The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the digital divide and brought the importance of universal broadband in South Africa into focus.

Online education can be a societal equaliser; however, barriers to entry to essential services like digital education need to be swiftly removed, says Huawei Southern Africa region VP David Chen.

On March 15, South African schools and tertiary institutions closed their doors in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus, with many schools taking their curricula online and teachers creating lesson plans, activities and assignments to complete to ensure that learning continues at home.

“Online education is an important societal equaliser, as all students will be in a position to access the world's best educational content regardless of economic barriers,” he says.

However, this is contingent on broadband becoming ubiquitous.

“The recent announcement of zero-rated educational and informational websites [was] a crucial move by South Africa’s mobile networks, an indication of how seriously the information and communication technology industry takes [its] role to impact society where [it] can in positive ways,” he notes.

In South Africa, data traffic surged between 35% and 60%, while mobile network operators started dropping data costs during the South African lockdown.

However, many are unable to exploit this opportunity or access the content made available, owing to limited broadband access or network capacity.

“As South Africa prepares to meet this highly disruptive and destructive virus head-on, we must concurrently ensure that the foundation is built and strengthened to withstand any future shocks that may come.”

Enabling a digital education platform to work in South Africa’s context requires the removal of the barriers that prevent the delivery of universal broadband to South Africa’s citizens.

“Improving the pace at which broadband is developed in the country underpins many, if not all, endeavours to limit the impact of external forces and disruptions to education provision and other public service delivery,” says Chen.

A host of elements need to be in place for broadband to be expanded and for capacity to be built to support a robust digital ecosystem and allow for the large-scale use of online services going beyond education to health, government and commercial applications.

These include spectrum, access to sites for small cells, swift site application approvals, simpler processes and reasonably costed way leaves and affordable devices and data.