BRCK’s Moja network covers 2 million people and has 8 million+ sessions per month, making it one of the largest public WiFi networks on the continent.  With that kind of reach, we realized we could do something to help spread the information that’s so necessary during this crisis in order to flatten the African curve.

• First, we’re making sure people who want to get online watch approved coronavirus educational videos in order to earn their free internet time.  This mechanism isn’t available almost anywhere else, so it provides a great opportunity to push the right information in front of people. 
• Second, we have a whole channel dedicated to information, contacts, and alerts/updates on the coronavirus. You can see the current COVID-19 channel here. 
• Third, we’ve created an educational channel for all ECD, primary, and secondary content so that children can continue learning when they’re not at school. You can see the current BRCK Education content aggregated here.

Educating Through Moja

The work Moja is doing today can have a huge impact on the non-pharmaceutical interventions to stop the spread. Moja is an outdoor public WiFi network that connects almost 1 million people in Africa to the internet for free every month. We reward our users for their attention and engagement with a digital currency called Moja points. Moja points can be used to connect to the internet. 

Our users, like many people in Africa with smartphones, want to connect to the internet, the largest, greatest network of knowledge and information in the world. And they can afford to spend time, but not money, to get online. These incentives and connections are the pipelines through which we have now started disseminating locally relevant educational content about COVID-19. 

Information about COVID-19 is the first thing users see upon connecting to Moja WiFi. Users connected to Moja can watch an educational video to earn points to go online. 

People in urban Africa are no longer huddled around radios and TV sets waiting for the government to tell them what to do. They are looking to find information and connect with others on their smartphones. Unlike everyone reading this blogspot, and learning from other online sources, not everyone has the privilege of digital access. Not everyone has the privilege of being perpetually and ubiquitously online.  The 4 barriers to connectivity are:

1. Access (to a signal and/or a smartphone)
2. Digital literacy
3. Relevance of content (local languages, and accessible for the illiterate, etc.) 
4. Affordability

Because Moja addresses all 4 of those barriers, we are playing a growing role in bridging the digital divide. We are using that bridge to:

• Disseminate to our users as soon as they land on our captive portal the many PSAs in English and local languages about COVID-19, tactics, and strategies to stop the spread.

• Give our users the latest official and verified updates from government bodies and WHO.

• Provide an education content portal for learners, parents, and teachers. We had already done a lot of thinking during our Kio Kit days about the most relevant content for Kenyan students.

Looking Ahead

The challenge we have now is to use these tools to drive behavioural change by helping our continent understand why these changes are crucial to saving millions of lives. Because the paternalistic “what and how” approach simply won’t work. We need creative ways of communicating these messages effectively to people who may not even have a primary or secondary school education. 

If you have content to share with our users, please click here.

We have a lot of work to do, and the work of the technology sector must include connecting 800 million people in Africa to the information they need to both understand and fight this pandemic. 

The pipelines we build today will continue to bridge the digital divide for our young, entrepreneurial, and astute population that lacks access to the global digital economy today. 

The world shifted last week, and a new reality sits in front of us. We always paid lip-service to how important the internet was when everything was normal. We’ve all just realized it’s absolutely critical when things go upside down at a global level.

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”
– Lenin

What we’re seeing with the onset of COVID-19 and the tightening of borders, the closing of schools, and the social distancing that’s being forced upon us is that there is a massive uptick in demand for connectivity. Even in richer countries, the response leaves a digital gap, where those who have it are able to keep working, learning, and entertaining themselves, while those who don’t are left behind. In poorer countries, it gets worse.

This is our new reality. It won’t be a short-lived one, and the effects across our society set a generational mark, just as 9/11 did in America, the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain coming down in Europe and the bombing of Hiroshima in Japan. But this time we’re all feeling it at the same time. And the global economic downturn and lingering commercial malaise will last long enough to mar my daughters’ generation with a very different future than they thought they had even one week ago.

As I was watching the servers in China groan under the weight of students learning and parents working from home, I had a realization that those in businesses such as connectivity, cloud services, telemedicine, streaming entertainment, and gaming were about to get a lot busier. This is true, and it’s a good chance for both organizations and governments around the world to step forward on setting the basic foundations of the internet – the infrastructure we need to be online.

You can’t be a 21st Century economy without power and connectivity. This is more true today than it was even one week ago. More business, more education, more news, more entertainment will be online than ever before. If your country has even a small percentage of its population offline due to lack of affordability or access to signal, then you’re setting yourself up for failure. But this is a solvable problem and one that isn’t nearly as expensive as it was a few years ago. More importantly, investing in this now is not nearly as expensive as being left behind economically because you don’t support and subsidize it today.

The larger the digital divide in your country, the more you’ll be left behind. If you don’t have a strong foundation of data connectivity, then the pillars of eGovernment services, business opportunities, education options, healthcare solutions, entertainment industry, and many more won’t reach their potential. Not in-country, and definitely not internationally.

This then is one of the great challenges of our time: connecting everyone everywhere, affordably.

