Warraq said she knew of several young Yemenis who had missed out on career-making interviews or presentations because power cuts had kept them from logging into Zoom. "Others used generators, but since the war started, there's been a fuel shortage and prices have doubled, so many people can no longer afford fuel," she added. "Some try to go to hotels to get internet and electricity, but it costs them a lot to sit in the lobby," said Aisha Warraq, programme manager at the Sanaa Centre for Strategic Studies think-tank. When offices and internet cafes closed due to fighting or COVID-19 restrictions, people had to work from home, where power cuts can last more than 20 hours. Those ready to pay a premium could sign up to state-backed provider AdenNet, which has stayed online at times when other providers were cut.īut AdenNet limited subscriptions to its service, leading to a black market that has seen modems sold for several hundred dollars, dwarfing monthly average incomes.įrequent power cuts have added to Yemen's web woes. "The world is online and we're simply not," said Akil. He, along with Hakkam and Sillal, said they planned to seek work abroad after graduating, adding to the "brain drain" from their homeland.
That's how we would do audio recordings," Akil said. "Our professors would send us 10-15 audio messages on WhatsApp, each of them five minutes long. Nasser Akil, 25, another student at the university, said his professors used WhatsApp because it required less bandwidth.
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Instead, he asked friends abroad to download lectures onto external hard drives to bring with them, then distributed the material on flash drives. "Want to watch a lecture or an extra course on YouTube? Forget it," said Abdulrazzak Hakam, a 26-year-old medical student. When Aden University shut its doors during periods of fighting and COVID-19 lockdowns, students and faculties found low-tech workarounds as Yemen's bandwidth buckled under the weight of online lessons. That's not enough for me to watch a lecture and it's too expensive for me to get more," he said. He was already spending pocket money on public transport to reach the university, making an internet connection a luxury. "I live in the countryside and the internet is so slow out there," said Bilal Sillal, a 25-year-old dermatology student at Aden University. Getting online is even more difficult in rural areas. That is due to an aging, unmaintained internet infrastructure that has been damaged by more than seven years of conflict, along with a steep devaluation in the local currency which has severely curbed purchasing power in recent months.
They pay the highest rate in the region at $16 per gigabyte, compared to about $1 in nearby countries, according to a forthcoming report on Yemen by the Arabia Brain Trust (ABT), an independent think-tank that promotes sustainable social and economic development. Just over a quarter of Yemenis have access to the internet, compared to an average of three-quarters across the Middle East, according to a 2022 report on the country by online reference library DataReportal. Moreover, internet penetration rates are also low. The next slowest, in Turkmenistan, is six-times faster. Yemen has the world's slowest internet speed, according to web analysis service SpeedTest, with an average download speed of 0.53 megabytes per second. For young people, it can mean missing out on economic and educational opportunities.īakri said TakeMe's five investors had spent thousands of dollars since 2020 on trying to make the app as lightweight as possible to run on mobile internet service, all to no avail. But the internet was just too slow."īlighted by years of war and economic crisis, Yemen's slow and costly internet limits access to everyday services from banking to online classes and transport.
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"We had all these security problems with normal taxis, where the passengers robbed the drivers or vice versa.
"Aden was absolutely fertile ground for a ridesharing app," said the 34-year-old TakeMe founder. Yemeni entrepreneur Obeid al-Bakri launched a ridesharing app to provide safe transport in the southern city of Aden, but his plans quickly ran into trouble, the internet was so slow, no one could get online to book a ride.
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