TECHNOLOGY-AFRICA: A Long Way to Bridge the Digital Divide

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Aug 21 2002 (IPS) - As Non-government organisations (NGOs) become more reliant on Information and Communications Technology (ICT), two emphases are being taken to computer use.

The first is a need to bridge – or at least narrow – the digital divide that separates the computer ôhaves” among the rich and in developed countries and the ôhave nots” among the poor and developing nations.

Secondly, NGOs are becoming savvy users of the Internet to disseminate information and attract attention and donor funding with organisation web sites.

ôOur web site allows us to kill two birds with one stone. We can get our message across, and expand our ability to solicit aid more easily than with expensive faxes sent from Africa,” says Andrea Mavuso of the SOS Children’s Village in Mbabane, Swaziland, which offers housing, food and education to street children.

Johannesburg this week is hosting the 2002 Highway Africa, a conference for journalists who cover ICT news. Rhodes University’s School of Journalism is drawing computer experts, sociologists, business leaders and NGOs to speak about advances on the Information Superhighway.

The conference theme of ôBridging the Digital Divide” is a departure from earlier emphasis in the ICT sector on technology, the latest computer developments and news of the Internet.

One of the keynote addresses features this credo: ôBecause of the obvious value of the Internet to raise living standards, strengthen grass-roots democracy, empower women and improve health, efforts to make ICT technology widely available is a compelling story.

At its heart, the talk about bridging the digital divide is about providing Africa tools to create a self-sustaining and prospering continent finally free of donor dependency, where information access supports democratic institutions, and where ordinary people are empowered as never before.”

These are lofty goals, but just how can the Internet accomplish them on an impoverished continent where so much ôdigital divide” has to be narrowed? The numbers are daunting. In the technologically advanced and wealthy industrialised nations, one out of four North Americans and Europeans use the Internet, compared to one Internet user out of 5,000 people in Africa. Ninety-six percent of computers connected to the Internet are in the wealthiest nations, where only 15 percent of the world’s people live. The number of telephones in the 50 least developed countries is 1 percent of the number of phones in the United States.

ôThe digital divide will not be bridged until the quality of education improves in Africa,” says Phillip Bastock, a computer consultant from Britain, who works in Southern African nations. ôThere is a correlation between education and Internet use, just as there is a correlation between more educated people earning higher incomes and their use of computers, because computer hardware can be purchased and Internet access fees can be paid if you have the money.”

Mozambique, for example, has a 30 percent literacy rate. A web page is currently indecipherable to a majority of Mozambicans.

ôInformation is literally power, and there are some governments who wish to block the free flow of information that would empower the citizenry and thus jeopardise certain governing elite. If the digital divide is to be eliminated, democratic institutions must be assured. Every person’s right to access information has to be honoured,” says Bastock.

NGOs, assisted by donor organisations and various United Nations agencies, have come to rely on the Internet to both communicate by e-mail and through web sites. But in concrete terms, what are they doing to bridge the divide this year?

The NGO bridges.org, based in South Africa, has a mandate to help communities in developing countries get connected by providing free computers, software and e-mail accounts.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation and Namibia’s Department of Agriculture have started a pilot programme to teach 90 farmers on communal lands how to retrieve information from the Internet. Data will be provided in the 11 languages spoken in Namibia, which shows the complexity but not impossibility of disseminating information to people whose education does not include knowledge of the English language.

An NGO called ‘Computers for Africa’ rehabilitates some of the 20 million used computers thrown out by American businesses each year, and makes them available to NGOs in East Africa, where there are 5 telephones per 1,000 people, compared to 981 phones per 1000 people in the United States.

In Swaziland, the Computer Education Trust, funded by a local businessperson, Natie Kirsch, is providing 950 computers to 49 schools this year. Kirsch, who has as his goal to make every Swazi schoolchild computer literate, says, ôIt is very gratifying to see that the schools are cherishing their new computer equipment. They are putting it to use teaching ICT skills to students.”

Uganda has received an initial 5-million- U.S.-dollar grant from the World Bank to set up Internet and computer training centres in rural districts. Internet content written for local distribution will be made user friendly as it is tailored to Ugandans.

The NGO One World is launching an Open Knowledge network to expand local African content on the web. The operating belief is that web use will increase in Africa and the digital divide will shrink if people can access information that is locally generated. A daily feed of information will be sent to a local distribution point in a country, and from this hub it will be disseminated to villages. The system will be interactive, allowing villagers to send out requests for information and suggestions for government policy.

The network is being financed by the G-8 Opportunities Task Force that is following the protocol of last year’s Genoa Plan of Action aimed at narrowing the digital divide between the G-8 group of developed countries and the developing world. Part of the plan is to increase local content on the web, thus making it more accessible to African users.

The G-8 Digital Opportunities Task Force is allocating 2 million U.S. dollars in seed money to small and medium enterprises in Africa so they may acquire information and communications technology, opening access to global markets, all in the name of bridging the digital divide. Hewlett-Packard is providing the hardware.

Despite these efforts, by 2005 only one half of one percent of Africans will have Internet access. ôNGOS know that our effectiveness using ICT technology will always be limited until more people we need to reach have to computer tools to receive our message and interact with us,” says Mavuso.