I’m excited about what we’ve been doing at BRCK with the Moja network and platform, cracking the problem of affordable public WiFi that has brought 2 million East Africans online for free, and thinking through the hard business model problems that make it work — for consumers and for businesses. We think that what we have is something special and that it needs to rapidly scale. We can drastically change the fabric of a country, person by person and business by business, as we grow.

However, it’s not enough.

• We also need more terrestrial fibre options for the far greater load of heavy internet traffic and the larger video streaming services that are being used.
• We need more creativity and long-term thinking by regulators around spectrum licensing so that both satellite signals and data signals can be deployed at a cost that is open to new, smaller companies that offer more unconventional solutions than the oligopolies made of mobile operators and ISPs that wall off the space for innovation.
• We need governments and bi-lateral institutions, through funding, to catalyze incredibly rapid deployment of more undersea, terrestrial and satellite backhaul.

We often hear that in great challenges lie great opportunities. That has never been more true than today. Coronavirus is a global kick in the rear, reminding us that even if we’re not all yet connected online, we are still connected as humans. The chaos of the past few weeks and months lays bare the real dangers of the digital divide, yet it also uncovers an important opportunity and the promise of greatness that stand before us if we meet it head-on.

I’m committed to building this new future. Let’s do it together.

I’m here seated at my corner and, whenever I put my head up and look around, I see her. 

As I walk around to get a cup of coffee, she is there looking beautiful and sophisticated. She is everywhere, like the wind or the air that we breathe. I go to have lunch at Friends and she is there looking classy, asking for chapati and matumbo — because she defines her class, it’s not the matumbo defining her class. She walks barefoot around the office because she can — and how else are you going to see her manicured toenails? When she decides to wear a pair of high heels, she rocks them like a star on the red carpet.

She is the first person you see when you walk through the door, with a bright welcoming smile. If you’re new, she makes sure that you aren’t stuck at the entrance and quickly asks how she can help. She never forgets a request, even days later. Her speed on the keyboard when responding to the “kings in the field” is amazing. She makes sure no request is left pending to ensure they have an easy time. She is polite, witty, organised, curious, and punctilious. 

In the boardroom, she takes a seat at the table and confidently takes charge. She has shown that when a woman’s voice is heard, when she participates in discussions, and when she exercises leadership, she brings something unique and highly valuable. The quality of her contributions are key to good decision-making, the impact of which will be felt across the company. The law is on the tips of her fingers and she knows all the jargon, not forgetting that she knows every human being in the company by name and by character.

Walk with this woman and you will never get stuck, because she has a solution for almost everything. She will randomly remove a screw driver from her handbag to help you fix a car issue. Wondering where the screwdriver came from? She works in the Network Pillar where she assembles SupaBRCKs and ensures all the cables and boards are in place. Having a problem with opening your beer? She will open it using the spanner in her clutch bag. When she holds a glue gun or a soldering machine, she will do her job to perfection. Ask her what a PCB is, and she will give you all the details.

And don’t act surprised yet… she can carry a 40KG Kio Kit down the stairs and across borders to present to a client. I am not exaggerating… this woman will go on top of a building to repair or install a PoP to ensure that you get a good signal for Moja Free WiFi wherever you are. 

When it comes to purchasing supplies, be it locally or from China or anywhere else in the world, this woman is a pro. She knows the ins and outs of customs and with just a few questions, she will get your procurement details right and get you what you were looking for — or even better. She handles and counts the cash better than a bill counter and will tell whether a note is fake or not. Spend some time with her and you will be astonished.

Whenever she goes to pitch about Moja Free WiFi to a client, she puts her best foot forward and takes charge of the conversation, ensuring that the client is heard. And even if she does not get a deal that day, she will never give up. Her strength is renewed everyday like the sun and she will eventually close that deal. 

Give her a problem to solve using code and she will do it like you have never seen it done before. Her attention to detail, critical thinking, and black screen magic will amaze you. The night owl will commit code in the wee hours and in the morning she will look refreshed and ready to take on another day and another challenge. 

When she tests that code, you will never get away with bugs. Because she is curious, a fast learner, creative, and will drive for the results. Don’t be shocked when she wakes you up in the middle of the night to fix a bug. From a distance, during the Wednesday lunch, she will look at the rice and tell you whether or not it’s well cooked. She will even tell you the temperature at which the rice was cooked. 

She picks that customer service phone call with a smile on her face. She gives them an assurance that everything is under control and follows up to make sure that the customer is happy and satisfied. She is resourceful, ingenious, and creative. When she is project managing, she will document the details keenly and follow up frequently and cheerfully. She will be on time with the delivery of a project because she is timely, keen, and creative.

Whenever she boards a matatu during a marketing activity or UX study on Moja Free WiFi, she is friendly with the touts, drivers, and customers. She thrives in user satisfaction and user happiness. She commands the crowd smoothly yet with authority.

She is strong, understanding, a critical thinker, self-motivated, and curious.

She is the Woman at BRCK!