The problem of the lack of connectivity in a large part of the world has been further exposed due to the pandemic COVID-19; particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, including in Peru. We have witnessed the lack of Internet access limits the conditions of development and widens the social and economic gaps among the people connected in urban areas and those who are not connected in rural areas. This problem has a multidimensional nature and arises from several underlying and structural causes that have been widely diagnosed so far. In this regard, this paper is focused on Peru, but it is potentially applicable to Latin America and the Caribbean. The new contribution is the definition of the residual gap of rural telecommunications (“residual gap”), understood as the group of localities that are not either prioritized or to be prioritized by the private sector or the traditional public interventions in the short and medium term. Likewise, we have analyzed the effectiveness of the current institutional design to deal with the connectivity gap and have proposed the incorporation of a third channel for the whole “residual gap”: a model of bottom-up governance for the emergency of sustainable community networks. According to its characteristics, this third channel demands the reconfiguration of the roles in the different social classes and enables the inclusion of territoriality and interculturality approaches in a wide range of geographical spaces. Finally, even though the localities that are part of the residual gap are characterized by a range of adverse conditions for the provision of traditional telecommunication services or others, for the rural Peruvian case, a great residual gap has a huge community network, beyond telecommunications (e.g. rural communities, indigenous populations, water and irrigation associations, etc.). This previous condition is a great advantage for the successful application of the model of community networks proposed in the institutional redesign. Its identification of opportunities is the third contribution of this paper.
El problema de falta de conectividad en gran parte del mundo ha sido más expuesto a raíz de la pandemia de la COVID-19; particularmente, en América Latina y el Caribe, así como en el Perú, se ha atestiguado cómo la falta de acceso a Internet limita las condiciones de desarrollo y agranda las brechas sociales y económicas entre los conectados en las áreas urbanas y los no conectados en las rurales. La multidimensionalidad de este problema se encuentra la concurrencia de causas estructurales y profundas que, en el tiempo, han sido ya ampliamente diagnosticadas. En tal sentido, este trabajo, enfocado en Perú, pero potencialmente aplicable a América Latina y el Caribe, propone como nuevo aporte la definición de la brecha residual de telecomunicaciones rurales («brecha residual»), entendida como el conjunto de localidades no priorizadas ni priorizables por el sector privado ni por las intervenciones públicas tradicionales en el corto ni el mediano plazo. Asimismo, se analiza la efectividad del diseño institucional actual con el que se atiende, desde el Estado, a la brecha de conectividad y se propone, para el conjunto de «brecha residual», incorporar una tercera vía: un modelo de gobernanza bottom-up para la emergencia de redes comunitarias sostenibles. Por sus características, esta tercera vía demanda la reconfiguración multiestamental de roles y habilita la inclusión de enfoques de territorialidad e interculturalidad en diversos espacios geográficos. Finalmente, si bien las localidades que integran la brecha residual se caracterizan por una serie de condiciones desfavorables para la provisión tradicional de servicios de telecomunicaciones u otros, para el caso rural peruano, un gran conjunto de la brecha residual cuenta con un vasto tejido social comunitario, ajeno a las telecomunicaciones (v.g. comunidades campesinas, pueblos indígenas, asociaciones de agua y riego, etc.). Esta condición previa se presenta como una gran ventaja para la aplicación exitosa del modelo de redes comunitarias propuesto en el rediseño institucional, su caracterización e identificación de oportunidades es el tercer aporte de este trabajo.
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