Africa goes Online by Daniel Akst and Mike Jensen Can the Internet ease the information famine in Africa? Many people on the continent are already proving it can do that, and more.

A remarkable characteristic of mass starvation is how rare it is in free countries. As the Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen points out, “no substantial famine has ever occurred in a democratic and independent country, no matter how poor.”

Unfortunately, Africa today is in the grip of a famine, although it only sometimes involves not having enough to eat. The continent is afflicted instead by an information famine, one with consequences not so very different from a severe shortage of food. Growth is stunted. People die. The future dims. And just as in the case of a food shortage, the lack of democratic and responsive governments is a major reason.

The irony is that while a great deal of attention has been paid to the supposed digital divide within developed countries such as the U.S., where computers are more often than not readily available to schoolchildren, the digital divide that is equally, if not more critically important, is the one between information-age societies like ours and underdeveloped places like sub-Saharan Africa.

Americans without e-mail, after all, can pick up the phone or send a fax, an option rarely available to most Africans for whom even conventional postal service can be an adventure (one former development worker tells of receiving a letter in Ethiopia postmarked nine years earlier in Nigeria). Americans have such a wealth of informational resource—books, periodicals and hundreds of television stations—that they sometimes seek shelter from the punishing hail of media that falls here. Africans enjoy no such luxury—which is precisely why the Internet is so important to Africa.

Outside relatively advanced South Africa, there are only a handful of African Internet users so far. But the potential of the Internet in Africa is staggering. Using the ‘net, after all, impoverished Third World peoples can engage with the intellectual capital of the West. A virtual university, for instance, could at little cost bring many of the benefits of Stanford to Senegal. More informally, the ‘net can make available a world of information and expertise to remote, information-starved communities at very little expense. The Internet also allows educated residents of underdeveloped countries to leverage their training and skills in the global marketplace, something already happening in India and even, here and there, in Africa. Many Africans speak English or French, and shared communications devices are old hat on a continent where hardly anyone has a telephone.

In fact, large-scale sharing of information resources is a dominant feature of the African media landscape. A given copy of any newspaper might be read by more than ten people, there are usually perhaps three users per dial-up Internet account, and it is not uncommon to find most of a small village crowded around the only TV set, often powered by a car battery or small generator. Why not shared public Internet terminals?

Next page: In sub-Saharan Africa the Internet can actually help break the deadly information famine that besets the continent. Look closely and you can see it’s already happening.

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Copyright information | Masthead | Carnegie Corporation of New York web site