Osama Manzar

Since 2002, Osama Manzar has been the pioneer in setting up the digital infrastructure roadmap for rural India, one based on community led ownership and enterprise. In doing so, he has clearly defined the critical roles that different stakeholders can play in ensuring that digital infrastructure and literacy is a tool that can reach the hands of all people in the country.

In the early 2000s, Osama Manzar recognized the opportunity that an emerging digital future could present to rural India. While the majority could not predict the rapid digitization to come in the next decade, Osama had already started envisioning how this could be the tool that helps unleash the true social, democratic, and economic potential of rural citizens.

Through his organization, Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF), Osama has pioneered the ecosystem of stakeholders defining and working towards digital inclusion for the poorest and most remote communities in India and the world. In doing so, Osama has aligned the strategy of stakeholders such as the government, private sector, and civil society organisations towards effective and sustainable digital inclusion in India. Founding DEF in the early 2000s as an aggregator of resources, best practices, knowledge and sharing of assets for stakeholders connected to the problem of rural digitization, Osama immediately established DEF as the ‘go to’ organization for policy advisory, implementation strategies and best practices for digitization for the most remote communities. The Indian Government’s ‘National Digital Literacy Mission,’ set up by DEF is today the country’s central strategy for rural digitization, based on methodologies developed and tested by Osama. Further, by anchoring this vast network of stakeholders, Osama has shifted the narrative of digitization from being an infrastructure and access driven problem to one that holistically addresses questions of context, language, usability, adaptability and much more. DEF aggregates and amplifies the best practices so that spread of digitization models that are sustainable can be accelerated in the areas that need it the most. So far Osama’s work has directly impacted 60 million people in India and, globally, works across 50 vernacular languages and has reached over 250 million people indirectly.

Osama believes that in order to effectively penetrate the large rural swathes of the country, this digital future is something that needed to be localized, owned and managed by communities through micro entrepreneurship and community managed infrastructure. In implementing this vision over the last two decades, Osama has defined the narrative and roles that all key stakeholders play to make this happen, including the government, private sector, and civil society organizations. Instead of relying on a technocratic, top-down, market driven model to reach rural communities, Osama imagined the natural communal way of life as well as the enterprising nature of rural communities as being the anchor to accelerate the penetration and impact of digital tools in the country. The subsequent connection this digital access has created, between rural and urban, markets and the people, and leaders and their citizens, has opened up something far more significant than anyone could have predicted: the self-agency and potential of unlikely audiences to start demanding their rights, sell their talents on the market at a fair price, and educate themselves to a better life.

The Indian government has progressively moved towards digitization across the country, through its ‘Digital India’ national program and resulting in initiatives such as the all-citizen biometric identification system, Aadhar; Osama’s model has created a pull factor that demonstrates to the government how exactly its Digital India mission can reach the most remote communities. Today DEF stands as the pioneer organization playing an advocacy role in driving community driven innovation towards digitization in India.

The early 2000s in India was an inflection point in the deep, complex history of the country. Almost 10 years after economic liberalization began, the country was richer overall, but more unequal. The economic system vastly rewarded those with existing resources, be it information, money, or access to networks - while most of the country continued to struggle and often were left worse off. At the time, the dotcom and digital boom in India was also fairly nascent, with only 13 million mobile subscriptions in place and 82,000 broadband connections across the country.

The impending digitization in the country was seen by powerful institutions such as the government as a means for prosperity and growth for all. The Aadhar system in India today, which is the world's largest biometric identification platform, is an example of the vision that politicians and technology leaders had for the country. However, the dominant approach to digitization, especially in rural and the poorest regions of the country, was seen as an ‘infrastructure problem.’ The assumption being made was that the free market, supported by government intervention, would accelerate digitization and hence uptake of the increasing number of government digitized services. While there has been tremendous success from the perspective of output and reach, the long-term result of this approach to digitization has been a further social and economic divide created between the well- and under-resourced. There are computers in the most rural parts of the country today, but they are digital ghost towns without the knowledge, understanding, capabilities and ownership to utilize them.

