This policy brief describes the critical role of community-centred connectivity initiatives (CCCIs) as infrastructure that builds the digital confidence of women and girls in poor urban and rural communities in Nigeria. In the context of rapid digitalisation that is making information technologies more accessible to socioeconomically marginalised communities, structured mechanisms at the grassroots level are necessary to guide the digital transformation of women and girls in a way that is responsive to their specific needs. As community-led initiatives, CCCIs provide for this responsiveness.
Women and girls in marginalised communities face intersecting barriers to their productive engagement in the digital economy, including unaffordable data and devices, a low level of digital skills, household and caregiving responsibilities, cultural restrictions, and a lack of voice in community decision making. In this way they are frequently entrenched in cycles of disempowerment that prevent them from being active agents of their own economic transformation. With interventions that evolve as community needs evolve, CCCIs offer a pathway to disrupt these cycles, helping women and girls to reimagine their futures.
This policy brief draws on experiences at the community level in several diverse poor urban and rural communities across Nigeria. It focuses on the benefits CCCIs have demonstrated in girls’ education, and how digital skills have strengthened women’s entrepreneurial activities. It is also aligned with efforts to ensure regulatory authorisation and to support pilot CCCIs in communities in the country in order for their transversal impact to be felt.
Considering that CCCIs respond to the needs of communities in ways that one-size-fits-all national commercial networks cannot, CCCIs are allies in the implementation of strategic policy plans that aim to economically empower women in marginalised communities.
The following supportive policy positions would allow CCCIs to flourish in these communities:
- Ensure CCCIs are authorised to operate effectively in both urban and rural communities by introducing a more flexible and proportionate regulatory approach for community networks. This includes creating a dedicated or simplified licensing pathway such as the General Authorisation Framework already adopted by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), 1 with requirements better suited to the scale and realities of community-led operators.
- Create gender equity requirements for licensed CCCIs (e.g. for aggregator models that require licensed spectrum) with conditions such as training quotas and measures to ensure that women are included in the community ownership, management and/or governance of CCCIs. Community ownership will also help to protect the local infrastructure.
- Encourage CCCIs to create women-only forums alongside their operations, which could serve as trusted spaces where women can share knowledge, create meaningful relationships and make their training and other needs known.
- Consider ways to subsidise the price of digital technologies such as laptops and smartphones for use in microenterprises and schools in poor and rural communities.
- Fund community-led and designed training interventions run by CCCIs aimed at building the digital confidence and digital business skills of women in communities, including by offering training in local languages and providing access to more effective training through the use of computers and tablets in public access facilities. Such products ultimately help build income for users who can then afford CCCI connectivity services.
- Authorise the use of mobile spectrum or fund the expansion of CCCI infrastructure in communities such as additional hotspots for women to ensure better access and safety for women and girls.
- Prioritise digital skills training for girls in schools while building the digital knowledge, confidence and awareness of teachers.
- Consider using universal service and access funds to set up computer labs that prioritise access for girls in disadvantaged schools leveraging the connectivity provided by CCCIs.
- Build on the technical awareness and the administrative, communication and other professional skills of operators of CCCIs so that they can respond effectively to network maintenance requirements as well as the needs of women in communities.
- Support cross-sectoral institutional policy development and dialogue to attend to structural deficits in communities, including unstable electricity supply and the high cost of data and handsets.
- Encourage the development of multistakeholder and skilled networks that can support CCCI operators in their efforts to be responsive to the diverse needs of women.
Read the full report here.