Wi-Fi Slums

The crowd gathered in an open space within Mathare valley in a little corner of the slum known as Shantit. The crowd comprised of corporate company officials, top government officials, top personalities in the I.T industry, slum residents and slum geeks as well. It was another day of triumph for the slum I.T nerds who had done it again. They were all gathered to officially launch another highly successful software. A software that had been thought up, developed and brought to a level of innovative excellence within the walls of the slum. This was not the first successful software or mobile app to come from this slum and other slums like Kibera. What where once the breeding ground for thugs, prostitutes and drug addicts were now I.T. labs churning one ingenious innovation after another. 

This transformation did not come about overnight or magically appeared. It was the result of a deliberate journey started over a decade ago when these I.T nerds we were celebrating today were just toddlers. This gurus were brought up in the information boom that rocked urban slums in Nairobi a decade or so ago. They were brought up in what was then known as Wi-Fi slums. Wi-Fi slums meant something different to different people. It was a campaign tool for politicians, a corporate social responsibility initiative for corporate companies/private sector, fertile grounds for innovation to I.T. firms, community development to the civil society, national development and prosperity in a digital fashion to the government of the day and lastly to the slum dwellers, this was simply free internet.

When the idea of Wi-Fi slums was first floated, it coincided with a time of extreme optimism in the country. Therefore we would all be forgiven to have imagined that Wi-Fi slums would mean that all the slums in their geographical entirety would be free Wi-Fi hotspot offering free internet to everyone within the slums environs. Frankly speaking this project was delayed for sometime as many championed for every inch within the slum environ to be covered by free Wi-Fi. Of course this was after the initial resistance to the whole project by skeptics who believed that what slum dwellers needed was food, shelter and basic services as opposed to free internet. Nonetheless a time had come for the globalization of the urban poor so to speak, and where else better to start than from the utmost bottom of the social strata, slums.

Many wanted the whole project to be halted for years so that we could strategize on the shape and form that it would take on the ground. What the free internet would be used for and package its utility to the slum dwellers. Some would say that without proper planning, the youths would only use it for ‘facebooking’ and other mundane indulgence. The rest argued that there was no master plan on the use of the internet when it was first invented. That the use and application of the internet took a life of its own and no one had foreseen its present usage. So the best thing was not to figure out everything before we set out but allow the community to mould itself within this new opportunity. 

Surprisingly the biggest opposition, which was at a closer look only ignorant opposition to progress, was from the so called elite in our society. Their concern was that free internet would only magnify social ills within the slum. That the evil that is imagined to take place in slums would now permeate into their ‘safe’ communities through the virtual world. That social decadence prevalent in the dark corners of the internet would now be readily available to be propagated by this new entry of previously marginalized community. This type of victimization, stereotyping and attempt to classify the entire poverty stricken community as one homogeneous heap of social decadence was silenced by the realization and acceptance that morality and strength of character is not pegged on the socio-economic affluence of an individual. 

Wi-Fi slums did become a reality, a first in Africa and around the world. But in the beginning it was not at the large scale level that the most optimist among us would have wanted. Not every inch of the slum was covered by free Wi-Fi. In the first phase of the project free Wi-Fi would be found in and around government compounds such as the chiefs camp, all community schools within the slums (from primary to tertiary schools) both government sponsored and non-government sponsored, youth and women self help groups project locations, all community based organization offices within the slum, some of the church and mosque compounds within the slums, assorted community projects locations and last but not least all major ‘base za mtaa’.   

Contrary to the belief that it would be impossible to quantify the impact of Wi-Fi slums at least in the short term, a lot could be said about the impact of this new found information power. The information flow was not only from the world to the slums but also from the slum to the world. While the children born in this new information age were being nurtured in this digital movement, those of age (the youth) found themselves thrust into new found freedom and power. Freedom to access information relevant to their situation at the touch of a button and power to tell their story to the world. Now they could not only Google or YouTube best practices to tackle their most pressing challenges but could also Facebook, tweet and blog their victories and defeats alike to the world. 

Slums were no longer black spots of information where little was known of the happenings within them to the outsiders and even less information would trickle down to them. Now with the influx of the poor slum dwellers into the social media spheres, it was now impossible to ignore the voices of this multitude proponent of our society. Now with networks that joined them together on the virtual world amongst themselves, it was now far much easier for slum dwellers to rally behind a single purpose or objective as a constituency. It was the end of the road for those who preyed on them through misinformation or because they were uninformed. Now they could not be ignored but actually influenced socio-economic agendas of which they were only spectators to in the previous information regime. 

So here we were at the launch of yet another mind blowing software application made in one of the urban slums in Nairobi, Kenya. This was the culmination of hundreds of software apps that were created in our silicon/slum valley. At first the creations that were produced were meant to be small scale in their usage as they targeted different socio-economic challenges that were unique to our urban slums. But as natural progression or evolution of ideas would have it, many an entrepreneurs had taken up these little known apps and applied them on an industrial scale targeting greater geographical areas and population. Just as Facebook was first meant to just target university students and later became a global phenomenal. This was the same script of progress that many of these apps created in the slums played. 

These Wi-Fi slums had opened up the slums for business. Job creation in the ICT sector shot up to the delight of the government. I.T hardware firms touched base in the slums with donations of laptops and other electronic devices. This was yet another successful government and private sector partnership, an initiative between government and telecommunication companies. What started out as Wi-Fi hotspots in airports, cafes, schools, offices was later localized the Kenyan way first as free Wi-Fi in Matatus and now free Wi-Fi in Slums. There was already a vibrant community development sector in the slums and free internet only served to strengthen their development strategy and processes, only this time on an extraordinary level. What an exciting time we live in.