As with any success story, we have travelled a long way to get to where we are today. Zenzeleni (‘Do it yourself’ in isiXhosa), was born in 2012 through a friendship between a University of the Western Cape (UWC) doctoral student, Carlos Rey Moreno, and a local community activist, Masibulele ‘Jay’ Siya. It led to a partnership between UWC and the local tribal authority of the Mankosi community. Through the years of evolving into its current form, Zenzeleni has always placed community at its centre and navigated challenges to bring new opportunities.

At first Zenzeleni was a local wireless intranet, providing free voice services between analogue phones, connected by solar-powered routers. Later we included an external connection to the internet via a 3G modem to make calls to national numbers. At this stage our villages had no electricity and we realised that we could use the solar power stations to charge phones. This was the first opportunity that we had to generate income and reinvest this back into our community. 

In 2014, we established our first legal cooperative ISP. Thanks to support from Ellipsis Regulatory Solutions we received full ICASA licence exemptions to operate and offer communication services. Throughout this time UWC supported our activities through action research. Techno-economic and social studies helped expand our understanding of the barriers to access, use and benefit from telecommunications. These interventions resulted, amongst other things, in connecting our local schools and allowing youth using the internet to apply for, and successfully receive, national tertiary education grants – some of the first in the area! 

In 2016 Zenzeleni’s work was recognised internationally, through receiving support from the Internet Society and from the Association for Progressive Communications; in 2017 we were finalist in the Mozilla Equal Rating Challenge; and again in 2017 we received the South African national award for Best Innovation with Social Impact. This support allowed us to create our own wireless backbone from Mthatha to our Mankosi community (60km away).

At the end of 2017 we migrated from connecting to the National Research and Education Network (via Walter Sisulu University) to an uncontended fibre connection through a like-minded larger ISP, Easttel, opening up the opportunity to expand the network to businesses. 

In 2018, the South African Department of Science and Technology and the Technology Innovation Agency supported us to seed a second cooperative ISP in a new community to test whether our model could scale. Thus Zenzeleni Zithulele cooperative was born. In September of the same year the global community visited us when we hosted the Third African Summit on Community Networks. 

We keep growing thanks to the invaluable care and work from individuals and partners.

Sifuna uZenzeleni anwenwe nje ngomlilo – “We want Zenzeleni to spread like fire”.  Nontsokolo Sigcau, Mankosi Cooperative