"Our solution stems the challenge of lack of affordable and meaningful Tanzania as recommended by the UN Secretary General’s report on Digital Cooperation. Although there are 6 telecom companies in Tanzania the competition among them has never been pure. There is what is suspected as collusion in pricing fixing of data bundle. This causes Internet poverty and the victims are the ordinary citizens and more so the marginalized rural and underserved urban populations. The problem of Internet affordability took us to the path that we began to think about digital divide as whole set of divides in Internet access, digital skills, and digital gender gap.

The end result of the thinking resulted in the so called “strength in numbers”. That is that is it possible to bring people together to share the cost of a broadband infrastructure and monthly data bundle package to bring the cost of Internet down? Is this possible to use numbers in cooperative arrangement to do this? We tested this hypothesis between 2021 and 2023 by establishing a community driven project called Tanzania Digital Inclusion Project. The project aimed higher- connecting citizens to meaningful Internet, creating community network innovation hubs, providing digital skills, digital adult education, e-learning skills for teachers and STEM trainings for girls to reduce digital gender gap.

Ten year(10) Objectives of our solution(TADIP).
1. To provide Meaningful and Affordable broaband Internet to 4 million citizens.
2. To provide digital skills to 1.5 million youth and women
3. To engage 100,000 girls in STEM trainings program
4. To establish 200 Community Network Innovation Hubs

Approach
Our approach is use of cooperative arrangement, where all community stakeholders share the cost of establishing the Internet infrastructure and monthly cost of data bundle. The aim is not profit but cost-sharing to bring down the cost of making affordable and meaningful Internet available for every subscriber in the community where can have the Internet."

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nazar-nicholas-69656ab7/

• United Republic of Tanzania

• Youth
• Women
• The poor

After our successful pilot in Kigamboni area, our next is to scale to our regions of Tanzania by creating 200 Community Network Innovation Hubs that will potentially be connected 4 million to affordable and meaningful Internet, provide digital skills to 1.5 million youth and women and help 50,000 girls go through STEM where citizens can participate meaningfully in the digital.

In the cooperative Community Newotk arrangement there is process to follow to ensure project ownership to the target beneficiaries and future sustainability of the project. First an awareness meeting is held to where all community key stakeholders attend. These include the government, civil society, private sector, and technical community. What follows is the feasibility study for a proper area to install the hub and the technologies to be used. After settling on the area and technologies After that technologies to be used have been decided and implementation is done. The target beneficiaries are low-income citizens who normally have to decide between the price of data bundle and food and public institutions like schools, smallest units of local government, healthcare centers, dispensaries, local police stations, community centers and Micro, Small and Medium Entrepreneurs.