Advancing Rural Connectivity in South Africa through Policy and Regulation: A Case for Community Networks

There is currently widespread consensus amongst governments and at the highest levels of the United Nations in respect of the right for all citizens, regardless of their station on life, to have unfettered access to the Internet. However despite substantive investments in telecommunications infrastructure development, a plethora of policy interventions and two world summits on the Information Society, almost half of the world's population remains unconnected. In this paper, we argue that this situation calls for innovative solutions to address the digital divide to ensure that the poor also derive social and economic benefit from broadband Internet access and use. Rural South Africa, which remains largely underserved to date, serves as a case study in which we propose innovative policy reforms to support a model of Community Networks. Based on learnings derived from a real-world project, we argue that the digital divide can indeed be addressed through bottom-up community ownership models. Such models can only sustainably thrive if governments and regulators are willing to develop an enabling policy environment.