I Had Built Something Valuable on Land I Did Not Own

In 2022, Meta changed its algorithm.

I did not know this was happening at the time. I knew that posts which used to reach thousands of people were now reaching hundreds. I knew the comments had thinned out. I knew the conversations I had built across three platforms — the women who had been showing up for years, the people who had read everything, the strangers who had become something closer to community — were quieter than they had been.

I assumed I was doing something wrong. I changed the format. I changed the timing. I changed the captions. The numbers kept falling.

What had actually changed was not me. Meta had moved Instagram from a social graph model — where you saw the people you followed — to an AI-powered discovery engine optimised for retention. Who had followed you before 2022 mattered less. The algorithm was now deciding what you saw based on what would keep you scrolling, and what would keep you scrolling was rarely the considered, slower work I had been doing.

By 2024, Meta had moved again, this time toward what the platform called micro-niches. Hashtags became largely irrelevant for distribution. The algorithm rewarded creators who fit cleanly into a single, narrow content category. I did not. I wrote about strategy, design, women in tech, financial services, mentorship, parenthood, ideas. I was, in algorithmic terms, illegible.

I had 84,000 followers across platforms and was afraid this would perish. The reach in some platforms like instagram kept falling faster than new follower count.

This is the part of the story where, in the version most people tell, the protagonist quits social media, builds a newsletter, and lives happily ever after on Substack. That is not what I want to write about, because that is not what actually happened, and because the lesson there is too small.

What actually happened is that I sat with the loss for a long time and asked a different question.

The question

The question was not which platform should I move to. The question was: what exactly did I just lose?

The answer arrived slowly, then all at once.

I had not lost an audience. The people were still there. They had not unfollowed me. They had not died. They had not changed their minds about what I had to say. They simply could not see me anymore, because a private company had changed a setting on a dashboard I would never have access to.

I had not lost income directly. The opportunities that came to me — speaking, consulting, mentorship, advisory work — had never come because of the platforms. They came because of my work. My thinking. My fifteen years building digital infrastructure for Lesotho's financial sector. The platforms had been a way of being visible to the people who would eventually become clients. The platforms had not been the work.

What I had lost was something harder to name. I had lost the infrastructure of my visibility. I had built a relationship with people I cared about, and the rooms in which those relationships happened were owned by someone else, who could rearrange the furniture or close the doors at any time, for any reason, without telling me.

I had built something valuable on land I did not own.

What the research says, and why it matters more for some of us

I want to be careful here, because the language I have just used — land I did not own — is the kind of phrase that can sound like personal grievance dressed up as insight. Let me bring in the data.

A peer-reviewed systematic review published in Administrative Sciences in 2024, drawing on 48 studies, examined the relationship between digital platforms and entrepreneurship. Its central finding was that platforms lower barriers to entry for entrepreneurs but create dependency and precarity. Platform-dependent entrepreneurs, the review concluded, own no customer data, build no brand equity independent of the platform, and face unilateral algorithm and policy changes they cannot influence. The entrepreneurial process — already characterised by high risk — is made more precarious by platform dependency, not less.

That is the structural argument. It applies to anyone building on someone else's infrastructure: a Shopify seller, a YouTuber, a TikTok creator, a writer on Substack, a small business that has no website and runs entirely on WhatsApp Business.

The reason I am writing this essay specifically about women — and specifically about women entrepreneurs in markets like mine — is that the structural risk is not distributed evenly.

The Cherie Blair Foundation's 2025 report Empowered or Undermined? found that women entrepreneurs without smartphones are 5.5 times less likely to use social media for business and 3.75 times less likely to have a bank account. That is the access end of the gradient. At the other end, the women who do have smartphones and are running businesses are disproportionately running them entirely on platforms they do not own — Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Marketplace — because in many sub-Saharan African markets, those platforms are the only customer acquisition channel that does not require capital, formal registration, or technical skills the women have not been given access to.

For a man running a side business on Instagram in a high-income market, platform dependency is an inconvenience. He can hire a developer to build a website. He can run paid ads while he diversifies. He can absorb a 60% reach drop because his primary income does not come from the platform.

