Support to the Lesotho´s Leland initiative.

Through the Leland initiative the Government of Lesotho will receive assistance from USAID to set up the basic infrastructure for a national Internet gateway designed to ensure the availability of reliable, cost-effective and competitive internet services in the country. Broadly, the objective of the programme is to promote widespread access and utilization of the internet to facilitate the attainment of national sustainable development goals. The programme has four distinct dimensions, namely:

• the establishment of the central national infrastructure
• the creation of the enabling policy environment
• implementation of government connectivity
• implementation of community and school connectivity

In the context of the Leland Initiative, the Government of Lesotho needs to provide professional and non-professional staff for the internet gateway hub, a suitable physical environment, responsibility for taxes, duties and fees related to the operation of the scheme, as well as provision of mobile internet services to serve the districts, schools and communities in the country. Assistance of the United Nations is therefore required to enable the Government to take advantage of the important opportunities presented by this initiative.

Arrangements for implementing the scheme in the areas of community and school connectivity have not yet been fully articulated. It is therefore being proposed that a number of high-tech/internet-savvy volunteers (initially 4) be assigned to the Leland Initiative to help operationalize the school and community connectivity components of the programme. The role of the ICT volunteers in this project will be to ensure that the establishment and implementation of the community and school connectivity aspects of the Leland Initiative are well coordinated with the rest of the programme and that the benefits of the scheme are reaped by the population at the grassroots levels. Their main responsibilities will be:

• conducting inventories of the available internet resources and skills in the country
• identifying target schools and communities to benefit from the scheme;
• determining the appropriate sequencing and phasing of the internet interventions to achieve an effective coverage of the selected target schools and communities;
• providing relevant training to grassroots groups, students and other relevant groups in the target populations to get practical benefits from the internet;
• design procedures for implementing a mobile internet scheme