This one size fits all approach to India’s digitization strategy misses out on augmenting the existing knowledge, resources, and skills of local communities. Further, it misses the diagnosis of what India’s heterogeneous communities need locally and how digitization can help. The result is the loss of human potential, capacities, and growth, be it economic, educational or as an informed participating citizen in India’s democratic processes. Ultimately, a lack of sustainable digital ecosystems in rural and smaller towns and villages across India means that people have less access to information and the inability to create and share information. This means that they are vulnerable to exploitation from those who do have access, behind the curve when they are competing for the same educational opportunities as the rest of the country and lose out on their true potential.

Having the heart of rural India inside of him, Osama Manzar knows all too well how important community and self-enterprise is to survival for the majority of people in India. The social capital that is derived from community activity across rural India sets the precedent for the decisions people make, what they are influenced by, and the opportunities that are present in life to them. It is usually a community effort to educate the sons and daughters in a village, cooking for festivals are done together and people certainly rely on each other to discuss and debate who to vote in the local elections. Understanding and respecting this, especially the role that women play in the investment and growth of community outcomes, Osama saw the impending opportunity that digital literacy and tools could provide for communities to thrive, especially as informed participants in democracy, as learners, earners, and to strengthen their overall social and economic conditions.

In 2002, Osama launched DEF, with the vision of decentralizing the ownership and management of digital tools, literacy, and infrastructure to rural communities, thus shifting the roles that other stakeholders play across the system. In doing so, Osama believed that the resultant access to and spread of information between these communities and the rest of the country could lead to economic, social, and cultural empowerment. Osama’s approach was to initially built up a vast network of practitioners, policy specialists, entrepreneurs and other stakeholders who were already trying to address the problem and penetrate the same rural and remote communities. By doing this, he quickly established DEF as the organization that housed the best practices, networks, and knowledge on digitization, not just in India but globally too.

Osama’s model takes on a plug and play approach, where he connects the vast stakeholders who are invested in rural India together through digitization. In order to do this, he understood the need to align incentives and leverage the strengths that these stakeholders each have. Osama first identifies ‘model communities,’ that serve as vantage points to engage local entrepreneurs, research the community landscape (needs and opportunities) and then co-create innovations through digitization at a local community level. At the heart of each innovation that takes place through DEF’s support, the community needs to be part of the co-creation process and then ultimately own the digital infrastructure, resource, or tool they have, turning them into social or economic engines in their locality. Furthermore, Osama realized that sustainable digitization in the country could only work if it is augmented with the existing tools, resources, and knowledge of local communities. Thus, a lot of the innovations that DEF captures and implements takes a run off the concept of ‘jugaad’ or frugal innovation. This community ownership model also ensures that there is accountability, whether it be to deliver a high-quality product and/or service for a cost or to fulfill the expectant needs of the community for a resource that is collectively theirs. This works brilliantly in rural India as communities already are tightly connected to each other and members influence each other. DEF’s innovation umbrellas cover four major hotspots that communities usually need access to: Infrastructure, Education, Governance and Services, and Markets and Social Enterprises.

An example of a community co-created innovation is the Wireless for Communities (W4C) in partnership with Internet Society. The initiative picks up from the slack left by mainstream Internet Service Provider (ISPs), who refuse to invest in infrastructure development in rural parts of India, because of the perception of a lack of market demand. The W4C leverages line of sight and low-cost wi-fi equipment to use unlicensed spectrum bands to run locally driven wireless hotspots in villages. The initiative has provided technical employment and entrepreneurial ideas to thousands of people across India, who are today the central point of connectivity for their community members. This democratization of the internet to the most localized level today has not only strengthened social cohesion among community members, where children from all religions come together to take after class digital tutoring, but it has also completely shifted how market actors see rural audiences. Today, ISPs are trying their best to enter rural markets and support local entrepreneurs to be the catalysts for digitization, with internet penetration predicted to hit 950 million in India by 2025. This systemic and mindset shift has opened up the entrepreneurial landscape for millions of Indians to get employed and be the pivot points of digital access for their communities.

Similarly, the DEF-inspired eHeritage program in partnership with UNESCO, has enabled 45,000 community leaders to be able to capture and upload information about local heritage and traditions online. Communities such as the Rajasthan folk musicians, who are slowly seeing their art form fade away, have started to critically record, upload, and spread information about their art form and heritage to platforms that are supporting the amplification of this. The digital access and tools which has augmented the skillset and needs of these local communities has started to shift the future of what these fading cultural artifacts looks like, empowering these communities to not just see their artform as sustainable but also marketable. Over 600 of these musicians who have undertaken training and programs either through DEF or other community programs or government supported initiatives, have gone on to use their digital skillsets to promote their musicians through platforms such as Spotify and have started to share information more widely about their artform. Around 150 of these musicians in Jaisalmer are now self-organizing as a community group to problem solve and expand access to these tools to many other artist peers in their region to market their work, generate incomes and connect with broader audiences.

