Nevertheless Internet access in Africa has been largely confined to the capital cities, although a growing number of countries (currently Angola, Benin, Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe) do have Points of Presence (POPs) in some of the secondary towns, and South Africa has POPs in about 70 locations.

Figure 2

In some countries the PTOs have made a special policy to provide local call Internet access across the whole country. To do this, the local telecom operator establishes a special 'area-code' for Internet access that is charged at local call tariffs, allowing Internet providers to immediately roll out a network with national coverage. With the massively reduced costs for those in remote areas that this provides, it is surprising that so far only 10 countries have adopted this strategy - Burkina Faso, Chad, Gabon, Malawi, Mauritius, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.

The total number of computers permanently connected to the Internet in Africa (excluding those in South Africa) broke the 10,000 mark at the beginning of 1999. As measured by Network Wizards, growth is up 36% in six months from July 1998 when there were only about 7,800 hosts, to 10,703 in January 1999. The correct figure may actually be closer to 12,000 or 15,000 due to the measurement technique which cannot count hosts which are not properly reverse referenced in domain name servers. In any case this represents about one host per 75,000 people, or 0.024% of the world’s 43 million hosts. Nevertheless, the six-monthly African host growth rate almost doubled the world average (18%), so this a significant increase on the earlier figure of 0.021% in July 1998. Yet all of Africa has about as many Internet sites as Latvia, with a population of 2.5 million.

The opening up of the Nigerian Internet market will likely change the picture as the national telecom operator (Nitel) has big plans to provide Internet countrywide. With a fifth of Sub Sahara's population, Nigeria has been one of the slumbering giants of the African Internet world. Until mid 1998 Nigeria had a few dialup email providers and a full ISPs operating on very low bandwidth links, and few operators were able to afford the $130,000 a year cost for an international 9.6Kbps leased line. Nitel has now established a POP in Lagos with a 2MB link to Global One in the US and has put POPs in 4 other cities. The Nigerian telecom regulator has recently licensed 38 ISPs to resell the service, and about 12 are currently active.

Currently, the average total cost of using a local dialup Internet account for 5 hours a month in Africa is about $60/month (including usage fees, telephone time, but not telephone line rental). According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 20 hours of Internet access in the U.S. costs $29, including telephone charges. Although European costs are higher ($74 in Germany, $52 in France, $65 in Britain, and $53 in Italy) these figures are for 4 times the amount of access, and all of these countries have per capita incomes which are at least 10 times greater than the African average.

Nevertheless ISP charges vary greatly - between $10 and $100 a month, largely reflecting the different levels of maturity of the markets, the presence or absence of competition, the varying tariff policies of the PTOs and the different national policies on access to international telecommunications bandwidth.

Most African capitals now have more than one ISP, and in early 1999 there were over 300 public ISPs across the region. Seven countries had 10 or more ISPs – Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe – while 20 countries had only one ISP. Although Ethiopia and Mauritius are the only countries where a monopoly ISP is national policy (i.e. where private companies are barred from reselling Internet services), there are other countries in which this practice still continues, predominantly in the Sahel sub-region where markets are small. See Table 1 below for further details.

Table 1

Source: Michael Jensen, mikej@sn.apc.org

In response to the high cost of full Internet based services and the slow speed of access to the World Wide Web, and also because of the overriding importance of electronic mail, many ISPs have launched lower-cost email-only services and are continuing to attract subscribers. Similarly, because of the relatively high cost of local electronic mailbox services from African ISPs, a large proportion of African email users make use of the free Web-based services such as Hotmail, Yahoo or Excite, most of which are in the US. These services can be more costly and cumbersome than using standard email software because extra online time is needed to maintain the connection to the remote site. But they do provide the added advantages of anonymity and perhaps greater perceived stability than a local ISP which may not be in business next year.

There is also a rapidly growing interest in kiosks, cybercafes and other forms of public Internet access, such as adding PCs to community phone-shops, schools, libraries, police stations and clinics which can share the cost of equipment and access amongst a larger number of users. Many existing ‘phone shops’ are now adding Internet access to their services, even in remote towns where it is a long-distance call to the nearest dialup access point. In addition a growing number of hotels and business centres provide a PC with Internet access.

