From Africa Recovery, Vol.13#4 (December 1999), page 21 (part of special feature on information technology)

ECA Deputy Executive Secretary Lalla Ben Barka says that African governments, institutions and civil society will bear responsibility for how effectively the new information technologies are used

For Africa to jump, it will need legs

On national planning capacity: Such capacity is very low in many countries. The issue is one of political will. Even if the weak private sector manages to acquire information and communication technologies (ICTs), the enabling environment still depends on governments that must also develop human resources. There are many problems ahead for planning and implementation, but ECA is ready to help any country or sub-region.

On ICTs and basic rural needs: Conference participants continually warned that ICTs must reach the majority of Africa's population, which is 70-75 per cent rural. Even with rapid urbanization, you find the densely populated city outskirts full of rural people trapped on the edge of "modernity."

We talk about sophisticated technology when we don't have electricity in our villages. Since there is a risk of further rural marginalization, we have to be imaginative. In the 1970s, we talked about literacy centres in villages. Now, we will increasingly focus on telecentres. They can be a source of important and useful information.

Governments obviously have a role to play. But as with literacy, health and agricultural extension services, the problem has always been an approach that imposes "knowledge" from the outside. Extension workers must come only as facilitators. Rural people must express their own needs, and gradually meet these needs by themselves.

On African content on the Internet: I believe strongly in gathering and analyzing traditional knowledge so we can better integrate knowledge from elsewhere in our development. We have made mistakes by accepting undigested information and knowledge from outside. We must produce our own knowledge, or more of it. I did a lot of literacy work 20 years ago and I remember extraordinary discussions with rural people on a vast range of topics. We continue to neglect an incredible amount of knowledge. We must preserve this knowledge, or it will be too late. People with certain types of knowledge are no longer passing it on and the new generations are losing their roots.

I asked one panel during ADF '99: how many countries have a clear idea of what they want to be in 10, 20 or 50 years' time? If we don't have our own vision, if we don't produce our own content, we will remain poor consumers, submerged in badly digested information from outside. We must avoid this in the new millennium.

On a cautionary note: ICTs are already very fashionable but they are also a necessity. We must make sure that in a few years' time, we don't find ourselves swamped with equipment we have not maintained or even used, but left to pile up in cupboards. Forty years after independence, we have been through some fads. We risk doing the same with ICTs.

The potential is there for us to leapfrog several stages. Where other parts of the world have taken decades to get to a certain stage, Africa can get there quickly because we can access very detailed and very broad information. But we must prepare ourselves to make use of new technology. The responsibility is ours alone, through our institutions, governments and civil society organizations.
When you jump a stage, you must know what you have jumped over. There are some stages we must not jump and this requires analysis and decisions on the pace at which we go forward. We will not be another South Korea, which was at a similar level of development with African countries 30 years ago. It has done some leapfrogging, but it made sure of its material, institutional and human resources. I fear that African countries may not take the time to do this.

On 'free offers': When I worked on a 10-year education plan in Mali, we had lots of offers from donors telling us about computers in primary classrooms all over the world. We said thank you very much; we realize the enormous potential gain but we must be ready. Putting computers in rural schools when there is no electricity, a shortage of trained teachers and little or no African content is a wasted investment. So let's proceed in stages. The African market is wide open, and patrons are making us "free offers" we are not ready to absorb. We need to be ready so that if we jump some stages, we will still have legs to walk on.

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