
How does (free) internet benefit Africa? - tefo-mohapi
There&#x27;s a lot of initiatives currently punting &quot;free internet&quot; for us, Africans, but how does having free internet benefit the continent?<p>I get the information benefits, but beyond that?<p>How does a poor person in a rural area REALLY improve their life by just having a cheap android phone and access to the internet?<p>Your thoughts?
======
dozzie
> [...] how does having free internet benefit the continent?

I don't think it does. I think it's one of the ingenious ideas to solve social
and infrastructural problems by throwing an app at them, because real solution
requires work, while creating an app is cheap and still gives the author the
feeling of trying to help the world.

> How does a poor person in a rural area REALLY improve their life by just
> having a cheap android phone and access to the internet?

Merely having a smartphone connected to internet is too little. To benefint
from it one still needs to develop skills, and I can't think of anything that
realistically could be done on 4" screen.

~~~
syedkarim
>one of the ingenious ideas to solve social and infrastructural problems by
throwing an app at them

The internet is not an app; the internet _is_ infrastructure.

~~~
dozzie
Infrastructure for _what_? For _apps_ , mostly, especially when it comes to
smartphones.

If you lack _basic_ infrastructure, you won't benefit from information. You
still need to do something with that information.

~~~
pkinsky
It's infrastructure for sending text, videos and photos to families, friends
or business partners in other towns or cities, downloading repair manuals,
music, books or movies, accessing weather predictions, translating between
languages, etc. These things have real value.

~~~
dozzie
Only if you have basic needs covered already. If you don't, then those are
pretty much useless. Read the lengthy comment written by veddox.

And weather forecasts seem laughable idea for Africa. It's either deserts,
when weather forecasts only help once in few months, or tropical climate, when
you know exactly how it will be for next few months without any forecasts.

~~~
tefo-mohapi
What's the point of useful information when you have issues securing your next
meal?

------
photonicist
I'm from the UK, but spent some time in Baltics. In the UK, "free" wifi
generally isn't free and mobile internet is expensive and pretty crap. Someone
will inevitably tell me that I'm complaining about first-world problems, but
countries stereotyped as "poor" and "former soviet" make the UK look stone-age
with regard to internet access.

In the Baltics, easily-available internet means kids can access Wikipedia,
KhanAcademy, etc. They can get exposure to other cultures despite their
geographical isolation. Most of my mathematical and programming education came
from the internet, not classrooms - despite the UK's "world class" education
system.

Older people have more involvement in their local community due to better
communication with the community. This also gives them better representation
nationally, as I witnessed in the form of a farmer's strike/protest in Tallinn
a few weeks ago - where people from remote little villages and towns all
around the country descended on parliament.

On a more selfish note, a person in a "poor" area who can freelance via the
internet and earn "western" fees can live like a king off very little work,
and some of that money will presumably find its way into their local
community.

------
notahacker
Educated Africans with good English (and to a lesser extent French and
Portuguese) skills can potentially earn a lot more working remotely than they
can in the more limited range of work available to them locally. That foreign
cash, like remittance incomes, then gets injected into the local economy.

But yes, there are certainly parts of Africa that could benefit more from
money being spent on things other than internet access.

~~~
tefo-mohapi
I think eradicating poverty directly is more important than internet access.

~~~
syedkarim
How do you propose to eliminate poverty directly?

------
semicolondev
_I get the information benefits, but beyond that?_

>> Having access to information benefits individuals and society as a whole.
I'd rather focus on how to utilize this access to internet and create things
which are valuable for others to consume locally or globally.

 _How does a poor person in a rural area REALLY improve their life by just
having a cheap android phone and access to the internet?_

>> Internet connects people. Almost everything that you do in person can be
done via internet. Rather than only being a clueless consumer of the internet,
people can learn skills that matter to them. This age is of Knowledge and
skills that can create things, solve problems. Sell things on internet. Write
book and tell the world. Develop softwares for yourself and others. Earn a
living. Help people.

~~~
tefo-mohapi
But a poor person in a rural area is typically illeterate and is more
concerned about shelter and where the next meal comes from

------
samfisher83
They can google farming techniques? Maybe figure out how to make clean water.

~~~
tefo-mohapi
What if (highly likely) they cant read English?

~~~
jpindar
You think the internet is all in English? Seriously?

~~~
veddox
How many pages on the Internet are written in kiLuba? Lunda? Mambwe? Bemba?
Nyanja?

~~~
tefo-mohapi
My point exactly

------
gull
The road out of poverty passes through education. Internet is access to
education.

------
veddox
We have to distinguish between Internet access for people in the cities and
people in rural areas.

The benefits for people in the cities are definitely there: better
communication, higher flow of information, more possibilities.

The benefits for people in the bush are, as far as I can see, virtually zero.
Giving "free Internet to all those poor people in some African village" may
sound great to a Western audience, but to me it signifies an utter
misunderstanding of rural Africa.

