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From Africa Recovery, Vol.13#4 (December 1999), page 13 (part of special feature on information technology)

-- UN Economic Commission for Africa

Cool heads and new technology

First African Development Forum tackles continent's telecommunication issues

By Nii K. Bentsi-Enchill in Addis Ababa

With eloquent brush strokes, Mali's President Alpha Oumar Konaré captured essential themes of the conference: "As an African, I am keeping a cool head -- a computer can cost eight years' salary or send 20 children to school.... If we don't have our own clear vision on information and communication technology, we will be disappointed.... Liberalization of communications is an irreversible process and local radio is working wonders since being freed from state control.... Young people are the soldiers who will drive us forward with new technology.... We must not fall into the trap of separating our cultural renaissance from economic development. Globalization is inevitable but we have to enter it while being true to ourselves."

He was speaking at the end of the African Development Forum, conceived by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) as the first of an annual series in which Africa will set a definitive agenda for the next millennium. The theme for 2000 is HIV/AIDS. In 1999, it was the challenge of globalization and the information age, themes that fit in the framework of the UN Special Initiative on Africa. Launched in 1996 by the UN system to help accelerate the pace of African development, the initiative has a specific component on harnessing information technology for development and considers improved telecommunications a positive factor in development, not a result.

Participants ranged from community activists and technical experts to national and international policy makers and private entrepreneurs. There were flights of optimism: information and communication technologies (ICTs) offer African countries the "opportunity to leapfrog the industrialized stage and transform their economies into high value-added information economies that can compete with the advanced economies on the global market," one speaker said.

People also came down to earth. How can we talk about joining the information age when agriculture, Africa's economic foundation, is in trouble? "The credit system has collapsed, extension services are collapsing and the credit-transportation-marketing nexus has been broken," a participant said. Over 60 per cent of ICT projects "result in some degree of failure," a conference theme paper added, noting that current "supply-driven pressures" will increase as new technology makes equipment obsolete.* Africa must become neither an experimental laboratory nor a dumping ground, the paper declared.

ECA Executive Secretary K.Y. Amoako outlined the challenges ahead. There will be over a billion Africans in 2010, he noted, almost double the population when the African Information Society Initiative was launched in 1996 (see Section 2). In endorsing this policy framework for the deployment of ICTs in Africa's development, African countries stated that by 2010, every woman, man, child, village and public and private sector office should have secure access to information and knowledge through computers and communication media. Achieving the goal of "equity of access to ICTs" for women, young people and the disabled as well as for rural and marginal urban communities will require partnerships within African countries and between them. It will also require partnerships with the local and foreign private sector, Mr. Amoako stated.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi inserted a key nuance. Africa has no choice "but to do whatever it takes to ensure" a vibrant domestic private sector. Without local enthusiasm and confidence, foreign investment is unlikely. However, weak and "failing states" cannot be considered growth-friendly. "Robust states" can -- and need to -- be both legitimate and democratic. Liberalization and macroeconomic stability "are normally taken as an end in themselves" but produce "neither meaningful growth and transformation nor sustained liberalization and macroeconomic stability." Enhancing the capacity of the state "must be considered one of [Africa's] critical challenges," he concluded.
"What will the private sector do to improve rural access to telecommunications?" one person asked representatives of the Global Information Infrastructure Commission (GIIC). This international coalition of big firms involved in all aspects of telecommunications from hardware to broadcasting recently set up a GIIC-Africa chapter. "Rural access is not our primary concern," replied a spokesman, adding that access is very important and will come with greater competition.

Many participants called for faster privatization and liberalization. Describing government monopolies on telecommunications services as a "stranglehold on development," one speaker observed that people are waiting months or years to get e-mail connections. The International Telecommunication Union estimates that providing five telephone lines per 100 Africans will cost $50 bn. "This by far exceeds public sector financing capacity, making large-scale private investment a necessity" and governments will find it increasingly hard to maintain their monopoly on ICTs, another conference theme paper argued.**

Still, equity issues retained their prominence. UN Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette stated a simple truth. Even if ICTs are installed and accessible, "without literacy and basic skills they will remain as remote as they are now." There is a "clear link between the development of basic skills and tremendous gains on the part of the previously dispossessed," she told a plenary session.

