A visit to rural Tanzania

Some years ago, In a visit to Tanzania for the Tanzania Community Network Summit, we had the chance to visit a rural community outside of Dar es Salaam. The landscape in the surroundings of Dar es Salaam is very minimal, there is little to no infrastructure, no service of any kind. When going on on the road, you are able to see settlements here and there sparced across the land. Aside from that the only element that stand out were the baobabs that you could see every now and then. They are easy to spot. While I was travelling, I was imagining what would it take for these people to have any kind of telecommunications infrastructure. Infrastructure builds on top of other infrastructures, they rely on each other. So in order for you to have, let's say, telecommunications infrastructure... you need to have roads to take them, towers to mount them, electricity generation or electricity provisioning, knowledge on how to set it up and maintain it, devices to access to that infrastructure, and so on.

One thing that stand out also in a way inspired by the work that Rhizomatica does in indigenous communities in the Amazon region was that infrastructure can be available for everyone or it can be available for those the core institutions in a community like the school or the health center, or the community radio. and so, I thought what would take for the health centers or the schools? or the village centers to have some kind of communication mechanism that they could rely on and the baseline for this was Meshtastic in my mind they could have a very small solar panel a self-contained battery inside of it and from there to connect a mesh static device and to charge a mobile phone for using that mesh static device with that only the health centers or the village centers in the different villages could be connected with each other relay information and creating network that could serve them well I never pursued that but the idea remains...

What's the minimal infrastructure that can be deployed that can help people be in touch with each other?