eNgoma Community Wi-Fi

Only 24% of Zambians have access to regular, affordable and reliable internet and more than half of Africa’s population remain offline while organizations are continually seeking new ways of connecting engaging and this untapped audience. One of the main barriers to connectivity is affordability.

eNgoma has developed an innovative, scalable and sustainable solution to advance digital inclusion by providing safe and affordable internet access to low-income communities which also provides a public engagement and marketing platform for organizations to communicate with users.

seNgoma provides Internet to low-income communities through a digital ecosystem that includes Free Wi-Fi Hotspots in communities and a public engagement and communication solution that allows organization to engage, communicate and market to users of the Wi-Fi network audiences through automated, engaging campaigns (animated digital Ads, infographics, short video clips and surveys) and thus augment other traditional marketing and communication channels being utilized to deliver content to audiences.

Majority of Africa's population is under the age of 35 years and use mobile as the first port-of-call to communicate with their social networks and a fair proportion of this demographic now own a basic smartphone. However, the majority of mobile usage comes under a pre-paid system, where consumers are looking to control their mobile data costs, with only a minority of the population having the privilege of unlimited data. 

Therefore, to stay connected and relevant to this young audience, and to find the right place and right time to capture their minds and strengthen communication and connection requires a strategy that engages them at all levels and more especially via their mobile devices.

Traditionally, communication channels such as print and broadcast media have been used as engagement channels. However, with the changing media landscape, traditional media channel use is declining in popularity. Instead, many audiences are using the Internet to obtain information. 

As more people have access to mobile phones and the internet, the easier it becomes to offer them important information and services.  

There is, therefore, a great opportunity to connect with this audience while helping bridge the digital divide and contribute towards the attainment of the SDGs. 

The eNgoma Community Wi-Fi solution uses a Captive Portal Wi-Fi Platform that allows users wishing to connect to the Wi-Fi Hotspots with the option to login after viewing digital advertising content, after answering a short survey/ quiz or after watching a short video. By providing a reliable Wi-Fi Internet service in exchange for logging in via answering a short survey or viewing educational content, eNgoma's corporate and NGO partners can increase their engagement with the public via this communication portal and public engagement channel.

The Solution is integrated with Ad servers and survey tools that enable the dissemination of content creating an engagement platform for increasing general knowledge to promote behavior change communication and improve on already existing public awareness programs that currently use other conventional methods of information dissemination. 

The solution thus enables low-income populations to have affordable access to the Internet while benefiting from receiving basic civic education, health information, financial education, and climate change awareness and thus increasing economic capabilities.

Further, with access to the internet, many aspects of communities can be improved providing people with global networking opportunities and facilitating access to information to solve local problems while opening up new markets.

eNgoma is currently working with various institutions to provide digital public engagement and communication platforms. The eNgoma Public Engagement & Communication Solutions (the “eNgoma Solutions”) are aimed at interacting with audiences and providing information through intelligent, one-on-one conversational messaging solutions via our Public Engagement & Communication Chatbot Platform and via automated, engaging campaigns (short surveys, digital Ads and short video clips, as well as FAQs) using our Captive Portal Wi-Fi Platform.

The eNgoma Captive Portal Wi-Fi Solution aims to create an inclusive public engagement and public awareness promotion program for stimulating the participation of women and young people in the conduct of economic affairs.

We believe the eNgoma Captive Portal Wi-Fi Solution promotes inclusive development through participatory engagement and raising public awareness and providing a multisectoral platform that provides a direct, impactful, and cost-effective way of delivering content such as governance education, health education, financial literacy and climate change awareness to low-income young people in their communities.

The Captive Portal Wi-Fi Engagement Solution aims to build awareness, create a positive attitude, and encourage the adoption of appropriate behaviors in young people.

The main objectives include:

Objective 1: Providing ICT and connectivity infrastructure in local communities to enhance the capacity of governments and cooperating partners to empower and mobilise local communities to thereby improve their long-term impact and sustainability.

eNgoma proposes to partner with governments, civil society organisations, businesses and local communities to provide sustainable connectivity in local communities. The Captive Portal Wi-Fi Hotspots are installed in various communities, such as train and bus stations, markets and other social hubs like community centres and higher education institutions. The eNgoma Solution provides a platform for businesses, governments and cooperating partner to connect with the public while helping bridge the digital divide, contribute towards the multisectoral educational campaigns and attainment of the SDGs.

