1. Zenzeleni Networks South Africa
Community Networks Workshop
AUC, Addis Ababa, 19th June 2018
Sol Luca de Tena - Zenzeleni Network NPC
Good morning, thank you for giving me the opportunity to participate in this panel and share some of the work from the South African community Network Zenzeleni. I am Sol Luca de Tena, a director in Zenzeleni non for profit company.
In this presentation I will briefly introduce Zenzeleni, some our our main achievements in 2017, and what lies ahead for us in 2018, showing both our imminent growth and some of our challenges.

2. Zenzeleni Networks Mankosi Cooperative
&
Zenzeleni non-for-profit
Mankosi, South Africa
May 2018
Zenzeleni started in 2012 as an initiative to support people to provide telecommunications services to themselves in the rural Eastern Cape region. There have been various phases Zenzeleni. at first as an wireless intranet for people in the community to communicate, then giving mobile phone charging services as the area had no power grid, then gaining a gateway to internet through a 3G modem and eventually - through creating our own backbone - a connection first to the National research and education network, and then to fibre - providing internet in 5 villages, 3 to schools, and 7 local businesses.
Over the years Zenzeleni has grown into two legal entities - constituted by people from the locality and a few experts from SA and abroad. The locally owned cooperative, Zenzeleni Networks Mankosi, is the local, legal internet service provider that focuses on giving services and liaising with what is relevant at a local level - user needs, local tribal authorities, retaining and reinvesting the network income into locally relevant development, and Zenzeleni non for profit company - where I sit- which firstly provides support to the local cooperative in addressing technical, legal, financial (business) and social barriers that arise, and secondly is the liaison with the greater national and international ecosystem which the CN has to manage - government policies, other operators, seed funders, engaging new communities, and gaining lessons and exposure from forum such as this one.
We are in the process of seeding another local Cooperative.

3. License exemption to deploy and offer telecommunications services
Legal
License exemption to deploy and offer telecommunications services

4. 93% unemployed, 90% not completed school
Working Area
100,000 people
93% unemployed, 90% not completed school
Non/poor basic infrastructure
Most people live on 1USD daily threshold, up to 25% of monthly income spent on Telecoms
Now a brief picture into the context in which Zenzeleni exists. We are located in the Mthatha river valley in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. This is a beautiful region, birthplace of the amaXhosa peoples, and still today a severely underserviced area - with little or no basic infrastructure (roads difficult to travel on, no or poor power and water supplies, etc) -, with people living in difficult financial and social circumstances, in a country riddled with socio-economic inequalities vestiges of colonial, apartheid regime which deliberately restrained development – education, health and other basic infrastructure and services. The name Zenzeleni in IsiXhosa means “do it yourselves” echoing our people centred mission - common in CN - and also alludes to the major challenges we face. Here there are few businesses and job opportunities, so people rely on welfare grants and remittance from family members in the cities and mines. In these circumstances people spent up to ¼ of their monthly income on telecommunication services, this is often money spent that is needed for food, transport, clothing or other basic needs. People also pay for the most expensive rates, as they cannot afford contracts and often buy re-sold prepaid data vouchers. Furthermore the mobile networks that are available have poor connectivity, last week a doctor in the area told me he has contracts with all 3 other telecoms companies to try and always have access to one, even then his signal drops. This luxury of having 3 contracts is obviously not accessible to local people.
In this scenario the impetus of “Zenzeleni/ do it yourselves” is for local, indigenous people to be able to access affordable, reliable internet, while also retaining the expenditure in a local ISP business and - through the coop - to reinvest it in their community needs.
Addresses multiple policy issues.

