The World Is In My Hand

Special Report: Activate! Leadership for Public Innovation programme

Here (in South Africa), talking about our separateness has become an art form. We spend more time critiqueing the walls that divide us than trying to overcome them. We have become paralysed by a sense of deep-seated cultural and economic differences, yet often fail to recognise the obvious opportunities to connect to each other.

Just think of how cellphones have opened up new possibilities over the past decade. It’s an opportunity literally in our hands. But we’ve failed to grasp it to the full. Other countries have used cellphones to help people get jobs, finances and further education. Here, service providers penalise those who can only afford basic cellphones by charging higher rates for simpler technologies – like unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) – while the operating costs are next to nothing.

I keep wondering whether big business is really serious about reuniting our country. I would like to take the CEOs of Vodacom, MTN and Cell C with me to Rooigrond, where I live, so that they can understand the power they have to change the lives of young people.

Rooigrond was established in the early 1990s. At that time, the municipality gave its permission for people to move onto the land, but since 2006 we have been threatened with eviction for illegal occupation.

Though no formal eviction order has been issued, the state of uncertainty has given the municipality a convenient excuse for not providing services to us. We don’t have a proper toilet system and half the households have no electricity.

Two years ago, I was helping to run a children’s feeding scheme when the community’s two water pumps broke down. The village was distraught. There was no water to drink, wash or cook. More than 400 children showed up desperate for food, but we could not even cook pap. I knew we had to find a way to solve the problem.

So I decided to contact everyone I knew in the surrounding area, hoping that someone would be able to help us. Our “SOS” call worked – a nearby property owner brought in water and we managed to feed the children. A light went on for me that day: if we could connect people inside and outside our community, we would have the power to solve many of our problems.

I had founded a project – Operation: ROOIGROND – early in 2010, but now I was ready to kick it into top gear. Word-of-mouth brought in the first equipment for our early-learning centre. But I wanted a wider audience.

So I started to use the internet and social media to tell the story of my community.

The trouble was that I had to travel to Mahikeng to find an internet café. That all changed when I was given a sponsored BlackBerry. Suddenly I could surf relevant websites and I began tweeting about our projects. There was so much information out there I had never known existed; so many platforms to tell our story.

I couldn’t believe it when people started to respond! They asked questions, and suggested articles to read.

When I first tweeted about our need for magazines or the legal difficulties we faced in our quest for service delivery, I didn’t realise I was beginning to turn my wish list into reality. Now, a constitutional law expert is helping us to access water and sanitation. An agricultural specialist has designed a farming plan, and a young social entrepreneur is working with us to find ways for women to manage the challenges associated with menstruation, such as the lack of sanitary pads which keeps schoolgirls at home every month.

Through the keypad of my cellphone we now feel part of the nation. There is a whole network of people who are concerned about Rooigrond and committed to improving our lives. Even the elders in my community have started to tweet, now that they’ve seen what the world of mobile technology can do! South Africa has one of the highest levels of cellphone users in the world, and mobile technology could bring down many of the walls that still separate young people and poor communities from real opportunity.

For example, in India, a cellphone-based project called Babajob links about 8000 work-seekers to employment every day. In the blue-collar and informal markets, a huge challenge is that information about jobs is largely not digital and not accessible. By digitising information, and because telecommunications costs are so low in India, Babajob has connected work-seekers in the poorest communities to more than one million jobs.

The difference is that in India, low-end USSD is free and normal cellphone costs are just 1 rupee (15c) a minute to phone anywhere in the country. India knows that access to information and connections between communities is what drives economic development in their country.

Contrast that to South Africa: out of 46 African countries surveyed in 2012, South Africa ranked thirtieth in terms of cellphone costs. The cheapest prepaid products in SA are three times more expensive than in our neighbour Namibia!

Of course, cynics might say that reducing the cost of communication won’t dramatically change lives because opportunities are limited and many young people are unprepared for work. I say it is exactly that sort of “them and us” mentality that continues to polarise our country.

If young people could just see a little further over the horizon, it would give them a sense of hope and imminent possibility. If we feel connected to something bigger than ourselves, we have more incentive to study harder and keep away from harm.

Koketso Moeti is part of the Activate! Leadership for Public Innovation programme. Follow her on @ORooigrond or visit www.rooigrond.co.za. Activate! Leadership for Public Innovation is a national network of diverse young people committed to social transformation. Go to: www.activateleadership.co.za

This article has been edited for Supernews with permission from Activate! The full article was originally published by the Sunday Times on the 10^th June 2012 as part of Youth Month.