Villager centered transport system in unreached communities

This study presents an ICT based transport system called Social Services on Wheels (SSW) that reduces villager´s long distance trip-frequency in unreached communities. Trip-frequency is decreased using a community car to eliminate villager´s need to travel to urban areas by bringing welfare services - access to healthcare, education, learning and purchasing - to the rural village. The community car brings measuring devices, PC notebooks and team members (Village entrepreneur, healthcare worker, IT assistant) to temporary service points within villages. The measuring devices and notebook applications are supported a back-end data operations office using mobile network coverage and Internet. The villager walks to the nearest service point and interfaces with the SSW operations and information systems. Social Service on Wheels has been tested in two rural villages in Bangladesh during October 2013 to February 2014. The results showed that 4,496 long distance trips were reduced because the villager were satisfactorily served without leaving their village. The villagers tended to associate the delivery of six social services with the Toyota community car rather than the SSW teams who performed the tests or helped with IT issues. SSW empowered the community by hiring locally and training the SSW teams. The sustainability of SSW project is a challenging area and is still being investigated.