To scale highly successful and impactful ‘model community’ innovations, Osama does two things; first he rigorously maps the entire process from start to end of setting up the innovation and open sources this knowledge asset to CSOs, gram panchayats (most local level governance), and other stakeholders who are interested in seeing growth. In fact, Osama has built an entire network of over 1200 organizations in the country and abroad that actively contributes to a resource pool of knowledge and innovations that are being driven by local entrepreneurs and NGOs, which promotes digitization in rural areas. Furthermore, the DEF network and ecosystem have partnered to launch national and international awards that celebrates and incentivizes further innovation in the ICT for development sector. His Manthan Awards program, in partnership with the World Summit Awards and the Indian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, has awarded financial injections to over 400 local enterprises who are digitizing rural India while creating a database of over 5000 best practices and innovation frameworks for replication. There has been independent replication from this database in over 36 countries already and this continues to accelerate on a year-to-year basis.

The second approach that Osama takes is through an advocacy route. Leveraging existing government policies, Osama applies his model community methodology across several districts and after demonstration, hands the process over to the government to scale across the country. For example, under the central government's National Optic Fibre Plan (NOFP) and Bharat Broadband Network Limited (BBNL), a vision to make at least one person digitally literate from each family in each district of the country was laid out. The government called for partnerships between civil society and the private sector to implement this vision, without really having a strategy or framework in mind. DEF focused on implementing its community owned model in three states initially and across three districts. The model, which leveraged the infrastructure that the government was providing, was handed over to local women entrepreneurs to take forward and showed significant outcomes from the perspective of livelihoods and greater usage of democratic rights and tools to demand better governance (such as a 30% increase in usage of the Right to Information Act tool during and after implementation). In following this approach, DEF is able to take prototypes of specific government strategies for digital inclusion, test and refine them using its vast bank of knowledge assets and resources, and then empower the government to implement the most effective models at scale.

The story of Anita Devi from Madhya Pradesh is a strong anecdote of this impact. Anita ran a Dhaba (a small roadside restaurant) with her husband and the only skillset she had was the ability to cook. When her husband ran ill, she faced the prospect of going bankrupt, putting the future of her family under enormous threat. Anita started accessing these digital centers where she started becoming literate and taught herself business skills. She subsequently went on to run a localized digital center and she has utilized her skill sets to also run a restaurant in a hotel right next door to this center. Anita’s impact doesn’t just stop at herself or her family. She’s a vocal advocate that encourages thousands of other women in the villages near her to become formally educated. Each person that becomes digitally literate and has access to the resources needed to uplift themselves becomes a beacon of inspiration and admiration in a communal driven society, hence amplifying the entire network and ecosystem, thus greater participation. DEF’s prototype stopped after reaching roughly 9,500 citizens and today is being spread across the country by state and central governments under the National Digital Literacy Mission banner.

The ongoing COVID pandemic perhaps shines a light on exactly why community led digitization models are critical for a rapidly changing country like India. Subsequent lockdowns and panic meant that millions of migrant workers and hundreds of millions of rural citizens were completely disconnected from physical infrastructure touchpoints that they needed to pick up rations, access information about government schemes and pick up cheques from their pensions. Everything quickly moved towards digitization, alarmingly highlighting the critical need to expand localized access to digital tools once the pandemic is over. Thousands of entrepreneurs who have already benefited from DEF’s work have acted as their community's saviors to get and send information, access money, rations, and market information. DEF also reacted quickly, training an additional 10,000 entrepreneurs, and setting up 600 additional community digital centers to halt the spread of misinformation and ensure all citizens are aware of how to stay safe from the virus, access what they need to and continue to be linked to their family members in other parts of the country.

