[Ict4devwg] New information and communication technology is unlocking potential and emancipating Africans – By Klaus Boldt

[Vern Weitzel]

Subject: 	[bytesforall_readers] New information and communication
technology is unlocking potential and emancipating Africans – By Klaus Boldt
Date: 	Mon, 25 May 2009 06:23:52 +0530
From: 	Frederick "FN" Noronha <fredericknoronha at gmail.com>
Reply-To: 	bytesforall_readers at yahoogroups.com
To: 	bytesforall_readers <bytesforall_readers at yahoogroups.com>



http://www.african-times.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1095

Closing the digital gap

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New information and communication technology is unlocking potential
and emancipating Africans – By Klaus Boldt

Small farmers stay in touch with markets, opposition groups organize
into networks, aid organizations coordinate activities, ministries
improve their services – Internet, email and mobile phones are
improving daily life in poor countries.

Mrs. Muyonjo was fed up cycling 32 kilometers to the next small town
just to recharge the battery on her cell phone. The housewife lives in
the small village of Ivukula in the district of Iganga in eastern
Uganda, which still lacks electricity. People there offer mobile
charging services but at too high a price. And the last time she went
there, they replaced her battery with an older one that lasted for
just one day.

“I looked at what was readily available and came up with my own
charger,” said Mrs. Muyonjo. She bound five ordinary household
batteries together and connected the positive and negative terminals
to her cell phone charging device. It worked.

As a result, Mrs. Muyonjo was featured on the website of the Women of
Uganda Network (www.wougnet.org). It illustrates the kinds of
difficulties Africans have to deal with in using modern information
and telecommunications technologies (ICT). But it also demonstrates
their ambition and inventiveness – if they see a chance to improve
their living conditions.

Modern ICT has become a routine and indispensable part of life for
most Europeans. In Africa, far fewer people have access to the
Internet but their numbers are growing. At the beginning of the
century, only one in 160 Africans was online. By 2007, that number had
risen to around 5.5 percent, according to figures from the
International Telecommunications Union (ITU). In Germany, it is 72
percent.

But there are even major differences within Africa. In Liberia, a
World Bank survey found that only 0.03 percent of the population had
access to the Internet, while in the Seychelles, that number is 34
percent. In South Africa, 84 out of every 100 people own a mobile
telephone, whereas only one in 100 does in Ethiopia.

The Internet, at least, is the first technological innovation not
arriving in the African continent as a ‘Third World technology.’ In
the past, obsolete equipment and machinery, taken out of service in
the rich countries, was often shipped to Africa. Apart from investment
costs for networks and broadband connections as well as computer
hardware, all the necessary Internet applications – web servers,
databanks, browsers, email programs and other tools – are available
for free and at the same quality as in the industrialized nations.

It is a new technology of “leapfrogging” – bypassing development
stages. The biggest hurdles are the weak infrastructure and the lack
of education among the broad mass of the population. Two-thirds of
Africans south of the Sahara live outside cities, usually without
electricity or a telephone. But businesses require a certain critical
mass of users of high-tech products to make investment attractive.

In many African countries, the private sector is building telecom
networks and providing mobile solutions for telephones and the
Internet. German development aid to Africa also depends heavily on
private sector commitment in the IT sector. But that is also not
without risk as investors’ main concern is profit, not social
benefits.

“One of the consequences of this is the development of a conventional
wisdom that leaves the domain of infrastructure development to the
market – to operators and investors that do not always see the broader
social value of communications in society, to governments that lack
capacity and often clear strategy and to international institutions
that tend to approach it in a limited and ‘technocratic’ way,” warns
the report “Global Information Society Watch 2008.”

In light of high prices for Internet access and lack of competition in
many countries, the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and
Development (BMZ) now plans to advise African governments on
regulating telecommunications markets. “That is necessary to offer
investors an incentive to lower prices for consumers and also to
provide services to rural areas,” said Susanne Dorasil, head of the
economic policy unit at the BMZ. She sees enormous potential for ICT,
especially in the areas of education, health, e-government,
micro-credit and in exchange of economic and trade information.

