In 2013, Project Isizwe as a non-profit organization pioneered the blueprint of how free public WiFi can be deployed in a way that is sustainable.

The project was approved by the City of Tshwane’s Council under the Municipal FinanceManagement Act (MFMA) and funded under a grant due to the organisation’s non-for-profit status.

This was also the first time such an initiative was to be rolled out on the African continent.

In 2013, five free public-access WiFi hotspots were rolled out as part of the TSHWI-FI initiative, which later expanded to 15, 250 and ultimately 1050 throughout the City by 2018.

Project Isizwe connected over 3 500 000 unique users in the Capital City since November 2013, logging over 276 Million sessions.

We also developed a content portal, called Tobetsa, which is designed to give users access to uncapped curated content.

This content is focused on education, skills development and employment, and gave local communities the power to access information, education and jobs online, empowering them to participate in the mainstream economy like never before.

During Isizwe’s partnership with the City of Tshwane, our initiative delivered 500 TB (1000GB = 1TB) of data a month.

To buy this amount of data as pre-paid data would cost about an average of R300 per 1 GB.

This implies that Project Isizwe’s flagship Free WiFi project with the City of Tshwane saved residents up to R150 million per month during the duration of the initiative.

The project concluded in June 2018.