Hi Muthoni

A very nice piece but the devil is in the details and believe me, the infrastructure that enables access to the Internet, costs money, a lot of money, no kidding. That is why even in developed nations, the internet is not universal but at least it's affordable due to massive private sector investment that went into building the transport networks in those countries hence the dense development of the Internet in most advanced economies.

The good news is that there is continued development of this infrastructure one day at a time across the continent. There is also a new movement around community networks to aid inclusiveness in places where there is no connectivity and this is not only in Africa but across the world.

For Africa, there is also an issue of geography. There are regulatory issues. There are economic issues in terms of what is a national priority though most counties have started to take the Internet and ICT seriously. No kidding, right now, access to food/water and healthcare is proving to be more of a priority than the Internet in most countries.

In your piece you talk of education and health. In terms of education and it being online, I tend to think that such content can be online or offline but it has to exist first and with internet exchange points and CDN's, a nation could leverage on such infrastructure to deliver such critical content to its people in the country at a much lower cost.  In terms of health, the same approach could come in handy and this is where Internet exchange points become very important.

Just my opinion as I sip a warm glass of muharubani (african herbs) concoction.

Noah

./noah

neo - network engineering and operations

On Sat, Apr 4, 2020 at 4:39 PM Dorcas Muthoni via kictanet <kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke> wrote:

Hi all,

This is an article I wrote recently: http://www.afchix.org/blog_post/internet-should-be-public-utility/

Happy to here your thoughts.

The regulatory framework needs to be future looking. The COVID-19 situation is bringing us back to the table to revise what we otherwise thought was reasonable use and penetration of the Internet in Kenya and across Africa.

Good time to revive  like APC, KICTANET etc to revisit policy advocacy on  universally accessible and affordable Internet access. Internet should be considered as critical as other services like water, electricity, sewerage etc.

We all know the school calendar is in total jeopardy and talks on having kids repeat 2020 on the table. 

Universally accessible and affordable Internet access is what will give us a continuity strategy for education and support telemedicine. These are some of the areas where growth must happen.

Regards, Muthoni

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