MY SECOND A4AI-ALLIANCE FOR AFFORDABLE INTERNET COALITION MEETING EXPERIENCE

After attending the 1st A4AI coalition in Abuja in March this year, where I met my world pulse sisters for the first time in person, I was so excited and learnt a lot from the workshop that I looked forward to attending the next one scheduled to take place in Lagos. During the first meeting, I learnt a lot because everything was so new to me, I had no idea all the trouble internet providers go through to get internet across to us. And so, here was I in Lagos, ready for the Coalition meeting. Again, I met with my world pulse sisters and the atmosphere was so welcoming, aside meeting my world pulse sisters, it was awesome meeting with some of the new faces that I met at the last meeting in Abuja and we were no longer new to each other but we welcomed each other with so much hugs and smiles. It was great converging again.
The event began and this time around the discussions and sessions was centred on Infrastructure Sharing, Pricing and Transparency, Affordability and Spectrum, with emphasis on Spectrum. From our discussions, we realized that internet affordability is still a problem; many end users are not able to afford the internet in Nigeria. It was also pointed out that we do have infrastructure sharing but it is still governed by pricing. It was interesting to learn that it takes about one year to get a site approved, question is- how long will it then take to get wireless infrastructure in the country? Once when there are no delays in approving the site then there will be speed. And that it costs 285 million USD per licence, for both licence and spectrum and it is for ten years. This means that spectrum is the chief barrier to competition since not many operators can afford that. And so for most people here, the challenges to staying on the net are the inadequate electricity power and access to the internet. We were shared into groups to discuss the various issues highlighted and in my group, we had very educating and enlightening discussions and at the end of the two day event, we came up with some recommendations that I will summarize below.
For Pricing and Transparency: - we recommended that service providers must be very transparent in their pricing, that is, the prices of data usage, and promotions by the telecom operators must be transparent. A way has to be created to monitor the terms and conditions of the promotions. Terms and conditions must be very clear. And also educate end users on how to find out the full details of the terms and conditions.
We also discussed that to get more women to engage on the web, women must be educated on the importance of getting online, if women have access to the internet they will be more productive, question is what are we going to do to ensure more women are online? And from the answers given, we realized that cost is a major issue in the less number of women getting online. Another issue is lack of safe and reliable access. We concluded that more women should be educated on how to get online and how to do meaningful things that will bring them great opportunities on the web, also women should be educated on what it means to go on megabyte, etc. basically educate them to know which part of the internet consumes more data so as to save cost.
As we ended the two day event, we all felt more enlightened and motivated to continue to impact and empower especially women to be involved online, we also encouraged ourselves to always share our online success stories with the women as this will encourage them too. For me it was a great event, I feel very glad being part of this coalition, thanks to world pulse I wouldn’t have met them, or even participate in the very educating event. It was also a great opportunity connecting with new people and new organizations, new offline networks. I look forward to the next event in Abuja in October God willing. Smiles…..