Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Abandoning the News, page 2

Alex Twinomugisha is the ICT Manager at the African Virtual University (AVU) in Nairobi, Kenya, which has been commissioned by the Partnership to bargain with satellite companies on behalf of Partnership universities. Reports Twinomugisha, “The bandwidth price has already started to come down. In less than a year, the average African university is paying $4 less per kilobit per second. And now that the universities have formed this ‘bandwidth club,’ prices will come down even more. In the new tender we are floating, we are looking at a target price of no more than $2.50 per kilobit per second. That means some universities may get up to six times more bandwidth for what they are paying now.”

Raoul Davion, the MacArthur Foundation representative to the Partnership, says the evolving technology and apparently steadily falling satellite prices could change the entire effort. “Getting together to buy bandwidth was originally conceived as a ‘bridging’ strategy,” says Davion. “The Partnership felt that universities needed a way to obtain Internet access via satellite until terrestrial fiber-optic cable becomes available. But,” he continues, “it’s conceivable to me that with new technology, along with the continued growth of satellite companies, that this could be a leap-frog technology that enables Africa to avoid laying much of the terrestrial cable that was essential in the developed world.”

As wonderful as those cheaper prices will be, Twinomugisha and Davion agree that managing the bandwidth will prove a much more important challenge. That will involve wholesale training and cultural transformations at nearly all the universities.

The inspiration for the bandwidth consortium was a similar arrangement by universities in South Africa that banded together to negotiate Internet access costs. The organization, called TENET (for the Tertiary Education Network), also specializes in training university ICT staff in managing bandwidth use. Duncan Martin, director of TENET, says, “Much of the bandwidth universities are buying is being wasted. Students must be prevented from doing selfish things like music downloads. There also need to be firewalls and monitoring use on a per-student basis.” The foundation partnership is negotiating with TENET about training and advising ICT managers in Partnership universities.

Twinomugisha insists that, “The very first priority must be for universities to establish local area networks (LANs) that can be used instead of much more expensive Internet connections. For example, a lot of research and scholarly material that individuals now look for on the Internet can be placed on a LAN and shared in that way. Internet costs can be substantially reduced with better management and LANs.”

However well managed, many critics still contend that the amount of money universities are spending on bandwidth is inappropriate. Says one skeptic, “Universities are worshipping at the altar of the Internet. When you have grossly overcrowded classes, dilapidated infrastructure, and sometimes water and sewer systems don’t even work, how can these costs possibly be justified?”

MacArthur’s Raoul Davion, as well as many ICT officials at African universities, have a ready answer to such questions: “With the proper bandwidth you might be able to teach 10,000 more students via distance learning, as opposed to hiring 24 more professors. And bandwidth also allows, for example, all the courses of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and other Internet learning resources to be online and adapted to meet the needs of African universities.”

Still, AVU’s Twinomugisha acknowledges that there are principled objections to the ICT focus. He says, for example, “Some professors just don’t believe that distance learning is an effective strategy. We face problems on a daily basis with people who don’t believe what we are doing makes a lot of sense, and people who are scared that technology might take their jobs.”

Universities involved in the foundation partnership tend to be among the leaders in adapting ICT, but even among them, there are considerable differences. For all, the pace of change can be dizzying.

Nigeria’s University of Jos has blazed a trail in ICT among West African universities, generally regarded as the region that has the most problems. Donna Allison Oti, a Senior Fulbright Scholar with a Ph.D. in Mass Communications, spent ten months at the university. “I was concerned before I got there,” says Oti, “because I had heard about the connectivity problems at African universities. I was especially worried because I spent a year in South Korea, where I had a high-speed DSL connection from home.” (South Korea is among the most heavily Internet-connected countries in the world.)

“Jos wasn’t as convenient because I had to go to the office,” Oti continues. “But to my surprise, I could get a broadband connection from several labs on campus. I could download large research files when I wanted and I was able to complete the preface to an anthology of poetry and a paper currently under review.”

The story of how the university gained such a high level of connectivity is best told by Professor Len Liverpool, the school’s ICT coordinator. “Eight years ago, there was a group of people at the university who were dedicated to making ICT flourish,” Liverpool explains. “We didn’t have much money, but we had strong institutional support, going over the tenure of three vice chancellors. In 1997, Jos had a student and staff population of 15,000, but we had no ICT staff. There were less than 10 computers and fewer than 10 people who had any computer skills at all. But today,” Liverpool proudly points out, “we have over 3,000 e-mail users; over 400 networked computers; all three of our campuses are linked by 15 local area networks utilizing fiber optics and Cisco switches; and we now have an established tradition of training.”

The goal, Liverpool adds, “is for every student and staff member to have an e-mail account and for everyone to have Internet access. We want many students involved in distance learning and at least 200 ICT graduates a year.”

Dr. F.F. Tusubira, ICT director at Makerere University in Uganda, also oversees a program of notable ICT advances, but acknowledges that he’s still coping with major challenges. “The bandwidth problem will be here for some time,” he says. “The fundamental challenge is that satellite access is intrinsically expensive. People in America pay $500 for what our university pays $28,000 per month.”

The cost is not the only constraint on Internet use, Tusubira adds. “Someone in Europe can download 1,000 abstracts in a brief period of time. Here it can take two days’ work. That slows down the process of research and discourages people from relying on the system.”

Tusubira believes that one major reason African universities have lagged so far behind in accessing the Internet is the history of authoritarian and repressive governments on the continent. “Many in the last generation of African leaders viewed mass communications as a security risk,” he explains. “Some
current leaders do, as well. It could be dangerous to allow many people access to a communications tool like the Web that is not easily monitored or controlled. It’s like private radio stations: opposition parties can overthrow governments with that. There still are countries such as China, Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe, where you can be arrested today for expressing certain opinions or even accessing certain sites on the Internet.”

But progress is being made. In Uganda, for instance, after much lobbying by universities and others in the ICT community, the government has agreed, in principle, to lay fiber-optic cables whenever it builds new roads. “Building a road costs $3 million per kilometer,” Tusubira says. “Adding fiber optics would only be an additional $100,000 per kilometer.” Such a plan is expected to be operationalized within a year.

Aminu Ibrahim, the deputy director of Nigeria’s National Universities Commission, agrees that African
governments have been very slow to provide the kind of regulatory and funding help taken for granted by universities elsewhere. The toll on Nigerian universities, Ibrahim believes, has been particularly devastating.

Next page: “Every day, the technology becomes more available and easier to use. Africa can be one case where the last can become the first.”

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