The rapidity with which most African public telecom operators have moved into the Internet services market is also noteworthy. In the last three years PTOs have brought Internet services on stream in 31 countries and similar moves are afoot in three others (Liberia, Somalia and Tanzania). This follows trends in the developed countries where almost all of the PTOs have established Internet services. In many francophone countries the PTO operates the major value added service provider as a joint venture with France Cable and Radio (called Telecom-Plus in many countries and DTS in Madagascar).

In all the countries where the PTO has established the international Internet backbone, it is the sole operator except in Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. Usually the PTOs operate the international gateway or access to the national backbone, and leave the resale of end-user Internet access to the private sector. In a few countries the PTO operates a gateway in competition with the private sector, namely Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia, Mozambique and Zambia.

As far as the multinational ISPs are concerned, AfricaOnline, now a subsidiary of UK based Africa Lakes (http://www.africaonline.com), is the largest operation. The group is consolidating a year of growth which saw local branches open in Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe, adding to its stable in Ghana, Kenya, and Côte d’Ivoire. The other three multinational ISPs which operate subsidiaries or franchises in the region are now trailing considerably with UUNET found only in South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Namibia, while Swift Global is in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

Due to high international tariffs and lack of circuit capacity, obtaining sufficient international bandwidth for delivering web pages over the Internet is still a major problem in most countries. Very few of the countries outside of South Africa had international Internet links larger than 64Kbps until two years ago, but today 17 countries have 512Kps or more, and 10 countries have outgoing links of 1Mbps or more - Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Tunisia. Excluding South Africa, the total international outgoing Internet bandwidth installed in Africa is about 34Mbps. However this means that on average about 7 dialup users must share each 1Kbps of international bandwidth, making connections to remote sites very slow.

As a result, a growing number of African Internet sites are hosted on servers in Europe or the U.S. This is especially necessary for countries where ISPs operate their own independent international links without local interconnections (peering), such as in Kenya and Tanzania, which means that e-mail traffic between the subscribers of two ISPs in the same city must travel to the US or Europe and back. This makes it more efficient to host outside-country, and is also being encouraged because web hosting costs in Africa can be very high, while there are even a number of free hosting sites in the US and Europe.

One response to the bandwidth problem is that incoming bandwidth is now starting to outpace outgoing bandwidth, following the increasing use of data broadcasting services which are now being installed by ISPs in Africa. These use a DirecPC-type system providing incoming bandwidth of 64Kbps for about US$30-$1000/month (depending on usage). The assymetric service can deliver up to 8Mpbs incoming, while the normal terrestrial phone circuit or leased line is used for all outgoing traffic. This arrangement uses a standard digital KU-Band or C-Band satellite television antenna costing $175-$500 (depending on size required) and a decoder card for the PC costing US$450. In Southern Africa the service is provided by two South African companies - Infosat and Siyanda (http://www.infosat.co.za / http://www.siyanda.co.za). A similar service covering other parts of Africa via a different satellite is provided by Interpacket (http://www.interpacket.net).

These systems allow ISPs to limit traffic on their expensive existing links to outgoing data only, and to use a low-cost TV satellite dish for receiving the higher volumes of incoming traffic. This can substantially reduce the operating costs for the ISPs and increases the speed of access to the Web for their users.

Two-way satellite-based Internet services using very small aperture terminals (VSATs) to connect directly the US or Europe have also been quickly adopted wherever regulations allow (in Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia which all have ISPs that are not dependent on the monopoly telecom operator for their international bandwidth).

With the exception of some ISPs in Southern Africa, almost all of the international Internet circuits in Africa connect to the USA, with a few to the United Kingdom and France. However, Internet Service Providers in countries with borders shared with South Africa benefit from the low tariff policies instituted by the South African telecom operator for international links to neighbouring countries. As a result South Africa acts as a hub for some of its neighbouring countries - Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland.

The major international Internet suppliers are AT&T, BT, Global One/Sprint, UUNET/AlterNet, MCI, NSN, BBN, Teleglobe, Verio and France Telecom/FCR. A number of other links are provided by PanamSat and Intelsat direct to private and PTO groundstations in the US and UK, circumventing local PTO infrastructure.

Aside from the South African hub and a link between Mauritius and Madagascar, there are no other regional backbones or links between neighbouring countries. The main reason for this is that the high international tariffs charged by telecom operators discourages Internet Service Providers from establishing multiple international links. As a result ISPs are forced to consolidate all of their traffic over a single high cost international circuit. Roaming dialup Internet access is now a reality for travellers to most African countries courtesy of SITA, the airline co-operative, which has by far the largest network in Africa. SITA's commercial division, SCITOR (recently renamed Equant), which was formed to service the non-airline market, now operates dialup points of presence in 40 African countries. Subscribers to Internet service providers who are members of IPASS (a group of ISPs, including SITA, who share their POPs) can access their home ISPs for about $0.22c a minute. (See http://www.ipass.com. for details).

