From My Experience In Poor Countries...
...that would be Central Africa values of "poor", which I hope we can all agree qualifies.
What I've seen is that Internet access as such is not a problem.¹ You just stroll down² to the local internet café (remember those?), get connected, and you can spend hours browsing YouTube and posting updates on Farcebook and doing all the time wasting stuff that people do on the internet. The connection will not be the fastest³, and there will be a noticeable latency as it will almost certainly be a VSAT link, but for the rest it's not that different from what we had maybe 10 years ago.
Except the local web.
And that's where the problem lies: it's easy to consume global content from even the poorest place in the world. But that doesn't help much. What would help is having the infrastructure so as to improve local online communications, so that local communities could interact online more, in ways that are adapted to the their socio-cultural context.
¹ For local values of "not a problem", which intersect a large part of the set of values known to us as "catastrophe".
² Might be a few hours' stroll, but down there nobody is ever in a rush.
³ See (²).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
