The satellite and the right to education in Honduras

ICTs are called to enrich and transform education as we know it. This was emphasized by UNESCO in its 2015 Qingdao Declaration: “Technology provides unprecedented opportunities to reduce the long-existing gap in learning. The application of ICT is essential to fulfill our commitments of non-discrimination in education, equality between men and women, and empowerment of the latter in favor of sustainable development. We are committed to ensuring that all girls and boys have access to connected digital devices and an adapted and responsive digital learning environment by 2030, regardless of their disability, social or economic status or geographic location.”

The pandemic has made this digital divide much more evident, but the rest of the problems have not ceased with the emergence of Covid-19. At the end of 2020, hurricanes Eta and Iota devastated Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, with nearly 60% of its homes in poverty, and a large part of its schools, which had already been closed since the past. month of March, were destroyed. This article published by AECID provides data that clearly reflects the seriousness of the situation. Honduras is a country in which only 1.9% of the rural population has access to the Internet and in which before the pandemic there were already a third of young people disconnected from the educational system, so the combination of the pandemic and the Hurricanes have had a terrible effect on education. In the survey by the Association for a More Just Society mentioned in the article, it is said that in-person classes are only maintained in 22% of those surveyed and that 73% of the families surveyed who have not enrolled their children this year they have done it because they do not have enough income to have access to the Internet.

For this reason, HISPASAT, in collaboration with AECID and the Government of Honduras, has donated a connectivity service to 15 schools in Honduras so that students and residents of the towns where the schools are located have access to the Internet. In the specific case of students, HISPASAT has made available a digital classroom solution in which a satellite terminal receives educational content and stores it so that students can download it thanks to the deployed WiFi network. In this way, students can continue their education by carrying the content chosen by the teacher on their devices to work on at home without needing their own Internet access that their families cannot afford. This service, whose characteristics can be adjusted to the needs of each government or school and which could be expanded to the rest of the country's schools and include other equally important applications such as telemedicine, is exportable to any point in Latin America thanks to the coverage of the HISPASAT satellites. Only through initiatives of this type can a problem be reduced, that of the digital divide, which is preventing an egalitarian and sustained development of rural society in the region.