Information is never just that abstract concept 'information'. Information has to be transmitted for it to be of any use. Information transmission requires a sender and a receiver, an encoding for the information that is understood by both parties, and a medium. In this case, we have senders (people who write web pages) and receivers (African villagers). If we add in free Internet, we also have the medium. But without a shared encoding, all these are absolutely useless. The shared encoding is, in this case, the (written) language. But as long as rural Africans cannot speak English (or any other language commonly found on the web), and as long as they cannot at least read with some level of proficiency, we simply do not have a working system of encoding that could be used to transmit information.

Thus, in order for free Internet to be effective as a provider of information, we first need to give the target audience an education sufficient for reading and understanding English.