Cheap Internet changing face of learning in Nanyuki

Some 30 minutes away from Nanyuki town, pupils at a girl’s secondary school can hardly wait for the sound of the bell to run to their favourite spot – the library.

The 220 pupils at Sweetwaters Secondary School still marvel at the delights of going online and accessing education materials through computers at the library.

Three years ago, local internet access provider Mawingu Networks connected the rural school to internet using a combination of low-cost wireless technology and solar power.

Interestingly, the availability of the internet has concided with a reduction in the school dropout rates and improved scores in the pupils’ academics.

“There has been a significant reduction in dropout rates as pupils embrace ICT and grasp concepts initially perceived difficult. This fascination with the internet has given them a reason to stay in school,” said Moses Ringera, the school’s deputy principal.

Sweetwaters is one of the 26 schools in Laikipia County that Mawingu has connected alongside the county government office, public library, a dispensary and small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

When it entered Laikipia in 2013, Mawingu – which means ‘clouds’ in Swahili – had 100 hotspots. It provided cheap Wi-Fi in specifically in Nanyuki town by tapping White Spaces.

White Spaces is a technical term used to refer to the un-used broadcast frequencies which are a key resource for bridging the last mile in Internet access in the country.

With support from Microsoft and United States’ development finance institution OPIC, Mawingu has since grown its WiFi hotspots to over 1,100. The hotspots connect 600 small businesses to the internet and have over 11,000 active users in and around Nanyuki, a town with a population of 50,000.

In total, Mawingu has 67,000 users on its hotspots.

“Mawingu provides last-mile connectivity access to areas that cannot economically access the Internet. The beauty with this is that all our operations are cloud based,” said Tim Hobbs, director and CEO of Mawingu networks.

READ: Microsoft starts low-cost Internet plans in Nanyuki

Simply put, cloud technology is computing based on the internet. It involves using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.

This technological disruption has seen people move from running applications or programs from software downloaded on a physical computer or server in their building to accessing the same kinds of applications through the internet.

Experts reckon Kenya and Africa at large are yet to go fully to the cloud but that the key obstacles — high speed access, affordable data and reliable connectivity — are fast being cleared.

Experts say the main challenge is in public perception regarding cloud computing as well as and fragmented and confusing regulations.

According to research done in 2016 by the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), 35.6 per cent of public sector institutions in Kenya use cloud services in comparison to only 22.9 per cent of private businesses.

This trend is largely due to a government strategy to digitise services across the public sector.

Companies fear that hosting data remotely on the could exposes them to vulnerabilities, a perception Microsoft argues is untrue maintaining that cloud is safer.