5. Example: amount of school that can be reached through current coverage
Project failure! And distrust
School with 3 connections, not working. PCs 7 years

6. But for all the logic this makes it has taken massive perseverance, creativity and patience to get anything done….facing countless challenges along the way, requiring work to shift technical, legal, financial and social status quos that simply does not cater for the people and conditions we are working in.
This slide shows some of the installation, and our team at our weekly meeting speaking remotely between Cape Town and Mankosi. You can see in the top picture the first frames for the solar panels. Incidentally were power for the network really is the by far the most costly element in some cases 80% of the cost. Just to illustrate how difficult it really is for some one to locally “do it themselves”, firstly one needs skills or research capacity to find the panels and batteries, and even wood for the frames as roofs are either thatched of not the right angle, the you need to organise transport, then mount them without power tools, and so on. Requiring heaps of resilience, creativity and patience.

7. WiFi Internet Backhaul WiFi Hotspot
Solar Powered, WiFi Internet Backhaul, Mesh & Hotspot Current backhaul (intranet) capacity Mbps Current upstream (fiber) 40 Mbps, Mbps (hotspots)
WiFi Internet Backhaul
WiFi
Hotspot
WiFi
Mesh
Solar
Panel

8. Some hard facts Sept - Oct 2017
3 schools, 2 local businesses unique devices GB of traffic
Nov - March 2018
3 schools (+2), 5 businesses unique devices +1TB/month traffic
March - April 2018
3 schools (+2), +7 new bus. pending unique devices TB/month
Some statistics from last months
Cost more than 20x less than other options
Some hard facts. September marks the moment when we were able to access fiber. We are focusing on TIA which is slowing down connecting businesses. No marketing and 7 businesses waiting.
To illustrate: residents typically buy the smallest prepaid voucher, R5 (South African Rands) at a time, which equates to around 5 megabits (MB) of data, or 6 minutes of call time. Better rates can be accessed by buying moderate monthly contracts – such as R199 for 5 gigabits (GB) or R499 for 20 GB - but both are unaffordable to residents. The costs are exacerbated by the fact that vouchers in such areas retail through local distributors at a 40% margin (hence a R5 voucher is actually sold for R7). Residents also have to pay an additional R5 to recharge their phones – possibly at a neighbour or local shop - as many do not have electricity at home. Yet once they have purchased vouchers and charged phones, residents then struggled with unreliable network coverage.
Current currency conversion is 1 Rands is equal to USD 0,08c, so R5 is about USD 40c.

9. Quick glance at 2017 Trust International and National recognition
Establishing and maintaining trust for 6 years.
International and National recognition
Finalist in Mozilla Equal Rating Challenge, Winner of SA National Award for Best Innovation with Social Impact, National intergovernmental committee, presentation to Electronic Communications Amendment Bill, DTPS budget vote, etc.
Own backbone built, Zenzeleni NPC & Connection to fiber established
Reliable, affordable connection and two entities with focused mandates,
First Anchor tenants & upgrading of backbone
Allows for significant upgrades and a commercial fiber connexion.
Pull and funding to scale
Overwhelming interest and managed to secure funds for initial scaling
Last year Zenzeleni took a couple of quantum leaps. After exhausting every avenue to utlilise existing telecoms infrastructure, we were able to build our own backbone with a beyond the net grant from ISOC. Through work liaising nationally and international, we were awarded funds from the Mozilla Equal Rating Challenge (in which we were finalists), we were able to access the National research and education network, bring in some additional expertise into our team, and add batteries to the whole network (because even in the capital of the region power cuts would cut the network regularly). This allowed us to start building a more robust team and network. The jump to fiber was a massive success, currently the service is better and cheaper than the NREN but we could only access it with an anchor tenant to ensure fixed monthly payments, which could not be expected yet from community users alone. However to access anchor tenants we again required expert skills, not available in the community. Thus the NPC was born. We also started receiving more recognition nationally and international as Zenzeleni was creating solutions to multiple challenges. We were awarded the national prize for Best Innovation with Social Impact, were requested to support the creation of an intergovernmental Zenzeleni Steering Committee through which to liaise with government, we have presented - together with APC - recommendations to the Electronic Communication Amendment Bill, Budget speech we are an active member of APC and the vice-chair of the ISOC Special Interest group on CN. Over and above this we have participated and presented various projects to develop open software, study social barriers to effective use of the internet in the area through APC and the UWC, and more... All these achievements complement each other, we have learned that we need to act on all this levels and aspects to progress.
And beyond all these quantifiable achievements, there is an overall critical one without which it would be impossible to truly achieve anything sustainable.Maintaining and further building Trust. In an area were people have been undermined, overlooked, un-services for so long any new, innovation “project” can easily turn into another failed good idea of dumping technology, another exploitative initiative, or another excuse for someone to be a gate-keeper for people to access services. Zenzeleni has avoided these pitfalls through establishing and maintaining trust over time.