At the multilateral level, Germany supports the World Bank’s
Information for Development Program and the Development Gateway
Foundation. Their goal is to narrow the digital divide between the
developing and industrialized world. Since the turn of the century,
the state-owned GTZ development agency, which carries out the German
government’s development policy objectives, has implemented more than
150 projects with an ICT focus, as well as supporting home-grown
innovation in Africa.

One example is the use of mobile phones as cash dispensers/automatic
tellers. Under the name M-PESA (Mobile Money for the Unbanked),
Vodacom subsidiary Safaricom offers customers in eastern Africa the
ability to remit money at designated service points and send the
receipt to the payee via text message. They can then take the message
to a shop or gas station and get a cash payout. That represents
significant progress as only around 20 percent of Africans have a bank
account.

The Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission has set up the Anonymous
Whistleblower’s System with GTZ support. Using the software system,
Business Keeper, developed in Germany, cases of corruption can be
reported confidentially. Frustrated by a complete lack of information
on their parliamentarians’ voting records, two young bloggers in
Nairobi set up the website www.mzalendo.com “to keep an eye on the
Kenyan Parliament.”

“This experiment in parliamentary e-participation is exceptional even
on an international level,” according to the Office of Technology
Assessment at the German parliament (TAB) in its report “Development
Through Networking.”

The Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange KACE is another project that
illustrates Kenya’s role at the forefront of ICT implementation in
Africa. The website, partly funded by the German Hanns Seidel
Foundation, facilitates the exchange of economic data with the
eventual aim of becoming a virtual marketplace.

The platform www.pambazuka.org publishes a weekly electronic
newsletter on political, economic and social issues. It has more than
1,000 contributors and a global readership of half a million people.
The Internet presence of state institutions, media and NGOs is helping
Africa to make its voice clearly heard around the world.

The TAB study identifies economic development and trade, democracy
promotion, e-government, as well as education and research as key
areas for ICT implementation in Africa. Although the continent is in
last place in a global comparison of Internet use and broadband
connections, the mobile phone sector is growing faster than in any
other region. “In the African context, the mobile phone capitalizes on
the innate verbal of African culture and society, perhaps explaining
its rapid uptake,” said Ben Akoh of the Open Society Initiative of
Western Africa (OSIWA).

Internet use in Africa is still mainly the preserve of privileged and
wealthy sections of the population. But so-called alternative elites
are also using modern telecommunications channels to build networks
and get their message across in the international NGO community. They
use mass text messaging, email or Web interfaces to conduct political
campaigns or disseminate information about the latest conflict zones.

For Ingo Imhoff, head of the ICT department at the GTZ, the most
important issue is how useful information technology is to the end
user. “Our initiatives are focused not on the technology but how it
can be used,” he said. “You have to make it clear early on what the
benefits are and keep stressing them.”

“The Internet already brings economic benefits within Africa but it
is important that policy makers understand how to enable its
opportunities in their own countries,” said Dawit Bekele, regional
bureau manager of the Internet Society for Africa.

German development aid supports ICT projects that improve efficiency
for the tax officials in Tanzania or a hospital administration in
Senegal. The non-profit organization InWEnt, which promotes human
resource development, has started an education and networking
initiative that aims to improve the spread of free and open source
software in southern and East Africa.

In the final analysis, the uses and quality of the services offered
will decide the success of ICT ventures. But sometimes the services
provided by the companies are just too tempting, as illustrated by
Martin Zint’s experience. Zint, who helps train radio journalists in
West Africa, had a problem in Chad with his mobile phone one day but
was unable to get through to his provider’s free hotline. So he went
to the phone company’s office in the capital N’Djamena. There, he was
told that the company had had to switch off the hotline because the
hold music was so cool that customers kept calling – just to enjoy the
tune.

Copyright © 2009 The African Times

-- 
Vern Weitzel (Mr.) BSc, BA, MA, M Env Man & Dev
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