The only country in the region with an X.400 service is South Africa. Other advanced services such as ISDN and video conferencing are also generally not available on the continent - the only countries able to provide ISDN services are Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, the Seychelles, and South Africa, (which had 35,000 subscribers in 1996).

Voice over Internet (VOIP) services are not officially available anywhere in the region, and none of the telecom operators have implemented voice over IP technology for their traffic except for Egypt Telecom which is routing some of its voice traffic to the US over IP. Demand for most of these services is expected to increase once there is a broader penetration of computers and data processing equipment on the sub-continent.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) has now taken over administration of Internet IP Address space for Africa (along with North America, South America, and the Caribbean). This means that address space is no longer free and until a local African Registry can be set up, networks will now be required to pay ARIN USD$2500 per year to obtain a Class-C address. While proposal for an Africa Network Information Centre (NIC) has been discussed for some years, progress is being made only now, partly because of the lack of on-the-ground national networking associations to support it and the political difficulties of identifying the appropriate host country and organisation to operate it.

There have been few attempts to establish email-to-fax gateways in Africa despite the apparent need, given the low penetration of the Internet. Currently the co-operative project known as the Experiment in Remote Printing (TPC) only has two African countries among the 27 in its coverage list - South Africa and Botswana. Likewise, none of the commercial Internet fax services have local delivery facilities outside of South Africa.

ICT hardware and software

Recent estimates for the number of PCs in Africa put the average at about 3 per 1000 people in 1996, however some studies, such as ACCT's 1995 survey, indicate that this may be an overestimate by between 3 and 6 times, making the average closer to less than one per 1000. Some of the wealthier countries such as Botswana, Mauritius and South Africa have significantly higher levels of penetration, at least 5 per 1000. At the same time, account should also be taken of the number of users sharing a single computer which is much greater than in more developed regions.

Given the lack of public sector resources in Africa, the penetration of computers is generally much lower in government, with by far the majority of PC equipment being used by private companies. Computers are still mainly used for accounting and word processing, although spreadsheets are used to some extent for budgets and forecasting or as a simple database application. The limited number of database systems often use Microsoft Access, but many national documentation centres and archives, as well as small university and NGO libraries, use the UNESCO/IDRC developed ISIS/microISIS package for bibliographic data. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and digitization facilities are beginning to be installed by some universities, ministry planning departments and municipalities.

Almost all of the PC equipment uses Intel or Intel-compatible processors except for the publishing industry where there are significant numbers of Apple Macintosh PCs. As a result Microsoft Windows is the dominant operating system, although because many PCs are older machines using 386 and 486-processors, and there are still large numbers of DOS-based systems. Because of poor maintenance and insufficient skills to diagnose system problems and swap parts, there are many out-of-commission machines which could easily be re-activated.

Underutilisation of existing computer resources is also very commonly caused by the preponderance of many standalone PCs in the same office with no use of Local Area Networks (LANs). Often an office may have many machines, but only one with a modem connecting to the Internet. This usually means that there is competition for the machine and a shared email account which is not conducive to effective use of the Internet.

Although there are as yet few examples, the use of low cost equipment such as Network Computers (NCs) and set-top boxes are increasingly being seen as a vital means to reduce costs and increase the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in Africa, and a number of pilot projects have been established to test these options. Recently a South African cellular phone and subscription TV distributor, Teljoy, has begun marketing a set-top Internet access unit for US$300 which will use the TV screen as the monitor. In another project, a South African distance education consortium has started using Sun Network Computers for its computer centres.

The use of free and open-source software is also gaining popularity. In wide-area networking, where local area networks are connected to the Internet, as well for many ISPs across Africa, Linux the free UNIX-based operating system, is already very widely used. Recent versions of the package have now been tailored for consumer use and are being increasingly supplied with new PCs, by companies such as Dell, Compaq, IBM and others. The Netscape web browser and email package, and the WordPerfect suite have been ported to Linux and are being distributed free use to schools in Africa.

