Policy Brief No. 246 — November 2026
Beyond Access: Closing South Africa’s Digital Participation Gap Luke Boyle Key Points → Despite significant progress in expanding affordable internet access in South Africa, approximately 17 million people remain unconnected, and many low-income communities face barriers to meaningful digital participation. → While private-sector providers have improved connectivity, their consumption-driven business models risk reinforcing inequalities. → Community-centred connectivity initiatives (CCCIs) demonstrate how internet access can support digital skills, local content creation and economic empowerment, but face structural challenges. → Supportive regulatory and financial frameworks are needed to ensure connectivity translates into meaningful economic opportunities and inclusive digital participation.
Introduction Only 36 percent of Africans are internet users1 (International Telecommunication Union [ITU] 2025), making the continent the least connected region in the world. This disparity has been framed in development discourse as a central obstacle to economic growth and modernization, mobilizing intergovernmental institutions, development agencies, multinational corporations and national governments to pursue ambitious digital transformation agendas. These efforts have contributed to a 115 percent growth in the number of internet users across Sub-Saharan Africa between 2016 and 2021 (World Bank 2024). Yet this progress has been deeply uneven and digital connectivity continues to mirror historical patterns of exclusion. In South Africa, specifically, internet access reflects apartheid-era divisions in service provision. In recent years, however, affordable high-speed internet has increasingly reached historically underserved communities, particularly townships2 and lowincome areas. As of 2024, 78 percent of South Africa’s
1
Internet users are individuals who have used the internet (from any location) in the last three months. The internet can be used via a computer, mobile phone, personal digital assistant, games machine, digital TV and so forth. See https://databank.worldbank.org/metadataglossary/all/series.
2
A township refers to the underdeveloped (typically urban) residential areas that, during apartheid, were reserved for non-whites who lived near or worked in areas that were designated “white only” (Pernegger and Godehart 2007).
About the Author Luke Boyle is a Ph.D. candidate in innovation in global development at Arizona State University’s College of Global Futures. Originally from Cape Town, South Africa, he holds a master’s in urban sustainability from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and previously conducted research at UCT’s Urban Real Estate Research Unit, where he published widely on the forces shaping urban transformations in African cities. His Ph.D. research investigates digital transformations in African cities by centring the urban margins. Specifically, he explores how digital practices and lived experience generate alternative sociotechnical imaginaries that challenge dominant narratives of technological progress and urban development. This research has been recognized through the School of International Futures’ 2024 Next Generation Foresight Practitioner Fellowship and the 2025 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. Combining creative foresight methods with decolonial and participatory approaches, his scholarship advances pluralistic approaches to futures thinking and science and technology studies. His broader aim is to deploy research methods centred on care, respect and situated knowledge to reimagine what constitutes futurity, who performs it and how African epistemologies can broaden the study of technology, urbanity and futurity.
population are internet users, making it the country with the third-highest rate of internet use in Africa.3 Despite this, only 14.5 percent of households had a fixed home internet connection in 2023 (Independent Communications Authority of South Africa [ICASA] 2025, 19), with nearly three-quarters of the population relying on mobile phones to access the internet (Vermeulen 2025). Mobile data packages are considerably more expensive than fixed internet options (Association for Progressive Communications [APC] 2025): a 20 gigabyte mobile data bundle costs upwards of one quarter of the monthly income of the 37.9 percent of South Africans living below the lower-bound poverty line (Statistics South Africa 2025). As a result, approximately 17 million South Africans remain unconnected (Duarte 2025), and millions more are only marginally connected. Even among those who are connected, barriers such as limited digital skills, unaffordable devices and gaps in locally relevant content constrain meaningful connectivity and participation in the digital economy (Partridge et al. 2024; Namugwe 2026). The ITU defines universal and meaningful connectivity as “the possibility for everyone to enjoy a safe, satisfying, enriching, productive and affordable online experience,” a standard achieved only when six enabling dimensions — infrastructure, device access, affordability, skills, safety and security, and universal reach — are met simultaneously (ITU 2022). Throughout this policy brief, “meaningful participation” refers to these dimensions and the productive economic and social benefits that connectivity enables, rather than to access to and use of connectivity alone. Efforts by government actors have struggled to match the scale and complexity of this challenge. To complement state-led initiatives, a diverse set of non-state actors — from large telecommunications firms backed by global capital to small, communityowned networks — have increasingly stepped in to fill the gap. This policy brief explores two approaches to expanding affordable internet access in South Africa: private-led, profit-driven models and community-centred connectivity models.
