Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 2 | Bandwidth and Copyright: Barriers to Knowledge in Africa?, page 3

“Even if we got all the bandwidth we needed, we’d still have problems,” he says, and goes on to review some of the country’s recent history, which impacts on his point. “The incursion of military rule sabotaged the universities. Universities that were supposed to be places of open inquiry were completely muzzled. The universities came to have the same kind of ethnic and religious intolerance and corruption that the military bred into the society at large. The result is that people and universities don’t trust one another and are afraid to cooperate or even ask questions. The rest of the world has already ‘moved to Mars’ in ICT. We’re still trying to climb out of the caves.”

Even with the restoration of democracy in Nigeria, Ibrahim says, there has been no concerted, coordinated approach to providing universities with the necessary technological infrastructure necessary for advancement.

“In places like the U.S., South Africa, even Mexico,” Ibrahim says, “there are special rates on all kinds of things for educational institutions. But in Nigeria, universities are charged the full commercial rate for telephone and electric service, which the government has monopolies on. Nigeria has two national telecom carriers owned by the government. Both have a fiber-optic backbone, but neither has connected any university, or even knew enough to ask. African universities need to learn how to lobby and apply some pressure.”

Ibrahim then points out another example of how outdated and uncoordinated government regulations continue to hamper ICT development. “We organized a program through the U.S. embassy and Teachers Without Borders to get donations of used computers and other equipment,” he says. “The first shipment sat in the port for 10 months, then the customs people put a tax on it. Once you added all that together, the donations made no sense. You might as well buy everything new.”

Despite all the problems, Ibrahim remains optimistic, largely because of the “leap-frog” potential of evolving technology. “ICT has created this great divide,” he says, “but it has also provided a solution. Every day, the technology becomes more available and easier to use. Africa can be one case where the last can become the first. The technology is changing so rapidly that having had it for a long time is no longer an advantage.”

One development that has the potential of saving African universities almost as much money as they are now paying for bandwidth is Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), which could greatly reduce many universities’ telephone bills. Sunday Folayan is the past secretary general of the Internet Service Providers Association of Nigeria. Folayan initiated the phone call for an hour-long interview for this article using VOIP. “I paid a fraction for this phone call that I would have paid for the telecom landline,” he noted.

Folayan has just launched a new company called General Data Engineering Services, which sells VOIP in Nigeria. “In just two weeks, we signed up 8,500 subscribers,” he reports, “and we’re still growing. I am sure that eventually the government will try to stifle VOIP because it means the end of the state-owned telecom. Universities pay at least as much in telephone bills as they do for satellite Internet access,” he continues. “If they can slash their phone bills, they have that much more to spend on the Internet, or whatever. The universities need to break the shackles of economic dependence on the government.”

At the same time that universities are struggling to reduce bandwidth costs, they are also exploring alternatives such as placing as much information as possible on so-called virtual libraries or LANs. Most of that work has been centered at university libraries, and Prisca Tibenderana has seen the transformation from the beginning. She is Makerere’s deputy university librarian.

“Before ICT, libraries in most African universities were like ghost towns,” she says. “They hadn’t bought any journals or new books for many years and most students just stopped going there. They were useless.” But now, ICT has opened university libraries to large populations. We have an average of more than 5,000 visitors a day and the problem is that there are too many students demanding Internet access and training and we don’t have enough people to do that.”

Still, Tibenderana is pleased about the library’s renewed place in the university’s life. “In 1997,” she says, “we only had two computers, which people mostly used for e-mail on a small scale, and we charged fees for that. Then, in 1999, the World Bank gave us 15 computers and we started training people how to use them. In 2001, the African Development Bank gave us 40 computers and we started a computer lab. That same year, a Swedish donor funded subscriptions for three databases. Now we have nine databases that provide full-text access to scientific and scholarly journals.”

The creation of this limited “virtual library” highlights what may become one of the largest obstacles to African scholars’ access to Web resources, assuming the bandwidth challenges can be met. The problem is copyright restrictions.

Tusubira of Makerere University explains: “In the U.K. and the U.S., there is a tradition of each student having his or her own textbooks, copies of journals and so forth. The tradition just doesn’t exist in Africa. The reality is that people here copy books for the 3,000 students who can’t afford it.” He goes on to explain that this is certainly not what publishers want, since it violates their copyright to photocopy books and journals, but observes that the situation might be different if these publications were available to students, teachers and scholars at lower costs. “Publishers have to ask themselves just how much potential income they lose in poor African countries,” he says.

Alex Twinomugisha at the African Virtual University agrees with much of what Dr. Tusubira says. He notes that copyrights on Western business and computer science textbooks are proving ruinous for the AVU. “The publishers are charging $800 for the books,” he reports. “We only charge $1,000 for tuition.”

Next page: The notion that textbooks could cost almost as much as tuition is staggering, but Twinomugisha thinks part of the solution may lie in a “collective bargaining” process similar to the universities’ bandwidth consortium that would negotiate lower fees from publishers.

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