Six African Presidents from Burundi, Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Malawi, Rwanda and Senegal attended the Connect Africa Summit, held on 29 and 30 October 2007 in Kigali, Rwanda, to seek new ways to improve Africa’s information and communication technology (ICT) industry. The Summit ended with investment commitments amounting to $55 billion, with the ICT industry taking the lead. More than 1,000 participants, including information technology ministers, ICT company executives and senior international development officials, focused on interconnecting the African continent with ICT broadband infrastructure and strengthening its connectivity to the rest of the world. The Summit closed with the adoption of five goals to bridge the digital divide in Africa, which together would help achieve “a global partnership for development”, one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
“We have to be decisive and make a good political choice about how to tap into these possibilities”, said Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, who hosted the conference. He stressed that the right policies and choices have to be made in order for those technologies to be part of the solution, adding that both the technology and the financial resources were already there.
Connect Africa is a global partnership that brings together multi-stakeholders, including China, India, the European Commission, the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Arab countries, major ICT companies, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and other international organizations, to mobilize the human, financial and technical resources across Africa. It aims to bring broadband and ICT services to all African villages by 2015.
“With the entrepreneurial spirit of the African private sector working with their international partners, the support of the international community and the commitment from Governments, universal connectivity in Africa is no longer a utopian dream”, said Under-Secretary-General Sha Zukang of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, who represented Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the conference. He also noted that innovative ways were needed to extend the reach of ICT to the most remote corners of the continent.
“This is not a technology problem—the technology is waiting to be deployed”, said Craig Barrett, who serves both as Chairman of Intel Corporation and the United Nations Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and Development. Stressing that it is an implementation issue, he added: “We now need the government priorities, decisions and policies to drive the implementation of a pan-African infrastructure.”
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| Photo/ Courtesy ITU M. Zouhri |
Africa’s mobile market has been the fastest-growing of any region over the past five years and has grown twice as fast as that of the global market, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the leading UN agency for ICTs. Mobile phones now outnumber landlines by nearly 7 to 1, with almost 193 million subscribers in 2006. ITU also predicts this figure is going to grow to more than 270 million by the end of 2007. “Africa is open for business”, said ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré. “We are looking for investment through win-win partnerships in a viable marketplace by an expanding ICT industry”, he said. Wealth creation is key to achieving the MDGs, he pointed out, explaining further that new investment in ICT infrastructure will lead to create employment opportunities and increase overall economic growth.
“The development banks and other financing partners have a responsibility to step in where gaps are holding back development in the region”, said Donald Kaberuka, President of the African Development Bank (AfDB). During the two-day Summit, ITU and AfDB announced a partnership to help provide for all major African cities with broadband infrastructure by 2012. AfDB recently approved a $150-million loan for a pan-African cable, bringing fast and inexpensive broadband to at least 23 African countries. The World Bank Group announced that it expected to double its commitment to ICT in Africa within the next five years, reaching $2 billion by 2012.
Goal 1: Interconnect all African capitals and major cities with ICT broadband infrastructure thereby strengthening connectivity to the rest of the world by 2012.
Goal 2: Connect African villages to broadband ICT services by 2015 and implement shared access initiatives, such as community telecentres and village phones.
Goal 3: Adopt key regulatory measures that promote affordable, widespread access to a full range of broadband ICT services, including technology and service neutral licensing/authorization practices, allocating spectrum for multiple, competitive broadband wireless service providers, creating national Internet Exchange Points and implementing competition in the provision of international Internet connectivity.
Goal 4: Support the development of a critical mass of ICT skills required by the knowledge economy, notably through the establishment of a network of ICT centres of excellence in each sub-region of Africa and ICT capacity-building and training centres in each country, with the aim of achieving a broad network of interlinked physical and virtual centres, while ensuring coordination between academia and industry by 2015.
Goal 5: Adopt a national e-strategy, including a cyber security framework, and deploy at least one flagship e-government service, as well as e-education, e-commerce and e-health services using accessible technologies in each country in Africa by 2012, with the aim of making multiple e-government and other e-services widely available by 2015. |
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