“Meaningful connectivity” sounds like a bureaucratic phrase — the sort that ends up in PowerPoint decks about inclusion. But Vuyani Jarana, CEO of Ilitha Telecommunications, uses it differently. He’s talking about a kind of access that actually works, the sort that doesn’t collapse under price, patchy signal, or the industry’s obsession with statistics. Roughly one in five South Africans still can’t get online. According to Datareportal, about 21% of the population — around 13.6 million people — remain offline or connect only intermittently. They’re not just unconnected; they’re excluded from the systems that now define opportunity.
Jarana’s pitch is less about cables and more about structure. If connectivity is a bridge, South Africa keeps building it from the wrong side — laying fibre into suburbs that already have a view. The problem isn’t ambition; it’s the business model that assumes high-income users first and everyone else later, maybe. As he puts it, “The standard commercial models created for high-income areas don’t meet the needs of township markets.”
He isn’t wrong. For years, operators have treated lower-income areas as edge cases. The maths is brutal: low returns, high logistics, and the constant friction of geography. So the market does what markets do — it optimises away from the poor.
That’s where the “meaningful” part of meaningful connectivity in South Africa becomes less moral and more mathematical. Jarana’s idea is to break access into pieces: smaller, shared, community-run. A “fractional use” model, he calls it. The analogy he uses is a loaf of bread — some buy the full loaf, others just a quarter. It’s a simple way to say: stop pretending the township market behaves like Sandton. Build systems that flex.
The model also folds in local labour. Instead of flying in teams from elsewhere, Ilitha trains residents to install and maintain infrastructure. It’s a small design choice, but a revealing one. The future of connectivity isn’t only fibre; it’s social architecture — the networks behind the networks.
Still, this kind of talk makes policymakers nervous because it doesn’t fit the usual story of scale and competition. The idea of “fractional” anything cuts across the standard telecoms fantasy of endless growth. But Jarana insists the numbers work if the model does. The point is to treat connection like a public utility — divisible, shareable, priced for actual people.
Government seems to be listening, at least in rhetoric. Communications Minister Solly Malatsi recently called connectivity “a prerequisite for economic participation.” The phrasing is right, but the delivery lags. Projects like SA Connect show what’s possible when the state partners with the private sector — yet they often get stuck in pilot mode. The infrastructure gets built, but the access story stays uneven.
Meaningful connectivity, in contrast, begins with the question of what people can actually do online. It’s the difference between a network that exists and one that enables. In some rural villages, residents now monitor kraals through security cameras when they’re in the city. That’s not a grand innovation story; it’s a quiet form of autonomy.
There’s also something quietly radical about Jarana’s idea of “anchoring.” Build strong, high-capacity internet points in community spaces — schools, clinics, government buildings — and let smaller service providers piggyback to reach nearby homes. It’s a reversal of the usual hierarchy: the public sector becomes the magnet for private expansion, not its afterthought. The Eastern Cape’s fibre partnership with Liquid Intelligent Technologies is an early example. It isn’t glamorous, but it works.
All of this still depends on politics, of course. The spectrum, the pricing, the willingness of regulators to stop treating connectivity like a luxury market. But the deeper point is cultural. South Africa’s digital policy has spent years chasing modernity through numbers — kilometres of fibre, megabits per second — instead of asking who gets to use them and on what terms.
As Jarana frames it, “Internet access is a basic human right that can exacerbate or bridge divides.” It’s a line that’s been said before, but here it lands differently — not as a slogan, but as a ledger entry. Every policy that ignores affordability, every rollout that skips the townships, adds another line of exclusion to that ledger.
A recent Reframed article on South Africa’s digital quality of life pointed out that affordability isn’t the issue; infrastructure is. But infrastructure alone doesn’t equal access. The future will be built on the quieter, less photogenic work of pricing fairly, training locally, and designing networks that match how people actually live.
Maybe that’s what “meaningful connectivity” really is — not a slogan or a metric, but a way of saying that technology only matters when it bends toward the realities on the ground. And in South Africa, those realities still demand more meaning than megabytes.