What are your thoughts?

International Telecoms Week x Datacloud Africa 2026 Conference Podcast Edition

Co-Founder & CCO Mea Thompson - unconnected .org

“Connected” can be a lie we tell ourselves with a coverage map. A school can sit inside a service area and still be offline where it counts, with no devices, limited digital literacy, or internet that’s too expensive or unreliable to support learning. We sit down with Mia Thompson, CCO and co-founder of unconnected.org, to get specific about what meaningful connectivity really means and why the language we use matters if we want to bridge the digital divide for good.

We go deeper than infrastructure talk and into the incentives that shape outcomes. Mia makes a sharp point: the digital divide is often not a technology issue at all, it’s a return on investment problem. Traditional telecom investment favors dense cities because the numbers work, while rural communities and schools get left behind. So we ask the uncomfortable question: whose responsibility is it to fix this, and what happens when no one owns the outcome?

Mia walks us through the “impact marketplace” approach unconnected.org uses to make rural connectivity viable. By negotiating better global pricing on satellite, hardware, and software, they pass savings to local implementation partners so those partners can build and own networks sustainably. We also unpack a less-discussed blocker: fragmented funding. When incentives and subsidies are hard to track, impact gets hard to prove, so scaling stalls.

If you care about meaningful internet access, rural connectivity, and practical ways to connect schools and clinics without turning it into charity, this conversation will give you a clearer model and sharper questions.

Subscribe, share this with someone working in telecom or policy, and leave a review with your take: who should own meaningful connectivity where you live?

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Credits
Host:

• Stella Gichuhi

Producer:

• James Njoroge

Executive Producers:

• Harry Hare
• Agutu Dan