By Shirley Gilbey, Director of Immersive Learning, Caribou
Unequal, but digitally connected
South Africa sits at a peculiar crossroads. It is arguably the most unequal country in the world, and yet it also has one of the most digitally connected populations on the continent. Mobile penetration is high, and fintech is active despite constrained funding environments. But for millions of South Africans living in rural areas, informal settlements, and low-income urban communities, the digital economy might as well be happening on another planet.
I have spent years working at this intersection, and what strikes me most is that the divide is rarely about access alone. What use is a smartphone if you cannot afford the data, navigate the interface, or have never been taught to use the systems that increasingly govern access to jobs, healthcare, finance, and government services? Digital exclusion here is not a technical problem. It is a structural one, layered onto the same fault lines of race, gender, geography, and poverty that have shaped South African inequality for generations.
Digital technology holds genuine potential to address some of that structural inequality, and it is already doing so. Mobile money has extended formal financial services to communities that formal banking rarely reached. Digital identity platforms are beginning to unlock access to social grants and healthcare records for people without fixed addresses. Online learning is putting tutors in rural classrooms. But for that potential to be realised equitably, that digital inclusion does not yet become another arena where the privileged pull further ahead, philanthropy needs to operate differently.
Funders must support more than programmes
Many well-intentioned philanthropic funders approach digital inclusion through a programme lens: fund the digital literacy programme, fund the connectivity pilot, fund the device distribution. These investments matter and they do good, but on their own, they are rarely sufficient to produce lasting change at the systemic level that South Africa’s inequality demands.
The organisations doing this work face a challenge that grant reports rarely surface. Many deliver strong results within the narrow scope of what they have been funded to do, while quietly struggling with the things that make delivery possible: the staff member who coordinates partnerships, the monitoring system that tracks outcomes, the institutional knowledge that takes years to build. When funders cover beneficiary costs but not core operational costs, they set a ceiling on what grantees can achieve. The programme runs, but it cannot grow, replicate, or sustain itself and the opportunity for lasting change is lost. Even initial short-term gains may dissipate quickly.
Consider what it actually takes for a digital skills programme to reach marginalised women in a rural community in ways that produce durable outcomes. It requires more than a facilitator and a device. It usually requires deep community relationships, safe physical spaces, cultural and linguistic knowledge, and sustained follow-through over time. None of that is achievable without a well-resourced, stable organisation behind it – one that retains experienced staff, maintains systems, and plans beyond the next grant cycle.
What changes when you see the work up close
This principle extends well beyond the philanthropic sector. When any organisation invests in genuine proximity to the people it is trying to serve, it changes what gets built and how resources are deployed.
A few years ago, Caribou led a team of product managers, engineers, and UX designers working on a major global digital payments product on an immersive trip to South Africa to answer a specific question: what does it actually mean to design for financial inclusion, not just aspire to it? They could have commissioned research or pulled existing data. Instead, they spent a week in context.
They conducted in-depth consumer interviews at a tech and innovation hub in Braamfontein. They spoke to small business owners in Maboneng, 44 Stanley, and Rosebank, watching how merchants chose one payment method over another, how informal traders weighed the cost of going digital against the risk of staying cash-only. They went to Khayelitsha, Philippi, and Langa, sitting with consumers in township communities and asking direct questions about how people actually managed money, what trust meant to them in a financial product, and where the systems that were supposed to serve them had let them down. What they found was concrete and consequential: township communities had unemployment rates above fifty percent among working-age adults; consumers had been exploited by financial institutions before and carried that wariness into every new product interaction; informal traders understood perfectly well that a card machine would grow their business but had seen fixed monthly fees wipe out margins in the past.
That team left with something no data set could have given them: a lived, embodied understanding of the gap between something designed in a conference room and the actual reality of the people it was supposed to serve. That understanding shaped what they built for the better.
Depth resilience and social cohesion
Across Caribou’s work in Africa and beyond, we see the same pattern holding for philanthropic funders. Those who spend time in community alongside the organisations they support structure their funding more effectively – not because they are more committed than their peers, but because they are working with richer fuller information. They have seen what operational under-resourcing looks like in practice. They have felt the distance between a strong theory of change and a stretched team trying to implement it. They have spoken directly with users whose experience of a programme too often does not match what the logframe records.
Digital exclusion is particularly hard to understand from a desk. It is easy to assume the problem is primarily one of infrastructure – that more towers and cheaper data will solve it. But spend time with a community health worker trying to use a government e-health platform on a borrowed phone with intermittent signal, and the picture shifts considerably. The problem is not connectivity alone. It is trust, literacy, digital agency (the capacity to navigate, question, and shape digital systems) and the absence of organisations with the operational depth to support people through the transition. You cannot see that in a report.
What systemic change actually requires
Shifting from programme-only funding to more systemic support requires funders to operate at two levels simultaneously.
The first is the organisational level. I invite funders to reconsider the indirect cost ratios and overhead restrictions baked into so many grant frameworks. Grantee organisations are significantly less able to deliver sustainable digital inclusion work that actually shifts outcomes over time without the operational infrastructure to do so. Funding the programme without funding the organisation is a choice, and its consequences are most visible to the people working and participating at the community level.
The second is the ecosystem level, and it is the bolder call. Consistent resourcing of the organisations doing connective tissue work would be fundamentally transformative. Investing in the platforms and intermediaries that build capacity across the sector, networks that facilitate peer learning between grassroots organisations, research bodies that generate the evidence that makes the case for change would exponentially improve the potential for sustainable impact. These are not glamorous investments. They rarely produce the direct beneficiary numbers that satisfy a board. But they are not wasted either. Without them, even well-funded delivery organisations remain isolated, unable to influence the conditions around them, and restricted in their ability to learn from each other at a meaningful scale.
What digital inclusion looks like at its best
At its best, digital inclusion in South Africa looks like a young woman in Limpopo completing her Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) qualification through a blended learning platform, passing her assessment via mobile, and accessing a formal employment opportunity online that she could not have reached otherwise. It also looks like a smallholder farmer in the Eastern Cape receiving real-time weather and market data through a simple SMS service backed by a cooperative with the operational capacity to sustain and adapt the service as needs change. And it looks like a community in Mitchells Plain that is equipped with devices, data, and the digital agency to navigate, question, and shape the systems that affect their lives.
South Africa has the talent, the organisations, and the urgency to make digital inclusion a genuine driver of systemic change. What it needs from its philanthropic community is funding that matches that ambition, resourced at the level of the challenge and grounded in a real understanding of the work.
The message is clear: fund the ecosystem, not just the programme.