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See https://datahub.itu.int/data/?e=ZAF&c=701&i=11624.
The Fragmented Landscape of Digital Inclusion in South Africa Over the past decade, digital inclusion in South Africa has been pursued through a combination of state-led programs, regulatory interventions, donor-funded initiatives, community-based models and rapid private-sector expansion. These interventions share the overarching goal of expanding connectivity but are shaped by different motivating logics and incentive structures.
Government Initiatives South Africa’s primary vehicle for state-led connectivity expansion is SA Connect, the country’s national broadband initiative, approved in 2013 with the goal of achieving universal access to affordable, high-speed internet by 2030 (Department of Communications 2013). However, the program has been fraught with challenges regarding oversight and implementation (APC 2017; Illidge 2026) and has repeatedly fallen short of its targets. Phase one connected 970 of the planned 6,135 government facilities.4 Phase two shifted the program’s focus to extending broadband access to households with an initial target of 1.9 million household connections, a target later significantly revised downward due to governance and funding constraints. While it is reported that phase two provided coverage to an estimated 5.6 million households and created 32,055 Wi-Fi community hotspots (Mzekandaba 2026), this falls well short of universal access and the program is now concluding. The Development Bank of Southern Africa estimates that achieving universal access to 100 Mbps broadband by 2035 will require between R108 billion and R142 billion5 in cumulative investment (Development Bank of South Africa 2025), far exceeding what current state-led programs have mobilized.
4
See www.dcdt.gov.za/sa-connect-document.html.
5
Between CAD$9 billion and CAD$12 billion.
Regulation as a Market Lever Given the limits of direct state delivery, regulatory bodies have sought to use market mechanisms to drive affordable access. ICASA has played an important role in promoting competition. Ongoing initiatives include creating Universal Service Obligations for licensees, conducting trials of dynamic spectrum sharing in KwaZulu-Natal and developing infrastructure-sharing mandates (Colmer 2026). The Competition Commission’s Data Services Market Inquiry, which investigated high data costs and anti-competitive conduct, has resulted in a progressive amendment6 to the Electronic Communications Act (2005) aimed at making high-speed internet deployment more accessible and competitive. These market reforms have been critical enablers of expanding affordable access, and the vacuum left by poorly implemented state programs has increasingly been filled by private-sector internet service providers (ISPs).
Market-Based Responses to Improving Access Recently, private-sector ISPs have emerged as the dominant force driving connectivity expansion in urban and peri-urban low-income areas. These companies have demonstrated an ability to rapidly mobilize capital and scale infrastructure, often extending internet access further than public programs over comparable periods. However, the market-driven approach is primarily oriented toward user growth and revenue generation and does not substantively address the structural barriers that underpin meaningful participation in the digital economy (Partridge et al. 2024; Namugwe 2026).
Non-Profit and Civil Society Actors Even where connectivity is technically available and nominally affordable, market-based solutions remain out of reach entirely for a significant portion of the population. Development institutions and non-profit organizations (NPOs) have long emphasized the role of information and communication technologies as drivers of economic growth, innovation and inclusion (World Bank 2024; Cariolle 2021). Several global technology companies have also attempted to bring free
6
B12-2026, Electronic Communications Amendment Bill (S Afr), 2026.
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high-speed internet to South Africa, among them Facebook’s Free Basics, Google Station, Project Loon and Microsoft’s Airband Initiative, though all have since been discontinued, having failed to meet their objectives. These initiatives have been criticized for underestimating complex local contexts and the commercial motivations underlying their philanthropic framing (Akbari 2025). At the local level, NPOs have implemented digital literacy programs and facilitated connectivity in marginalized communities. Project Isizwe, for example, is a prominent NPO that has connected more than one million users through free WiFi in underserved communities and schools.7
CCCIs CCCIs represent a distinct and increasingly important strand within this ecosystem. CCCIs deploy participatory approaches to centre communities’ needs when delivering internet access and can range from locally owned and operated networks to large-scale social enterprises. They typically prioritize social value, affordability, local ownership and development (APC 2025; Forster, Matranga and Nagendra 2022). CCCIs complement the internet access offered by commercial service providers and statesponsored public access networks (Finlay and Rey-Moreno 2024). However, their impact remains constrained by structural barriers, including limited access to financing, restrictive licensing regimes, high backhaul connectivity8 costs and reliance on a licence-exempt spectrum (APC 2025). These diverse interventions illustrate both the dynamism and the disjointed nature of South Africa’s digital inclusion landscape. Multiple actors are working toward similar goals but often in isolation, with misaligned incentives and limited coordination. The result is a system that has expanded access in aggregate but has not consistently translated this into meaningful connectivity. It is against this backdrop that two models have emerged as particularly prominent: private-led, profit-driven ISPs on the one hand, and CCCIs on the other. The remainder of this policy brief examines each,
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7
See https://projectisizwe.org.
