OVERVIEW: OPPORTUNITIES AND

CHALLENGES OF THE INTERNET IN AFRICA

by Théophile Vittin

Since the end of the 1980s a new era of possibilities concerning information and communication technologies (ICTs) has begun in Africa. Satellite technology, which permits instantaneous transmission of images, has brought the continent onto international information circuits. The popularity of other information and communication technologies, such as the Internet in the 1990s, came at the same time as other monumental trends such as globalization, economic crisis and democratic change. Slowly Africans, albeit mostly in urban areas, are learning to use these new technologies.

While the written press continues to report about the development of Internet on the continent, some African observers warn of its possible disadvantages and negative effects. But the majority believe that “going online” will integrate the continent into the “information society” and facilitate, perhaps even accelerate, social and economic development.

The new technologies, particularly the Internet, hold a fascination for many. It offers great potential, especially as an aid to the work of development agencies, the media, and non-governmental organizations. The advantages of using the technologies, they point out, include low-cost communication, more efficient ways to share information and knowledge, a heightened presence and visibility for Africa, and less isolation for those studying and working in African universities and living in rural communities.

Will using ICTs radically transform life in Africa? How are they being used around the continent today? Using the Internet as an example, this article will aim to identify the advantages and disadvantages of the technology, its uses in Africa, and the challenges of making the technology more accessible.

Development of the Internet in Africa

In the majority of African nations today, international aid agencies have largely contributed to bringing ICTs such as the Internet into more widespread use, as many of the chapters in this book show. At the end of 1999, all African countries were connected to the Internet except for Eritrea. Public information campaigns about using the technology have multiplied, and national chapters of the Internet Society, a global organization concerned with evolution of communication protocols, have been established around the continent.

Use of the Internet, at first mainly confined to the aid agencies, researchers and some NGOs, rapidly spread to a growing number of users among the general public. Although it is difficult to know how many people use computers in Africa, we do know that there were about 15,000 Internet Service Providers (ISP) across the continent at the end of 1999, according to Mike Jensen, a well-known South African expert on the Internet. At the same time there were 500,000 Internet subscribers according to Mr. Jensen, among others. (Users can be online and not be a subscriber since they can connect to the Internet without using an ISP.) There were about two million Internet users in Africa in 1999; half of them were in South Africa.

However disparities in access and use of the Internet exist among African nations. As just mentioned, use in South Africa is highest, followed by Sub-Saharan Africa and then Maghreb countries and southern Africa. Within nations, although there are some exceptions, the Internet is only present in the capital or principal cities. The typical African “Internaut” is a young man, very well-educated, who belongs to the social and economic elite.

How the Technology is Used

Beyond the statistics about equipment and the number of people with access to computers and the Internet, what purposes does the technology serve in Africa? Electronic mail is one of the most popular uses, although most message boxes are shared by several people because of high costs. E-mail is certainly an easier channel through which to communicate internationally since telephone rates and prices at telecentres are so high. In Mali, for example, a one-minute telephone call to France costs 1,587 francs CFA (US$2.64), to the United Kingdom about 2,153 francs CFA (US$3.58), and to the United States and South Africa a one-minute call costs 3,540 francs CFA (US$6).

Expensive equipment has contributed to the popularity of cybercentres and other public access points to computers. For this reason statistics about the number of computer and Internet users can only be rough estimates because so many users in Africa have no alternative to cybercentres.

A multitude of other uses for the Internet exist. These include enabling Africans living abroad to engage in national debates by reading local newspapers online, participating in electronic debates and discussion groups, and buying or selling goods electronically. African artists can promote their work by advertising and organizing “virtual galleries.” People can study online and even work long-distance with teleconferencing and e-mail. And African countries can promote tourism with webpages about their cultural and natural sites of interest.

Journalists in Africa use the Internet to complement information provided by traditional news agencies; this includes online news services, radio programme banks and mail lists. These tools help African media to reduce costs, save time and be more efficient. According to the Panos Institute, 38 radio stations on the continent have a website, and 14 of these diffuse many of their broadcasts online. Some major African news organizations publish online versions of the news; they include Africa Online and the Panafrican News Agency (PANA), which records 100,000 hits per day (see civil society website list at end of book).

