Africa Renewal is an information programme provided by the Africa Section of the United Nations Department of Public Information. It produces up-to-date information and analysis of the major economic and development challenges facing Africa today. A recent update from Africa Renewal about the development of a high-speed telecommunications cable that will span the continent explains how this development could go a long way to bridging the "digital divide". Here is a summary of that report.
HARNESSING THE INTERNET FOR DEVELOPMENT:
African countries seek to widen access, produce content
By Gumisai Mutume
While Africa's post-independence leaders dreamed of linking their countries through road and railway networks, today's leaders are on the cusp of making their own dream come true - connecting African countries with each other and the rest of the world through a high-speed telecommunications cable. Originating in Durban, South Africa, a broadband telecommunications cable will stretch underwater for 9,900 kilometres through the Indian Ocean to its final destination, Port Sudan. The East Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) will, among other functions, support broadband Internet connections that transmit information at up to 40 times the speed of dial-up telephone links. Such high-speed connections allow users to download large files such as video clips or listen to online radio.
EASSy is one of the ICT projects of the continental development plan, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). In June, African telecommunications and technology ministers endorsed the immediate start of the project, which is expected to cost $300 million and is due for completion in 2007. The project will significantly cut telecommunications costs within Africa and with countries overseas, thereby helping the continent to bridge the "digital divide" - the gulf between people and countries with access to knowledge and information and those without.
The EASSy project is part of an African plan to ensure that all countries are connected to each other through a broadband system. These countries will in turn be linked to the rest of the world through other submarine cables. Currently, the lack of adequate broadband connections has been a major hindrance to Africa's promotion of greater ICTs use. There are few direct high-capacity Internet links between African countries. High-capacity transmission lines are mainly concentrated in North America, Europe and Asia.
As a result, about 75 per cent of Internet traffic in Africa first goes through Europe or the U.S. and is then routed back, a very costly process. For example, while Benin and Burkina Faso are neighbours, Internet traffic between them passes through France or Canada. Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) estimates that Africa spends $400 million each year on the use of international bandwidth for national or regional data. In fact, in many cases, e-mails sent between two Internet service providers in the same country are sent abroad and then rerouted back because domestic "Internet exchange points" are lacking.
The slow pace of Internet development on the continent is reflected in low levels of use. Only 2.6 per cent of Africans have access to the Internet, compared with 10 per cent of Asians, 36 per cent of Europeans and 69 per cent of North Americans. When broken down by country, the level of Internet use in most of Africa is even lower, since two countries, Egypt and South Africa, account for nearly half of all users.
Low-speed transmission lines also mean that Internet users in Africa find it much faster and cheaper to download material rather than to post their own onto the Internet. This leaves Africans primarily as consumers instead of producers of Web content. To redress this imbalance, and in line with pledges to develop a more inclusive Internet that they made at last year's World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunisia, African countries have initiated a series of ICTs projects. In addition to EASSy, these include a venture by South Africa to involve the public in the development of its Internet domain ".za", attempts to translate software and other Web tools into African languages to allow more Africans to produce their own Web content, and numerous efforts to broaden the use of the Internet for distance learning.
Language diversity
Another area of growing concern is the absence of African languages on the Internet. The dominance of European languages has limited the spread of Internet use by excluding those not fully literate in those languages. African information ministers meeting in Dakar, Senegal, last year urged new programmes to promote African and other languages on the Internet. This, they argued, would help "fight against the linguistic digital divide and ensure the participation of all in the emerging new society."
The original design of the Internet's domain name system had a strong technical bias towards English. Even languages such as French, Spanish and German are at a disadvantage when it comes to naming Internet hosts, because they use accented characters that the system does not support. In addition, existing tools to create Web pages, such as HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language), are based on English or other Western languages, requiring programmers to be functionally literate in those languages to generate content.
"Limiting people to the use of ICTs in a foreign language tends to exacerbate the digital divide, makes ICTs adoption long, difficult and expensive, and impoverishes local cultures," notes a study by the Pan African Localisation Project. Funded by the IDRC and implemented by non-governmental African ICTs and language development organisations Kabissa and Bisharat, the project seeks to "localise" software and Internet content by using Arabic and African languages.
