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 Private-Private Partnership framework that can be customized to deliver and provide sustenance to this initiative 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 the different stakeholder arrangements in this 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, with attractive incentives to each stakeholder, can serve as the basis for organizing such the stakeholders to aid the community to develop the networks.