Business
Using Free Wi-Fi to Connect Africa’s Unconnected
As young pitchmen shout to potential passengers over blaring music, a graffiti-covered private minibus fills up more quickly than the other dozen in the scrum. It has free Wi-Fi. The specially outfitted matatu, as the minibuses are known in Swahili, is part of an experiment by Safaricom Ltd. to connect Africa’s unconnected, offering a glimpse of what it takes to bring some of the world’s most price-sensitive users online. Once on board, Mwenda Kanyange updates his Facebook status and browses the Web for his hour long trip home through Nairobi’s traffic-clogged streets. “It gets kind of boring,” the 23-year-old college student says, “Wi-Fi is good for that.”
Tech companies world-wide are trying to reach billions of people just beyond the middle class, and many of them are in Africa. Only about 16 percent of Africa’s one billion people use the Internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union industry group. That is well behind Asia, with 32 percent, and Arab states, with 38 percent. But Africa is the fastest-growing region for accessing the Internet by phone. Mobile-broadband penetration on the continent rose to 11 percent last year from 2 percent in 2010, the group says.
“The numbers can only move in one direction,” says Erik Hersman, who founded a Kenyan crowd-sourcing site and a tech incubator here in the capital. The key to unlocking that growth is discovering ways to bring the Internet to people for whom even phone calls can be too expensive.
Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and other companies are funding groups like the Alliance for Affordable Internet, which work to bring down the cost of getting online globally. Intel Corp. is working in Africa with phone manufacturers to bring down the price of smartphones running on Intel processors. International Business Machines Corp. has opened a research center on the continent.
There are few better places in Africa than Kenya to start a technology venture. A half-dozen tech incubators dot Nairobi. And nearly half the country’s population of 40.7 million people use the Internet in some form, according to the government. But Wi-Fi in Kenya tends to be at upscale establishments, such as airports or high-price restaurants.
On Mr. Kanyange’s matatu, only half the roughly 20 passengers appear to be jumping online. A 24-year-old housekeeper a few seats away from him says she doesn’t have an email address, let alone a Facebook account. Neither does anyone in her family. Reaching people like the housekeeper is the goal of Safaricom’s Vuma Online program, borrowing a Swahili word for “blowing strong and fast.”
The Kenya-based company hopes that putting free Wi-Fi in places where tech novices and tech aficionados meet will coax more people to the company’s paid service. Safaricom says it is willing to absorb losses for the time being but declines to say what it is spending.
