Zimbabwe rural girls writhe under high internet cost
By Spiwe Hellen Chihwanda
Oftentimes people tend to focus on young women and girls in the city yet they are just but a fraction of the populace. The majority of them being the rural young women and girls. These remain marginalized in every aspect due to their remoteness.
Before the advent of the internet, the playing field was level as each community would independently survive on its own. However due to globalization they have been completely left out because the world is advancing and has become digital thus isolating them completely in this generation where cyber-culture has become the way of life.
Literally everything is done online nowadays be it social, academic, professional and, many other facets of life. The world we live in heavily depends on this yet the cost is beyond reach to most city folks, let alone the young women and girls in the rural area. Their plight goes beyond the cost only because even in areas where there has been a good Samaritan to donate free Wi-Fi access to them, poor network connection hinders them from fully benefiting and utilising it.
Many rural young women and girls end up with shattered dreams and live miserable lives because they could not get internet access to complete their Continuous Assessment Learning Area (CALA) tasks. At the end of the day there are girls who has been evaluated as a failure yet the girl had no access to the internet. The high cost of internet has defined the rural girl child a failure yet this is far from the truth.
Due to this incapacitation the rural girl child is engaged into child labor and the saddening part of this is that they are not rewarded meaningfully so as to pursue their dreams. Rather they are taken advantage of and exploited in those homes where they will be working. You can have a teacher of any subject area asking for a certain girl to do laundry for him or her during lunch hour. As if that is not enough instead of at least buying data for the child to do her CALA the teacher molests the child. This child labor that the rural girl child is exposed to hurts so much because countless lives are being destroyed in a bid to ease the burden on guardians who cannot afford purchasing data for them.
We might ignore the rural girl child now because of the fact that she is still a child and we carry on with our lives as usual but there comes a day in the future where that girl blossoms into a young woman. A woman from whom as a nation you will require her contribution as human capital. How then will you capitalize on someone you have not invested in? How then can she be useful to us as a nation when we have left her in the hands of teachers who take advantage of her for their sexual gratification? How then will you benefit from her because she never had the privilege to pursue her dreams, ambitions and goals due to our cultural beliefs, duties and practices her time was ever limited?
The rural areas may be overlooked and the impact of high internet cost for the rural folk ignored yet it must be treated as a matter of urgency. If the rural girl child is given the privilege to have internet access she will be able to bring about ideologies that will uplift her community because only she understands her situation. Only she understands her plight and she will do everything in her power to bring her community out of poverty. Imagine a rural girl child whose grandfather is a traditional healer. Picture this girl child with all the amenities that she needs for her studies including access to the internet. Can she not move on to study pharmacy and perhaps collaborate with big pharmaceutical researchers to study her grandfather’s herbs and rejuvenate our health sector as a community, as a people and as a continent. The Chinese are famous for documenting the gifted amongst them and preserve the knowledge for generations to come.
Imagine a girl child whose father is a farmer can she not further her studies and become an Agricultural Engineer who can in return assist us through her mechanization innovations on how we can make the most of the little water that we have and harvest more. As a country we can become the bread basket of Africa again. The implications of high internet cost on the lives of young women and girls in the rural areas should be addressed because we cannot watch and see lives and dreams being shattered. We cannot allow these gifted young girls to waste away in poverty.
