So, 15 years ago I traveled to Senegal to help evaluate how the Internet could be useful to them, economically speaking. Before my trip, I was imagining things much like you're describing here. What I saw on my trip was fairly eye-opening.
First of all, in much of the country basic services like electricity and running water cannot be taken for granted. Phone service is available -- for a price paid by the minute to some equivalent of a local entrepreneur who has invested money into getting a mobile phone plan and has some means of charging / powering the equipment (solar was the typical method, although I saw more primitive techniques as well). Internet access was generally many miles away in a regional capital, which is probably an all day trip for someone walking or on a horse (cars are for the wealthy). When you get there, access is very expensive.
I'm assuming things have gotten better in the last 15 years. For instance mobile phone penetration was already dramatic when I visited and can only have improved since then. However literacy was a serious problem -- you have to be able to read in order to make sense of almost anything on a computer, and in Senegal at least just knowing French is an elite signifier since most speak Wolof. Very few people were fluent English speakers -- I effectively had to learn pidgin French just to have conversations with the local telecom employees, although thankfully most Internet-specific technical terms were just directly taken from English.
In Dakar (the capital city) things were very different. It was pretty much what I imagined a typical city in Africa to be like -- and Internet access there was still expensive but in the realm of affordable. University students got some sort of access that was reasonable, although the pipe out of the country was pitifully small at the time (we had more bandwidth for our office than the whole country had in 2001).
The really interesting thing was that no one could figure out how to make money off Internet access other than Internet cafes and connecting people to the very large number of Senegalese who live outside the country. I imagine the remittance market is huge now. However things have changed, it almost certainly hinges on the extreme motivation people there have to better their lives. They will move heaven and earth to make a buck -- SV entrepreneurs could learn a lot from the drive on display everywhere I went. If you can imagine a way to make money from a situation, they were way ahead of you.
One last thing -- Senegal is considered one of the African success stories, generally speaking. It is relatively democratic, has a growing economy (without all the problems that come with having oil deposits) and has been the recipient of decades of development funding. Many countries in Africa are worse off than Senegal, and I would imagine the snapshot I got in 2001 looks like utopia to them now.