For a woman running her primary business on a platform in a low- or middle-income market, the same algorithm change is existential. The Cherie Blair Foundation's data shows it: when reach collapses, customer acquisition collapses. When customer acquisition collapses, revenue collapses. When revenue collapses, the business — and often the household — collapses with it.

This is not a creator-economy problem with a gender flavour. It is a gender-economy problem that the creator-economy framing obscures. The standard advice — build a newsletter, own your domain, diversify your channels — was written for people whose worst case is a slower year. For the women I am writing about, the worst case is the end of the business.

What ownership actually looks like at this scale

When I say own your digital presence, I am not saying every woman entrepreneur should buy a custom domain and learn web development. That advice is correct for some readers and useless for most.Ownership exists on a gradient.

A WhatsApp Business catalogue is more owned than an Instagram shop, because the customer relationship runs through phone numbers you can export, not through a feed you cannot access.

An email list of 200 customers — collected at the till, on a paper sheet, and typed into a spreadsheet on Sunday evening — is more owned than 5,000 Instagram followers. The list works on any platform. The followers work on one.

A registered domain that redirects to a Linktree is more owned than a Linktree alone, because the domain is portable. The platform is not.

A community newsletter sent by SMS — yes, SMS, in markets where data is unaffordable for many — is more owned than the same content posted on a feed somebody else controls.

The question is not do you own infrastructure that looks like a Silicon Valley founder's stack. The question is what direction are you moving in. Toward more ownership, or toward more dependence on platforms whose interests are not aligned with yours.

What I built afterwards, and why

I built leratomphaka.com because I needed somewhere the algorithm could not reach.

The blog you are reading this essay on is owned. The mentorship I sell is sold from a platform I control. The consulting work runs through my own infrastructure. The intellectual property — frameworks like the CBA Model, this essay series, the toolkits in development — lives somewhere it cannot be suspended, throttled, or hidden by a policy change I will hear about second.

I still use social media. I am writing this knowing it will be posted to LinkedIn, where the algorithm will decide how many people see it, and where I will not be told why if the answer is very few. The platforms are useful. They are how new readers find me. They are not where the work lives.

The shift from access to ownership is not the shift from social media to no social media. It is the shift from the platform is my business to the platform is one of my customer acquisition channels. From treating reach as a substitute for customer relationship to treating reach as a way of beginning a relationship that will eventually move to ground I own.

For policymakers, this distinction is not yet captured in any framework I have seen in Lesotho or the region.

Digital inclusion is measured by connectivity and account ownership. Digital ownership — the gradient I have described — is not measured at all. It does not appear in the National Digital Transformation Strategy 2024–2030 as an indicator. It does not appear in enterprise development criteria for grants. It is not in the reporting requirements for organisations running women's enterprise programmes.

That absence is not neutral. What is not measured is not funded. What is not funded does not get built.

The specific ask

Three policy moves would change this faster than another round of digital literacy training.

1. Recognise digital ownership as an economic participation indicator. Not connectivity. Not account ownership. Whether the woman entrepreneur owns the infrastructure her business runs on — a domain, a customer list, a platform she controls. Add it to the data we collect. Make the gap visible.

2. Subsidise the basics. Domain registration, hosting, SMS infrastructure, simple website tooling for women-owned MSMEs. The unit cost is small. The structural impact is significant.

3. Train for ownership, not just for use. Most digital skills programmes teach women how to use platforms. The CREATE shift requires teaching them how to own infrastructure — CRM basics, email list management, owned-platform fundamentals. That is a curriculum that does not currently exist at scale in our market. It can be built.

I sat with my own platform loss for a long time before I understood what it was telling me. The women this essay is about — in Mokhotlong, in Butha-Buthe, in Maseru's informal economy, on prepaid data, building something — should not have to learn what I learned the way I learned it.

The infrastructure that protects them is not yet built. That is the work.

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Afternoon Papers is a monthly essay series on women, ownership, and the digital economy. Issue 01 draws from “From Access to Ownership,” presented at the CTO Commonwealth Digital Roadshow Women in Digital Forum, 22 April 2026.

Lerato Mphaka is a strategist, designer, and mentor with 15 years of experience building the digital infrastructure of Lesotho's financial sector. She is co-director of The Black Heron Group and founder of the LM Foundation.

Read more at www.leratomphaka.com.