10. 2018 a year of scaling & consolidation for Zenzeleni
Network expansion & establishing techno-financial management models (new communities and looking at contextualising the Guifi.net commons model to the South African context)
Growing local capacity (undertaking regular skills transfer workshops, focus on youth and women)  
Team operational consolidation be able to answer to overwhelming interest from more rural and urban communities, businesses etc.
Maintaining national and international relevance (hosting of African Summit on Community Networks, liaising with public and private stakeholders, etc.)
All required to create a positive growth environment for Zenzeleni.
This year Zenzeleni will test its ability to scale towards sustainability by expanding to a new area and seeding a new cooperative. This is partly funded by the South African Department of Science and Technology and the Technology Innovation Agency, and will allow Zenzeleni to undertake a more systematic – resourced – incubation process. Key to this is setting up systems and transferring skills for cooperatives to take a further step toward autonomy. Here there is a strong element on the inclusion of women in taking the lead of the new cooperative and also further recognising their role within the Zenzeleni ecosystem. Another key focus area for Zenzeleni is defining its commons approach to managing its network infrastructure.
Zenzeleni bases its management of the commons-pool-resource from the model developed by Guifi.net which services more than active nodes.

11. Zenzeleni sustainability now and future

12. Zenzeleni’s benefits
High value asset local ownership, participation, ICT for and by local benefit/ relevance
Creation of new rural businesses and new rural income streams.
Provision of, and access to, cheaper telecommunications.
Facilitating community development through the vehicle of collective (community) ownership.
Maximizing the retention and circulation of capital within rural micro-economies.
Creating local, critical and scarce higher value added services.
Retaining the most skilled youth and decreasing the number of forced migration split households.
Enhanced savings for impoverished households.
Enabling the development of other existing and new rural businesses.
Increased access of rural households, hospitals and schools to the benefits of connectivity and the digital knowledge economy

13. Conclusions: key sustainability and value elements
Local ownership, consultative integration of technology and “business purpose” – relevant to needs and decided by residents
Partnerships: access to low cost infrastructure, bandwidth and services and navigate telecommunications sector and raise adoption, anchor tenants – private and public.
Seed fund for the creation of new cooperative CNs:
initial business and network infrastructure set- up (legal/ governance, initial hotspots,
initial capacity building (business and network operation) first year mentoring
Governance, technical, sustainability

14. Sifuna uZenzeleni anwenwe nje ngomlilo
“I didn’t know that you could get a little bit of money without having to go outside of the community to work hard [in the mines]. That is the future I want for my children.
Sifuna uZenzeleni anwenwe nje ngomlilo
“We want Zenzeleni to spread like fire”
- Zenzeleni Networks Mankosi board members
I want to end with two quotes from board members of the Zenzeleni Mankosi cooperative which illustrates what drives us and why people in rural eastern cape have put 6 years to make this a reality.

15. Thank you! sol@zenzeleni.net info@zenzeleni.net zenzeleni.net
To end off I would like to share this quote from one of the Zenzeleni networks cooperative board member, David Lukhozi, which illustrates what drives us and why people in rural eastern cape have put 6 years to make this a reality.
Thank you