Co-financing of bottom-up approaches towards Broadband Infrastructure Development: A new opportunity for Universal Service Funding

Bottom – up Broadband infrastructure development facilitated by the civil societies and social enterprises are on the increase. However, the problem plaguing the development of these bottom-up approaches in developing countries is the financial capacity to expand their small networks into larger networks –leading to the demise of some of these initiatives. This paper proposes co-financing of these networks as a means of sustaining the bottom-up Broadband network. The argument of this paper is anchored on two of developing country cases. One in India and the other in Ghana. One survived with financial injection and the other did not due to low revenue. This paper, based on these cases, proposes the utilization and the reintroduction of Universal Service funds in developing countries to aid these small networks. This is a qualitative study, the Grounded Theory approach was used adopted gather data for these cases.