Issues of Guatemala

ISSUES OF GUATEMALA Vicky Mosquera

In order to make this essay a little bit more realistic it is important for you to have real data aside from the description that we can give you all. This data may be alarming at first but when you read my description you will see how we manage to work with these problems. It is hard trying to describe a countries situation in a small essay but this will be a short description only to give you a general idea of our country.

. INFRASTRUCTURE

» Communication:

1) Telephones: A few years ago it was virtually impossible to have a phone at your house of you lived in a rural area. This was because the company that was in charge of communication was not able of wiring the phone cable to remote areas. In those times what the community use to do is to activate a line in the store and so everyone so often would go and call from there, leaving that number as reference and having the store owner take messages for them.

All these changed when several cellphone companies were welcomed to Guatemala. Since cellphones need no cable it was easier and cheaper to have one in order to communicate. Today virtually everyone has a cell phone, the only areas where I have not seen one is in really poor areas of Guatemala.

2) Internet: In The metropolitan areas it is hard to find someone that does not has internet, but, in the rural areas no one has the need to have this tool since they do not have the need of a computer. So internet companies have pretty limited services, to areas that are the main cities of Guatemala.

3) Written Communication: we have several U.S companies that can deliver any kind of package (for example DHL), and of course Guatemalan post office that is somewhat slow but at the end you will get you mail. The problem for example in sending a written message is that not everyone knows to read and write in rural areas, this is why this option is only available to some villages.

» Transportation

In Guatemala car roads are the most used way of transportation by everyone in the country. We have 12,033 km of roads to communicate all the country, about 26% of all this roads are paved, this means approximately 3,117 km the rest are dirt roads. Of this percentage of paved roads we have 125 km of highways.

This can sound impossible and of course can result in an issue. What happens is that only the interstate roads and the ones inside a city or village are paved, when you get of the main road you will find dirt road until you reach a village which some of them will be paved. Of course this is not for the villages but the majority has this problem. This “dirt roads” can be a great way to move un summer but sometimes in winter since there is too much water it is needed a car 4x4 , this is a problem specially seemed in roads that a certain level of inclination because it is between mountains. This helps us conclude that for example the product can not be too delicate to transport because most probably it will travel in the back of a pick-up on a “dirt road”. Also, for them to go to a village is not easy , so they travel once a week or twice a month this gives the product another problem because they can not be traveling in order to get a power source for example.

» Power Availability

According to the electric company 19 of the 22 departments of Guatemala has electric service, in which not all the rural areas have access to it. 52% of the country has electric service the rest of it uses wood and fire as the main source of energy. In some areas when there is no access to electricity, they may use gas but is a really small percentage. So the use of an electric source to the product can not be taken for granted.

. CULTURE

Our culture is one of the most complex since we have a reunion of several different ancient cultures. Our country has 23 different ethnic groups which preserve their language, religion, traditions, etc. most of the country’s traditions are based in a mixture of all this ethnic groups and Spanish traditions. This is why it is really difficult to described out country’s culture. That is why we can only give a superficial description with a couple of datas.

Aside form all this mixture we have a pretty strong culture, which can a be an issue when designing a product, because not every person is open to new forms of doing what they have been doing for so long. So, this is an issue to consider, whether the product can adapt to a string culture.

» Literacy: 69% » Birth rate: 29.88 births/1,000 population 2.8% per year » Population Distribution: 60% rural / 40% urban, 55% Maya Indian / 45% Ladino » Religion: 70% Roman Catholic, 30% Evangelical » Language: Spanish is universally spoken throughout Guatemala. Mayan languages are spoken by 40% of the population and for many, Spanish is a second language. » Poverty: In Guatemala according to PNUD 56.1% of the Guatemalans live in poverty and 15.7% of the population lives in extreme poverty. This is a great percentage of population that lives in poverty. The PIB per capita (PPA) is of 4148. This is really not representative of our reality of our country because this an average between the rich persons and the poor, so the richest can fluctuate the results. In our country there are very rich people but also really poor people, this is why we have a Gini coefficient of 0.54. this coefficient id measured between 0 and 1, in which 1 represents the perfect equality in which everyone has the same.

. DISTANCE BETWEEN DEVELOPERS AND USERS.

This supposedly can not be an issue because that is why you are working with us, in order to break down this frontier and become in direct contact through us to our users.