In smaller sessions, participants explored all these issues. Youth delegates from several countries insisted that they should be educated, empowered and involved in all aspects of ICT development. Their importance is underlined by Africa's age structure: while AIDS is cutting down adults, some 45 per cent of Africans are under 15 years old; the rest of the world's average is 30 per cent. The infrastructure group called for strategic choices on how and when -- and not whether -- to privatize and liberalize telecommunications. It said governments should establish independent regulatory bodies before liberalization so that negotiations with investors are effective and result in appropriate choices of technology. Speakers called for harmonization of national rules to attract more capital and facilitate initiatives such as the Regional African Satellite Communications Organization (RASCOM).

Set up in 1992, RASCOM links 42 countries in a satellite-based project to reach rural areas. The project aims, among other things, to install 456,000 solar-powered relay stations, increase rural phone lines to 1 per 100 people, reduce average distances to a phone from 50 to 5 kilometres and provide direct connections between African countries. In August 1999, RASCOM's board of directors awarded France's Alcatel the contract to finance, design, build, launch and operate the dedicated satellite system for an agreed period before transfer. RASCOM has some 20 per cent equity in the enterprise but no voting rights.

ICTs exist within a context of social inequality, noted the focus group on gender. Already disadvantaged in access to education, credit and land, women are also marginalized in all areas of ICTs. They should take part in all ICT decision-making processes, participants said, calling for more education for girls, particularly in the scientific and technical fields. They added that women entrepreneurs, especially in the informal sector, need products, services and training so they can conduct electronic commerce and gain access to business opportunities without numerous intermediaries.

Participants shared experiences of telecentres, which are a pioneering method of expanding rural access to telephones, computers and the Internet. Recurrent themes included the shortage of managerial and accounting skills among telecentre operators and sustainability -- many telecentres are externally financed.

Given these and related problems such as language, content and network reach, telecentres are not the singular solution to rural access, says Ms. Kate Wild of the Canadian International Development Research Centre, who coordinated the conference. Clinics, post offices and schools can also host such services for communities and electronic links between schools have been growing faster than telecentres in some countries. This is partly because the education system provides a ready basis for electronic networking and also because concrete education initiatives are attractive to private sector and donor partners, she observes.

One example is the African Virtual University (AVU). This World Bank-funded initiative is helping to "alleviate the decay" of Africa's universities, many of which face dwindling budgets and declining academic standards, said University of Zimbabwe lecturer Stanley Moyo. Since 1997, the AVU has hooked up with 22 institutions in 16 countries and eight more in francophone and lusophone countries are joining. It offers credits in courses such as calculus and engineering as well as non-credit lectures. Some 2,000 hours of classes have been broadcast live by satellite and this year, over 600 students have taken computer science lectures. More of the course materials will eventually come from within Africa.

African universities need information technology to survive, said Professor Olalere Ajayi of Nigeria's Obafemi Awolowo University, noting that hardware costs are halved when students learn to assemble computers. Such institutions can also become Internet service providers, added Prof. J. Mwenechanya. With funding from the World Bank and the Netherlands, the University of Zambia linked all campus buildings in a fibre optic network, obtained unlimited Internet access and set up Zamnet as a commercial Internet service provider.

The conference purposefully placed such areas of progress in the broader context of governance and access issues. How do you bring government to the people in Nigeria, which has 36 states and 770 local governments? When allocating scarce resources, all governments must be smart, a conference theme paper observed. Installing computers, software and support in government offices can cost $10,000 per employee per year and the costs of training, support and operation of technology investments may be five times the purchase price of equipment, participants learned. Yet, governments and other organizations often spend much more on procurement than on skills development, he said.
Participants did not doubt the benefits that ICTs can bring when properly employed. In Morocco, better coordination between the finance and planning ministries -- and computerization -- is said to have halved, since 1989, the time it takes to prepare the national budget. ECA offered some specific guidelines for ICT use in governance that seem more broadly applicable. It said the first step is to ignore ICTs altogether. Then, select priority areas for improvement, establish strategic goals and set up sign posts to guide planned activities towards goals. The second step is to review alternative ICT solutions that support planned activities, taking account of financing, infrastructure, literacy and skills constraints; then analyze the (capital and recurrent) costs and benefits of each solution. After agreeing on an ICT solution, develop a work plan for acquiring and allocating resources and providing training while staying focused on strategic goals and user constraints. Last, begin monitoring and evaluation during the design phase and do not stop.

**Globalization and the Information Economy: Challenges and Opportunities for Africa, ECA, 1999. Both publications are on the ECA website: <www.un.org/Depts/eca/adf>

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