About Us
Zenzele was born out of a crisis. With the Covid 19 leaving 15 million rural children at home without access to the internet to receive school lessons, the South African government issued a clarion call to all mobile telecoms providers to give the rural areas internet. The traditional mobile giants struggled to offer a solution to these hard-to-reach areas. Their networks’ high frequency struggled to send a signal more than a couple of kilometres from towers, especially in the hilly Kwazulu-Natal areas where Zenzele has rolled out networks. Rolling blackouts meant that batteries could not be recharged by the time the next day-long blackout occurred leaving the networks permanently unstable. The incumbents also voiced their frustrations about theft of equipment such as solar panels and generators, often within a day of installation, rendering the towers unsupportable.
There was a perception in the communities that the incumbent cell phone providers were less than keen to extend data services to rural and peri-urban areas.
The reason – money.
A voice call at time of writing (March 2022) costs R2.00 per minute for our target customers, but if they could get data for R50 per gig, it would cost 0.4 cents per minute – a 50th of the cost. With sparse access to voice services and no access to data, our research studies found that poor people are spending 20% of their disposable income on voice minutes if they can access cell phone coverage at all.
It was against this backdrop that the Zenzele movement was born. Ironically, the isolation of Covid, caused communities to come together as never before, to find a solution to their connectivity problem. After engaging with stakeholders that included the telecoms companies, government, tech giants and local service providers, they finally found a UK start-up company Champion Mobile Global which was the only technology provider in the world that was pioneering solutions that were specifically designed to help people facing these rural challenges.
Zenzele, which means “Do it yourself”, is fundamentally different to other telecoms networks, in that the companies holding the telecoms licenses are proudly local and owned by the communities they serve. As they are providing a vital service to the community and they are making money for the community, it is in the interests of the community to protect the equipment at all costs.
Our breakthrough came when the South African government issued emergency regulations releasing spectrum thus allowing for connectivity providers to deploy without the usual red tape -via the hastily legislated ICT-National-State-of-Disaster-Regulations. This brought about a unique situation, where our eight companies came into possession of spectrum, allowing them as holders of Electronic Communications Network Service (ECNS) licenses to deploy networks using lesser known frequencies with minimal regulatory requirements.
Was the rollout easy? Far from it. New technologies always have teething issues, but we have persevered and now over 30,000 people have benefitted from our community networks.
We are proud of the fact that our networks are community owned. Rather than sending money back to foreign countries, profits from services are reinvested into extending and improving the network. The community ownership ensures that the owners, who include the beneficiaries of the non-profit organisations set up to benefit them, physically guard the network infrastructure as if their lives depend on it.
We also take pride in the fact that our individual users act in the interests of the wider communities, where private dwellings, shops and schools host towers and access points to provide coverage to the wider community, again making the equipment safer.
We are not stopping here; we will soon announce special deals with our users to access financial services uniquely tailored to their needs. Watch this space for how you will be able to get insurances, such as funeral cover and banking services from black entrepreneurs and a community owned bank, with eleven million co-operative members. Our UK partner is also developing exciting mobile phones that cater to the needs of people like you in your local community.
WHAT ELSE WE OFFER
In the community
” We are very happy that Zenzele is offering our communities free internet during this Covid-19 crisis. It means that people can access important information and can communicate freely in this challenging time.”
Mayor of eMhlatuzi