Deep in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest, students from neighboring villages filter into a classroom for daily lessons in their local language. But this is no routine instruction: Their teacher is often located hundreds of miles away in a satellite-television studio in Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s northwestern state of Amazonas.
While the program reaches thousands of schools, the school days are short—limited by overhead satellite connectivity. Yet, so valuable is the education that “many children travel three hours by boat to attend,” says Christopher Fabian, who works at UNICEF, and who observed the situation on the ground firsthand as part of an official trip to Brazil.
Fabian, who previously managed UNICEF’s venture capital fund, has seen digital tech startups in developing countries fail because of a lack of internet connectivity. His observations in Brazil underscored the need to address the global digital divide. Girls and children with disabilities are especially vulnerable to these inequities, he says. A good place to start chipping away at the problem: the world’s schools, only half of which have internet access. This inspired him to co-found Giga, an initiative of UNICEF’s Office of Innovation and the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union, which targets the digital divide that adversely affects schools.
A schools-based approach to solving the digital divide
The impetus for Giga stems from research on what it means for a young person to be information-poor, says Naroa Zurutuza, Giga’s data and technology lead. She uses a nutrition analogy: “We have measures for how many calories a day a kid needs to be healthy, so how much access to information does a child need to have access to opportunity?”
Giga launched in 2019 with the express goal of connecting all of the world’s schools to the internet by 2030. The target date aligns with that set for the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, points out Fabian, the co-lead on Giga.
We have measures for how many calories a day a kid needs to be healthy, so how much access to information does a child need to have access to opportunity?
—Naroa Zurutuzam Giga technology lead, UNICEF
To deliver on its goal, Giga comprises four components:
- The mapping of school locations and determining the strength of internet access, if any
- Modeling to develop school connectivity plans that are best suited to local contexts
- Designing solutions to finance the capital and operational costs of connecting schools
- Supporting governments through procurement and the contract management process to ensure connectivity projects are executed effectively and schools receive quality internet
Scaling for coverage
Giga and its partners have already connected over 5,600 schools in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and the Middle East, including countries like Honduras, Kyrgyzstan and Rwanda, among others. In 2023 alone, the objective is to scale to 40 countries. “It’s an ambitious goal, of course, but you have to dream big. Otherwise, you’ll never get there,” Zurutuza says. “We’re finishing the first phase of Giga, where we proved that we can [use these technologies and that] they can work. Now the next one is to address scale,” she says.
To deliver connectivity to schools, the team first needs to map them and know where they are. Giga retrieves this information from existing school location data provided by local governments and stakeholders, and then checks it for accuracy. When data on school locations is unavailable or inaccurate, Giga offers support by using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms specifically developed to identify accurate school locations in satellite imagery tiles.
“There are a set of characteristics that are unique to schools—from the shape of the roof to the material of the roof to playgrounds—that can be used to distinguish them from other types of buildings,” Zurutuza says. Data scientists train ML models to learn these patterns so they can detect matches when they see them in satellite images.
While the premise sounds disarmingly simple, its execution is anything but. Finding a grain-like pixel that might be a tiny fraction of a school roof or playground in millions upon millions of images is like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s a daunting task. “If you have 1.2 million pictures [from a country], and if we assume each has 10 million pixels, that’s a lot of individual pixels you can have to scan,” points out Kanon Hile, social innovation portfolio director at Dell Technologies.
Fortunately, it’s just the kind of brute-force computing that ML models are adept at executing. As part of a partnership with UNICEF USA, Dell has donated its High Performance Computing (HPC) services. The HPC environment is especially useful when you “need a lot of horsepower to answer a problem quickly,” Hile says.
The on-demand model for HPC services that Dell has donated helps Giga process millions upon millions of satellite images quickly and efficiently. With HPC, in 2022, Giga was able to accelerate work that would previously have taken months to weeks. Thanks to computing power from Dell and Giga’s ML models, Giga’s mapping team was able to identify 20,000 schools in Sudan, including over 13,000 previously unmapped schools.
Moreover, these HPC services reduced the timeline for the Sudan project from one year to six weeks.
Implementation on the ground
Beyond location mapping of schools, Giga also determines the connectivity status in real time. As the project proceeds, the team has been updating a public map with this information.
“Every three hours, we get information about upload and download speeds, latency and other service-related information about the schools,” Zurutuza says. “A live map helps us to troubleshoot on the ground as well.”
“Governments [often] don’t have mechanisms to monitor this at scale, so this is a tool to make sure that the work that we’re doing is having the right impact and that the money we’re investing is reaching even the hardest-to-reach schools,” Zurutuza says.
The school connectivity map is also a portrait of inequality around the world, Zurutuza points out: Often, richer areas are completely green (fully connected), while poorer areas are completely red (not connected). A similar situation plays out in Brazil: While large swaths of the country, especially in urban areas, are connected, many schools in difficult-to-reach areas don’t even have mobile coverage.
Financing connectivity projects also is challenging. In Brazil, Giga worked with the government to sign a bill that ensures that the funds meant for rural connectivity are used appropriately.
Without access, the future is dark. I know that if you break up the world into quintiles, the bottom quintile is totally left out. We see access as nonnegotiable.
—Christopher Fabian, Giga co-founder and co-leader, UNICEF
Wider impacts of internet access
Fabian and Zurutuza recognize that granting internet connectivity alone will not ensure that all children will be able to access education. “UNICEF has a huge education team with other parts that are bigger than Giga to make sure that all the components are in place,” Zurutuza says. In addition, Giga includes clauses for child protection in contracts that it shares with governments, ensuring that students and teachers alike navigate the web safely.
Fabian points out that access is a necessary first step. “Without access, the future is dark,” he says. “I know that if you break up the world into quintiles, the bottom quintile is totally left out. We see access as nonnegotiable.”
Fabian is excited that the products Giga is building are becoming mainstream. “We’re building tech that is getting used by governments,” he says. Indeed, the groundwork that Giga is building will have long-lasting impacts beyond the immediate goals of delivering internet access to all schools. The maps and data are already being used for other purposes like allocating educational resources and emergency preparedness. “Usually, schools serve as hubs for many things, including vaccine delivery and emergency response,” Zurutuza points out.
In Zimbabwe, another country that Giga has worked in, connectivity for schools meant the groundwork for electricity had to be laid first, which was completed using solar panels. The electricity service brought the community together, Zurutuza says. “You would see community members coming to the school to charge their phones,” she says.
Giga has made significant progress since its establishment in 2019. By the end of 2022, the initiative had already mapped 2.1 million schools across 136 countries. It’s on track to help governments connect about 25,000 schools in the next 18 months. There’s plenty of work ahead, and Fabian believes there’s no choice but to keep at it. “Right now, there are kids who are losing years of education,” says Fabian. “We have to go as fast as we can.”
Lead photo courtesy of UNICEF/UN0452188/LE VU
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