How does (free) internet benefit Africa?

In the Baltics, easily-available internet means kids can access Wikipedia, KhanAcademy, etc. They can get exposure to other cultures despite their geographical isolation. Most of my mathematical and programming education came from the internet, not classrooms - despite the UK's "world class" education system.

Older people have more involvement in their local community due to better communication with the community. This also gives them better representation nationally, as I witnessed in the form of a farmer's strike/protest in Tallinn a few weeks ago - where people from remote little villages and towns all around the country descended on parliament.

On a more selfish note, a person in a "poor" area who can freelance via the internet and earn "western" fees can live like a king off very little work, and some of that money will presumably find its way into their local community.

I don't think it does. I think it's one of the ingenious ideas to solve social and infrastructural problems by throwing an app at them, because real solution requires work, while creating an app is cheap and still gives the author the feeling of trying to help the world.

> How does a poor person in a rural area REALLY improve their life by just having a cheap android phone and access to the internet?

Merely having a smartphone connected to internet is too little. To benefint from it one still needs to develop skills, and I can't think of anything that realistically could be done on 4" screen.

>> Having access to information benefits individuals and society as a whole. I'd rather focus on how to utilize this access to internet and create things which are valuable for others to consume locally or globally.

How does a poor person in a rural area REALLY improve their life by just having a cheap android phone and access to the internet?

>> Internet connects people. Almost everything that you do in person can be done via internet. Rather than only being a clueless consumer of the internet, people can learn skills that matter to them. This age is of Knowledge and skills that can create things, solve problems. Sell things on internet. Write book and tell the world. Develop softwares for yourself and others. Earn a living. Help people.

But yes, there are certainly parts of Africa that could benefit more from money being spent on things other than internet access.

The benefits for people in the cities are definitely there: better communication, higher flow of information, more possibilities.

The benefits for people in the bush are, as far as I can see, virtually zero. Giving "free Internet to all those poor people in some African village" may sound great to a Western audience, but to me it signifies an utter misunderstanding of rural Africa.

In the West, the Internet has brought on a social and economic revolution, with much changing for the better. But to think that simply giving African villagers free Internet would bring them the same benefits is utterly misguided (at least as things stand at the moment). Here's why:

1) Electricity: smart phones need a lot of electricity. How do you get that into places that aren't hooked up to the grid? First you would need a program to distribute solar cells or something of the sort to provide the necessary power. (Note that I think this in itself would be a much more laudable goal than free Internet - you can do a lot more with electricity than you can with access to the Internet.)

2) Hardware: You need to get those smart phones into the village in the first place, and once they are there, keep them in working order. (Despite extreme heat, dust everywhere, and a host of other technophobe conditions.) Note however that many villagers do in fact own a cell phone by now, although they tend to be good old-fashioned, cheap and durable Nokias.

3) Education: many, if not most villagers are illiterate. The Internet is a text-based medium. If you really want them to benefit from the Internet, fix the education systems in their countries first.

4) Language: most villagers do not speak English/French/Portuguese fluently. The percentage of sites in a language they understand (if they can read) is infinitesimally small. Therefore, the actual benefit they have from Internet access is much reduced.

5) Oral tradition: Almost all of Africa has an oral tradition, not a written one like the West. This means that there simply is no culture of writing things. Very few books are being written in Africa, the number of magazines appearing in any given native language range from zero to perhaps five. This partly has to do with the aforementioned lack of education, but a lot of it is really a cultural artefact. Again, the Internet is a text-based medium that includes very few sites in local languages. And if (almost) no one is going to write new sites, that is going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

6) Programming?: Some people suggest that given free Internet, the villagers could teach themselves programming to earn a living. This is ludicrous. Even for those who can read and write, many have never even seen a computer, let alone have the funds to buy one. And how are they going to get paid if they (as is usually the case) don't have a bank account, and the nearest bank is 200km away?

7) National service providers: the last point is an economic one. Despite what people in Europe and America may think, there is actually Internet available in large parts of Africa. Local service providers are expensive, unreliable and often incredibly slow (we used to be glad to get a 5kb/s connection). But they are local. If some big company from the West pushes in with an offer of free Internet for all, the national economy is going to suffer for it. (It's happened before with the clothing industry in Tanzania, that was all but destroyed by western "charity clothes".)

I have lived most of my life in Africa, I love the continent and its people. Of course I want them to develop their countries further. But seriously, giving free Internet to villagers is just about the dumbest thing you could do right now. Yes, eventually they should get good Internet, absolutely. But that is problem #241 on the list, and we're still working on problems #25 through to #43. Let's fix the education and healt...