More Africans are riding the information super highway

AS RECENTLY as 2000, sub-Saharan Africa as a whole reportedly had fewer fixed telephone lines than Manhattan.

These mere 17 years later, the significance of this contrast –staggeringly significant at the time though it may have been – seems almost quaintly anachronistic. With the mobile revolution, Africa has casually assumed its place in the global conversation without having to worry about laying down, or ripping up, hundreds of millions of kilometres of phone cable.

Back in 1996, however, it was a concern. It takes almost a leap of imagination to think back over the ensuing two decades and appreciate how the digital environment has changed. It is estimated that 345.6 million Africans use the internet today.

Surfing the internet is plain sailing in the West but hits the rocks in Africa where the availability and affordability of the tools – a computer, modem and a working telephone line – cannot be so easily taken for granted.

But while the constraints are real, that does not mean that the information super highway once it touches Africa peters out into the wilderness of the bush.

A small but growing list of sub-Saharan African countries already have full-connectivity to the global network of computers that is the internet.

These at the moment are Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Unofficial access is available in Zimbabwe, while the rest of the continent has to make do with the bare bones of e-mail and off-line Fidonets.

Getting Africa up to speed, and sensitising governments to the importance of providing a regulatory and infrastructural framework conducive to building an internet culture, is the goal of a hard-working group of African telematics devotees within civil society and government.

A high-level Working Group on Information and Communication Technologies in Africa, which met in Ethiopia last year under the auspices of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), is spearheading an African Networking Initia- tive among decision- makers which aims to harness the developmental and economic advantages of global networking.

The Capacity Building for Electronic Communications in Africa, a project started in 1993, aims to have an impact in up to 24 African countries through the Pan African Development Information System ( Padis) based in Ethiopia.

On the ground, NGOs have been avid netters, hooking up to global networks such as GreenNet of the Association for Progressive Communications and attempting to spread the benefits locally. And there is also a growing number of commercial providers, selling access to the more than 6.5 million documents, according to the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, available on the world wide web last year.

The use of the internet, because of the types of clients at the moment in Africa, is less about the trivia and entertainment that personifies surfing and the chat rooms in the West. It is more about the local application of the hard information and the globalisation of issuebased advocacy that telematics also provides.