8
Backhaul refers to the portion of the network that comprises the intermediate links between the national internet backbone and the local access network.
Policy Brief No. 246 — November 2026 • Luke Boyle
in turn, before considering how policy could better enable complementarity between them.
Analysis Private Sector Expansion: Scaled Inclusion Without Meaningful Participation South Africa’s consumer-fixed broadband market is projected to almost double between 2025 and 2030 (Gilbert 2025), driven primarily by privatesector ISPs offering affordable connectivity in townships and low-income areas. The push into these markets has been shaped by saturation in wealthier segments, lower deployment costs stemming from technological advances and foreign investors drawn by untapped demand in underserved communities (McLeod 2026; Labuschagne 2025). A key driver of this growth has been the development of innovative payment mechanisms enabling people to pay for access as and when they can afford it. Moving away from traditional contract-based, monthly service charges that require bank accounts and credit checks, private ISPs have pioneered a per-device, per-day pricing structure that makes connectivity accessible to households excluded from traditional ISPs (McLeod 2026; Moyo 2025). This trend is exemplified by Fibertime, a South African pay-as-you-go ISP operating in township communities, which offers 100 Mbps uncapped fibre internet at R5 per device per day, purchasable through prepaid vouchers available at local spaza shops or via banking apps (Nokia 2025). However, the pay-as-you-go model can also mean that families with multiple devices end up paying more for internet than residents of affluent suburbs with uncapped fibre lines. These private providers mobilize capital and technical expertise at a pace that public programs have struggled to match, and they are essential to reaching underserved populations at scale. However, the high capital costs of infrastructure deployment, combined with very thin margins in these markets, mean that providers must achieve large-scale rollouts to be viable, reflecting a business model predicated on user growth and revenue generation (McLeod 2026). Connectivity is often subsidized by bundling with other products and services (namely, entertainment, fintech
and e-commerce ecosystems) integrating new users into digital markets primarily as consumers (ibid.). Other private internet solutions provide free Wi-Fi access in exchange for watching an advertisement or surrendering user data, funded through third-party advertising revenue (Labuschagne 2025). This raises important concerns regarding how private models use data harvesting and track user behaviour with little transparency or meaningful consent (APC 2017). Consistent with these concerns is what Richard Heeks (2022, 689) describes as “adverse digital incorporation”: inclusion of people into digital systems that enables a more-advantaged group to extract disproportionate value from a lessadvantaged group. Evidence of this dynamic playing out in South Africa is reflected in the fact that, despite the well-established correlation between internet penetration and GDP growth, South Africa’s high internet penetration has failed to translate into economic growth and transformation (Mazodze 2026). Moreover, research shows that internet use in South Africa’s townships is “predominantly consisting of social interactions and entertainment with very little engagement linked to products and services which have the potential to yield [greater] economic gains” (Partridge et al. 2024, 64). While it is not the intent of private ISPs to lock users into extractive systems, they operate within financial structures that often require them to relegate broader social missions in favour of financial viability. In addition, safety and security, one of the six dimensions of meaningful participation, receives little attention in this rollout. Models oriented toward rapid user acquisition on thin margins provide little to no safety education and support for first-time internet users. This leaves marginalized groups with lower digital literacy and limited tech familiarity, vulnerable to digital fraud and privacy breaches (Anthony 2023). These issues erode trust in e-commerce, government services and online payments — the very activities that support meaningful connectivity (Netshirando, Kadyamatimba and Munyoka 2024). This situation highlights that while South Africa has made significant strides toward realizing universal reach by expanding affordable access to high-speed internet, a gap remains between access and meaningful connectivity and its six dimensions. Precarious access — compounded by digital literacy gaps, unaffordable devices and safety concerns — constrains users to passive or
low-value online engagement, limiting their ability to participate in higher-value digital activities such as e-commerce, remote work, civic duties, education and accessing essential public services.
