Academy for Educational Development

Skopje, October 11, 2005 — Working with the Government of Macedonia and the private sector, AED has helped to transform Macedonia, once the least developed of the Yugoslav republics, into the world’s first “wireless country” of its size or larger.

Now a vast majority—95%—of the country’s population has access to wireless, broadband internet service.

Through a grant from USAID, the AED project Macedonia Connects worked with a local internet service provider to connect every one of the country’s 430 primary and secondary schools to a wireless network. Two years ago most of these schools did not even have working telephones. Now each is outfitted with a computer lab, and the students are connected to the world. That network became the backbone for the national wireless system.

“Our project team had the technical vision of how the network we created for the schools could be expanded to benefit the entire country,” said Dennis Foote, vice president and director of the AED Center for Applied Technology.

Affordable countrywide broadband access will enable government and businesses to use the Internet to foster economic growth and development through agribusiness, tourism, and increased educational resources for schools and universities.

According to Foote, Macedonian officials believe the new infrastructure will attract new investment opportunities and create jobs.

The public-private partnership involved in making this exciting advancement possible includes members from the Government of the Republic of Macedonia, the Macedonian Ministry of Education and Science, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the People’s Republic of China, Microsoft, and Motorola. Microsoft provided valuable software packages and licenses to the government of Macedonia, and Motorola contributed necessary hardware.

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