Outside of South Africa there are few mini and mainframe computers, and most of these are confined to Ministries of Finance for government payrolls, and a few of the larger parastatals, telecom operators, banks and insurance companies. IBM, NCR, Bull and ICL are the dominant suppliers of mini and micro-computers, although there are also some Fujitsu machines.

Few of the international companies operate offices in Africa, but Bull, Compaq, IBM, NCR, Oracle and Microsoft have some form of local representation in most countries. Microsoft now has its own offices in Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Morocco and South Africa. PC equipment is often clone equipment imported from Asia but Compaq, Dell, IBM and ICL also have significant shares of the market and Dell South Africa is now selling via the Web.

The Millenium Bug or Y2K problem has gained significant attention across the sub-continent, especially because there are large numbers of older machines in use and very limited resources or skills to ensure their compliance. Most large corporations, parastatals and government departments have launched Y2K programmes but it is unclear how many will be able to meet the deadline. The issue is mitigated to some extent by the fact that relatively fewer mission-critical systems have been computerised in Africa, and service interruptions in basic infrastructure such as telecoms and electricity are already common.

Usage of Africa’s Information Infrastructure

The vast majority of people in Africa rely almost exclusively on radio for information, with far smaller and more elite groups in the cities and towns also making use of television and newspapers. As mentioned earlier, the majority of Africans have not yet made a phone call, but interestingly, the usage of international lines is much higher than the world average, partly reflecting the large size of the African Diaspora and the arbitrary borders within the region. In 1996 the average for international outgoing calls in sub Saharan Africa was 233 minutes per line per year, compared to a world average of 93, and 113 for high income countries.

It is notoriously difficult to measure actual numbers of Internet users, but figures for the number of dialup accounts provided by ISPs are more readily available, for which it is estimated that there are now over 400 000 subscribers in Africa. According to a recent ECA study, each computer with an Internet or email connection supports an average of three users. This puts current estimates of the number of African Internet users at somewhere around 1.2 million. 

Most of these are in South Africa (about 700-800 000) leaving only about 400,000-500,000 amongst the remaining the 734 million people on the continent. This works out at about one Internet user for every 1500 people, compared to a world average of about one user for every 38 people, and a North American and European average of about one in every 4 people. No studies have been made of the number of rural vs urban users, but it is safe to say that users in the cities and towns vastly outnumber rural users.

There are now about 26 countries with 1000 or more dialup subscribers, but only about 9 countries with 5000 or more – Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, Ghana, Mozambique, South Africa, Tunisia, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Clearly a number of countries such as those in North Africa and Southern Africa have more highly developed economies and better infrastructures which would naturally result in larger populations of Internet users. Most of these countries were also among the first on the continent to obtain Internet access and so have had the most time to develop the market. There are now local Internet Society chapters throughout Africa and in most of the countries with large Internet user populations.

Evidence gathered by ECA suggests the average level of Internet use in Africa is about one incoming and one outgoing email message per day, averaging 3 to 4 pages, in communications which are most often with people outside the continent. Surveys indicated that about 25 percent of the email is replacing faxes, while 10 percent are replacing phone calls and the other 65 percent are communications that would not have been made in the absence of an email system.

The highest number of users surveyed belonged to non-government organizations (NGOs), private companies and universities. The ratio of nationals to non-nationals varied between countries: 44 percent of users surveyed in Zambia were nationals as compared to 90 percent in Ghana. Most users were male: 86 percent in Ethiopia, 83 percent in Senegal, and 64 percent in Zambia. The large majority of users were well educated: 87 percent of users in Zambia and 98 percent in Ethiopia had university degrees.

A recent South African survey of the Internet found similar results: the average user was male, 26 to 30, spoke English, was high-school or university-educated, earned between US$24,000 and US$45,000 per year and worked in the computer industry. This indicates that the high number of users in the country is largely attributable to the advantaged sector of the population.

Email is used for general correspondence and document exchange, technical advice, managing projects, arranging meetings, and exchanging research ideas, although its use is still limited for accessing formal information resources. Across the continent, users report that email has increased efficiency and reduced the cost of communication but as yet it is used almost exclusively for contacting individuals in other regions. The Web is still a relatively under-utilised resource, although 40 percent of Zambian users questioned had conducted literature searches on the web.

Universities were initially at the vanguard of Internet developments in Africa, and most of them provide email services; however in early 1999 only about 20 countries had universities with full Internet connectivity. Because of the limited resources and high costs of providing computer facilities and bandwidth, full Internet access at the universities where it exists is usually restricted to staff. Post graduates are often able to obtain access but the general student population usually has no access.