In the West, the Internet has brought on a social and economic revolution,
with much changing for the better. But to think that simply giving African
villagers free Internet would bring them the same benefits is utterly
misguided (at least as things stand at the moment). Here's why:

1) Electricity: smart phones need a lot of electricity. How do you get that
into places that aren't hooked up to the grid? First you would need a program
to distribute solar cells or something of the sort to provide the necessary
power. (Note that I think this in itself would be a much more laudable goal
than free Internet - you can do a lot more with electricity than you can with
access to the Internet.)

2) Hardware: You need to get those smart phones into the village in the first
place, and once they are there, keep them in working order. (Despite extreme
heat, dust everywhere, and a host of other technophobe conditions.) Note
however that many villagers do in fact own a cell phone by now, although they
tend to be good old-fashioned, cheap and durable Nokias.

3) Education: many, if not most villagers are illiterate. The Internet is a
text-based medium. If you really want them to benefit from the Internet, fix
the education systems in their countries first.

4) Language: most villagers do not speak English/French/Portuguese fluently.
The percentage of sites in a language they understand (if they can read) is
infinitesimally small. Therefore, the actual benefit they have from Internet
access is much reduced.

5) Oral tradition: Almost all of Africa has an oral tradition, not a written
one like the West. This means that there simply is no culture of writing
things. Very few books are being written in Africa, the number of magazines
appearing in any given native language range from zero to perhaps five. This
partly has to do with the aforementioned lack of education, but a lot of it is
really a cultural artefact. Again, the Internet is a text-based medium that
includes very few sites in local languages. And if (almost) no one is going to
write new sites, that is going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

6) Programming?: Some people suggest that given free Internet, the villagers
could teach themselves programming to earn a living. This is ludicrous. Even
for those who can read and write, many have never even seen a computer, let
alone have the funds to buy one. And how are they going to get paid if they
(as is usually the case) don't have a bank account, and the nearest bank is
200km away?

7) National service providers: the last point is an economic one. Despite what
people in Europe and America may think, there is actually Internet available
in large parts of Africa. Local service providers are expensive, unreliable
and often incredibly slow (we used to be glad to get a 5kb/s connection). But
they are local. If some big company from the West pushes in with an offer of
free Internet for all, the national economy is going to suffer for it. (It's
happened before with the clothing industry in Tanzania, that was all but
destroyed by western "charity clothes".)

I have lived most of my life in Africa, I love the continent and its people.
Of course I want them to develop their countries further. But seriously,
giving free Internet to villagers is just about the dumbest thing you could do
right now. Yes, eventually they should get good Internet, absolutely. But that
is problem #241 on the list, and we're still working on problems #25 through
to #43. Let's fix the education and health systems first; help them develop
good agricultural techniques and fight corruption; build up solid
infrastructures for transport and electricity, or any other of the myriad of
things that they need, URGENTLY.

~~~
taphangum
Problem No. 1 is getting the right information to the right people is it not?
In that case, isn't the internet the best way to disseminate that information?
Doesn't bridging the information gap, bridge the skills and eventually wealth
gap?

I'm sorry, but I just don't understand your argument at all.

~~~
veddox
My point is that free Internet is the solution to a problem that is not yet
ready to be solved.

Most importantly, the current lack of a good education means that the Internet
as a means of information transferral becomes effectively useless. Until the
people have at least basic literacy skills and a moderate grasp of English,
the Internet won't help them, because they won't be able to use it.

~~~
taphangum
How is the availability of information (which is the real separator of
peoples) 'a problem that is not yet ready to be solved'?

~~~
veddox
Information is never just that abstract concept 'information'. Information has
to be transmitted for it to be of any use. Information transmission requires a
sender and a receiver, an encoding for the information that is understood by
both parties, and a medium. In this case, we have senders (people who write
web pages) and receivers (African villagers). If we add in free Internet, we
also have the medium. But without a shared encoding, all these are absolutely
useless. The shared encoding is, in this case, the (written) language. But as
long as rural Africans cannot speak English (or any other language commonly
found on the web), and as long as they cannot at least read with some level of
proficiency, we simply do not have a working system of encoding that could be
used to transmit information.

Thus, in order for free Internet to be effective as a provider of information,
we first need to give the target audience an education sufficient for reading
and understanding English.

~~~
taphangum
What has given you the idea that the only viable 'Encoder' is written
language? Voice or (depending on the bandwidth performance of a given area)
video could do the job just as well, at least initially.

Is the Internet not the best (or at least one of the best) medium for the
learning of the 'encoders' necessary for wider use?

~~~
veddox
I never said that the written language is the _only_ encoder possible.
However, I am sure you agree that it is by far the most common on the
Internet. Even to navigate YouTube you need to read the buttons/know what to
search for!

Furthermore, even if we take sufficient bandwidth to watch videos/hear audio
for granted (which is a large technical problem in itself), we are still left
with the problem that you first need to produce material in a language that
the people actually understand (which is, all too often, not English or French
or any other major language!).

> Is the Internet not the best (or at least one of the best) medium for the
> learning of the 'encoders' necessary for wider use?

In theory perhaps, but in practice? How many people do you know of that have
learnt how to write and read using the Internet?

