infrastructure

Leapfrogging, as I understand it, basically what happens when a country skips stages of economic development. When you think about how in the U.S. you had telegrams and telephones and cell phones, you kind of see that as like steps, right? But in countries like Nigeria, for example, you didn’t really have widespread landlines and telephone lines before everyone in the country had a cell phone.

speaker

Keeks

reason

This comment provides a clear and relatable explanation of the concept of leapfrogging, which is central to the discussion. It challenges the assumption that all countries must follow the same linear path of technological development.

impact

This explanation set the stage for the rest of the discussion by providing a framework for understanding how developing countries can rapidly advance technologically. It led to further exploration of specific examples of leapfrogging in different countries.

So in terms of energy, we’re looking for alternative energy sources and how we can really translate electricity, which can be abundant in Saudi in terms of solar and wind. Can that be translated into long-term storage? Short-term storage in terms of batteries is something that’s already growing, but the medium and long-term storage in terms of chemicals, storage to chemicals, I think that’s something we’re really seeing developments in there, how you take ammonia, for example, as an energy carrier and transport it internationally.

speaker

Ahmad

reason

This comment introduces the complex technical challenges and innovative solutions being explored in energy storage and transportation. It demonstrates how leapfrogging isn’t just about adopting existing technologies, but also about pushing the boundaries of current technological capabilities.

impact

This comment shifted the discussion towards more specific technological innovations and their potential impact on energy infrastructure. It led to a deeper exploration of how countries like Saudi Arabia are positioning themselves at the forefront of energy technology.

Waypoints are solar-powered micro data centers that reimagine mini-grids using AI to efficiently distribute electricity across multiple revenue-generating services. They don’t just provide electricity, they unlock its potential.

speaker

Connor (via video presentation)

reason

This comment introduces a concrete example of an innovative solution that addresses multiple challenges simultaneously – energy, connectivity, and economic development. It illustrates how leapfrogging can involve creating entirely new technological paradigms.

impact

This presentation sparked discussion about practical implementations of leapfrogging technologies and how they can be designed to meet multiple needs in developing communities. It led to further exploration of the economic and social impacts of such technologies.

We live in a world of scams which have deteriorated our financial systems and sectors across the world. You know there are organizations that specifically work on how people can bypass phishing scams and how you can be safe online, how people can use VPNs and a lot of actors are of course also doing a lot of sensitive work so how can you protect your own identity online.

speaker

Raashi Saxena

reason

This comment brings attention to the often-overlooked challenges and risks that come with increased connectivity. It highlights the need for digital literacy and security alongside infrastructure development.

impact

This comment broadened the discussion beyond just infrastructure and access to include the importance of education and security in the digital realm. It led to consideration of the holistic approach needed for successful technological leapfrogging.

For instance, the research and education network there made a public partnership, public private partnership with support for government. They made sure that everyone understood that education and science are not competing with incumbents or providers. So they managed to have agreements, for instance, that’s an amazing job, to power grids in the country. They have fiber optics running across the country through the power line.

speaker

Alex Mora

reason

This comment provides a concrete example of successful collaboration between public and private sectors to improve infrastructure. It demonstrates how creative solutions can overcome traditional barriers to development.

impact

This comment shifted the discussion towards practical policy solutions and the importance of collaboration between different sectors. It led to consideration of how similar models could be applied in other countries.

Overall Assessment

These key comments shaped the discussion by progressively deepening the understanding of leapfrogging from a general concept to specific technological innovations and practical implementations. They broadened the scope of the conversation from purely technological considerations to include economic, social, and policy dimensions. The discussion evolved from defining leapfrogging to exploring its manifestations in energy and connectivity, then to considering the challenges and opportunities it presents, and finally to examining concrete examples and potential solutions. This progression allowed for a comprehensive exploration of the topic, touching on theoretical concepts, technological innovations, social impacts, and policy considerations.

How can we create more global awareness around the importance of energy resources for meaningful connectivity?

speaker

Jarrell James

explanation

This is crucial for achieving the UN’s connectivity goals by 2030 and ensuring sustainable development in leapfrogging regions.

What are the potential applications and impacts of chemical battery storage technologies being developed in Saudi Arabia?

speaker

Ahmad

explanation

This could be a key factor in enabling sustainable energy solutions and supporting leapfrogging in developing regions.

How can we develop and implement policies to subsidize smartphones, laptops, and tablets for students, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on education?

speaker

Dua

explanation

This is important for ensuring equal access to education and preventing long-term negative impacts on students from marginalized communities.

What are the best strategies for implementing and expanding telehealth services, particularly for women in marginalized and rural communities?

speaker

Dua

explanation

This could significantly improve access to healthcare information and services in underserved areas.

How can we better integrate education into connectivity and energy access projects to maximize their transformative potential?

speaker

Alex Mora

explanation

Combining connectivity initiatives with educational programs could enhance the overall impact on community development.

What are the possibilities for expanding the model of using power grid infrastructure to deploy fiber optic networks in other countries?

speaker

Alex Mora

explanation

This approach has been successful in Brazil and could potentially be applied in other regions to improve connectivity.

How can we further develop and scale the concept of community networks and optimize bandwidth sharing algorithms?

speaker

Jarrell James

explanation

This could provide more efficient and cost-effective connectivity solutions for underserved areas.

What are the potential applications and impacts of portable Wi-Fi capable batteries (like the Parable) in leapfrogging regions?

speaker

Jarrell James

explanation

This technology could significantly improve internet access and energy availability in remote areas.

How can we better leverage youth leadership and initiatives in driving connectivity and technological development in leapfrogging regions?

speaker

Dua

explanation

Given the large youth populations in many developing countries, their involvement could be crucial for successful leapfrogging.

What are the best practices for implementing digital literacy programs, particularly focusing on cybersecurity and safe internet usage in developing regions?

speaker

Raashi Saxena

explanation

As connectivity increases, ensuring safe and effective internet use becomes increasingly important.