We’re thinking too small. The real internet opportunity is not efficiency

In the video, Supa Mandiwanzira, the minister responsible for the internet in Zimbabwe, was interviewed at the World Summit on the Information Society Forum (an ITU conference). In the interview he says one of the greatest strides made in Zimbabwe to make the internet accessible to people in rural areas is the move by government to lower the costs of VSAT. This, he said, has enabled the banks to reduce their costs. TelOne has also been able to to provide internet to some 300 schools.

They key figure Supa mentions in the interview is the 70% of Zimbabweans that live in rural areas. We can argue about the accuracy of that figure of course but even if this were 60 of even 50%, the truth is that there’s a whole huge population out there that don’t have access to the internet and are excluded from the huge opportunity it is.

While government can do VSAT and connected schools and all that, the truth is that a real game changer in connecting these people will have to be commercial. It’s kind of the same way government and the central bank went on and on about financial inclusion until EcoCash came.

Supa says in the interview that Zimbabwe is an agriculture driven economy and that the internet presents opportunities to improve production for farmers (weather information, market info etc…). He also proudly brings up the now all too familiar “Zimbabwe is the most literate country on the continent” line. The efficiency that access to information brings to anyone that previously was disconnected is unparalleled indeed and the minister is on point.

But there’s a bigger opportunity than being efficient with the legacy tools we have possessed for centuries. The internet allows all of us to access knowledge to be inventors. It levels access to knowledge that empowers us to use the mind as a tool and not just ploughs, hoes and donkey carts. This is the “knowledge” in the commonly used line “technology is an enabler of the knowledge economy”.

For someone in the rural areas, the internet opportunity should not be boxed in being more efficient in their agriculture; it should be liberated to studying and specialising in anything they are talented for. They should learn to be rocket scientists if they so wish. They should use their minds to solve agriculture problems in Brazil from here if that’s their passion. They should learn opera and comedy and perform for a global audience from Chivi. They should write code for Heroku if they so wish, because the best programming mind they could ever hire, is probably in Binga herding cattle.

Sounds extreme yes, but when you think about it, that’s actually the real internet opportunity that our generation has to harness. There are no easy answers to making this possible, but the faster, as a nation, we starting thinking how we can solve the problem of creating an ecosystem where this is possible, the closer we get to living in our times, and the future.