agLe@rn Participant Access Survey

Introduction and Rationale

Many people are interested in Internet connectivity in developing countries around the world and want to know if connectivity is a problem and the ways in which Internet users access online resources. For the APRTC, a question we are frequently asked is – How do agLe@rn students access your online courses? In an attempt to get some answers to this question we conducted a survey of our alumni and current participants in March 2003. The question was sent out to about 200 individuals and we received 63 responses. All of APRTC’s main target groups were represented with 19 respondents from academia, 13 from government organizations, 9 from NGOs and 21 from private sector companies.

Results and Discussion

As expected, very few of our students were using personal computers at home to participate in the courses. Computers are still relatively expensive in most developing countries and private ownership is rare. Only about 3% indicated they were using this method.

The next most commonly used access method was local Internet or Cyber Cafes with about 25% of our students using this resource. It appears these commercial community access providers are reasonably accessible to many agLe@rn students in terms of both cost and location.

By far the most popular access method was to take advantage of computers at work which were connected to the Internet. Just over 70% of the respondents indicated that this was their most common way of accessing courses. More and more, organizations and institutions are “going online” and allowing their employees to use their systems for professional development and other work related purposes.

One interesting result was that there were clear differences in access methods depending on the sector in which a student was employed. The vast majority of participants in NGO’s, government offices and private sector businesses were using connections from their workplace (78%, 85% and 100% respectively). In contrast, students from academic institutions did not seem to take advantage of their connections at work and about 75% of our academic participants preferred to use local Internet Cafes. The primary reason for this is the poor connectivity of most agricultural universities in developing countries where the common practice is to connect the entire university to the Internet through a single connection. With hundreds of users (students and faculty) sharing this single connection, the quality is definitely not good enough for comfort.

Raw Data

For those interested in the raw results and differences between countries we have compiled the results in the table below.