Africa Goes Online
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If the ‘net in the industrialized West is a place for entertainment, trading antiques or following your stock portfolio as if it were your favorite sports team, in sub-Saharan Africa the Internet can actually help break the deadly information famine that besets the continent. Surprisingly, if you look closely enough you can begin to see that just such a thing is already happening.

In Morocco, a local Internet service provider has landed the contract to digitize the entire National Library of France’s paper archives. Scanned pages are beamed by satellite from Paris to the data center in Rabat where they are processed by a large team of low-cost keypunchers and then sent back.

In Senegal more than 10,000 small businesses across the country emerged to provide public telephone services after the national telecom operator opened up the public telephone market. Now many of them provide Internet access and other PC-based business services. And in the capital city, Dakar, medical students are being taught by a team of doctors in Brussels using video link-ups.

On 24 university campuses across Africa, students are linked to classrooms and libraries world-wide via satellite as part of the African Virtual University (AVU) project, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Many of these students will soon be able to obtain degrees in this way in computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering. More than 12,000 students have completed semester-long courses in engineering and in the sciences and more than 2,500 professionals have attended management seminars on topics such as Strategy and Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Global Competencies and E-commerce. The Internet plays an important role at AVU, which gives students access to an online digital library with over 1,000 full-text journals. Over 10,000 free e-mail accounts have been opened and can be accessed through the AVU web site (www.avu.org). Students must pay for the courses, but classrooms are packed anyway.

In Togo, an Internet-based call center has been set up to provide globally competitive telephone support services for companies with customers in North America and Europe who simply dial a local number in their own country, which routes the call via the ‘net to the support desk in Africa.

Craftmakers around Africa are selling their wares all over the world via the Internet through such nonprofit groups as PeoplLink, which sends digital cameras into the bush so that pictures of the crafts can be e-mailed back to the web site. (www.peoplink.org)

The National Museum of Namibia plans to make information about the fifth largest insect collection in Africa available worldwide via the Internet, thanks to the efforts of some industrious Namibian secondary school students. Despite their lack of computer experience, the students managed to digitize 20,897 insect inventory records in just over 12 hours. Further student marath-ons are planned to digitize the entire collection. (www.natmus.cul.na)

At least 11 African nations have initiated national school-networking programs and most countries on the continent are seeing more and more of their schools connected to the Internet, demonstrating increasing interest from governments, schools and the private sector. A continent-wide organization called SchoolNet Africa has also been set up to enhance teaching and learning by spreading basic information technology skills, as well as by fostering the development of information resources and projects linking students, teachers and administrators across Africa and beyond. (www. schoolnetafrica.org).

These are, of course, the exceptions. Africa’s poverty and telecommunications problems mean that it will be a long time before it becomes a continent of Internet addicts. Sub-Saharan Africa has by far the least developed infrastructure in the world. Although encouraging trends have emerged in the last few years, the differences between development levels in Africa and the rest of the world are especially wide in the area of information and communications technologies. Only 2.5 percent of the world’s televisions are on the continent (which has 13 percent of the world’s population). Computer penetration is less than 3 per 1,000 people.

Africa’s phone systems are spotty and often rely on antiquated equipment, and progress is hamstrung by bureaucracy, outdated administrative structures and, in most instances, state-owned monopolies.

All these problems can be seen as part of the generally abysmal state of networks of every kind on the continent. Africa’s electrical grid, for example, is grossly inadequate, resulting in irregular or nonexistent electricity supplies. In many countries the power distribution network does not reach significantly into rural areas, and “power sharing” (regularly scheduled outages lasting for many hours) is a regular occurrence, even in some capital cities.

The poor state of the transport networks in Africa follows the same pattern, and this results in additional barriers to the movement of people and goods. These barriers make the need for Internet access all the more pressing, at the same time they make it all the more difficult for e-commerce and other Internet-age developments to blossom.

But poverty probably isn’t the main impediment to Internet use. “African governments are the big barrier to progress in this area as in most areas,” says Nancy Hafkin, who as a United Nations aid worker in the early 1990s helped bring something called FidoNet to Africa. (FidoNet is a simple way of getting computer bulletin boards to talk to one another and was in common use before the Internet became ubiquitous.)

There is general agreement among those with long experience trying to bring information technology to Africa that the difficulty is highly regulated telecommunications services, usually appearing in the form of a moribund state-owned monopoly that is expensive and wary of change—especially of change embodied by a medium as potentially subversive as the Internet. African governments have the power to alter these circumstances, and gradually, some are doing so.

The signs of progress are unmistakable. Four years ago only 11 African countries had any Internet access at all. Now all 54 of them have permanent connections, and although some 20 countries have only one Internet service provider, hundreds of ISPs are open for business elsewhere on the continent, many of them in fierce competition with one another.

There is also a rapidly growing interest in various forms of public Internet access, such as adding PCs to community “phone shops,” schools, police stations and clinics, which can spread the cost of equipment and access among a larger number of users. “Cyber cafes are popping up in all the capital cities of Africa,” reports Bob Hawkins, a World Bank official working to bring Internet education to African schools. Many phone shops are now adding Internet access to their services, even in remote towns where the nearest dial-up access point can only be reached by a long-distance telephone call.

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