Community-Centred Connectivity: Meaningful Inclusion Without Scale CCCIs are a diverse set of internet access models that prioritize community ownership, participation and social impact alongside the provision of affordable internet access. They fill gaps created by market-driven models, both in terms of where connectivity reaches and what it delivers once it arrives. This is a particularly important distinction in a context where a large portion of the population lives in urban margins, informal settlements and rural areas. CCCIs approach connectivity as one component of broader social and economic development rather than a standalone service (Rey-Moreno 2025). In practice, this means training residents to install and maintain networks, supporting digital literacy, fostering local content creation, and reinvesting surpluses into community organizations and local businesses. CCCIs also use mesh networks to provide locally hosted content and services without requiring (and paying for) a connection to the broader internet. iNethi in Cape Town, for example, developed an open-source application providing access to a community business directory, local creative media, a payment platform and social networking (iNethi Team 2024). This has supported small local businesses with digital tools that they would not otherwise have access to (Iitumba et al. 2023). As Ben Tarnoff (2022) argues, genuine alternatives to profit-driven connectivity require developing models of public and cooperative ownership, and CCCIs exemplify this. They extend users’ participation beyond consumption, making them agents with greater control over how internet connectivity is deployed, governed and used. Central to this are the engagement processes that typify CCCI models. Participatory design, local governance structures, and community-defined rules on safety and content empower communities to shape connectivity to their needs (Finlay and Rey-Moreno 2024; Rey-Moreno 2025). CCCIs thus make digital transformation a collective process of community development, where value is generated and circulated rather than extracted. In South Africa, CCCI networks already serve tens of thousands of users (APC 2025) across
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communities ranging from rural villages to dense urban townships. For example, Zenzeleni, the country’s first community-owned and operated network, has connected more than 13,000 people and 10 local clinics and schools.9 This model offers uncapped internet as much as 20 times lower than mobile data prices,10 and as the network is locally owned, revenues remain within the community or are reinvested to expand and improve the network.11 Both Zenzeleni and iNethi focus on developing technical and digital skills, including education on internet safety. These models demonstrate that when meaningful participation is actively incorporated into internet provision, connectivity can be a vehicle for empowerment, agency, upward mobility and local economic development in marginalized communities. Within a telecommunications environment that systematically favours large-scale, profit-driven models, CCCIs face persistent structural barriers in scaling (Suárez and Vinelli 2021). Access to appropriate funding mechanisms remains the single biggest barrier (Alam and Mazar 2021). And while they successfully demonstrate a strong social return on investment, commercial investors and financial institutions primarily look for profitability and scalability when making financing decisions (Rey-Moreno 2025). There are also very few avenues for blended finance models for CCCIs (Belli and Hadzic 2021; Forster, Matranga and Nagendra 2022). As a result, community providers frequently depend on precarious funding sources such as donor grants, corporate social investment programs or publicly appropriated monies (APC 2025; Vo, Foditsch and Mesker 2025). Spectrum allocation presents another binding constraint. In South Africa, the allocation of spectrum through expensive auctions effectively prices out smaller operators and CCCIs. While ICASA provides CCCIs with licence-exempt spectrum in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, this comes with significant limitations in terms of coverage and capacity (APC 2025). Moreover, licensing requirements under the Electronic Communications Act create substantial administrative and financial burdens that can overwhelm community-based organizations
9
See www.apc.org/en/users/zenzeleni.
10 Ibid. 11 See https://zenzeleni.net/our-model/.
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lacking formal administrative capacity, and the absence of a standardized national framework for wayleaves allows larger operators to dominate the process (ibid.; Colmer 2024). Backhaul costs are equally prohibitive and are often the single biggest operational cost for CCCIs (Jensen, Esterhuysen and Miliza 2025; Rey-Moreno 2025). Community networks in marginalized and rural areas often pay significantly more for backhaul connectivity than retail fibre prices available in middle-class suburbs. For example, for a 10 Mbps uncontended line, iNethi pays approximately five times the cost than that of a retail 50 Mbps fibre line available nearby (APC 2025). This cost disparity reflects a broader pattern across Africa, where high backhaul infrastructure prices continue to limit the viability and scalability of community networks (Rey-Moreno 2017). To mitigate this issue, many CCCIs share backhaul costs and infrastructure with each other rather than competing (APC 2025; Forster, Matranga and Nagendra 2022). Without targeted regulatory reform, appropriate financing mechanisms and sustained institutional support, CCCIs will remain constrained to the margins of the connectivity ecosystem, despite their demonstrated potential to address persistent digital inequalities.
