New report provides detailed analysis of the Information Technology market Published on August 30, 2010 by Press Office (Companiesandmarkets.com and OfficialWire) LONDON, ENGLAND

Internet user penetration in Peru is about 22% lower than average for Latin America and the Caribbean. It used to be higher than the regional average when access was primarily through dial-up – a remarkable achievement considering Peru’s low economic indicators – but while other countries have raced ahead thanks to broadband growth, Peru has fallen behind. Broadband subscriber penetration in Peru is about 49% lower than the Latin American average. The slow development of broadband in Peru can be blamed in large part on the lack of market competition, which has made the ADSL service offered by Telefónica del Perú’s (TdP) one of the most costly in Latin America. The only competition comes from other broadband technologies. Within only two years of launching services, triple player Telmex Peru has managed to wrest market share in both broadband and cable TV. Having won a WiMAX licence, Russia’s Yota promises to cover 12 regions of the country with a WiMAX network. Browse all Information Technology Market Research Reports http://www.companiesandmarkets.com/information-technology-market-research-reports-p79.aspx?prk=3e010b35ed6baba3e1564bac37997a36 Browse all Information Technology Company Profile Reports http://www.companiesandmarkets.com/information-technology-company-profiles-p106.aspx?prk=3e010b35ed6baba3e1564bac37997a36 Browse all Latest Market Research Reports http://www.companiesandmarkets.com/market-reports-trends-and-industry-statistics-p9.aspx?prk=3e010b35ed6baba3e1564bac37997a36 About Us Companiesandmarkets.com is a leading online business information aggregator with over 500,000 market reports and company profiles available to our clients. Our extensive range of reports are sourced from the leading publishers of business information and provide clients with the widest range of information available. In terms of company profiles, Companiesandmarkets.com’s online database allows clients access to market and corporate information to over 100,000 different companies. We provide clients with a fully indexed database of information where clients can find specific market reports on their niche industry sectors of interest. Companiesandmarkets.com is focused on providing clients with exemplary customer service and a flexible approach to accessing business information. Our team have extensive expertise in the market research industry and are keen to provide clients advice on their research requirements and possible alternative sources of information; a model which provides clients a value for money solution to research. Peru’s ICT market – problems and potential: http://www.companiesandmarkets.com/r.ashx?id=PFLLTUWS2342502&prk=3e010b35ed6baba3e1564bac37997a36

Source: http://www.officialwire.com/main.php?action=posted_news&rid=209636

By Dan Collyns BBC News, Ayacucho, Peru

The scarf is a physical reminder of all those missing and dead in Peru’s conflict

There is something warmly familiar and comforting about the quiet chatter of women and the clickety-clack of knitting needles.

Standing or sitting huddled together in small groups, the knitters dressed in traditional Andean hats, big "pollera" skirts and draped with a "manta" or shawl, form a multi-coloured feast for the eyes.

But they have more in common than crochet. These women are some of thousands in Peru who lost husbands, brothers and sons in the country’s bitter internal conflict between the Mao-inspired rebels of the Shining Path rebels and state forces in the 1980s and 90s.

  "I shouted: ‘Why are you taking my husband’ but they beat me too”

Each one is knitting a message or epitaph to their loved one the size of an A4 sheet of page which will form part of an enormous scarf which, it is hoped, will reach a kilometre in length.

It is being called the Scarf of Hope and it aims to be more than just a symbol of Peru’s estimated 15,000 "disappeared" but a physical reminder that in the majority of cases their relatives live on without ever knowing how they died nor where to find their remains.

"It’s like a piece of memory," says Marina Garcia Burgos, a Lima-based photographer who was inspired to initiate the project with two colleagues while working in Ayacucho.

"Each woman chooses the colour and the knit of her panel. As well as embroidering the loved one’s name, some also sew on a piece of their clothing or a photograph."

But its significance goes beyond that. In the remoter corners of the Andes, textiles have been the clues used to identify exhumed human remains where ID documents are a rarity.

For the women fortunate enough to have positively identified and laid to rest the body of an exhumed loved one, in so many cases it was by recognising the colour and feeling the knit or weave of the fabric wrapped around the remains.

More often than not – as was the case in Peru’s biggest mass grave exhumation and human remains restitution in Putis, Ayacucho – they themselves remember knitting the jumper or turning up the trousers worn by the victim.

Mass graves

While the government has begun exhumations there is a long way to go. Peru has more than 4,500 registered burial sites, yet fewer than 2% of the bodies have been identified, according to the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (Epaf), a non-government organisation.

The faces of many of the "disappeared" have been knitted into the scarf

In July, Peruvian police officers moved around 25 scarf knitters, along with their needles and bags of wool, from outside Lima’s Palace of Justice.

Undeterred the women settled across the street and encouraged passers-by in traffic-choked downtown Lima to join them in a knitathon or tejidoton. Many hard-bitten Limenos were sympathetic towards the women and curious to hear their stories.

They would have heard stories like that of Adelina Garcia, president of the National Association of Families of the Kidnapped, Detained and Disappeared of Peru (ANFASEP), an organisation almost exclusively made up of around 500 women in Ayacucho, the region which was the epicentre of the violence.

"Hooded soldiers kicked in the door of our bedroom, swearing and shouting. There were around 20 of them, they grabbed my husband," she says, recounting in a clear, unwavering voice the event which cut short the married life she shared with her 27-year-old husband, Zosimo Tenorio.

"I shouted: ‘Why are you taking my husband’ but they beat me too and as I lay passed out on the floor, they searched everywhere but found nothing, then left with him."

Aged just 19, she miscarried their second child after the beating she received. But soon after she went to the notorious Los Cabitos military base to ask the soldiers what they had done with her husband. It was December 1983.

