LAST week I spent time interviewing people on water and electricity. They seem to be related subjects as both are important need of development.
I traveled to Chongwe which is about 45 kilometres from Lusaka. I choose Chongweto get a feel of how people in rural areas access electricity and water.
I took a visit toMwantalasha village a place that has no electricity. The village which was about 4 km from the main electricity grid lacked energy supply and this was an obstacle to telecommunication infrastructure.
In an interview with Elias Mugala, a small scale farmer in Chongwe revealed that he had not even explored on how much it would cost him to bring electricity to his area. Asked why he has not applied for it, he said that he had not managed to raise that money.
Mugala once a polygamist who has eight children from two wives said if he had electricity he would want to own a fridge to preserve food and also set up a Barber Shop as a business and use it to charge mobile phones for his family and use other electrical appliances.
Asked if his children had mobile phones, Mugala said that some of his children had mobile phones but they did not have the internet facility on their phones. He observed that the lack of main electricity supply in many rural remote areas was major obstacle to deploying telecommunication infrastructure.
He was however grateful to the Mobile Service Providers for providing a service in his area. He called on the Zambia Electricity Supply Cooperation (Zesco) to have a deliberate program of servicing rural areas even beyond the rural electrification programme.
“Power coming from Lusaka by passes our villages to go to Chongwe town. Rural electricity application is quiet expensive. We are poor and it would be nice to have the electricity company just install power for us on credit like they did in some compounds in Lusaka,” said Mugala
Mugala who is 50 years old said in this new era there was need for the government to speed up the electricity installations in the rural areas. He is as old as Zambia but still lives a life of his parents of drawing water from a well and having no electricity. As we compare the rural and urban we still see a digital divide.
Zambia is now a middle income country. At Mugala’s home his family was cooking on firewood. Chongwe is one area where environmental sustainability continues to be under tremendous pressure with wood harvesting for fuel wood (mainly charcoal) and clearance for agriculture. Deforestation has been an issue in Chongwe area.
Energy is an important sector that has an impact on development. Some poor communities have been highly impacted with the prepaid electricity meters.

• Lack of access to electricity and alternative technologies has contributed to the advert of widening the gap between the haves and have nots for many people

At Mugala’s village there are both grass thatched and iron sheets. Mugala was quick to notice that there was need to improve the roofing because grass thatched house may be burnt down with electricity. The cost estimates for connecting power in a rural area were estimated to be like the cost of education.
The Government should consider closely linking renewable energy with rural telecommunication and ICT initiatives. The information revolution has completely bypassed many rural poor people in Zambia. Many rural areas don’t even have GSM network which is highly concentrated on the line of rail. Sadly some people in the rural areas do not even dream of having electricity or even access to alternative power.
A visit to Sicholeka village in Chongwe showed that people where scare in this area. Visiting Elias Moyo in the area showed that he managed to stay in that village because he had sunk a borehole which was using a generator to pump water for irrigation. He has a generator, a battery, an inventor and also some solar panels.He uses the solar panels to charge the battery to help start the generator. The generator is used to pump water out is a 55 meter borehole into a 2500 liters water tank which he uses to irrigate his garden after the season is gone. To stay in Sicholeka village you had to sink a bore hole to access water and maybe this is why the village does not have a big population because efforts to dig a wells have proved futile. It was lovely to see that in this village a GSM network had a strong presence. Phone reception was very good in this area.
In this village access to electricity is not even a dream. This is a rural area that is close to Lusaka and has no transmission line in sight.
Lack of access to electricity and alternative technologies has contributed to the advert of widening the gap between the haves and have nots for many people who do not have access to such ICT technologies. The rural digital divide is most evident when comparing the disparities between urban and rural communities, men and women and between successful farmers and their less successful neighbours.
To bridge the rural digital divide there is need to strengthen human and institutional capacities to harness information and knowledge more effectively. Zambia needs to address the following key issues to reduce the digital divide that exists.
Internet content is still packaged in African foreign languages. Localisation of content has been very slow. Even when we produce content for the internet we are not producing content in in local languages. There is need for communities in the country to locally adapt content and contextualise it.
There is need for continued awareness creation and capacity building for rural dwellers on the importance of ICTs and how they can benefit from them.
It is also time for the rural communities to have a realistic approach to technologies and work on the high cost and financial sustainability to help increased awareness of ICTs in rural Zambia.
The fact that globalisation and the new technologies are fast transforming all aspects of development and how information is shared is the problem that makes rural societies in Zambia to lag behind. Communication is now a priority for an international community, which makes rural societies in Africa increase the need to improve the flow of information.
It is not always the people who are near to the source of electricity who will have access to electricity. These villages in Chongwe are simply about 120km from the Kafue George which is a source of electricity in Zambia.
Living in the city of Lusaka where electricity is more visible and connections to houses are happening on a daily rate is the exact opposite of what is happening in the rural areas.
Being nearer to Kafue Gorge does not mean access to electricity.
At Matipula primary school there were evening classes for adult education and speaking to the head Master ….he said they had access to mobile internet. Visible on his desk was a dongle and a desk top computer.
Rural Communities and ICTs in Africa
It therefore follows that the majority of farmers in Africa live in rural communities where farming is the chief activity. It is vital that the agricultural sector in Africa is not left behind in the information revolution. All farming whether large or small scale, requires an array of skills and knowledge.
Internet access is expensive in Africa. In many countries government’s ministries and public institutions are not yet using electronic media to manage information. A large proportion of the rural poor do not speak a language of international communication, many are illiterate and most have neither electricity nor telephone. Their main problems are food security, safe water and sanitation, health care and education. Is it realistic to talk about providing universal access to ICTs in these circumstances?
It is however possible that the rural communities can organise themselves and exchange information content and to communicate using all the ICTs-short, to reduce and eventually bridge the rural and eventually bridge the rural digital divide.
Farmers can use mobile phones to get information from a local entrepreneur about prices in several local agricultural markets, rather than relying, as they did before, on the word of the middleman.
Rural women and ICT
In the rural areas where the majority of the world’s hungry live, women and girls produce most of the food consumed locally. Their contribution could be far greater if they had equal access to essential resources and services, including information.
Rural women have even less access to information and new technologies than men and thus are at an advantage when it comes to making informed choices about what to produce and how best to market their products. Lack of information also limits their influence in their communities and their ability to participate in decision-making.
Challenges of Government have moved proactively to reduce the power deficit in the electricity sub sector which has potentially been a major hindrance to Zambia’s future economic prosperity.
Delivering the 2015 budget address, Alexander Chikwanda Minister of Finance said government had brought on stream 360 megawatts of power having completed the Kariba North Bank hydro power extension project and the 120 megawatts at the Itezhi-Tezhi Hydro Power.
“The energy sector continues to grow and contribute positively to economic growth,” observed MrChikwanda.