TECHNOLOGY-AFRICA: Lagging Behind In The Information Superhighway

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Lewis Machipisa

ADDIS ABABA, Oct 27 1999 (IPS) - Ethiopian Beterkawa has never made or received a telephone call before. He is not even sure if his wife has ever made a telephone call.

“Telephone, very expensive,” says Beterkawa, a shoe cleaner in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. His friends, Beneyame, a student, and Woondwossen, a taxi driver, have never touched a computer but have heard something about the internet.

“You need a big dish like they have at the big hotel, Sheraton,” says Woondwossen, confusing the satellite dish at Axum Hotel which links up hotel guests to Cable News Network (CNN), British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the South African M-net televisions station.

The first African Development Forum (ADF) held in Addis Ababa on Oct 24-28 is seeking ways to make people like Beterkawa and his friends not only to be able to make a telephone call, but also to join the information superhighway.

The forum, whose theme, “The Challenge to Africa: Globalisation and Information Technology”, marks the beginning of a process initiated by the Addis Ababa-based UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) for an African-driven development agenda.

ADF is born out of the conviction that Africa cannot achieve sustainable development unless the policies, strategies and actions are designed, managed and owned by Africans themselves.

But, in the rush to jump into the information band wagon, participants have warned Africa to guard against the temptation of leapfrogging into the information age.

First Africa has to put its house in order. This is because much of the rural areas where more than three-quarters of the Africa’s estimated 700 million population live has no electricity. Roads are bad, schools and hospitals are few. Illiteracy rates in Africa are the lowest in the world. One in four African live in abject poverty and the figure is growing by the day.

Technology may have brought the use of solar energy in rural Africa, but the gadgets remain beyond the reach of the majority. Just like with computers, the majority of the people may never be able to afford a computer. In Zimbabwe, for example, the cost of the most affordable computer is the equivalent of a year’s income of those earning minimum wage. They are in the majority. Millions more are unemployed and uneducated.

“Consequently, competence in the ICT (Information Communication Technology) implies literacy and the education of the people,” notes Arnaldo Valente Nhavoto, Mozambique’s minister of education. “In the case of Mozambique, an illiteracy rate of 60 percent in a population of more than 16 million constitutes an enormous challenge for the new millennium.”

Across much of Africa, millions have never made a telephone call let alone use the internet. Statistics from the Technology Centre for Africa says, only two countries, Seychelles and South Africa have more than one percent of its population using the internet. Even for Seychelles, the figure is hardly impressive, with 1.272 percent of the Indian Ocean Island using the internet.

Less than one percent of people in Africa use the internet, although the continent is home to 12 percent of the world’s population.

Only 0.006 percent of Burkina Faso’s population use the internet. Gambia has 0.12 percent, while diamond-rich Botswana 0.069. Tele-density for main telephone lines per 100 inhabitants in Ethiopia is 6, Kenya’s one, while Reunion has 35.6 telephones for every 100 people.

In North America, an average of 31 percent of total population uses the internet. Western Europe has 17.93 while Central America has 0.872 and East Asian 7.661.

That Africans are not hooking up to the ICT is now partly being attributed to the continent’s poor development. The new orthodox is that those countries with more people using ICTs are better placed for economic advancement.

While strengthening Africa’s information infrastructure is badly needed and a need to link ICT into the Africa development agenda, questions are being raised whether the continent is ready for the momentous step forward.

While ICT has liberated lives, created stock market miracles and improved economies, it has only touched a fraction of the world’s population. Half of the world’s people, three billion, have never made or received a telephone, yet Manhattan alone in the U.S. has more phones than all those combined in sub-Saharan Africa.

While there is a radio station for every 30,000 in most of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, on average there is one radio station for every two million people in most of the developing world. There is more internet hosts in Estonia than all of sub-Saharan Africa.

“The hardware disparity between the poor and rich nations is not nearly as troubling as the scarcity of information which directly undermines the ability of a nation not only keep its citizens informed and educated, but also alive,” noted Noah Samara, chief executive of WorldSpace, addressing the African Development Forum.

The idea to involve the private sector in speeding the introduction of information technology was, however, turned down. Delegates said the private sector in many African countries did not have a strong base, and was not prepared to embark upon technological ventures for markets too small and ill equipped in skills to justify its investment and risks.

With Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) dwindling rapidly and foreign direct investment slow in coming, sub-Saharan African countries do not have the funding to finance the continent’s entry into the Information Age.

Providing the infrastructure that would facilitate Africa’s integration into information technologies, which at present existed only in scattered urban centres, was a specialised and very costly undertaking. Development disparities in different African countries would also pose a host of problems.

Agreeing that it was an overly ambitious efforts to leapfrog African development using technology, K.Y Amoako. Executive Secretary of the ECA, organiser of the ADF, stresses that Africa needs time, and resources. “No one can do this for us. Africa must have its own answers, its own policy dynamics just as is the case of every other region,” he said.

“The issues for Africa will not be whether these changes take place, but how much we can be part of the changes. If we do not prepare for a development based more on science and technology, the marginalisation we will feel in the future will eclipse the marginalisation we feel now,” Amaoko warned.

Despite the obstacles, the consensus of the participants was that Africa could not stay out of the Information Age, whatever hurdles had to be overcome.