The Tanzania Community Networks Alliance (tzCNA) is now a “Local Partner” of the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), an initiative of the World Wide Web Foundation, a global coalition working to affordable and meaningful connectivity.

Tanzania Community Networks Alliance is a registered Non-Governmental Organization with Registration Number ooNGO/R/0742 to operate in Tanzania Mainland. The tzCNA is the alliance for community networks and community-based telecommunications networks that deliver affordable communication services in Tanzania. The A4AI brings together businesses, governments, and civil society actors from across the globe to deliver the policies needed to reduce the cost to connect and make universal, affordable internet access a reality for all. The tzCNA and A4AI shares a common belief that the high cost of an Internet connection is keeping billions users around the world from coming online. Even those with access to Internet, still do not afford to be online all the time and from everywhere.

By becoming a local partner, tzCNA and A4AI now have an opportunity to build a network to share knowledge, experiences, and expertise, and boost efforts to advance policy and regulatory reforms in Tanzania and beyond. In Tanzania, almost half of the population does not have access to affordable Internet partly due to the following reasons, high bandwidth cost, lack of the affordable last mile solution and lack of policies favoring community networks as well as television white space to bridge the digital divide said Mr. Jabhera Matogoro, the Founder and CEO for the tzCNA.

Sonia Jorge, the Executive Director of A4AI, said “We are looking forward working with tzCNA to bring affordable and meaningful connectivity to everyone in Tanzania”

Acknowledgement: Tanzania Community Networks Alliance is an outcome of the Open Internet Engineering Fellowship from Mozilla Foundation. Mr. Jabhera Matogoro, a Mozilla Fellow 2019 – 2020 was hosted by the Internet Society under the mentorship of Kevin Chege and Jane Coffin. However, views expressed here are solely those gathered by the author and should not necessarily be construed to be those of any organs or agencies or any other organization mentioned or discussed. We released this article under the cc-by-sa 4.0 license, and translation into other languages is encouraged.