Bridging the Digital Divide

Part 3 of the “Beyond the Hype” series

This piece is quite niche. If you work in M&E, development, or social impact, this is directly relevant. If you don’t, the previous and next piece might be more your speed, but you might still want to stick with me because the pattern here shows up everywhere.

After I finished my session on African intelligence and its systematic invisibility in WEIRD systems, Jason Bygate took over to address the practical realities of implementing MERL (Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning) technology in African contexts. Jason brought over 20 years of experience working across various impact sectors in Africa, and his session was grounded in real-world challenges that civil society organizations face daily. Let me walk you through what he covered.

A screenshot of slide 7 of Jason’s presentation. Digital Divide-Culture: Representation and Inclusion

The Digital Divide: Four Dimensions

Jason opened by framing the problem that civil society organizations face. They often lack the digital tools, systems, and capacity needed to manage, measure, and scale their impact. This leads to inefficiencies, reporting fatigue, limited access to innovation, and difficulty demonstrating outcomes, which ultimately hinders funding and collaboration. He broke down the digital divide into four interconnected dimensions:

1)Digital Poverty. This is about the basics, devices, and connectivity. Jason shared a striking statistic: 922 million people globally are living in what’s called “internet poverty.” This isn’t just about whether internet is available, but about three specific factors:

• Affordability: Can people spend up to 10% of their income on mobile internet?

• Quantity: Can they access at least 1GB per month?

• Quality: Is the connection at least 10 Mbps download speed?

He emphasized that increasingly, internet access is being recognized as a basic requirement alongside food, clothing, housing, and energy.

• My question to you: In your context, how much does 1GB of data cost relative to average daily wages? What does that enable or prevent in practice?

2)Productivity Gap. Jason made an important distinction here: digital access alone isn’t a silver bullet. He talked about “moving from product to purpose”, noting that without the right safeguards and skills, digital access can actually reduce people (especially in vulnerable communities) from active participants to mere products.

He highlighted attention exploitation, how social media platforms, online gambling, and other digital actors can exploit users rather than empower them. True empowerment, he argued, requires building productive digital capabilities. The ability to create, innovate, and generate value, so that access translates into opportunity and agency rather than exploitation and dependency.

Question for you: Have you seen cases where digital access led to exploitation rather than empowerment? What made the difference between the two outcomes?

3)Value. The third dimension is about converting access and capability into actual value. Jason explained that devices, connectivity, and skills are the foundation but to realize value, users need access to markets where they can apply their skills and generate income or impact.

Question for you: What are the market access barriers in your context that prevent people from converting digital skills into economic or social value?

4)Culture. This is where Jason’s framework touched on something deeper. He said: “When technology ignores culture, diversity disappears.”

He explained that technology platforms and emerging digital spaces are often designed and dominated by developers in the East and West, embedding their values, aesthetics, and narratives into digital environments. This leads to a dilution of cultural identity where diverse traditions, languages, and lived experiences from Africa and other underrepresented regions are rarely reflected or prioritized.

He noted that AI deepens this gap, since its training data largely originates from Western-centric or Asian contexts, reinforcing biases and limiting the visibility of diverse cultural voices. Without intentional inclusion, he warned, the digital future risks becoming a homogenized space where global diversity is erased rather than celebrated.

My question to you: What aspects of your cultural context, language, or way of working are invisible to or incompatible with the digital tools you use?

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The Triple A Approach: Awareness, Access, Adoption

To address these challenges, Jason introduced what he calls the “Triple A” approach. He explained that technology-driven initiatives often fail because people either don’t understand them (lack of awareness), can’t reach or afford them (lack of access), or don’t see how they fit into their daily lives (lack of adoption).

Awareness: The first pillar focuses on increasing awareness about the benefits and potential uses of digital technologies through targeted outreach campaigns, workshops, and community programs. The objective is to shift perceptions and stimulate interest in digital technologies, particularly among populations that have traditionally been excluded or hesitant to engage with digital tools.