The solution thus enables the low-income population to have affordable access to the Internet while benefiting from receiving basic civic education, health information, financial education, and climate change awareness and thus increasing economic capabilities and contributing to the overall positive social and economic benefits for young people.

Further, with access to the internet, many aspects of communities can be improved providing people with global networking opportunities and facilitating access to information to solve local problems while opening up new markets such as access to digital financial services or to be able check the latest weather reports for agricultural activities.

Objective 2: To support local innovation and promote equal opportunities for young people, women, and disadvantaged members of communities.

Providing “free” Wi-Fi at social hubs in low-income communities will act as an incentive for young people, women, and disadvantaged members of communities to learn more about the economic and employment opportunities and governance activities within their communities and beyond.

The solution provides a traceable, quantifiable, and measurable increase in public knowledge while achieving inclusive engagement via bite-size multisectoral educational content reaching young people.

Objective 3: To increase the participation of young people, women and disadvantaged members of communities in the democratic and economic life and self-governance at the community level.

eNgoma works with government and incorporating partners in digitizing bite-size educational content for dissemination via the eNgoma Captive Portal Wi-Fi platform. This level of public engagement and provision of multi-sectoral content to include civic education, health information, financial literacy, and climate awareness programs/ campaigns opens up new markets and increases participation of young people, women, and disadvantaged members of communities in the democratic and economic life and self-governance at the community level.

Young people are reached via their mobile devices which have become their most viewed devices for obtaining information.

This stimulates the supply of relevant, appropriate, and up to date information on various topics and opportunities targeting low-income young people who ordinarily cannot afford the high cost of Internet access on their mobile devices and help to bridge understanding between the civil society organisations and their target audiences.

The solution thus increases general knowledge among adolescents by delivery of up to date educational content to young people and thus complement broader delivery of social-economic education, content, and promotions in the quest to meet the required levels of literacy awareness and education in young people and more specifically to provide a multisectoral program that provides a direct, impactful and cost-effective way of improving knowledge, skills, attitudes and ultimately change behavior of young people.

The Captive Portal Wi-Fi Engagement Solution aims to build awareness, create a positive attitude, and encourage the adoption of appropriate behaviors in young people by:

1. Providing ICT and connectivity infrastructure in local communities to enhance the capacity of governments and cooperating partners to empower and mobilise local communities to thereby improve their long-term impact and sustainability.

2. Supports local innovation and promote equal opportunities for young people, women, and disadvantaged members of communities through access to safe, reliable and affordable internet.

3. Support local innovation and promote equal opportunities for young people, women, and disadvantaged members of communities.

eNgoma is currently working with various institutions to provide digital public engagement and communication platforms that are aimed at interacting with audiences and providing information.

The eNgoma Community Wi-Fi Solution has been successfully deployed in partnership with the USAID Discover-Health Project as a public engagement solution on the Zambia Ending AIDS Campaign for engaging the public on HIV/ AIDS awareness campaigns via digital advertisements and short surveys. eNgoma has also recently deployed Captive Portal Wi-Fi Hotspots at 7 Marie Stopes service delivery facilities in Lusaka and Ndola and at 8 Ministry of Health facilities in Southern, Lusaka, Central and Copperbelt Provinces. Further, eNgoma also recently partnered with the Zambia – German Development Cooperation through GIZ and deployed 12 Captive Portal Wi-Fi Hotspots in Copperbelt and Southern Provinces for engaging the public on good governance and other civic education campaigns.

eNgoma’s Captive Portal Wi-Fi solution has been operational since 2018.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a communication challenge unprecedented in world history. eNgoma has thus realized that creating a connection with people in current times requires some technological innovation and ingenuity and hence the launch of the eNgoma public engagement and communication solution to provide a platform for communicating with audiences and improve on traditional communication and marketing processes that use other content delivery channels. We believe this Solution is a creative way of addressing the challenge of informing and communicating with audiences in the digital era.

eNgoma has thus developed an innovative, scalable and sustainable solution to advance digital inclusion by providing safe and affordable internet access to low-income communities which also provides a public engagement and marketing platform for organizations to communicate with users in a direct, impactful and cost-effective manner.