The three-year project, launched in 2005, will survey the current state of localisation in Africa, hold a training workshop for experts and develop a Web-based database of resources. "This is a timely and exciting project that has the potential to speed the evolution and increase the impact of information technology in Africa," says Mr. Don Osborn of Bisharat.
Creating local content and laying high-speed cables to carry it will make it easier to use the Internet as an effective tool for education. Governments generally acknowledge that building more classrooms and training more teachers to reach those currently outside the school system cannot by themselves lead to universal primary education by 2015, one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by UN member states in 2000.
"Providing connectivity through the use of the Internet and computers to schools and public centres is one of the priorities of governments," says Ms. Josephine Ouédraogo, acting deputy executive secretary at the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), headquartered in Addis Ababa. "ICTs have already begun to exert massive transformation of education systems worldwide. The best teachers in the world are becoming available anywhere at the click of a mouse."
Ethiopia, one of Africa's poorest nations, has networked all of its 500 secondary schools and 12 universities. Established distance learning services in Botswana, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria and Tanzania are being augmented by ICTs applications. And in many African countries multipurpose community telecentres are hooked up to the African Virtual University, an online college headquartered in Kenya, and schools are connected across national boundaries to other schools in 31 countries under a programme facilitated by SchoolNet Africa.
Beyond the need for greater financing for such efforts, the challenges of broadening Internet access "require a new commitment to work together if we are to realise the benefits of the information society," says International Telecommunication Union Secretary-General Yoshio Utsumi. "Seeing the fruits of today's powerful knowledge-based tools in the most impoverished economies will be the true test of an engaged, empowered and egalitarian information society."
www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/vol20no2/202-harnessing-internet.html
A new Commonwealth initiative to bridge the deepening digital divide across its member countries was unveiled by Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, UK, on 3 August 2006.
Commonwealth Connects is a programme that promotes development in information and communications technology (ICTs) among member countries, particularly least developed countries and their communities. The aim is to facilitate local, regional and international linkages through the World Wide Web that will enhance access to information, networking opportunities and electronic commerce.
Addressing a gathering of Commonwealth partner agencies, high commissioners and members of the media at the launch of Commonwealth Connects and its website, the Secretary-General said the occasion was "a very important landmark".
"Today sees the birth of a global website for sharing best practice and best policy in ICT programmes and initiatives from right across the Commonwealth," stated Mr. McKinnon. "The site will be a critical element of building a Commonwealth IT community. Imagine the power of technology to bridge the digital divide to transform individual lives, communities and entire communities."
Commonwealth Connects focuses on five specialised areas: building policy and regulatory capacity; modernising education and skills development; entrepreneurship for poverty reduction; promoting local access and connectivity; and regional networking, local content and knowledge.
Commonwealth Heads of Government endorsed Commonwealth Connects as an outgrowth of its previous "Commonwealth Action Programme for the Digital Divide" and identified key implementation partners that could assist with the execution of the programme, namely the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Commonwealth Network of Information Technology for Development (COMNET-IT), the Commonwealth Business Council, the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, the Commonwealth Telecommunication Organisation, the Commonwealth of Learning, the Commonwealth Foundation, the Government of Malta, the Government of India, the Government of Mozambique and the Government of Trinidad & Tobago.
The first project launched under the Commonwealth Connects programme - "Rebuilding After the Tsunami: Using ICTs for Change" - was also unveiled at the event. This project aims to offer quality web development, e-communication services and training to organisations working on tsunami rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts in Sri Lanka and India.
Other Commonwealth Connects projects will involve the provision of radio-based business training for women in Cameroon to help them in micro-enterprise; and the distribution of refurbished computers donated by Caribbean governments and citizens to local schools for computer training.
www.commonwealthconnects.net
SchoolNet Africa is moving its Secretariat from South Africa to Senegal. It will operate under the auspices of the Groupe pour l'Etude et l'Enseignement de la Population (GEEP), an African non-governmental organisation (NGO) hosted by the School of Education at Cheikh Anta Diop University. The new Secretariat is being led by Ms. Nafissatou Mbodji from Senegal as Executive Director and Mr. Amr Hamdy from Egypt as Deputy Executive Director. SchoolNet Africa is an NGO that works to improve education access, quality and efficiency through the use of ICTs in African schools. The organisation works with learners, teachers, policymakers and practitioners through country-based schoolnet organisations across Africa.