Can fiber enable equitable digital access and unlock Africa’s potential?

Towards the end of 2022, following my return to South Africa having been engaged in a year of exploration, I shared a message on some of my social media channels that I was actively seeking to re-engage my mind in this wide intersection space.

It was an interesting experience, as having worked with a number of businesses in South Africa over the last eight years, I had moved most of my mental bandwidth in 2022 into foreign spaces abroad that were looking at a different set of problems. As I brought my attention back into the African landscape, I consciously felt myself adapting a beginners mindset. Listening with curiosity and seeking to ask better questions so that I could deepen my understanding of the complexity that was being navigated.

There were a number of projects that came across my radar from a variety of different sources and I felt energised by the energy with which these projects were crafting solutions to take on the problem spaces that they had been identified.

Shortly after this post I had the opportunity to catch up with a friend in Stellenbosch who has started a few businesses in South Africa and is involved in Isizwe, a project that is seeking to provide access to digital connectivity through a prepaid fiber connection from R5 per day. We discussed the project and the potential that digital access could unlock as we caught up about life and some of our shared curiosities.

Fast forward a few months and in early February 2023, I had the chance to visit and interact with one of the proof of concepts that cohort of passionate thinkers and builders behind Isizwe hand brought to life.

The Kayamandi Fiber Project is no small undertaking, it’s a shift on multiple levels not just a business model shift. It’s one of the many reasons that I am fascinated by the ambition that is driving Isizwe and the change the team is seeking to enable. If you’ve read some of my other writing, you will know that I firmly believe cynics will not build the future.

Having worked with a few start-ups I always enjoy looking back on early notes I recorded as their stories started to evolve and the narratives that started out as small seeds begin to mature through the interactions they have with the world around them. The two parts of early story telling that I pay careful attention to are the mission and the vision, a big reason for this is because you can use it as a window to better understand how deeply a team has thought about the problem space that they are crafting for.

• A mission is what you are setting out to achieve and how you’ll go about doing it.
• A vision is what the world might look like if you are successful in building out the business you are shaping.

Many of the Telco’s around the world will claim to have ‘connected’ the world and while they might have started the journey towards digital connectivity I don’t think that they will be the ones to allow people in Africa to access the enormous potential that an internet connection is able to offer. As more of the world comes online and an ever increasing amount of the services that we use in our a daily lives lean towards digital first options we need a digital connectivity landscape that allows the fully utility of this shift to be embrace. Not merely one that allows us to experience it in sporadic parts or just through one platform that you’re locked into (think special data deals for Whatsapp or Facebook).

Isizwe is seeking to onboarding users to internet connectivity at a lower price point. It’s doing so by directly challenging legacy profit margins, this allows them to address the disconnect between local communities and the services that they use. They are working from the base of first principles — what does the customer actually want (I prefer to think about this as thinking about how great products address peoples needs — which are often unseen — rather than their wants). Lastly the project uses a three pronged go to market approach — keep capital spend to a minimum, utilise pay as you go (can’t charge for this service on a credit card ), make the product time based (only way to avoid unnecessary surprises associated with existing models of connectivity)

Isizwe has also open sourced their ‘playbook’ which you can view here if you’re interested in how they have tackled some of the challenges out on the ground. Following interacting with the service on the ground and taking some time to think about it, it is overwhelming apparent that a time based architecture is a revolutionary approach towards the provision of digital connectivity in areas that have previously been excluded from having access to a service of this nature. There will of course be many cynics who will way in with their view(s) on why this approach may not work or why it won’t be able to become profitable. While it is valuable to engage with view offered by critiques and alternative view points, I would suggest focusing our available energy on building solutions that can drive change rather complaining.

When seeking to provide a new type of landscape for digital connectivity (pioneering per se), there are certain barriers that need to be overcome. Having researched the Kayamandi Fiber Project and interacted with it on the ground, here are some of the key things that I think Isizwe has done to overcome exclusionary barriers in the digital connectivity space.

-creating a peer to peer payments network so that you don’t have to utilise expensive alternatives that prohibit small transaction amounts from being processed digitally.

-removed high transaction costs by installing fiber infrastructure, thinking about service delivery over an extended time horizon.

-placed the ownership of network access back into the hands of the community — pay for what you need as opposed to pay for what we give you

-allowed a variety of funding sources to allow you to purchase access to connectivity as a user.

-the time based access approach gives visible and transparent freedom to a user of the network.

I think the team have successfully proved that they were able to create an attraction force, the big question now is how will this attraction be shaped into a lasting action? Chris Dixon has an excellent framing for this in a piece from 2015 titled ‘Come for the tool, stay for the network’.

I’ll revisit this specific section over the next few months as I seek to better understand how the different pieces of the tech ecosystem that is being built out contribute to the overall functioning of the whole. As well as looking at the design decisions that help to integrate this service offering into the lives of people.

There are challenges in everything that we do, but to simple not engage with something because is it difficult would mean that we never change. These words from Charles R Swindoll articulate my position well, “We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”

One of the marked differences that I have seen through the brief engagement (a short 30 minute chat and site visit) that I have had with the Isizwe team and the research that I have done, is that they are not just building services for communities but rather they are building/design services with them.

I am eager and excited to see where the team behind this initiative take it as they clearly have big ambitions.

It really does ask one to imagine the possibilities of a society that is digitally enabled, not just digitally connected. Steve Jobs famously spoke about the information age and Imran Chaudhri has made reference to the intelligence age (which hu.ma.ne has trade marked). There is a silent energy around Isizwe that has me thinking that it might be a key player in helping Africa to engage the potential offered by the age of access.

I’ll be following along the journey rather closely and share more updates as I uncover them. If you’re curious I’d encourage you to do so too. Oh and if you’re interested in gifting digital access to some one today you can do that here.