Several pilot projects in Africa have demonstrated the enormous potential of information and communication technologies for development. These include using Internet for diagnosis and treatment, transfer of medical data, information on disease control, education, research, and multipurpose community telecentres, which allow rural communities access to telephones, fax machines and computers connected to the Internet.

Besides use by NGOs, the Internet is beginning to be used in some universities and scientific institutions, which helps to compensate for the lack of training and general availability of scientific and technical information on site. The few teachers who are connected to the Internet can update their lessons, and students who are online can use the technology to access information not available locally. However only a very small number of educators and pupils are online in Africa.

In addition to initiatives such as the Virtual University introduced by the World Bank and Agence de la Francophonie, and numerous long-distance learning courses, the Internet allows access for students and academics to databanks, international research networks, better visibility for African researchers, and self-learning opportunities.

For the moment electronic commerce is not popular or widespread in Africa because of the small number of online users, consumers’ weak buying power, and general underdevelopment of e-commerce on the continent. On the other hand, in South Africa e-commerce is starting to take off, with sales of US$195 million by 600 South African companies in 1998—a 140% growth in relation to sales in 1997.

Impact of Internet Use

The Internet is a new technology that Africans have not completely mastered—including the technical backup and expertise required for maintenance. It has already had a cultural impact on the mostly urban elites who use the Internet, although many of them are already “partial” to the Western way of life. On the other hand, the Internet offers direct exposure to some of the reprehensible facets of the West such as pornography, criminal networks, racist hate networks, religious sects, prostitution rings, sex tourism and services offering young Africans “the chance to find a Swiss or German spouse.”

African elites who are already used to the swift pace of online technology which Paul Virilio, a French specialist on new information technologies calls “the tyranny of real time,” are gaining more and more exposure to the rest of the world. But is this a real advantage? For example African users can inform themselves about every detail of US President Bill Clinton’s relations with an intern by reading the Starr report online, even if they have no idea what is going on several dozen kilometres outside of their city. This exposure, which seems to be based on a latent desire to be everywhere at the same time and the almost magical power the Internet seems to possess, is reinforced by the West’s continual domination of Internet’s contents. All these add to the risk of cultural domination of Africans by the West.

At the same time, however, the Internet contributes to the free flow of information and helps promote pluralism: censure attempts by numerous African states have been thwarted through the technology. For example, the international NGO Reporters Without Borders maintains a website that provides information about journalists harassed, arrested or killed when exercising their profession and promotes the right to a free press. Many other human rights organizations—such as Amnesty International and Africa Watch—have been able to augment their actions and campaigns on the continent by using the Internet.

Likewise, organizers of local development projects in Africa can communicate directly with donors or with NGOs, and intercontinental networks are beginning to form through the Internet. And at universities new relations between students and professors are beginning to form because of the “equal playing field” in accessing information that the Internet provides users. Sometimes students can even educate their teachers by using up-to-date information they’ve accessed on the Internet.

However, despite these positive developments, the Internet is reinforcing the gap between principal urban centres and rural areas in African countries. Information and communication-rich “enclaves” are becoming more and more separated from the rest of the country, where communication technology hasn’t changed in the last 20 years or more. It is interesting to note that on the continent, traffic on each telephone line continues to grow while traffic per habitant remains weak. The Internet’s development also accentuates existing inequalities between the educated and uneducated, the “information haves” and the “information have-nots,” and those who rely on cyberculture for news versus those who must rely on more traditional methods for news, including word of mouth.

Constraints and structural limits that prevent the Internet from being accessible to all Africans include weak teledensity. There are 1.85 telephone lines per 100 habitants on the continent, with 0.52 lines per 100 habitants in Sub-Saharan Africa. These statistics mask even more marked differences between the continent’s regions and countries. For example in 1996 South Africa had 10.12 lines per 100 habitants, Libya had 6.76, Namibia had 5.43, Kenya had 0.82 and Chad had 0.09 lines per 100 habitants.

Within African countries, despite some exceptions, telephone lines are heavily concentrated in capital cities. According to the International Telecommunication Union’s African Telecommunication Indicators 1998, in Zimbabwe 53.3% of telephone lines were located in the capital city, in Uganda the number was 64.5%, in Mauritania it was 75%, and in the Central African Republic 92.2% of telephone lines were located in the capital.

