In many parts of SA, the school curriculum has already gone digital, with past exam papers online, supplementary lessons streamed and applications at many tertiary institutions now handled online.
Yet, in too many households, connectivity remains intermittent, expensive or simply unavailable. This connectivity gap quietly shapes who can keep up and who is left behind.
Policy conversations around the digital divide have been running for decades. For families in places such as Lufhereng, the question has always been simpler: when does connectivity stop being discussed and start being lived?
Lufhereng, on the western edge of Soweto, used to sit on the wrong side of that gap. Two years ago, there was no fixed broadband infrastructure in the area. Mobile coverage was inconsistent. Households relied on prepaid data, often carefully rationed or on trips to internet cafés. Studying online from home was not viable.
The change began with a technical experiment.
Infrastructure must be in place where demand will grow, not only where returns tick the immediate financial boxes
— Charlene Abrey
Two homeowners agreed to host base stations on their rooftops. Those sites became known as Zinhle and Double Storey. A local internet service provider, Moja Prepaid, partnered with Openserve to sell services in the neighbourhood. By January 2023, around 90 households were connected.
That number kept growing. Today, 458 homes in Lufhereng are active customers. Five base stations now serve the area. Peak traffic exceeds 1.2 Gbps in a community that, not long ago, struggled for reliable mobile reception.
Infrastructure stories can easily turn into discussions of technical specifications. But the more interesting question is what happens once that infrastructure arrives and works the way it was designed to?
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Households that once had to schedule their internet use now live with stable home connectivity. Learners no longer need to choose which assignments justify spending money on mobile data.
Teachers can plan lessons that assume digital research. Parents can now interact with school communication platforms from home rather than borrowing devices or travelling elsewhere. The community now operates on the digital footing that the education system already assumes.
That promise can be seen in the 2025 matric outcomes at Lufhereng Secondary School, a no-fee township school that achieved a 100% pass rate, with 98.4% of learners securing bachelor’s passes, despite operating from mobile classrooms.
Those results are not “made” by a network. They are earned by learners and educators. But reliable home connectivity changes the odds at the margin: it makes exam preparation resources consistently reachable, supports after-hours revision and catch-up learning, especially during weekends and school holidays, and lets learners complete online university and bursary applications on time, without the hidden tax of rationed mobile data.
Lufhereng matters beyond its location. It shows what happens when connectivity is built, adopted and allowed to grow, not as a temporary intervention, but as infrastructure that stays because there is demand and a commercial model that supports it.
Much of the debate around digital inclusion focuses on affordability. Yes, that matters. But reach and reliability matter just as much. Infrastructure must be in place where demand will grow, not only where returns tick the immediate financial boxes. When that happens, participation in the digital economy becomes a lived experience.
Of course, this is not framed as charity. The project in Lufhereng was structured commercially, executed with a local partner and expanded in response to sustained uptake.
Community buy-in, local enterprise and national infrastructure investment worked together to show how durable inclusion is built as a system, not a one-off event.
SA’s future competitiveness will depend on how widely digital participation spreads. Education, entrepreneurship and public services are already digital by design.
Closing the access gap requires consistent execution on the ground, in places that rarely feature in strategy presentations.
In Lufhereng, the long-running policy conversation has finally met the ground. It started with two rooftops and a willingness to test a different approach.
It continues as hundreds of households now live with connectivity as part of daily life. The digital divide does not close with press announcements. It closes when access becomes ordinary.
- Abrey is executive of technology development and innovation at Openserve
