Content Creation and Dissemination

"Everything you know about Africa is wrong", says John Perry Barlow of Wired Magazine [1]. Africa has been hit by waves of connectivity since 1995. By early 1999 the number of African countries with direct links to the Internet in their capital cities had reached 51 – compared to four in 1995. These days, it is much easier to list the remaining countries without a direct connection -- Eritrea and Somalia—and even these have plans to be online shortly. The number of African users has grown to more than a million. There are about 150,000 hosts (Internet service providers) in the region, of which 95% are in South Africa [2]. What does this mushrooming of connectivity mean in terms of Africa’s economic, social and political development? Given the advent of a knowledge-based economy as predicted by World Bank President James Wolfensohn, does it portend unparalleled opportunities to harness information for the economic and social benefit of the region?

Universally available communications, innovative content and Internet connectivity are crucial for Africa’s development. International attention has now turned to universal access to information and knowledge – leading to a recent regional call at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Africa Telecom ’98 conference held 4-10 May in Johannesburg, for improving cost-effective access for the disadvantaged, through such innovations as multipurpose community centres or kiosks. That said, the emphasis is still far too much on the technology and the channels for dissemination, rather than the value-added, the content to be disseminated using these channels. The developmental utility of the new information and communication technologies is still not universally accepted.

The response of the pundits is usually "don’t worry about content, give access to users and the content will follow", or "it’s already out there - on the Internet". Despite this optimism, experience in Africa shows that access does not in any way guarantee the production and availability of local, or indigenous, content. It is clear that the Internet’s tremendous potential for sharing knowledge is not being exploited. Content on the Internet is growing by one and a half million pages per day, according to a recent survey [3]. The company estimates that the figure doubles every eight months. There are already 12 terabytes (12,000,000,000,000 bytes!) of archived material on the Internet, a quarter of this in the form of Web documents. Web content alone is expected to reach 12 terabytes by the turn of this century.

To say the least, Africa’s contribution to this expanding global web of content is insignificant. Internet content is entirely dominated by material produced in the United States, Europe and Asia. A recent host survey [4] shows that Africa generates only around 0.4 percent (1:250) of global content. What is more, excluding South Africa, the rest of Africa generates a mere 0.02 percent (1:5000)! More frustrating is that Africa’s share of Internet hosts has been declining ever since 1995 despite a brief rise in 1997, according to a survey conducted by Network Wizards. This could be regarded as a warning for the paucity of African capacity for generating content!

That said, the picture is slowly but steadily improving. Nearly all African countries online have some form of locally or internationally hosted web server, unofficially or officially representing the country with varying degree of comprehensiveness [5]. Linguistic diversity has also begun to kick in. Initially, English-speaking countries dominated African content. However, a recent project of the international francophone organization, La Francophonie, supported by France and Quebec, has substantially increased the quantity of web-based information available on French speaking African countries. The project provides web servers and support at ministerial level to Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Mauritania and Senegal, as well as training and support for 20 web site builders from organizations in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali and Senegal. The Banque Internationale d'Information sur les Etats Francophones (BIEF) also plans to establish web servers in Benin, Tunisia, Mauritius and Morocco [6].

Aside from the growing public information and commercial web presence, content generated from African universities and by their former students now living in Europe and North America is also expanding. At a bare minimum, most African universities have basic email connectivity, while universities in 13 of the countries have full Internet access. Almost all of them have some form of web presence, hosted either locally or elsewhere.

Africa generated and related content

Internet content that originates from Africa or that relates to the continent varies in its quality - ranging from sites such as Africa Positive [7] that promotes positive attitudes towards economic progress of the region and its people, to articles and discussions dominated by personal experience and perspectives. Subject areas covered are as diverse as art and politics. Because of this diversity, and because of the sheer volume, it is becoming increasingly difficult to categorize such content on Africa into a meaningful subject area. However, a large portion of this content can broadly be classified as business information -- about institutional activities, products and services, and news.

