Loskop community network with Project Isizwe

Status: Closed

Country: South Africa

Partner: Project Isizwe

Impact goal: 15 000 people

About the project

Project Isizwe apply their learnings from Mpophomeni in Imbabzane, around the Loskop mountain, creating a wifi community network that can continually sustain internet access for learning to 30 schools. They will install internet access points to schools and broadcast this to homes. Resellers trained by Project Isizwe will sustain the internet. Through this project they want to prove that the school community network model works in a rural, low-income, and low-density environment.

Results

The first phase of the project was to build the schools’ network and bring the 6 schools online  as this would create the base network for the full project. The network was built, and schools installed, onboarded and teachers trained between Monday 5 August and Thursday 8 August, well ahead of the 30th September deadline. Between 12 August and 15 September, the 3 learners who joined the project through a learnership, began to build a pipeline of homes for the community WiFi deployment.  The build of the community network began on 16 September and was completed on 1 November; completion one day after the 31 October deadline. The school and community WiFi aspects of this project have been successfully delivered.

Since inception 1,695 education stakeholders (teachers and learners) have benefitted from the free WiFi coverage installed at the 6 schools. They have used 12TB of data. The savings to these teachers and learners is R1.2 million - what they otherwise would have had to spend on mobile data were they not connecting to the school’s WiFi.

Across 120 homes where R5 WiFi has been installed, 3,670 users have purchased, connected to and used 34TB of uncapped WiFi data.

It has also been interesting to see that the 7 Day Bundles are equally as popular as the 1 Day Bundles in this area. In the more urban, less rural / densely populated areas there tends to be a much higher rate of daily purchases. It is very encouraging that users are buying the longer term bundles in higher quantities than we see in the urban networks.

Project Isizwe was fortunate to partner with a local technology company - Network Configuration - during the initial schools deployment that donated time and resources who assisted with the installations, onboarding and training. Three young local South Africans - Sanele, Portia and Sammy - joined the project early on as young technology and entrepreneurial resources keen to get involved and support the project. They have been trained, and helped with building the pipeline and installing the sites, and are now (through a learnership enabled by Network Configuration) resourced to the project for support, maintenance and sales. These three young people are benefiting from the project through studies, work experience, commission from sales and learnership employment.

About the partner

Project Isizwe was founded 2013 with a vision to provide equitable connectivity for 50 million African citizens through uncapped internet. The non-profit organization partners with internet service providers to enable impoverished African communities to equitable access the internet.

Visit their website here to learn more about them.