We Have a Unique Opportunity to Bridge the Digital Divide and Change Our Lives
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We Have a Unique Opportunity to Bridge the Digital Divide and Change Our Lives
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By Isaac Kwaku Fokuo, Jr., Founder and Principal, Botho Emerging Markets Group
December 13, 2020
Originally published in the print edition of The East African on December 5, 2020
One of the Kusi Ideas Festival’s themes is” The Pandemic Taught Us That African Integration is a Winner”. Most of the instances of this integration have been physical - for example, the African Union preparing the continent to receive medical supplies and future vaccines, and African airlines moving desperately-needed PPE around the continent. What if the real winner here is if we all come together online? What if we envisioned a “moonshot” for Africa that promises to bridge the digital divide and get millions of people online for the first time, knowing that when people are better connected, we can better manage the pandemic and become better prepared for our collective future?
According to the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development at UNESCO, most Africans access the internet through data from their cell phones. However, the usage gap on the continent, or the percentage of people living inside mobile broadband coverage but not using mobile internet, stood at 49% in 2019. Lack of digital skills and affordability are the two main drivers behind this gap - 1 GB of data costs an average of 9% of monthly income in sub-Saharan Africa (the global standard is no more than 2%). For many people across the continent, this puts getting online almost entirely out of reach.
COVID-19 has shown us in many ways that digital connectivity, particularly through our mobile phones, is crucial, and that a lack of it can have catastrophic effects. First, putting mobile data in people’s hands allows them to access information on demand, beyond what is supplied by government notifications and perhaps even cheaper. While there are mechanisms to get information on the pandemic to people via SMS or USSD, this entails a per-message cost, which is sometimes out of reach for the majority of the population. Second, as the pandemic has forced school closures and moved millions of children around the continent (and around the world) to online learning, lack of access to the internet is pushing students in low-resource settings behind.
Third, diagnostic tools to monitor the spread of the virus and disseminate contact tracing information are often only available in Western markets- and even if they were available in sub-Saharan Africa, they would still not be able to reach the unconnected. Currently, despite some successes on the continent in monitoring the spread of the virus, governments in the Global South are spending millions of dollars and wasting time and human resources doing contact tracing manually at the monetary and health expense of their own citizens.
There are examples from around the world about how we can leverage mobile data and technology, even for those getting online for the first time, to better manage the pandemic and prepare for a post-COVID future. First using national portals, emergency SMS services, social media, and devoted pandemic response apps, governments can spread timely and correct information about out-break statistics, travel restrictions, guidance on protection from the virus, and government response to the pandemic. We can look to Taiwan as an exemplar. From April to mid-August 2020, Taiwan, registered no domestic cases of COVID-19, with all new cases arising from inbound travellers.
Central database
The country implemented a national contact tracing platform known as TRACE that handles case identification, contact identification, and contact health monitoring via phone and a central database. Their success in containing the pandemic has been heralded as a best practice for strategies to manage a future pandemic.
Second, internet access can both allow people to work from home, thus helping to contain the spread of the disease, and also formalise the informal economy, therefore creating innovations to connect people to work. Amal, a Palestinian company, created an app that uses machine learning technology to connect construction workers to projects, eliminating the need for laborers to gather in search of work in densely populated areas that could be sites for the spread of COVID-19. Finally, access to mobile data can help diagnose and monitor the spread of the virus. In Nigeria, Wellvis created the COVID-19 Triage Tool, a free online product where people can self-score their risks of contracting the virus and then can access relevant information about prevention and care.
Luckily, there is no shortage of actors working to get people online on the continent in unique ways. Amp Global (“AMP”), headquartered in Mauritius with a presence in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, and South Africa is an example of an African company doing its part to bridge the digital divide, with the vision of getting 70% of Africans on 4G data by 2025. AMP partners with telecommunications companies to offer free data rewards to users on its app in exchange for amplifying and promoting content from African artists, removing the cost barriers that prevent people from accessing mobile internet in the first place.
Cost barriers
AMP is also bridging the local content gap, developing demand-driven content that African consumers want to access and simultaneously training African artists on digital skills that are in high-demand in the continent’s job market. If AMP is successful in its vision and enables 75% of Africa’s population to get online, there is a potential for this to create 44 million new jobs.
We cannot underestimate the importance of the democratization of data and the power of the Internet in a post-COVID future - just getting people online opens up a world of possibilities that go beyond getting a job. If you put data in the hands of people and allow them to do with it what they want, it will bring unprecedented opportunities.
Through the Internet, ordinary people can create products, services, and content to meet their communities’ needs, as evidenced by the pandemic. However, connecting the unconnected costs money and the task ahead of us is massive. A recent report from the Broadband Commission estimates that around $100 billion will be needed to achieve universal access to broadband connectivity in Africa.
Investing in digital skills and local content creation in Africa in the next 10 years alone will require $18 billion. Although AMP is a model to look towards, AMP and actors like it cannot do the work of getting hundreds of millions of people online by themselves. Governments, telecommunications companies, private sector actors, international organizations, and civil society need to move out of their silos to co-create and co-invest. Only then will we be able to realize a digitally resilient, interconnected, post-COVID future for Africa.