In addition to dilapidated telecommunication systems, local telephone networks are faulty, tariffs are high, and the price of computer equipment beyond most people’s reach. There is a lack of access to training on using computers or going online, and very few can provide maintenance for the equipment. In order to use the Internet, one needs to be educated, competent in using a computer, and be “open” to the rest of the world.

Although it can be argued that the Internet will help integrate Africa into the information revolution and the globalizing economy, it can also be said that it will reinforce African countries’ dependence on Western technology and knowledge, as well as the resources needed to purchase computer equipment and software. This dependency will be exacerbated by the dynamics of the globalizing economy and the ideology of ultra-liberalism. And as mentioned earlier, the knowledge and technology accessed through the Internet is concentrated in and reflects Western views, values and priorities.

In the constantly deregulating and already constraining context of globalization, African nations are chronically poor and have little room to manoeuvre. This forces them to rely on international aid agencies and private operators in becoming part of the information revolution. And by not implementing coherent strategies now concerning information and communication technology, African states are passively accepting the “rules of the game” imposed by outsiders. Thus the role of the state is becoming minimal while “regulation” is carried out by the market and aid agencies. All these factors lead to arbitrary choices about, among other things, the degree and use of the Internet in Africa.

The dependence that is shaping Africa’s insertion into world communication networks goes hand in hand with the outright failure of African nations (exceptions include South Africa and Senegal) to develop and carry out proactive policies in the field of new information technologies. These same nations have been obliterated by the neologism of “the global village” or the concept of “the information society” in vogue in African capitals. This is also strongly legitimized by the argument that the Internet can help bring about development on the continent. Obviously introduction of the Internet doesn’t suffice to bring about an information revolution in Africa, promote development and democracy, or give birth to a “new society.” Technology and information are only tools; what matters is who has access and for what objectives.

New Stakes

Today the Internet is mostly used by Africans to communicate internationally, rather than within the continent. And as mentioned earlier, use is limited to a relatively small number of people; this is where the challenge of enlarging and democratizing access to the technology rests. Efforts focused on doing this include an initiative suggested by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to establish an Information Technology Service. The service, which is described in The Millenium Report submitted to the Millennium Summit in New York in September 2000, would train groups in developing countries in the uses and opportunities of information technology. It is still too early to assess implications of the Internet in Africa since relevant statistics are only estimates and quickly become outdated due to rapidly changing ways the technology is utilized. For these same reasons it is difficult to determine the Internet’s economic and social impacts. And a gap still exists between the potential benefits of ITCs and the reality on the ground, since use is low even among scientists, at universities and schools, and in areas such as health and agriculture.

One helpful approach may be to try to determine the needs of current and future Internet users, taking into account the technology’s untapped potentials. In this way it may be possible to better develop and plan activities aimed at “high priority” goals. These may include making ITCs more available for use in the health field, among grassroots development projects, promoting education, and assisting the most marginalized.

Use and promotion of the Internet within these areas can be adapted to each specific user group. But the challenge of adapting the use of ICTs to user groups must be based on a pragmatic approach that is dictated by each group’s needs and wants, rather than across-the-board decisions about the number of hookups needed, for example. It also implies that constraints to ICT use, such as illiteracy and access to electricity and telephone services, will be addressed. In addition to developing local expertise such as among African technicians and specialists, more political will needs to be aimed at using ICTs to improve the lives of the most marginalized people in Africa, keeping development initiatives alive once international donors withdraw from the projects, and a commitment to find funds from national budgets in order to promote further development of ICTs.

How will it be possible to begin addressing these multiple constraints and formidable challenges? To begin, new information and communication technologies need to receive higher priority, especially in policy initiatives. If not potentially contradictory and even surreal situations will be created: schools will be online but without desks and chairs for pupils, hospitals will have access to telemedicine and the Internet but will lack cotton and other basic supplies, and despite high demand users won’t be able to install equipment due to lack of telephone lines. The enormous potential offered by ICTs, including the Internet, help to shed light on the new stakes and dilemmas that African states will have to confront and efficiently manage.

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Voices from Africa no. 9