Access: The second component addresses physical availability, not just internet connectivity, but access to computers, smartphones, and other relevant devices. Jason’s team works on establishing community technology hubs, partnering with telecommunications companies to improve infrastructure, and advocating for policies that reduce costs. This component also considers the need for reliable electricity and maintenance support, which are critical in many African settings.

Adoption: The final component emphasizes ongoing use of digital technologies. This includes training, mentorship, and support networks to help people apply and extend digital skills. Jason stressed that this phase is about practical, hands-on application tailored to specific needs and contexts, and involves working with local businesses and organizations to create opportunities for applying these skills, translating digital access into tangible economic and social benefits.

For MERL specifically, Jason emphasized applying this Triple A approach through a participatory, human-centred process for defining requirements, selecting or building solutions, and implementing technologies.

My question to you: Which of these three (awareness, access, or adoption) is the biggest barrier in your organization or community? Why?

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Buy, Assemble, or Build: Technology Options

Jason then got practical about how organizations can actually acquire MERL tech solutions. He presented three main approaches:

Buy Off the Shelf (Software as a Service)

• Limitations: Set capabilities, ongoing licensing costs

• Benefits: No upfront costs, immediate use, stable and supported

He mentioned tools like Impactasaurus, Epicollect, Cognito Forms, Magpi, CommCare, Ona, and others that organizations can start using immediately.

Assemble (Low-Code/No-Code)

• Limitations: Some technical skill needed, limited customization

• Benefits: More flexibility, infrastructure and support included

Tools in this category included WordPress, Airtable, Caspio, Microsoft Power Platform, Bubble, AppSheet, and various AI-enhanced low-code platforms.

Build (Custom Development)

Jason humorously called this “getting married and having a baby”, describing it as a long-term relationship that goes through phases: arranged marriage (not sure what you’re getting into), having a baby (lots of support needed, sleepless nights), teenager (needs less supervision but can do weird stuff), mature adult (running itself but still costs money), and even geriatric (may need major care).

• Limitations: Development partner needed, more expensive, ongoing costs for infrastructure and support

• Benefits: Fully bespoke and tailored to needs

He also mentioned a fourth option: Platform Cooperatives, shared infrastructure owned and governed collectively by the communities using it, designed to bridge gaps between funders, implementers, and communities.

My question to you: Where is your organization on this spectrum? If you could choose based purely on what would serve your community best (not on budget), what would you choose?

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The Technology Transformation Roadmap

Jason outlined a three-phase roadmap for organizations moving from analog to digital MERL systems:

Phase 1: Migration

• Migrate existing paper processes into digital format with document management systems

• Extend Excel/Google Sheets into web forms with basic graphs

• Focus: digitizing paper processes, storage and indexing

Phase 2: Transformation

• Migrate to mobile-based data collection (web or native apps)

• Move to online databases with more advanced analytics

• Focus: basic mobile forms, databases, analytics

Phase 3: Evolution

• Connect business intelligence/analytics tools (PowerBI, Metabase, Tableau) to databases

• Deploy AI agents (RAG AI) to enable conversational interrogation of data

• Focus: Business Intelligence and AI agents

He emphasized that throughout all three phases, the Triple A approach should be applied to ensure effective adoption and usage.

My question to you: Where do you feel pressure to “modernize” or “go digital” in your work? What’s driving that pressure, efficiency, funding requirements, keeping up with others? And have you ever asked: what am I actually being asked to give up?

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Data Governance: POPIA and Responsibilities

Jason dedicated time to discussing POPIA (South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013) and data governance towards the end of his session. He explained that POPIA safeguards personal information and enforces responsible processing, which is crucial for M&E work since it relies on collecting, storing, analyzing, and reporting personal and sensitive data from beneficiaries, staff, and communities.

He outlined key responsibilities:

• Responsible Party (NGO, donor, evaluator): Determines the purpose and means of data processing

• Information Officer: Oversees compliance and ensures lawful processing

• M&E Practitioners: Obtain informed consent, ensure anonymization where possible, apply impact assessments

• Operators (third parties, consultants, tech providers): Must follow contractual safeguards aligned with POPIA

His best practices included:

• Develop a POPIA-aligned M&E data policy

• Build staff capacity on data protection

• Use secure digital platforms and encryption

• Embed privacy-by-design in surveys and reporting

• Conduct regular compliance reviews

My question to you: Beyond legal compliance, what ethical questions does your data collection raise that regulations like POPIA don’t fully address?

