By IPS Correspondents
HARARE, Jul 2 1999 (IPS)

Making a phone call or surfing the Internet has become a central feature of everyday life the world over except in Africa.

However a recent 600 million dollar project to install a submarine cable connecting the continent with the rest of the world is one of many projects that are set to revolutionise African communications into the new millennium, industry experts hope.

The continent is currently outpacing the world average in the growth of Internet hosts, which increased by 38 percent between July 1998 and January this year compared to an 18 percent world average growth, says connectivity consultant Mike Jensen.

South Africa has seen the largest explosion in connectivity and boasts about 800,000 of the continent’s 1.2 million Internet users. And unlike on the rest of the continent, South African users are both rural and urban. Virtually all of Africa has access to the Internet, but only in the urban centres and then only accessible to a small elite.

Driving the continent’s connectivity drive, South Africa last month saw the long awaited launch of a 15,000-kilometre-long submarine, fibre-optic cable funded by 40 nations and which is expected to cater for Africa’s telecommunication needs for the next 25 years.

The first phase is a south-west cable linking Africa with Europe, while the second phase will be a 13,800 kilometre link with the Far East.

South Africa’s Telkom director, Sizwe Nxasana says the project provides a safe, secure, fully digital and reliable global highway that will effectively link Portugal to west Africa to Cape Town to India and Malaysia …(and has a capacity ) equal to 4.83-million simultaneous telephone conversations or over 8000 digital television transmissions.”

Telkom is South Africa’s telecommunications provider.

Work on the project is expected to start shortly and the system should be operational by 2001 in line with the Independent Commission for World Wide Telecommunications Development call for every human being to be in reach of a telephone by the early part of the next century.

Seen as the continent of the future, western donors have been falling over each other to fund connectivity projects in Africa as they prepare to tap into a growing important global market.

There is Leland, a 15 million dollar five-year long project sponsored by the U.S. government to provide full Internet connectivity to 20 African countries. Another is the World Bank Infodev programme that funds information for development programmes.

The UN Development Programme (UNDP) hatched its own initiative at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and the International Telecommunications Union is running a rural telephony project among others.

But the growing argument has been in favour of Africa taking charge of the process and building its own telecommunications infrastructure. In 1995, policymakers of 53 African countries endorsed the Africa Information Society Initiative (AISI) which stressed the importance of Africa building its information structure as a tool for development.

Well-meaning many of the foreign funded projects may be, most are still to bear fruit because at the dawn of the millennium there is still one telephone line for every 100 Africans compared to 10 lines per 100 people in Latin America or 64 for 100 people in the United States. Of all the phones in Africa, nearly 90 percent are in South Africa.

Muriuku Mureithi of telecommunications investment consultancy Summit Strategies notes that between 1991 and 1995 only 20 African countries managed to increase telephone coverage to match population growth and therefore maintain teledensity. The rest have witnessed a downward trend.

Among the subscribers of electronic communication services in Africa, there is a large number of international organisations with international staff and expatriate individuals within national organisations, notes researcher Michel Menou of the Pan African Information … This poses a special problem.

Expatriate users might have different experiences and needs of electronic communications than African users. In principle, many of them have temporary assignments in the country where they serve.

As electronic communications facilities become available they may rush to use them, creating some kind of bush fire effect…after they have left and their proportion in the overall subscribers population has significantly diminished, the patterns of use they have induced will only continue once they become part of the corporate culture.

Central Africa is the poorest region on the continent in terms of telematics (a combination of computer, telephone, and broadcast technology) development.

Southern and northern Africa lead the continent where even poor countries such as Mozambique, considered one of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world, are making a commitment to telecommunications.

Mozambique spends 5 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on telecommunications among the highest in the world. However, like elsewhere on the continent, immediate, positive effects are yet to be felt, notes the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).

Affordability of telecommunications is a major obstacle to expansion of networks and services, notes ECA.

If Africa remains on its present course, with the lowest teledensities in the world, with the fewest computers of any region, isolated from the information and knowledge available at the fingertips elsewhere, it has no chance to compete globally,

Mozambique’s public telecommunications network, for instance, remains thin with a teledensity of 0.36 lines per 100 people.

Mozambique has been reduced to its present state by a 17-year long civil war which ended in 1992 and has confined 60 percent of its population below the poverty line, according to official estimates.

Telecommunication expansion has also been affected by the wave of conflicts on the continent. More than a dozen countries are in a state of war, and many are struggling to recover from past conflicts.

Besides, more than 70 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s people live in rural areas, and it is expected that the rural population will continue to outnumber the urban population for the next three decades.

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