FunDza is celebrating some great news – the fundza.mobi site has been zero-rated by all major mobile operators in the country. This means that young people across the land can access the stories, blogs, poetry, plays and more on the fundza.mobi platform without needing to worry about whether or not they have sufficient data to cover it.
For the last five years, we’ve been requesting the mobile networks to zero-rate the platform, and we’ve been part of a consortium of NGOs that the DG Murray Trust has also been championing the networks to provide access to datafree. We are so grateful to the DGMT’s consistent support in this regard.
With the Covid-19 pandemic and its disruption of formal education, so the calls for zero-rating of educational sites have become louder and the mobile networks have at last compiled with these requests.
We are delighted. We know that the high cost of data is a major barrier to many young people accessing fundza.mobi content. Even though we built the fundza.mobi platform in a data-light manner, we know that for many young people any amount of data is prohibitive, so finding ways to overcome the data barrier is vital.
This is also a boon for our partners with whom we run projects that use the online courses on our fundza.mobi platform. Now their learners will be able to participate using their own devices at home or in any space without needing to worry about the attendant data costs.
Last month we reached more than 250,000 unique users through our fundza.mobi platform. On average our visitors were accessing 10 pages in a session and reading for more than 11 minutes at a time. With the zero-rating we hope to significantly increase these numbers so that we can spark a reading revolution that improves the literacy levels and life chances of millions of young people.
So, spread the word – get South Africa reading through fundza.mobi now!