Solar-powered Wi-Fi a gift to Senegal

By day, Bruce Baikie works at Sun Microsystems as an engineer specializing in telecommunications.

On nights and weekends, however, he has a side job - a small company that he started called Green Wi-Fi, where all the employees, including himself, are volunteers.

They work to bring the Internet to schoolchildren in small, remote villages around the world - children who don't always attend school and who live with intermittent or no electricity and who may have never seen a computer.

"We're just engineers and software people out of Silicon Valley, with mortgages to pay and kids in school," he said. "But we want to do something besides sell products to the West - more than just the next gizmo that goes on a cell phone."

Green Wi-Fi is developing solar-powered, wireless antennas for laptops that are specially designed to handle the dust and heat and other inconveniences of life in remote areas.

In May and again in June, Baikie went to Keur Sadaro, a village in Senegal, to try to get laptops donated by the One Laptop Per Child project hooked up to the Internet. The laptops are also solar-powered.

That effort was only partially successful: In New York, the Transportation Security Administration held up his Wi-Fi solar units because, he said, "They saw this thing with battery connections and circuit boards and wouldn't allow it on the flight." In Senegal, meanwhile, customs seized the laptops and wanted $5,000 in import taxes. After two days of meeting with officials, Baikie said, he got to a manager who understood the project, gave Baikie his business card and let the laptops go. Also, the solar charging station isn't finished, due to problems with the local telephone company, so he will return to Senegal in September.

Still, obstacles are routine when Westerners try to bring computing to developing countries, and Baikie has plenty of people he can rely on to help him out.

He is one person in an ad hoc network of people in the Bay Area - high school students, university professors, Silicon Valley engineers and marketing specialists - who believe so strongly that the Internet and computing will change the world, because anybody now can use computers to start a business or help an organization solve local problems, that they are devoting their time and money to make it happen.

"This is so close to our hearts and so important that we're stepping out of the high-tech startup field" to do this, said Mark Summer, the co-founder and CEO of Inveneo, a San Francisco nonprofit that gets computers into sub-Saharan Africa.

Summer calls Baikie a friend and said the two plan to work together when Green Wi-Fi's technology is more widely available. Now, all the antennas are built by hand, Baikie said, but soon they will be produced in volume in Taiwan.

In the project in Senegal, the village school, which is also a health clinic, was built by high school students from two San Francisco schools - Drew School and Lick-Wilmerding High School - who saw Green Wi-Fi's Web site and asked Baikie for help.

Working under the direction of the village elders, the students refurbished a building that had been abandoned by the Peace Corps, digging trenches and laying pipes for running water and installing solar panels on the roof so computers can charge at night, said Sam Cuddeback, Drew's headmaster.

Drew's relationship with Keur Sadaro began three years ago because a French teacher at the school, Daouda Camara, grew up in Senegal in a neighboring village. At first, the idea was to have students visit and share cultures, Cuddeback said, but now they do community service. The students plan to return to Senegal for two more summers to help the village build a library, start businesses and bring light to public places - using solar energy, of course.

"It's amazing to watch (them) from a distance, the enormous growth, the sense that (they) can make a difference as a kid," Cuddeback said.

Meanwhile, Baikie's managers at Sun Microsystems have "bent over backward" to give him time to work on the project, Baikie said, and he's recruited other Sun employees to help.

Today, he will ask for help from the One Laptop Per Child user group at San Francisco State University.

Although the computers in Senegal have already made an impact - more children in Keur Sadaro are attending school now, he said, because their parents think it's important - he needs help loading the network with curriculum in French, which the students speak.

Some day, Green Wi-Fi might make money. Baikie has incorporated it and applied for a patent on the technology. But money isn't his goal.

He hears from people all over the world about projects that could use Green Wi-Fi, and he said he finds great satisfaction in giving people tools they can use to help themselves. "If you do it for them," he said, "nothing ever changes."

Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Web Site: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/16/BUA712BH1O.DTL&hw=Solar+powered+Wi+Fi+gift+to+Senegal&sn=001&sc=1000