Recommendations These recommendations aim to create a more supportive regulatory and financing environment that reflects the diverse realities of actors delivering affordable connectivity in low-income areas. → Reorient connectivity regulation to reward meaningful participation as well as access. While regulators have incorporated developmental objectives through various policy levers, regulatory frameworks remain oriented toward infrastructure deployment and market efficiency. They do not incentivize harderto-measure outcomes related to meaningful participation, such as skills development, device access, small business growth, employment and local content creation. Given the thin margins and complexities that private-sector providers navigate in low-income markets, these outcomes should be incentivized through regulatory instruments. ICASA could use its
upcoming auction of high-demand spectrum to prioritize bidders that commit to measurable, meaningful participation outcomes; for instance, they could privilege bidders who commit to establishing digital hubs that provide training and access to digital tools, or those who provide free community hotspots and zerorate essential civil society organizations.
improving infrastructure mapping are also critical to reducing costs and enabling broader participation (Colmer 2024; Ndlovu 2026).
Conclusion
→ Establish strategic financing mechanisms for CCCIs and ISPs demonstrating communitycentred principles. Addressing the structural financing gap facing CCCIs and socially oriented ISPs is critical. Amending legislation around the Universal Service and Access Fund so that it could be used beyond grants and subsidies could lay the foundation for a ring-fenced portion of the fund to be used for financing CCCIs through blended instruments that include grants, concessional loans and technical assistance. A comparable mechanism for small ISPs already exists: the Tech Credit Fund, a partnership between Solcon Capital and the Small Enterprise Development and Finance Agency, provides financing for Black-owned ISPs operating in South Africa’s townships (Nkosi 2026).
South Africa’s connectivity expansion is transforming access to the internet in historically underserved communities. Private ISPs are reaching townships and low-income areas at a pace and scale that public programs have been unable to match. This is a genuine and significant achievement, and one that should be sustained and supported by policy. Yet access alone is not sufficient to deliver inclusive digital development. Without holistic policy interventions, the expansion of affordable connectivity can reproduce, rather than reverse, patterns of inequality. To avoid adverse digital incorporation, policy must align obligations with incentives and funding to make it viable for providers to move beyond access alone and equip underserved communities to truly unlock the opportunities internet connectivity offers.
→ Create a dedicated licensing class for community networks and ISPs that prioritize social impact. A dedicated licensing class for CCCIs and small ISPs with reduced fees and simplified compliance requirements would lower entry barriers and improve viability. This should be coupled with expanded access to innovation spectrum through dynamic spectrum allocation, which ICASA successfully trialled in February 2026 (Colmer 2026), and the “use it or share it” principle in the recent amendment to the Electronic Communications Act (2005).12
CCCIs in South Africa’s townships point toward an alternative where digital access is linked to community development, local value creation and mutual support — and where users are agents, not merely recipients, of provision. Though structurally constrained, these initatives demonstrate what meaningful internet access can look like. The policy challenge is not to choose between private-sector scale and communitycentred inclusion, but to create the conditions for both to coexist and reinforce each other. South Africa has set a national target of universal broadband access by 2030. The important task ahead is meeting that target with connectivity that is meaningful, not merely measurable.
→ Strengthen backbone investment and use public institutions as connectivity anchors. High backhaul costs remain one of the most significant constraints for providers in township communities. Public infrastructure investments must be explicitly designed to support last-mile expansion by using institutions as anchor tenants and making excess capacity available at regulated, affordable rates. Strengthening coordination across national and municipal levels, standardizing processes for wayleaves and permits, and
12 Electronic Communications Amendment Bill, supra note 6.
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Beyond Access: Closing South Africa’s Digital Participation Gap
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AI Disclosure AI Tools: ChatGPT (OpenAI); Claude (Anthropic); Conceptualization: ChatGPT was used to analyze the structure, tone and style of previously published CIGI policy briefs and to develop a revised outline and core argument from the author’s research notes and abstract. Claude was used to structure the brief’s argument and align its organization with the CIGI policy brief format, working from two drafts previously written by the author; Information Collection: During peer-review revision, Claude was used to search the author’s source documents for material relevant to reviewer comments, identify supporting literature and locate and verify bibliographic details of cited sources; all sources were obtained and reviewed by the author; Writing — Review & Editing: Both tools assisted with drafting and editing. ChatGPT edited the full draft for length, clarity and CIGI style. Claude expanded the author’s outline notes into prose, integrated research and citations into the text, and suggested revisions and edits in response to peer review. All AI output was reviewed, revised, verified against original sources, and approved by the author, who remains fully responsible for the content, accuracy and integrity of the final brief.
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Policy Brief No. 246 — November 2026 • Luke Boyle
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