Twenty-seven years later and she still does not have an answer. But in the last few years dozens of human remains have been exhumed on the grounds of Los Cabitos, and a furnace was discovered in which an unknown number of bodies had been cremated.

Mammoth task

As heartbreaking, tragic and infuriating as it is, Adelina’s story is not unusual in the organisation she now leads.

But what frustrates her even more is that none of them have ever received promised state damages for their personal loss and suffering.

The women took their knitting protest to outside the Palace of Justice

"Ten of the women in the organisation have died without receiving a penny since I became president in 2009. Some had been waiting for nearly 30 years," she says.

Her voice is part of a clamour of an estimated 76,000 relatives registered to receive damages from the government Reparations Council, which runs the Victims Registry.

The government has now pledged individual reparations payments will begin in 2011, six years after the Integral Reparations Plan was signed into law in 2005.

One of the problems was that the list of beneficiaries had to be completed before payments could begin, says Jesus Aliaga, who heads the National Reparations Council. He says this is now no longer the case and the list will stay permanently open.

"We could have done things better," he admits while explaining progress had been hindered by the mammoth task of trying to identify the relatives of the victims, the majority of whom were Quechua-speaking, illiterate and undocumented and living in extremely poor rural areas.

It is seven years since Peru’s state-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated that 69,280 people were killed in the country’s internal conflict.

The beneficiaries of state reparations would number, at the very least, double the commission’s estimated number of dead, says Mr Aliaga, which is likely to test available public funds.

Meanwhile, the knitters continue to knit and their number grows. The Scarf of Hope is expected to reach a kilometre in length before the end of the year.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11126057

It’s widely known that with more than 200,000 XOs in the country Peru represents the second largest OLPC project, only topped by the 400,000 XOs in Uruguay’s public primary schools. However what at least I hadn’t known until I met with people from DIGETE (Dirección General de Tecnologías Educativas – General Directorate of Educational Technologies) in Lima last week is that so far Peru’s Una Laptop por niño program had very much been focused on rural one-teacher multi-grade schools. In these schools every child and teacher received an XO laptop which so far has been the most widely adopted model in OLPC projects around the world.

One laptop per several children

I also learned that the current implementation phase the goal is now to include every primary school in the project and not – as we had previously erroneously reported – every primary school pupil. What may sound like an easily overlooked detail in the choice of words actually makes a lot of difference since rather than every child receiving a laptop this means that every school will receive a batch of XOs that will be shared by all its pupils.

According to a newspaper article as well as my conversations with DIGETE the heart of this plan is the establishment of a CRT (Centro de Recursos Tecnológicos – Center for Technology Resources) at every primary school around the country. Each CRT will be equipped with:

• approximately 20 to 35 XOs depending on the school’s size or rather the number of pupils in its classes
• a school-server that hosts educational content which can be updated via USB pen drives since the majority of schools currently don’t have Internet access
• solar panels to provide electricity in schools which aren’t connected to the national power-grid
• a projector and a screen

Looking at a recent news-agency report – which says that approximately 1.7 million pupils will benefit from the 230,000 XOs being handed out at this stage – this means that rather than one laptop per child most of Peru’s primary schools will look at something closer to a seven children per laptop scenario.

This is an interesting development in more ways than I can possibly think of right now. The most exciting thing to me is that it will allow for in-country comparisons between these different distribution models and their educational as well as social impacts.

Considering that OLPC has often focused on the benefits of one laptop per child in terms of usage that occurs outside the school context it will also be interesting to see what happens when children will on average only be able to take a – rather than their – XO home once a week. Another aspect that will be well worth looking at is how the usage models of teachers in these newly added schools compare to those of teachers in the 1-to-1 ratio schools mentioned at the beginning of this article.

Given the fact that Peru’s political system is currently undergoing a decentralization process – which gives regional education authorities more political power as well as new resources – another aspect to observe will be whether cities and provinces will opt to build on top of the government’s program and themselves purchase laptops for every child.

One way or another this is indeed a very intriguing development and I’m sure plenty of people in other South American countries and provinces looking into running similar projects will keep a close eye on what’s happening in Peru as the country increases its deployment to a total of more than half a million XOs.

Source: http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/peru/peru_between_one_laptop_per_child_and_seven_children_per_laptop.html

Oscar Becerra Tresierra, head of the Directorate General of Educational Technologies (Digete) of Peru’s Ministry of Education, announced 100% XO laptop saturation for Peruvian school children by 2011.

Pointing to a lack of training

"He recalled that in the fourth stage of "Una laptop por niño" (OLPC by its acronym in English), the Ministry of Education issued in this year, 230.705 laptops and will encourage the teaching and learning of 1,718,499 students and 85,413 teachers in 16,412 educational institutions in all departments.

At the end of this stage, "one laptop per child" will be distributed for free, about 550,000 nationally modern computers, in the context of improving equity and educational quality of public school students, Oscar Becerra detailed.

But before you celebrate, realize that OLPC Peru is having the same teacher training issues as Rwanda. How do you scale OLPC teacher training nationally with consistent quality? As Carlos David Laura of Peru’s Economic and Social Research Consortium (CIES), found in a survey, teacher training is uneven across the country:

Laura surveyed three schools in the south of the country that were among the first in Peru to receive the laptops. He found some teachers had never been trained to help children use the computers. Peru’s Ministry of Education has provided only five hours of training to some teachers, and many of the schools in the programme are in remote, rural villages, making it impossible for untrained teachers to ask for help.

His survey also found that educational achievement has not improved. Student grades haven’t changed and their level of knowledge was still below the national average.

Source: http://www.olpcnews.com/countries/peru/olpc_peru_for_every_child_but.html