The eNgoma ecosystem is therefore an enabler of universal internet access as well as being a platform for cost-effective and measurable public engagement solution for all our partners.

The eNgoma Solution thus addresses the above challenges and supplements the traditional communication channels by including this new innovative communication delivery channel. 

The eNgoma Community Wi-Fi Solution is currently averaging approximately 5,000 users per month with over 15,000 logins and over 20,000 impressions and is expected to grow to 15,000 users per month in the next six months and to over 100,000 users per month in one year with a target of reaching one million users per month in 5 years as the number of Wi-Fi Hotspots increase and with coming on board of civil society organization partners with objectives to engage the public.

Our main measure of progress is the number of Community Hotspots that we deploy. This has a direct impact on our other success factors below:

• Number users connecting to our Hotspots
• Number of unique users on our Hotspots
• Number sesions on our Hotspots
• Number unique logins on our Hotspots
• Number of Impressions on our Hotspots
• Amount of Data useage on our Hotspots
• Number of new users on our Hotspots
• Number of survey responses
• New versus Repeat Users
• Number of online users

We also look to benefit from our partners' performance indicators through in depth interviews with users and service providers in various locations and the impact that connectivity has brought to the community. We work with our partners to produce caser studies that aid in making changes and/ or improvements to our service.

3 full-time staff, 2 part-time members and 5 seasonal contractual members

The Team Lead, Chilufya Musosha is very knowledgeable Information Technology Specialist with extensive experience in a variety of IT technologies. Has hands-on experience with computer networking technologies including Wi-Fi, VoIP and WAN technologies. Over 13 years working experience, 3 with an ISP and 10 working for 2 of Zambia biggest USAID supported projects. Excellent troubleshooting and documentation skills and has several key industry certifications. I have worked with the Ministry of Health and Education on key projects such as SmartCare and the Centres of Excellence Programme. Has a lot of international experience setting up and support regional offices in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa. Over the last 4 years, his focus has been in creating solutions to help organizations gather and visualize Data. The data collection and visualization solutions around the NGO sector and primarily in health.

Chanda Mutoni has gained unique experience in a variety of Captive Portal Wi-Fi solutions and platform integrations. Has hands-on experience with Captive Portal Wi-Fi configurations, AI analytics, automations, design animations and content development.

Over the last 4 years, his focus has been in developing AI based public engagement and communication solutions to help organisations improve communication and public engagement strategies to gather and visualize Data. Prior to Co-Founding eNgoma, Chanda was CEO of Stockbrokers Zambia Limited. Chanda is solution oriented and embodies the passion for the developing Zambian solutions to tackle local problem.

eNgoma identifies and works with member of the communities to tailor make and customize solutions suited to the particular community. This has resulted in us having Champions at each of our Hotspots who help in basic troubleshooting with support from our main help desk. Our extension team thus comprises of a diverse group of individuals from difference backgrounds. 

We are applying to Solve to expand our pool of partners as well as seeking funding to grow our business to a level where it will be attractive as an advertising and public engagement partner.

We are looking for funding to grow the business and be able to have more Community Wi-Fi Hotspots in more low-income areas.

Further, eNgoma would benefit from technical assistance in the other identified areas above to make our business even more sustainable.

We are looking at partnering with NGO in health promotion, civic education, climate change awareness and financial literacy.

We would like to be considered for the Digital Inclusion Challenge as our solution advances digital inclusion.

We would like to be considered for this prize to explore the opportunity of deploying our Community Wi-Fi Solution in Refugee Camps. Zambia is host to a number of refugees from the region and we would like to pilot our solution to promote inclusive economic development for this population.

We would like to be considered for the prize as we believe our solution advances digital equity by affording internet access to low-income population who ordinarily would not be able to afford internet access and would thus be digitally excluded.

We believe that our Community Wi-Fi Solution benefits young women in the communities we operate in. For instance, the majority of users at our Bus Station and Food market Hotspots are women.

eNgoma deeloped and deployed the Zambia Covid-19 Information Chatbot for the Ministry of Health in Zambia and we would like to be considered for this prize to explore possible partnerships in AI and Data solutions.