CASE STUDY: Providing access to faith based organizations in Kafanchan.
In our bid to provide Internet access to youth in the kafanchan area we have decided to include faith based organizations as outlets for these services. These organizations all have youth programs and hope to reach the youths through the churches.
The Fantsuam Foundation director has been talking to the JNI general secretary in Jema’a local government and the ZittNet team has been passing information leaflets around the churches. As a result, the bishop of the catholic diocese of kafanchan recently invited the team to do a site survey and submit a quote, but he did not sign up, saying he could not afford to pay for the connectivity at the moment.
Other churches approached have shown little knowledge of what are the potential benefits of Internet access to the youths, and have little or no technical capacity to manage/advice on the proposal made by ZittNet to provide connectivity.

Challenges
One of the reasons why its such a challenge to sign such organizations up is obvious, the cost of the equipment is high and there is nothing ZittNet can do to reduce the cost of installation since the cost of equipment makes up the largest part of the total cost, when we do implement the Wisp in a box, that is likely to cut this cost down significantly.
Another possible reason is the lack of better advertising strategies by the ZittNet team, the lack of follow up on clients to push them just a bit more to commit to joining the network.

Solutions
We are working on ways to overcome these challenges, we have considered recruiting local champions to help with the follow up and marketing, like giving them an incentive, a percentage of the cost installing the client. Putting in place a system that ensures that a client that has been approached is followed up on at intervals. A template used for follow up on donors to the Organization will be modified and adopted for this purpose. Each client approached will have a sheet opened where the pre-determined intervals for ‘touching base’ with them is set, the project leader will make sure that the assigned team member follows up according to the timing set.