So far, DEF, in partnership with over 150 funders and institutional partners, has launched and scaled 59 community innovation models, targeting audiences such as handloom clusters, women homemakers, and almost every single citizen in rural India. The innovations have scaled to across 400 districts in India and several thousand villages, reaching over 60 million people directly and many more indirectly. At the most granular and individual level, access to digital literacy and tools in such a sustained manner over time has had significant impact from the perspective of skill development, educational attainment and success, livelihood generation, stronger democratic participation and citizens becoming more aware of their rights as democratic citizens, thus participating fully in its processes. Furthermore, the institutionalization of these innovations has started to shift the roles of stakeholders in this value chain. Civil society organizations are no longer the providers of digital tools, the private sector sees a market in rural India, and the Government understands that its large resource base needs to be shifted towards the most localized initiatives that is driving digitization, as opposed to being centrally provided.

DEFs work has scaled beyond India into over 70 other countries. The growing network of organizations and governments networked by DEF has created a ‘relational wealth,’ that facilitates cross learning and accelerates progress across borders. Moving forward, Osama plans to continue to anchor his model into the vein of what ICT for development means and looks like. His vision is to see every Indian citizen get access to digital literacy and tools, not as a provision of charity but something that they demand and can access themselves. The proof that this is on the way is that community members all over the country today are paying for access to digital tools provided by entrepreneurs.

Osama’s association with rural India dates to his years growing up in Champaran in Bihar. Osama grew up in a family that was passionate about education and strongly believed that all children should get access to it. Osama was deeply influenced by his father who started a school for students in his hometown, which he also attended. At this school, it was mandatory for all students to learn five languages, English, Hindi, Urdu, Persian and Arabic, representing the vast heterogeneity of the country. While his father operated from a playbook of strictness and formality, Osama recalls some of his fondest memories being the open learning environments and freedom he experienced while travelling to his grandfather's house, which very much was an adventure to get to with four different modes of transportation.

Osama moved to Aligarh to study Physics, which he soon realized was not a passion of his. This also continued after he joined the Indian Air Force for a brief period in which he also struggled to find purpose and enjoyment. While at Aligarh, Osama was involved in student activities and clubs, while also building positive relationships with the faculty at his University. He enjoyed creative tasks such as taking photographs and drawing, which was quickly caught onto by some of the faculty. For Osama, these activities were a means to tell powerful stories that needed to be heard. It was through this journey of creative expression that Osama started studying Journalism.

After completing his education, Osama decided for the first time in his life to move to a metropolitan city, in New Delhi where the seeds were planted for his long-term career. In the initial years in Delhi, Osama struggled to get his feet on the ground financially. He moved into the Dom Colony Slums, a community who are known for making their livelihoods through cremation of bodies. Osama’s fragmented work as a freelancer meant that he had to be enterprising to survive with expenses and find the cheapest possible means to live.

Osama later joined Computer World; a magazine focused on technology in India. His career with the magazine came to a point where the internet had made its entry into the country and was growing at an exponential rate. While building his career covering the tech sector for various national publications, he got opportunities to speak to several leaders in the tech space to understand the dotcom boom. As his career progressed, he went on to lead multiple IT (Information Technology) projects and spent hours referencing on the internet how technology and the internet could transform enterprises. Subsequently, he co-authored and published a book titled the Internet Economy of India which was critically acclaimed in the country. Osama followed a well-drawn entrepreneurial path as well, setting up the internet and digital division at the Hindustan Times, one of the country’s leading newspapers. He set up a thriving division with a 40-member team and shaped the future of digital engagement for the newspaper. It was clear to Osama that he had found the one thing that piqued his interest, and he could dedicate his life to it. Spending 16 hours a day reading, engaging with, and having discussions about digitization and the internet was what Osama was doing.

Through this journey, Osama realized that there was a massive divide which was shaping up as digitization was defining the future. He realized that the gap when it came to the flow of information to and from remote communities would only expand if digitization didn’t become equitable to all Indians. He also realized that this flow of information was one of several means of community development that could be unleashed via digital tools and literacy. His first prototype for what ultimately became Digital Empowerment Foundation came in the form of 4CPlus, a successful startup that was using digital tools to create business opportunities for creative and enterprising rural communities.

Osama saw the opportunity that digitization presented as a platform to allow each Indian citizen, especially in rural India to transform their own lives. He set up Digital Empowerment Foundation, which today is recognized as the premier organization to shape community led innovation and enterprise in digitization, impacting 15 million people directly and over 100 million indirectly.