In the area of Internet content development, African web-space is expanding rapidly and almost all countries have some form of local or internationally hosted web server, unofficially or officially representing the country with varying degrees of comprehensiveness. However, there are still generally few institutions that are using the Web to deliver significant quantities of information.

While increasing numbers of organisations have a Web site with basic descriptive and contact information, many are hosted by international development agency sites, and very few actually use the Web for their own activities. This is partly explained by the limited number of local people that have access to the Internet (and thus the limited importance of a web presence to the institution), the limited skills available for digitising and coding pages, and also by the high costs of local web hosting services.

Local African public and academic and research content development for the Internet is still at a very early stage of development. In general only the universities have so far placed any significant quantity of material on the Web. However even among the universities, only a few appear to have made a major effort in this direction. Most of the African academic/research web sites simply detail the departments and activities of the institution concerned, although a few have developed some other applications and areas of content.

Across the region there are as yet few locally developed electronic information repositories of national or sub-regional significance, and none of the existing ones are currently available on the Internet. This is partly because national archive and library systems are extremely poorly resourced, and many have had little opportunity to obtain ICT skills or equipment.

Although statistics gathering operations are also at a very low level due to insufficient support, many statistical offices are now using common standards and new tools. With the help of email and fax the collection of statistical information is no longer confined to the largest urban centres. The number of studies aiming at better knowledge of the structure and functioning of the socio-economic sectors is growing, and price indices now cover rural areas in some countries.

Surprisingly, it can be observed that the French speaking countries have a far higher profile on the Web and greater institutional connectivity than the non-French speaking countries. This is largely due to the strong assistance provided by the various Francophone support agencies, and the Canadian and French governments, which are concerned about the dominance of English on the Internet. ACCT's BIEF and AUPELF-UREF/REFER's Syfed Centres, which are building Web sites of local information as well as providing access, are the two dominant content developers in this respect.

Although there are a few notable official government web sites, such as those of Angola, Egypt, Gabon, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, Togo, Tunisia and Zambia, there is as yet no discernible government use of the Internet for existing administrative purposes. Web presence is higher in some sectors, particularly those involved in tourism and foreign investment, and these often have more mature sites, aimed at developing an international market presence. While most ministries and national research centres may have access to electronic mail, very few have a web site. Reflecting the limited resources of the public sector, the ECA survey found that government employees made up only one percent of users in Ethiopia and only six percent in Zambia.

As far as regional intergovernmental agencies are concerned, so far ECA, SADC (Botswana) and COMESA (Zambia) have built web sites with fairly extensive information on their activities and member states.

There are about 140 electronic mailing lists and UseNet newsgroups on the Internet which discuss issues relating to Africa (although a significant proportion of them are more closely affiliated with US African-American issues). These lists and newsgroups are almost entirely hosted off-continent except for a number in South Africa, North Africa and Kenya. There is a list for almost every nation as well as others on more general topics ranging from African Cinema to Post Colonialism. In the area of ICTs in Africa, AFRIK-IT is the only notable public list, and it is run from Ireland by the University College of Dublin (which happened to be where the person who started the list was studying).

There are other announcement and discussion lists with a smaller circulation, many of which focus on some of the programmes the international communities are carrying out in Africa, such as the African Information Society Initiative’s AISI-HITD-CL and its associated African Technical Advisory Committee – ATAC-CL, the PICTA-CL and ICT-SCAN-CL mailing lists hosted by Bellanet.

There are also some more specialised lists relating to African ICTs in particular sectors, regions or countries, notably:

AFAGRICT-L – The use of ICTs in agriculture and natural resource management in Africa, initiated by CTA and hosted by Bellanet

AFRINIC-DISCUSS – The list of the Interim Committee and interested parties to establish Africa’s NIC, hosted by ISP UUNET/Iafrica in Johannesburg.

IOZ – The South African Internet Service providers list hosted by ISP Citec in Johannesburg

EAIA – The East African Internet Service Providers Association, hosted by UNON in Nairobi.

Linux user-group lists hosted in Nairobi, Durban and Johannesburg.

