How Digital Inclusion Is Done in Africa

I've just returned from organizing an electronics recycling conference in Cape Town, South Africa, where I met Dr. Hylton Villet, the chairman of MyDigitalBridge in Namibia.

I’m well acquainted with the big digital inclusion projects in the U.S. like Connect2Compete and was completely surprised at how African projects like MyDigitalBridge are getting low-cost Internet to low-income people in a mostly rural country.

Namibia is a medium-sized country that borders South Africa. It's located on the southwest Atlantic coast of Africa. Its official language is English. It has a population of just over 2 million in an area considerably larger than Texas. It received its independence from South Africa in 1990.

It is mostly a desert country and the home of both the Namib and Kalahari deserts. After Mongolia, Namibia is the least densely populated country in the world. It is a country of rural villages and small towns. Half the population lives below the international poverty line, and the country has been hard hit by HIV/AIDS.

One thing that Namibia has going for it is a stable parliamentary democracy and a government that clearly believes in digital inclusion.

An NGO with A National Mandate

MyDigitalBridge is an NGO that started its work fairly recently. Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba stated, during his 2012 Annual State of the Nation address, that "our country cannot afford to lag behind in this (digital inclusion) area, because it is vital to the competitiveness of our nation."

MyDigitalBridge was founded soon thereafter that to refurbish PC donations for use in schools, recycle end-of-life IT equipment, and figure out how to get broadband to rural communities throughout the country.

Their mission is to connect schools to Internet learning, to connect rural clinics with telemedicine, and to develop village telecommunications in this part of rural Africa.

Citizen Connect

Their project for this is called Citizen Connect. What's really interesting is how Namibia is approaching the huge infrastructure problem of providing broadband in places that don’t have much basic electricity yet.

In Africa, Internet is wireless, and Africa uses mainly cell phone towers to provide broadband. It is expensive and metered by the MB (megabyte). It is also only available in and around cities.

How 4G Works in Africa

To make affordable Internet available in rural places, MyDigitalBridge is setting up an ambitious pilot project to construct solar-powered WiFi stations that use UHF TV band spectrum, commonly known as TV white spaces.

This is a bit technical, but basically the idea is for them to use old analog TV and FM radio frequencies that were abandoned after conversion to digital TV, just like we did in the U.S.

In the U.S., we auctioned off these frequencies to mobile companies who then used them to create 4G LTE (fourth generation long-term evolution) wireless networks. Verizon Wireless launched the first large-scale LTE network in North America in 2010. The new 4G networks can carry much more data and so are suitable for both mobile phone and PC broadband.

Digital Inclusion Collaboration in Africa

In Namibia, a considerable portion of the TV white spaces spectrum has been allocated for digital inclusion rather than for commercial use. Of course, the Citizen Connect project will require millions of Namibian dollars to complete, but Prime Minister Hage Geingob is providing strong support for MyDigitalBridge's work.

Like all successful digital inclusion projects, it has a strong base of stakeholders and collaborators, including the Communication Regulatory Authority of Namibia, the Ministry of Education and its Advanced Education Technology Services, and the Microsoft 4Afrika Initiative.

My special thanks go to Dr. Hylton Villet for attending the E-Waste and Refurbishment Standards Conference in Cape Town on June 7 and providing me with a draft of the Citizen Connect technical concept paper. 

Image: logo (MyDigitalBridge)