by Kenneth Walker

Access to knowledge may be the key to advancement in the developing world, but the seemingly limitless amount of information available on the Internet is often not available to individuals and universities in Africa.

At a time when the developed world is putting the finishing touches on the so-called “Third Generation of the Internet,” Africa is still struggling with the first. It has long lagged behind all other continents in the number of computers, users and percentage of people accessing the Web.

In developed countries, Internet access is virtually every teenager’s birthright, but the vast majority of African students arrive at university without ever having received or sent an e-mail, or even having sat in front of a computer.

Many who have questioned whether Africa’s digital divide with the rest of the world can ever be bridged, won’t have to wait long for answers. Events are coalescing quickly to determine the fate of the continent’s aspirations in education, development, science and research, on which may hinge the viability of the modern African state.

There are those who insist that without the global knowledge to meet their development needs, many African countries are in danger of becoming failed states. Even short of that dire prediction is the concern, expressed by observers like Rookaya Bawa, Carnegie Corporation of New York program officer in the International Development Program, who says, “Gaining access to the wealth of information available through the Internet is critical to Africa’s future. If we miss this opportunity, who knows how long it will take to catch up?”

On the other hand, there are those who believe that rapidly accelerating advances in communications technology might permit African societies to “leap-frog” into a brave new world of education, science, research and development that will enable the continent finally to overcome the information divide.

After essentially being left out of the first two decades of Internet connectivity, African universities are at the forefront of attempts on the continent to make up for lost time. In many African nations, universities have been among the first Internet providers and certainly provide the greatest access for the largest number of people, even sponsoring the Internet cafes that have become ubiquitous in many African cities.

The initial hurdle for most universities was just getting connected. Most of Africa—even today—is still not wired for regular landline telephone service.

Most of the developed world has been building electronic communication infrastructure for more than a century. And that has come to be augmented by cable, wireless and fiber-optic connections offered by a host of competitive business and government entities.

After decolonization, some African countries made serious attempts to build telephone lines, but they have been hampered by inefficient, state-owned monopolies as well as by high rates of theft of the copper wire used in telephone installations. As a result, universities interested in accessing the Internet almost all had to do so by purchasing bandwidth from satellite companies, often at more than 100 times the cost in the developed world.

The scramble for Internet access began at several African universities only within the last decade. There are great differences in both the pace of change at the universities and the skill levels among their information communications technology (ICT) personnel, according to a member of the new generation of Internet professionals. Jummai Umar, a 34-year-old Ph.D. research student on ICT and Knowledge Generation at the University of Abuja in Nigeria, who also works with UNESCO in researching ICT issues at African universities, points to different levels of ICT usage. Among them, she says, are the “middle-level users who are beginning to realize the value of the Internet and want to get connected. There’s also the lower-level users who don’t even know what bandwidth is. At some universities and technikons, they’ve never heard the term ‘bandwidth,’ and that goes for even the vice chancellors.”

Bandwidth costs and related issues are perhaps the biggest problem African universities face in accessing the Internet. Broadly defined, bandwidth refers to the rate of data transfer, i.e., the capacity of the Internet connection being used. The greater the capacity, the more likely it is that access and downloads will be faster.

African universities have been forced to buy bandwidth from the intrinsically much more expensive satellite companies. What’s worse, the purchases have been made through middlemen, boosting the costs even more.

Training a new generation in managing and accessing the Internet is another huge issue. Even as moves are being made on the first two issues, a newer, perhaps even more strenuous challenge is surfacing—the extent to which African scientists and scholars are being denied access to Web resources because of increasingly contentious intellectual property rights debates.

Among those concerned with these issues is the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa, a collaborative effort involving Carnegie Corporation of New York, along with the MacArthur, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations, which have pledged $100 million over a five-year period to help strengthen African universities. Targeted initiatives include improving universities’ capacity to utilize technology, including the Internet. Currently, the Partnership is in the midst of an effort to help African universities gain control of the cost and training issues surrounding online access. The initial focus has been to facilitate the forming of a coalition of African universities that will be better positioned to negotiate lower bandwidth prices.

Next page: Lowering bandwidth prices will promote Internet connectivity at African universities, but managing bandwidth use may be an even more important challenge.

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