AFRICA-DEVELOPMENT: More than just internet connections required
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by Gumisai Mutume
TORONTO, Jun 24 (IPS) -- As the development of the World Wide Web roars
ahead, only eight African capitals remain locked out of the global informa-
tion highway without any immediate hope of logging in.
The capital cities of Cape Verde, Comoros, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Mauri-
tania, Sao Tome and Principe, Somalia and Western Sahara still do not have
full Internet connectivity, nor do they have any known plans of getting
hooked up soon, say experts at the Global Knowledge Forum being held here.
While the fact that Africa will virtually be fully on-line represents a ma-
jor leap ahead for a continent that barely had four countries hooked up in
1993, the major concern now haunting developers is the lack of local, rele-
vant content produced by Africans for themselves.
Making the Internet relevant to the majority of the 4.7 billion people liv-
ing in developing countries is one of the major challenges facing the 2,000
policy-makers from 124 countries, non-governmental organisations and finan-
ciers who travelled to Toronto to attend the June 22-25 Forum.
"There is no point in having full Internet access unless there is content,"
Mike Jensen, an independent Internet consultant based in Johannesburg,
South Africa, told the conference, co-hosted by the World Bank and the Ca-
nadian government.
Pinpointing another source of concern, Jensen noted that 70 percent of Af-
rica's people live in remote, rural areas and therefore need innovations
such as using satellites for Internet services.
Out of the countries now with full Internet connectivity, only Burkina
Faso, Mauritius, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa and Zimbabwe have local
dial-up facilities outside of their major cities.
In this regard, Venancio Massingue, director of the Computer Centre at the
Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique, took a swipe at some donor agen-
cies. These, he said, are only interested in wiring African capitals, where
the country offices of international institutions such as the World Bank
and International Monetary Fund, and expatriate communities are based.
Even in capitals, huge costs rule out access to the Internet for the major-
ity of people and, as a result, the Internet in Africa may remain a tool of
the elite for a long time.
"Without competition, the average cost of a low-volume Internet account is
about 65 dollars a month, nearly the per capita income of Mozambique," ar-
gues Jensen.
Second-rate telephone lines are another drawback in many African nations.
Africa has the least developed telephone infrastructure in the world and
not much progress is being made in improving rural connectivity on a conti-
nent where 12 percent of the planet's population share two percent of its
telephone lines.
"Access that is affordable. Access in remote rural areas and access to
women," are priority areas, according to Karen Banks of GreenNet, a non-
governmental Internet service provider based the United Kingdom and one of
several organisations that have been linked to building a communications
network in Africa.
A number of large-scale projects to develop telecommunications on the con-
tinent remain on the drawing boards, such as AT&T's 'Africa One' initiative
intended to necklace the continent with a cyber-optic cable. It is yet to
be finalised.
In the meantime, experts say, people as producers of information needs to
be the major shift. When African intellectuals hook on to the Net, it is to
consult information about the continent created largely by Western coun-
tries, notes Massingue.
Lishan Adam, Connectivity Project Officer at the UN Economic Commission of
Africa is also worried about the uni-directional flow of information.
"Whose content is it?" Adam wondered. "Is it really going to serve the poor
rural communities?"
Adam added that once communities begin providing information relevant to
themselves, "translation will be required to make it accessible ..."
The Internet, serving some 50 million people worldwide, remains largely an
English-language medium characterised by the traditional patterns of infor-
mation flow-countries of the North flooding those of the South and setting
the agenda.
Some projects have taken off to develop relevant content such as an initia-
tive by the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to
transfer printed material in African libraries onto the Net, an InfoDev
programme in South Africa to produce secondary school material and Health-
net, which is trying to bring health information to doctors in Africa.
However, African Internet watchers fear that the sector will soon be domi-
nated by commercial interests and this will further marginalise the poor
majority. What is emerging is that large Western service providers such as
CompuServe, EUnet and Global One are moving onto the continent and are
likely to grab a substantial share of the market there.
Gumisai Mutume
Inter Press Service
mailto:ipshre@harare.iafrica.com
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