Carlos Rey-Moreno, after working in providing connectivity to remote health care centres in Latin America, has devoted the last eight years to studying, developing and supporting community networks around the world. As part of his PhD he co-founded Zenzeleni Networks, and studied the main drivers that could make a community network in rural South Africa sustainable and scalable. After obtaining his doctorate in 2015, he went and studied the common denominators across community networks in Africa, producing a seminal report on the topic, and co-organised the first five editions of the Summit on Community Networks in Africa. For the last four years, he has been with the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), where he co-leads its community networks initiative, overseeing projects in Latin America, Africa and Asia. He also coordinates its policy and regulatory work to create a more enabling regulatory framework for local operators and community networks. As part of that, he has provided training to regional regulatory associations and policy makers in Africa, authored reports and written submissions to public consultations on the topic, and participated frequently as speaker and convener in internet governance and similar telecommunications policy forums.

Purpose of position

The local access policy and regulation coordinator is responsible for overall coordination of Work Package 4 (WP4) of the "Connecting the unconnected: Supporting community networks and other community-based connectivity initiatives" project. The objective of WP4 is to contribute to an enabling policy and regulatory environment for local access at national, regional and global levels in the project framework. The WP4 coordinator is also responsible for providing overall strategic direction to the project, which will involve working closely with the overall project coordinator, the movement building coordinator, the gender and women's engagement coordinator, the regional coordinators and the rest of the project team. It also includes working closely with the Women's Rights Programme (WRP) and the global policy advocacy lead based on an integrated strategy for the policy and regulation work in the regions and globally.