A joint ITU-Unesco report estimated that for Africa to have access to quality universal broadband by 2030 $100 billion would be required.
Imagine: it is 2010. You are watching some series online (one of those before Netflix became trendy) and the 40-minute episode lasts two times longer due to your bad connection. You have tried all the tricks that make your router work and there is no way to see the protagonist without pixels in the face.
A joint ITU-Unesco report estimated that for Africa to have access to quality universal broadband by 2030 $100 billion would be required.
Imagine: it is 2010. You are watching some series online (one of those before Netflix became trendy) and the 40-minute episode lasts two times longer due to your bad connection. You have tried all the tricks that make your router work and there is no way to see the protagonist without pixels in the face.
It is now 2020. Full global pandemic. You work online, you get information online and you can only see the people you love the most online. All this with the same connection as in 2010. Sounds a bit surreal, right? To make things worse: imagine 2020, but without the Internet. This is the reality of 3.6 billion people nowadays.
According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), almost half of the world’s population lacks access to the network. In the, what the UN calls, least developed countries the connection is shown to be the lowest: only 33.1% of its inhabitants have a subscription to the mobile broadband, while in the West there’s a total of more subscriptions than people.
Africa is the region most affected by this disconnection; a territory in which the problem lays not only in the lack of connection itself but also in its absence of privacy. Only 17.8% of African households have Internet access and only 10.7% have a computer, just like the one I need in order to write this article.
This is how millions of people live and work when confinement is recommended throughout the entire planet. Even for the supplies of water and food, there’s still a need to expose themselves to everything that we are capable of doing behind the screens.
Donate a phone to finance a new one
Jari Ala-Ruona, CEO and co-founder of Aion Sigma, has spent the last five years facilitating access to technology in sub-Saharan Africa. “My goal has been to make new smartphones affordable by allowing people to pay for them monthly,” explains the CEO, stressing the high cost of a mobile phone in the region. “Spending €80 on a mobile phone a year could be the equivalent of buying three MacBook Pros a month for a European,” he says.
Last September, Ala-Ruona gathered his team in Ronda (Málaga) to decide on the next steps for his company. This is where the idea of Smartphones4good came from an initiative that consists of selling used smartphones from donations and financing the proceeds with access to new mobile phones in Africa.
However, the project has not been launched until the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic. The European Commission organized the #EUvsVirus Hackathon on April 22nd- 25th where the team presented their project. “Out of 20,900 people and 2,150 solutions presented, we won the Digital Finance: Support for the Digitally Excluded category.” “A few days later the icing on the cake arrived in the form of the Imaginbank of Spain sponsorship prize worth €5,000,” recalls Ala-Ruona.
One of the most important decisions behind Smartphones4good is the audience that the program is aimed at – the African businesswomen. Different organizations and companies indicate that women invest 90% of their salary in their family, while men spend only 40%; making it less likely that the businesswomen will be able to buy a mobile phone. For Ala-Ruona’s team, this was the trigger for targeting their program to them.
Smartphones4good will provide the women in Rwanda, Mozambique, Ghana and Kenya (in addition to an actual phone) with a business and a COVID-19 content training for their smartphones. It is precisely in Kenya where another initiative that promotes connectivity in times of Coronavirus has begun to expand.
Loon fights balloon disconnection
Made of polyethylene sheets and prepared to fly for more than 100 days, the balloons of Loon (a subsidiary company of the Google giant, Alphabet) travel through the stratosphere taking advantage of its winds, which can exceed 100km/h.
Several balloons are placed over rural and inaccessible areas to connect to the signal emitted by an operator on the ground; thus, allowing personal mobiles to access the service of their telephone company.
The battery of these devices is fully powered by solar energy and, through the storage of the information about the winds that each balloon shares with the rest, they generate algorithms that allow them to move autonomously.
In Kenya, the legal procedures that allow Loon to operate in its territory have been accelerated to improve communications during the pandemic. The commercial agreement between Loon and the operator Telkom Kenya had existed since 2018 and in the summer of 2019 they obtained a permit to start testing the equipment on the ground, but the current situation has made it more urgent than ever to connect the Kenyans.
“Given the global situation with COVID-19, we are working as quickly as possible to deploy the Loon service in Kenya to help in the short term and establish sustainable operations that will continue to serve Kenyans in the long term,” explained Alastair Westgarth (CEO of the company) in a Medium post.
Soon after, Westgarth announced Loon’s next step in Africa: a commercial contract with Vodacom in Mozambique.
Is universal broadband possible?
Both Smartphones4good and Loon have received a boost due to the Coronavirus crisis, however, they are initiatives that are projected in the long-term and that could be essential in the global reality that we find ourselves when all this ends.
Confinement and social distancing have shown us the importance of connection in our lives. It is so high that it could almost be considered a right. But would that be possible? In October 2019, a joint report by ITU and Unesco estimated that, for Africa to have access to quality universal broadband by 2030, $100 billion would be required, somewhat less than Jeff Bezos’ current assets.
For now, or until the billionaire founder of Amazon decides to donate all of his money, connectivity in less developed countries can only be improved through initiatives like these or those promoted by the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) or Quika.
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Translated from original source: https://www.rewisor.com/sobrevivir-a-una-pandemia-sin-internet/
— image source: https://www.rewisor.com/sobrevivir-a-una-pandemia-sin-internet/