A Public Management Framework for Wireless Broadband Development in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper identifies potential public and private stakeholders needed to help rural communities deliver wireless broadband infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa. These rural areas are not commercially viable for mobile broadband cellular networks. However, few rural communities in the region have attempted to develop Wi-Fi networks. Few have succeeded and some have failed. A public Public-Private Partnership framework that can be customized to deliver and provide sustenance to these initiatives may hold the answer to curb the failure of such initiatives. This study adopts the stakeholder theory of identification and salience on 6 community-based initiatives in developed and developing countries to find out different stakeholder arrangements in these cases. Based on the findings, the interpretive phenomenological analysis is used to explain how the findings could be utilized by the public sector agencies in Africa to help rural communities develop sustainable Wi-Fi networks. The paper concludes that a triangular relationship between the community, the public sector agency, and attractive incentives for each stakeholder, can serve as the basis for organizing such stakeholders to aid the community develop the networks.