The news media are now relatively well represented on the web. The Columbia University African (USA) Studies Department has identified over 120 African newspapers and news magazines that are now available on the Internet, of which over 60 percent are published in the region. (23). Those most well represented in this area are again those with more advanced Internet sectors - Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Also of note are the efforts to host daily newspapers by the ISP AfricaOnline which has offices in 5 countries - it is not entirely co-incidental that many of the countries listed above are also those where AfricaOnline is active.

There are two major continent-wide African news agencies, both of which extensively use electronic media - Inter Press Service (IPS) and the Pan African News Agency (PANA). Sub-regionally, Southern Africa has the only active regional news agencies using ICTs - the Southern African Broadcasters Association (SABA) and the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA). In other regions, use of ICTs amongst the media is much lower, but in West Africa, WANAD (West African News Media and Development Centre) is assisting journalists and media outlets to adopt the use of ICTs.

Of course international news correspondents in Africa are heavily dependent on ICTs to deliver material to their operations in the US and Europe. CNN and the other international television news companies regularly rent temporary space segments all over Africa with the local representatives of IntelSat and PanamSat to deliver reports and live coverage. Radio journalists (even freelancers) are now sending edited sound files by email to agencies such as the BBC World Service.

Two web search engines specialising on Africa have emerged over the last year - Orientation Africa -http://af.orientation.com and Woyaa - http://www.woyaa.com. As with other similar services elsewhere, these are run by commercial companies which generate revenue through advertising. Orientation is run by Hong Kong-based BlackBox and Woyaa by a UK company.

On a sub-regional basis, Southern and North Africa are the most advanced regions in terms of their use of ICTs, followed by East and West Africa with Central Africa lagging furthest behind.

In Southern Africa, South Africa, followed by Angola, Botswana, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, are at the top end the scale, with some institutions having leased lines and connectivity outside of the capital. These countries are followed further behind by Malawi, which just beginning to expand connectivity, and Lesotho, which has only just established a public access in Maseru. The institutions providing the most leadership in the use of ICTs in Southern Africa are the South African Department of Communications (Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Broadcasting), Department of Arts Culture Science and Technology, CSIR, SangoNet and UniNet (South Africa), ZamNet (Zambia) and CIUEM (Mozambique).

In North Africa, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco are all well advanced in their use of ICTs, followed by Algeria which is lagging behind. The champion agencies in these countries are ONPT and the local Internet Society Chapter (Morocco), IRSIT and ATI (Tunisia) and IDSC/RITSEC (Egypt).

In East Africa, Kenya and Uganda are the most advanced countries, followed by Tanzania and Ethiopia, with Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan falling far behind. Leading ICT support institutions in the sub-region are the United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affairs, the East African Internet Association (EAIA) and HealthNet (Kenya), the East Africa Help Desk (Uganda), ECA (Ethiopia) and COSTECH (Tanzania).

In West Africa, Senegal and Ghana are the leaders, followed by Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali and Niger. Further down are Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, with Liberia and Sierra Leone last. The leading ICT support agencies in West Africa are UCAD, ENDA and ORSTOM (Senegal) and NCS (Ghana).

Central Africa is still at a very low level of development in ICT use, with Cameroon and Gabon being the most advanced countries, followed by Nigeria, Chad, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea and then the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Congo Republic. The leading ICT support institutions are NACETEM (Nigeria) and ENSPY/UniYaoundeI (Cameroon).

Aside from Mauritius and the Seychelles, the island countries are all at relatively low levels in the development of ICT use, with Madagascar being the most advanced of the remainder. The leading agency in this area is the Mauritius National Computer Board.

Current and Planned initiatives to improve Africa’s Information Infrastucture

Sub-regional collaboration is increasingly being seen as an important means of addressing the need for improved ICT infrastructure. Action has been seen on a number of fronts in this area, starting with the Conference of African Ministers of social and economic planning which requested the Economic Commission for Africa to set up a 'High-Level Working Group' to chart Africa's path onto the global information highways. An expert group developed a framework document entitled the African Information Society Initiative (AISI), which was adopted by all of Africa’s planning Ministers at the subsequent meeting of the Conference of African Ministers in May 1996.

