Getting connected in Mali
It’s a dark, warm night filled with jostling crowds. Nearby you sense but don’t quite see a vast expanse of water flowing past. In front of you a stage glows with lights and the bright colours of musicians’ costumes. Directly beneath them eager fans stand close, faces and arms raised, moving in time with music. As you drift back the standing groups are broken up by clusters sitting on the grass, until at some point everyone’s sitting and the parties are more dispersed. The rainbow glow of the stage finds a hundred, blue reflections below in the phones and tablets pointed at the performers. It could be a scene from any festival in a stunning, outdoor location. This one is called the Festival sur le Niger, and it happens every year in Mali.
When it comes to internet access, the known facts about Mali are similar to those from other West African countries. Only 2% of the population have fixed line access to the internet, and this is almost exclusively available to people living in cities. Concrete figures on mobile internet access are harder to come by. We know that mobile phone contracts are at more than 100% penetration. Feature phones are cheap to buy from any roadside vendor for between 5000–10000 CFA (8–12€) and it’s reasonable to expect some people have more than one, while others still don’t have one at all. Rough estimates for the number of people who have access to the internet on a mobile are about 20%.
But of course, there is a huge difference between access and use. Only the very affluent, like those at the festival, are using smartphones with faster connections and lots of screen real estate. Many more will have phones with limited capabilities, tiny screens and fiddly buttons. Some of these will be able to connect to wireless internet, for others people can buy packages to access mobile internet connections. All these phones come pre-installed with certain internet-related features, almost always including Facebook. Studies of other countries in Africa, including neighbouring Nigeria, have suggested that some people equate Facebook with the internet.
Then there are also people who don’t go online themselves. Perhaps they don’t have a phone, or they don’t have a phone with internet access or they don’t live somewhere with mobile internet or WiFi. While approximately half of Mali’s population lives in Bamako, the capital, a large proportion live in villages in extremely rural areas. Connectivity inside the cities is expensive and patchy, outside the cities it’s extremely limited.
Despite the fact that device ownership and internet access is nowhere near as ubiquitous as in other countries, we can’t say that people are living lives untouched by the internet. The internet is one strand of connectivity in an interconnected culture which creatively uses multiple methods to share information. A video recorded on someone’s phone at the Festival sur le Niger can travel far — posted to YouTube, downloaded and shared as an MP3 via Bluetooth file transfer as well as via messaging services like Viber and WhatsApp, and, more intimately, in shared moments crouched over a friend’s phone, heads knocked together.
As An Xiao Mina recently pointed out “both informal communities in urban areas and rural locales in developing countries often feel like the edge of the Internet, where the next billion are just starting to come online. But, first, to understand the edges, it helps to understand the center and how the concept of “connectivity” is constructed.”
Without doing deeper field work we have no idea of the different ways the internet might be touching people’s lives without conforming to our pre-existing assumptions of what it means to be connected. Staggered relationships to the internet afford interesting opportunities and challenges for anyone thinking about creating new services.
It’s important that we start by thinking about needs and how we can best support people to serve their needs while other aspects of infrastructure, culture and the economy are changing. What kind of services can you create within the existing constraints? How can you use current information networks and behaviours to offer something useful and make people’s lives easier?
We’re often quick to judge places without “our” kind of internet access and technical capabilities as insufficient. But that’s such a narrow view of the world. Broadband and mobile internet access and speed are just one of the variables affecting the context we live in. It’s a variable that sits on a continuum with South Korea significantly faster than everyone else, North America and Europe above the global average and China and most of Africa currently below it. The changes in these variables help create the conditions for different use cases.
We can do better if we orient ourselves around a more inclusive perspective that doesn’t give one lifestyle automatic precedence over others. Accept each scenario as a valid approach and understand what works about it and what doesn’t. Once we understand people’s needs in these contexts, we’ll come up with better ideas which help us design different types of services than the ones we’ve come to accept as normal.
