How wiring the developing world can help save the planet

Even people who live hundreds of miles from a cable, a phone line, or a paved road, and who subsist on a few dollars a week, can use Envaya’s ultralight platform to establish websites.

The site is geared toward community organizations working to address issues ranging from deforestation and climate change to sexual abuse and special-needs education. It links these groups to each other, to potential funders, and to the rest of the world. Envaya aims not just to help connect the 2 billion-plus people worldwide who currently have no access to the Internet, but to help these populations build the foundations of civil society. It could also help super-charge the global environmental movement -- knitting together local but fast-growing collectives of activists who are planting trees, protecting waterways, promoting biodiversity, and encouraging sustainable agriculture throughout the developing world. With Internet access available and easy to use in low-connectivity environments, decentralized groups could form a unified front against global warming.

Envaya was cofounded just over a year ago, in mid-2010, by 27-year-old Joshua Stern. After graduating Stanford in 2006 with a BS in computer science, Stern forsook Silicon Valley to enlist in the Peace Corps. At the age of 23, he was posted to the island of Pemba, part of the Zanzibar archipelago off the coast of Tanzania. No more than a handful of people among the largely Muslim population of roughly 350,000 had ever touched a keyboard, let alone typed an email. Stern and his team of fellow volunteers built computer labs in schools, hospitals, and community centers, installing dozens throughout the island. They trained hundreds of students, parents, and teachers in the very basics -- how to double-click, hunt-and-peck type, use a search engine.