AISI calls for the formulation and development of a national information and communication infrastructure (NICI) plan in every African country, driven by national development priorities, and proposes co-operation among African countries to share the success of experiences. ECA and its partners have jointly organized national workshops on NICI development in Namibia, Rwanda and Tanzania to assist them in their debates and discussions on the applications of ICTs to support their development needs, and on the elaboration of national action plans. The NICI plan development work is being extended, with co-operation from other partners such as Acacia, IDRC, UNESCO, UNDP, USAID and the World Bank, to Burundi, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Morocco, Nigeria, Cape Verde, Ghana, Benin, Mauritania, Gabon, Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Togo, Cote d’Ivoire, Congo, Cameroon, Madagascar, Mauritius, Central African Republic, Chad, and Guinea; and the four Acacia countries: Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda. The experience developed by these countries in trying to formulate new policies will be of considerable interest to others considering the same undertaking.

Since then, communications ministers from over 40 African countries have provided high-level endorsement for telecommunications development policies encapsulated in their common vision document published last year called the African Connection. Aimed at supporting the development of the underlying infrastructure required by AISI, the target is to lay 50 million lines in Africa over the next 5 years. The project was officially adopted by the Pan African Telecommunication Union (PATU) at the last plenipotentiary meeting, held in Lusaka, of the member states of PATU, which was recently restructured and its headquarters moved to Nairobi.

The first concrete project of the African Connection was to hold a promotional and connectivity awareness raising car rally in which the South African Minister of Telecommunications, drove from the most northerly tip of the continent in Tunisia to its most southerly point in South Africa. Accompanied by a team of 40 journalists and support crew on a Hercules cargo plane and helicopter, the rally gained strong support from host countries, being met at the border and escorted through each of the 11 countries by the local minister of telecommunications. The initiative is expected to gain endorsement at the OAU heads of state meeting of the OAU in Algiers in July.

The next stage of the project is to open African Connection Telecentres in all 53 African states. This is in concert with recent efforts to improve accessibility to ICTs in rural areas through the use of shared public access facilities which exploit the convergence of technologies to provide cost effective services in under-serviced and remote locations. Some of these services have grown out of existing public phone shops, such as in Senegal where about 70 phone shops now provide Internet access. The concept has also received considerable support from the ITU and other members of the international community, as well as a number of national governments and public telecom operators.

This has resulted in over 20 pilot telecentres scattered through the continent (with the majority in Ghana, Mozambique and Uganda, as well as in Benin, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe) set up to test different models, means of implementation and mechanisms for sustainability. Development agencies active in this area include the British Council, IDRC, ITU, UNESCO, the World Bank and USAID.

The region's links to the rest of the world are also in for substantial change with a large number of international telecommunication infrastructure building initiatives having been announced in the last 2-3 years. One of the most well known of these is AT&T's Africa One which aims to put an optical fibre necklace around the entire continent; however after its initial announcement in 1995 the project has not developed, and a large number of other competing projects have emerged:

The South African PTO (Telkom) has announced the SAFE (South Africa - Far East) in collaboration with Malaysia Telecom which plans to lay a fibre cable between South Africa and Malaysia with various spurs along the way, including Mauritius. This will assist Telkom's strategy to become a hub for African traffic as it has also built a high-capacity VSAT groundstation, and links to its surrounding countries with optic fiber. This infrastructure will pick up regional intercontinental traffic to be routed through its existing SAT-2 fibre link to the European and North American backbone, as well as to Asia when SAFE is completed.

The SAT-3/WASC (South Atlantic Telephony/West African Submarine Cable) A West African coastal marine fibre cable is being planned for operation in 2003. PTOs, in Senegal, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Angola and South Africa have agreed to participate.

RASCOM, - the African satellite consortium owned by the African PTOs - has advanced plans to launch its own satellite before the year 2000. In addition, the ITU has announced the availability of some funds through its Initiative 2000 project to assist in improving the most glaring gaps in the PANAFTEL terrestrial network.

The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) has recently agreed to establish a company called ComTel which will work with member states to improve the terrestrial telecom infrastructure links between neighbouring countries.

The East African Co-operation (EAC) has established a US$60m project to set up a high-speed digital fibre optic backbone linking Kampala, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

The US-Russian joint venture company Lockheed Martin Intersputnik (LMI) intends to provide satellite transmission capacity and value added services including video and data distribution to customers in Africa.

Various world-wide LEO satellite networks have been launched, or shortly will be, such as Iridium and Globalstar, which hold particular promise for the region widely dispersed population. These services will derive most of their income when passing over developed countries, but will still have to pass over the developing regions such as Africa, where tariffs will be reduced to encourage demand.

