| 4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
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In addition to financial subsidy, non-financial support has been also granted to a project winner in any certain geographical areas. Examples of non-financial support granted to a project winner are as follows: allocating more frequency spectrum, providing more facilitations and granting some waivers.
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| 5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
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Telecommunication has grown to be one of the most successful industries with high standards of performance and growth. Yet, with telecom carriers prioritizing areas and segments where highest margins of profitability can be hatched, many rural and low-income areas and villages had low-performance data infrastructure and, in some cases, left totally unserved (About 21000 villages and 5 million people).
In an effort to bridge the gap and insure a fair and balanced deployment of services, the Universal Services Fund initiative was introduced by Communication Information Technology Commission (CITC). This initiative designs, subsidizes, and maintains a reasonably fast and reliable telecom infrastructure for unserved and low-margin areas through a unique collaboration between CITC/USF, representing the government and the regulating entity in the kingdom, and telecom operators.
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| 6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
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The implementation of such a plan of extended services and geographic locations requires the full utilization of the industry’s best expertise. Therefore, a clear and distinct set of responsibilities were given to the different parties involved in the initiative to ensure effective execution of the plan throughout the several stages of implementation. These responsibilities and expectations included, but were not limited to, the following:
Surveying: This task included the collection of data of areas of interest and how much investment there might be needed.
Design and implementation of infrastructure: This task includes the technical design of telecom networks, the actual mobilization of engineers and other manpower, and the startup of the service. This was done by telecom carries which utilized its existing capabilities in doing so.
Regulation: This is put into place by the CITC/USF and was developed with the unique characteristics and features of the pre-defined areas and affected demographics.
Subsidy of initiative: As the projects needed to be subsidized to compensate for the low-margin profit, the government toke the responsibility of subsidizing the initiative.
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| 7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
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Ministry of Finance: Providing the funds
Ministry of Communication & IT/CITC: Creating and authorizing the USF Mandate
USF: Design, organize, and implement the USF Mandate/initiative.
Telecom Operators: Implement the physical infrastructure.
Technical Monitor: A third independent party (i.e. Swedtel Arabia) to monitor the initiative and the quality of service provided.
General Authority of Statistics: provided the general population and housing census.
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| 8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
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Improving access to services such as (education, medical, banking, ..) services.
The initiative created more job opportunities in Rural Areas.
Telecommunications opens new markets for rural areas.
Telecommunications reduced distance and rural isolation.
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| 9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
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As the initiative targets ruler areas and villages and due to the diverse geographical nature of the country many obstacles and difficult locations were came across the teams during delivering the telecom infrastructure (mountains, islands, gravel roads, ..) as well as the lack of energy sources which was major barrier.
Limited resources which meant that the initiative had to be efficiently designed
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