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Jason covered practical demonstrations of tools at different levels of complexity:

• Google Forms, Sheets, and Dashboards

• WordPress Forms

• YoMobi (Capacitate’s platform)

• Zola

He also shared resources on internet poverty statistics and mobile connectivity reports for those wanting to dive deeper into the data.

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My Observations

Jason’s session was valuable and necessary. Organizations need practical guidance, and the challenges he outlined are real and urgent. The Triple A approach makes sense as an implementation framework, and the technology roadmap provides a clear path forward for organizations that are genuinely stuck in analog systems that aren’t serving them.

Sitting through his presentation after having just delivered mine made me reflect on the relationship between these two sessions, between the theoretical question of “whose intelligence gets recognized” and the practical question of “how do we implement digital tools effectively?”

So here’s what I’m sitting with. On the digital divide framework: Jason’s four dimensions are helpful, and I particularly appreciated that he included culture as a distinct category rather than folding it into access. His observation that “when technology ignores culture, diversity disappears” is exactly right. But if the technology platforms themselves are designed by and for WEIRD contexts, and if AI training data is largely Western-centric, what does “access” to these systems actually give us? Are we bridging a divide, or are we connecting people to systems that fundamentally can’t see them?

On the Triple A approach: Awareness, Access, and Adoption make sense as implementation steps. And Jason’s emphasis on participatory, human-centered approaches is important. But there’s a difference between communities participating in using tools designed elsewhere and communities controlling the intelligence systems themselves. Jason’s approach operates in the former (getting communities to effectively use tools built on someone else’s assumptions). This is valid, but is it sufficient?

On the technology roadmap: The progression from Excel to mobile to AI agents is logical. It’s how many organizations evolve their systems. But this roadmap assumes: that Excel logic is a natural starting point, that “advanced analytics” means Western-style dashboards, that “evolution” means AI agents, and that progress is inherently upward from analog to digital. What if some forms of intelligence (like the kind that makes stokvels work) can’t be captured in Phase 1, gets lost in Phase 2, and becomes completely invisible by Phase 3?

On platform cooperatives: This was the part that intrigued me most. Shared infrastructure owned and governed collectively by communities could create space for different forms of intelligence to shape the systems themselves. This depends entirely on who controls the architecture decisions, the data models, the metrics that matter, and the definition of what counts as “good data.” Collective ownership of a system built on WEIRD logic is still operating within WEIRD logic.

On data governance: POPIA and privacy protections are crucial. No argument there. But focusing on who has access to data and how it’s secured assumes we’ve already agreed on what data is, what it represents, and what it’s for. When we digitize community activities, whose interpretation of what happened becomes “the data”? When we build a form to capture input, who decided what questions to ask? POPIA protects people from privacy violations. It doesn’t protect communities from epistemological extraction.

The tension I’m holding is this: If we focus only on bridging the digital divide without addressing whose intelligence shapes those tools, we might solve the access problem while deepening the intelligence problem. We might create practitioners who are highly skilled at using tools that can’t see them, measuring impact in frameworks that miss what matters, and feeding data into AI systems trained on contaminated data.

Jason’s work is valuable, and organizations should follow his guidance. I believe many organizations genuinely need to move from paper-based systems that are inefficient and unsustainable. The practical challenges he’s addressing are real.

We need both conversations happening simultaneously. We need Jason’s practical implementation guidance, and we need to be asking deeper questions about what gets lost in that implementation. We need to be getting organizations access to digital tools and building different kinds of tools that can recognize different kinds of intelligence.

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What’s your experience been? If you’ve implemented digital MERL systems, what worked? What got lost? What did the tools capture that paper couldn’t, and what did paper capture that the tools can’t?

Next week: Varaidzo Matimba on the current state of digital tools in MERL and the gaps between what exists and what’s needed.

Thank you for reading!

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