Other networks, such as East, Tachyon, Skybridge, Teledesic and Celestri promise multimedia voice and data communications, and even the prospect of an "Internet-in-the- sky" using helium supported stratospheric telecommunications platforms, but some of these are still some way off, and the costs are unlikely to be within the reach of the average African citizen until the first decade of the next century. Nevertheless they are likely to considerably reduce operating costs for ISPs wherever regulations allow.

With the worldwide recognition of the importance of ICTs in accelerating development, a number of other recent international development assistance initiatives have improved the prospects for wider access to information and communication networks on the continent, especially in rural areas. Many of the initiatives are part of the AISI Framework Sub-programme on Connectivity being co-ordinated by ECA and UNDP.

In addition, to address the growing need for co-ordination and collaboration, donors and executing agencies involved in ICTs in Africa have agreed to establish an ongoing forum for information exchange on projects called Partnerships for ICTs in Africa (PICTA). Of the general projects identified, among the potentially most important are:

The UN Secretary General's System-Wide Initiative on Africa, which includes ICTs as one of the major components in a $11.5 million programme called 'Harnessing Information Technology for Development' (HITD/SiA), and is supported by the various UN partners.

The USAID/Leland Initiative which is assisting with developing Internet connectivity in 20 African countries in return for agreements to liberalise the market to 3rd party Internet service providers and to adopt policies which allow for the unrestricted flow of information. New initiatives for Leland announced by vice president Al Gore recently include a programme for: 'One Million PCs for Africa, 1000 schools connected and 100 Universities connected'.

The ITU's programme for Africa which involves various rural, community telecentre, health and satellite projects emanating from the Buenos Aires Action Plan, is being conducted in co-operation with UNESCO, IDRC, WHO and others.

The World Bank’s activities to assist in telecommunication and ICT development in about 25 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Initiatives include the African Virtual University (AVU), Economic Toolkit and Workshops for Internet Connectivity in Africa, the Rural Telecommunications Field Trial and Commercialization Pilot in Kenya, and the Global Connectivity in Africa Conference. The Bank expects to be heavily involved in sector reforms and privatization over the next few years with a view to mobilizing private participation for public objectives, to help remove market imperfections, and, where necessary, to attract private investment. It will focus on the rural sector and on information strategies, building infrastructure and applications.

IDRC's Acacia programme which has allocated CAN$60m over the next 5 years to developing the use of ICTs in local communities in Africa.

UNESCO's IIP programme, which has already (with funding from the Italian and Dutch Governments) been executing the RINAF (Regional Informatics Network for Africa) project to develop a self-governing programme of cooperation with African Member States in this area.

UNESCO has also recently established the Creating Learning Networks for African Teachers project to assist teacher training colleges develop literacy in ICTs and their use for education and to connect them to the Internet. The project,already been implemented in Zimbabwe, is being initiated in Senegal, and is intended to be extended to twenty countries with extrabudgetary support.

The multi-donor InfoDev fund established by the World Bank, which has supported the South African Telematics for African Development Consortium and the $1 million African Virtual University Project.

UNDP's Africa Bureau has agreed to a $6m fund to improve Internet connectivity in Africa in a project called the Internet Initiative for Africa (IIA). The countries currently participating are: Angola, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gambia, Mauritania, Namibia, Nigeria, Sao Tome et Principe, Swaziland, and Togo.

UNDP's Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) has 10 operational nodes in Africa - Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Gabon, Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Togo and Tunisia. National SDNP projects are funded for 2-3 years and are expected to provide seed money towards sustainability, either through sale of services or integration into the government budget.

UNEP's Mercure project which uses VSAT technology to establish an environmental information exchange network in Africa. UNEP is co-operating with the ITU to examine the possibility of using the spare bandwidth of the network for other functions.

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs is proposing the COPINE project to donate groundstations and transponder time to African research institutions.

The various activities of Agence de la Francophonie (international francophone agency) and related international organisations such as ORSTOM, AUPELF, UREF, REFER, which are providing support for ICTs in Francophone countries, most of which are in Africa. Recently the AFRINET project was launched which is providing web servers and related support at ministerial level to Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Mauritania and Senegal. Also, the Banque Internationale d'Information sur les Etats Francophones (BIEF) has a project to establish web servers in Benin, Tunisia, Mauritius and Morocco where databases and information from a number of other countries is hosted.

Copyright © 1999 Economic Commission for Africa (ECA)
For questions, comments and sugestions about this web site, contact the Webmaster
Last updated: 25 May, 2001