Africa must set off on the global information highway - or be left on the wrong side of the digital divide. This powerful message dominated one of Africa’s largest ICT events - ICTe Africa 2006. Piet van Niekerk, an journalist and analyst covering the ICT sector based in South Africa reviews proceedings at Nairobi exclusively for Developing Telecoms

Africa desperately needs to plug into the global information highway – or forever be left on the wrong side of the digital divide. This was the strong message to and from delegates at Africa’s largest Information, Communication and Technology conference – ICTe Africa 2006 – held in Kenya’s capital Nairobi. And Nairobi is without a doubt the perfect place to host an ICT conference.

For Kenya is among the countries in Africa with the largest cellphone markets. Her subscribers are expected to exceed 10 million by 2008.

According to the Global Systems for Mobile Association (GSMA) six countries in Eastern and Central Africa will very soon be among the top 15 cellphone markets in the world. By the end of 2010 GSMA predicts there will be 55 million cellphone users in Eastern and Central Africa.

The streets of Nairobi echo this prediction. Every second lamppost offers a better handset, a better connection, and a better contract. It also offers the occasional better Internet connectivity, but for the moment cellphones are the talk of this East African town.

And yet, while cellphone use is not the be-all and end-all of ICT, cellphone operators believe their impact on the market is an important part of Africa’s ICT development and ultimate “intelligent connectivity”. They also believe one of the largest problems to give all Africans access to ICT is to reduce the total cost of mobile ownership (TCO).

One of the ways to achieve this is for African governments to cut tax on handsets in order to boost mobile growth.

A vital role for ICT

This sentiment is echoed by the United Nations which – as part of its Millennium Project – also believes that ICT has a vital role to play in its plans to uplift more than 500 million people from poverty, elevate more than 250 million from hunger, and save 32 million from death by 2015.

The UN believes the provision of rural telecommunications to the disadvantaged rural areas remains the solution to usher rural areas into the information age.

For all this East Africa remains a digitally isolated place. And that was the main reason why, at the invitation of the Nepad Council, policy-makers, technicians, academics, students and NGOs gathered in the impressive Kenyatta Conference Centre to find ways to connect Africa to the matrix.

Dr Donald Keck

Africa shares in an insignificant 1.5% of this…

E-commerce

Dr Keck said global e-commerce is growing rapidly. In 2002 it was worth only US$2 billion but it grew to US$13 billion this year. Still, however, the lack of viable ICT infrastructure in Africa makes it difficult for the continent to participate effectively. Dr Keck identifies the digital divide as wide and exploding.

Of every single inhabited coastline on the planet, East Africa is the only one without a submarine telephone cable. Ironically, submarine-cable technology is not in the least modern. The first one across the Atlantic was laid by the American Cyrus Field in 1856.

At the conference Dr Qian Zbong, director of system design and implementation of Toco Telecommunication Systems, suggested that Africa’s IT solution lay in a simple 17mm thin (“the width of my little finger”) fibre-optic cable from Durban to Port Sudan. It will branch off to Dar-es-Salaam, Mogadishu, Mombassa, Djibouti, and wherever else it is needed. If not hijacked by money-making consortia, it could reduce the cost of East African connectivity by something like 90%.

That figure of 90% re-emerged in a speech by conference chairman Dr Jabulani Dhliwayo. He explained that Africa spent billions to route telephone calls – the continent’s connection to the Internet – from one African country to another, through western Europe and North America and via their satellites and cables because of its own poor telecommunication infrastructure: “Fix the infrastructure and you will have solved 90% of the problem,” Dr Dhliwayo urged.

Kai Wulff of Germany, MD of Kenya Data Networks, warned it was not as simple as that. All the connectivity and broadband technology in the world would not solve Africa’s communication problems without ensuring secure electricity, security, and other basic infrastructure.

Cellphone towers are stolen overnight, erratic electricity supply makes computer-use impossible in rural areas and bad roads create numerous other problems. Beyond this, African governments will have to come up with less draconian taxation of service providers to bring connectivity prices down.

Kai Wulff has a point. Absence of electricity makes any IT dream virtually impossible to achieve. Indeed, a regional 600 mW interconnection project to link east African countries with Southern Africa via Zambia will cost almost US$0.683 billion. After the money is found, it could consolidate Zambia’s position as an electricity exporter to Eastern and Southern Africa, but this must still actually be implemented. And the World Wildlife Fund is quoted in the quarterly Uganda Securities Exchange bulletin that the number of Africans without power will rise from the present 535 million to 586 million within the next 20 years.

On a more positive note

The conference also had its delegates who were less negative. They were notably from the Eastern Cape. Krishna Rau, Alfred Terzoli and Martin Mandioma, of the Telkom Centre of Excellence at Rhodes University in Grahamstown and the University of Fort Hare in Alice, have started developing a prototype of simple, cost-effective, integrated e-business initiatives through existing telecommunication platforms.

A field-test at Dwesa and Cwebe in the Mbashe municipality on the Wild Coast has been positive and has proved that e-business skills could be transferred via telecommunications to marginalised and semi-marginalised communities. The researchers say that using and developing existing ICT gives access to information, which leads to knowledge. Knowledge is a prerequisite for development. Therefore ICTs are considered to be promising technologies that can facilitate and kick-start social and economic development. The delegates’ successes were achieved in an area with a lack of public and regular transport, a scarcity of technical personnel, low levels of economic activity, low income per capita, an absence of electricity, and poor cellphone coverage.

Kick-start development

William Smale, a Rhodes BCom and IT graduate who runs a non-profit organisation to rebuild second-hand computers to install in rural Eastern Cape school computer labs, warned that we could not wait for ideal IT circumstances to descend on Africa before tackling the digital divide. We have to make use of what we have, adapt and survive. His project brings basic computer skills to pupils in rural schools.

What is more, William Smale’s sentiment rings true. According to a Reuters report published in the Kenyan Standard newspaper during the conference, analysts believe mobile operators should launch simple data products tailored for ordinary Africans rather than hoping that sophisticated Internet technology will catch on in the world’s poorest continent.

The analysts say that while cellphone use is high in Africa, data – which includes text messages – accounts for only 6% of usage. The immediate solution is to give Africa bottom-of-the-range technology.

Not everybody agrees with this. Kai Wulff says that the philosophy in Europe of dumping old technology in Africa “because it is good enough for Africa” costs Africa a lot of money.

Ultimately the solution lies in finding a golden mean: using existing technology to its fullest potential for information, education and e-commerce, while upgrading systems to make use of next-generation technology as soon as the emerging infrastructure allows for it.

To contact the organiser of the next ICTe Africa, due to take place in 2007 in Nairobi, visit www.nepadcouncil.org/ICTeAfrica2006