Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 2 | Africa Goes Online, page 4 (low bandwidth)

Some of the regional Internet backbones now being built across the continent will help address this problem. In particular, the African Connection project, developed by the African Telecommunications Union, aims to create the underlying infrastructure needed to support future Internet activities. Since building backbones takes time, the first project of the African Connection was a rally of sorts in which the South African Minister of Telecommunications drove from the northernmost tip of the continent in Tunisia to its most southerly point in his own country. Accompanied by a team of 40 journalists and support crew on a Hercules cargo plane and helicopter, the minister was met at the border and escorted through each of the 11 host countries by the local minister of telecommunications.

One of the best known and most important telecom projects on the
continent is Africa One (www.africa one.com), a private venture that aims to put a 32,000 kilometer optical fiber necklace around the entire continent by 2002. The $1.9 billion network will be built and maintained by Global Crossing, a leading broadband firm, and is planned to better connect African nations with one another as well as the rest of the world. Africa One contends that when the project is complete it will not only vastly expand telephone and Internet capacity on the continent, but will also eliminate $600 million a year in connection fees that Africans pay to complete international telephone calls—many of them between African nations.

Universities were initially at the vanguard of Internet developments in Africa and most of them provide e-mail services; however, by 2000, only about 25 African countries had universities with full Internet connectivity. Because of limited resources and the high cost of computer facilities and bandwidth, full Internet access at the universities where it exists is usually restricted to staff. Postgraduates are often able to obtain access, but the general student population usually cannot.

Carnegie Corporation of New York, among others, is working to change that, at least at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The Corporation is providing $3.5 million for a variety of projects, many of them related to information technology, including staff training in using computers and the Internet; more computers for student access as well as for use in digitizing the university library’s card catalog; network security; and emergency power generators. “What we’re funding is university strengthening,” says Andrea Johnson, a Carnegie Corporation program officer who is working on the project.

The Carnegie Corporation effort is one of many Internet initiatives undertaken by nongovernmental organizations on the continent. These reflect increasing interest from the international community in assisting with Internet development in Africa. At last count there were roughly 100 such projects underway. (For a continuously updated list, visit www3.sn.apc.org/ africa/projects.htm.)

Since 1997, to cite an example, the World Bank has been sponsoring a global effort to train teachers in using the Internet, a project now in 261 African schools. The idea is that these teachers will in turn teach other African teachers, spreading the knowledge across educational systems and societies.

Regional collaboration within Africa is regarded by many as an important means of tackling the problem of inadequate Internet infrastructure. Action has been seen on a number of fronts in this area, starting with the Conference of African Ministers of Social and Economic Planning who requested the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa to set up a “High-Level Working Group” to chart Africa’s path onto the global information highway. Hosted by the Egyptian Cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Center in Cairo, an expert group developed a framework document entitled the African Information Society Initiative, which has since been endorsed by all the countries in Africa.

But perhaps the most telling sign of Africa’s Internet potential is the involvement of Cisco Systems Inc. The big network equipment company, whose devices help power the Internet all over the world, is helping Kenyan ISPs band together to establish and share “Internet exchange points,” so that e-mail and web page requests from one local ISP to another don’t have to go through Europe. Cisco is doing the same for “domain name servers,” the machines that translate a prose Internet address (such as www.carnegie.org) into the corresponding numbers for the requested web page. Establishing local exchange points and DNS servers will mean a radically faster web experience for users of African-based pages, which Cisco hopes will encourage their creation, particularly in local languages.

Cisco is doing the same thing in South Africa. To encourage progress, the company is donating or subsidizing equipment and expertise, presumably in hopes that a burgeoning African Internet scene will open up new markets for its products. “If we aren’t there to work with these governments today, we probably won’t be allowed to do it later,” says Jim Massa, Cisco’s director of strategic government alliances. “It’s an opportunity but also a responsibility.”

The Internet is also proving useful to the growing number of Africans living overseas—as well as family members who stay at home on the continent. In Togo, for instance, Dejean-Tchapo Oboté Pierre was worried about his pregnant wife, Julie, who had gone to Marseilles to give birth there among relatives. “Since I was so concerned about Julie,” he writes, “I had to be calling her every two days and that was quite expensive (US $3 per minute). One day, I read an article about Internet telephony in a computer magazine.”

Making telephone calls via the Internet isn’t very common in the United States because people are affluent and phone rates are low. But it’s a different story overseas. Pierre looked around on the Internet and discovered Net2Phone, an Internet phone service that boasts substantially lower rates for international calls. Pierre had the technological wherewithal to get this going. His only problem was, he didn’t have a credit card.

“I therefore sent an e-mail to my nephew in Washington, D.C., requesting him to pay something into my account,” explains Pierre. “This was done and from that day I have been able to call my wife twice a day for the paltry sum of ten cents per minute. I should mention that soon after the birth of Melissa, her mother let me hear her cries on the telephone. I was overjoyed,” Pierre adds, “to be so united with them.”

His sentiments have been echoed by individuals, companies and organizations all over the world who have integrated use of the Internet into the daily routine of modern-day life. Perhaps slowly, but surely steadily, Africans from every country on the continent are joining the online world community, a place where they are necessary and eagerly awaited partners.

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