Web publishing is a rapidly growing form of content dissemination in Africa. Efforts to introduce large and small companies to electronic commerce have shown that the Internet is a valuable global marketing tool. For example, craftsmen in Uganda, Botswana, Senegal and Zimbabwe are now marketing their products worldwide through the United Nations International Trade Centre’s Virtual Handcraft Exhibition Centre. Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), another online marketing tool, is being used by large and small-scale enterprises in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Mauritius, South Africa and was introduced recently to Ghana. According to Dr. Nii Quaynor, Director of National Computing Services (NCS), a leading Ghanaian service provider that runs the local EDI, NCS’s experience holds considerable potential for western African countries.

There is no dearth of news about Africa on the Internet. In addition to updates by mainstream media sources such as Cable News Network (CNN) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), there is increasingly well-presented content from alternative sources such as Inter Press Service (IPS) and the Pan-African News Agency (PANA), among others. In addition, local newspapers from 33 African countries are now online, providing direct access to local news about a particular country, as told by the local media in that country. At the click of a mouse, Africans in the Diaspora can now read La Tribune of Algiers, Actualites Burkinabes of Ouagadougou, Les Echos of Bamako or the Zimbabwe Independent of Harare. A number of projects are also underway to publish radio and audio-visual content on the Internet, and some of this material is already available – with the only constraint to accessing it within Africa being low bandwidth connections.

Online radio from Africa and about Africa abound on the Web. These provide live news and entertainment broadcast to virtually anyone with direct link to the Internet. Apart from low bandwidth links in many African countries that makes difficult to listen to these online radios, the quality of sound and clarity is often better than regular short wave radios. South Africa and Northern Africa including Morocco and Tunisia are the pioneers in radio webcasts. Apart from real audio streams via mainstream channels such as Radio Africa, BBC, Voice of America, Radio France International, Channel Africa, Voice of Russia, United Nations, online radios in different languages including Arabic, Swahili, Hausa, Amharic and Portuguese are becoming available. A quick survey shows that wherever there is a good Internet connection there is an online radio. Annex I lists online radio sites on Africa and about Africa.

As with all other content relating to Africa, travel and South Africa dominates tourism content with a growing web presence of all hot tourism sites in the region [8,9]. Up-to-date travel and tourism information on Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Uganda, Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, Zambia, Kenya, Egypt, The Gambia and Tunisia is available from local sites as well as other sites maintained by government authorities promoting tourism, travel agents and enthusiasts. Any visitor of [www.zimbabwe.net/tourism] or [www.africa-insites.com/zambia/travel], [www.wildnetafrica.com/stbrob.html], [www.tanzania-web.com] or [www.zanzibar.net] could obtain hotel, visa, health requirements, weather, tour operators and service providers information on Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Tanzania and Zanzibar respectively. The benefit of such information is tremendous both for the traveller, the countries concerned and tourism sites. One remote eco-tourism resort in South Africa, for example, is now gaining a global clientele, because its website features multi-media displays of attractions, and includes an on-line reservation system.

One big missing link is the lack of African scientific and technological information. What does exist is mainly devoted to information technology, connectivity and politics. Accessing such content involves a tremendous effort, including the use of search engines such as HotBot [10] and its advanced search facilities, or meta search engines such as Dogpile [11]. Efforts to build consolidated and evaluated directories, virtual libraries and gateways on Africa- related science and technology information have not as yet borne fruit.

Popular Web Sites on African Social and Economic Development

The size of the Web, its exponential growth and constantly changing user needs render most popular web sites obsolete as a matter of course. That said, some sites manage to host substantive and regularly updated content on African social and economic development. [Table 1 lists some of these sites and describes them. A list of additional web sites is provided in Annex II.]

Table 1. Popular web sites on social and economic development in Africa

Content development is a two-way process. While populating the Web with Africa-related information is crucial to the promotion of indigenous content, access to global resources by those residing in Africa is equally important. An enormous amount of resources and knowledge can be filtered to be harnessed in Africa. Yet access is restricted by a number of factors.

Economic, social, political, technical and infrastructure constraints mitigate against content development and access to it in Africa. Table 2 highlights some of these constraints. For one thing, the cost of Internet access is beyond the reach of most institutions and individuals. Monthly subscriptions to Internet services range from $10 to $250. Direct leased connections can cost as much as $15,000 a month. Those in Africa who have access to the Internet tend to have high incomes, be well educated and to interact constantly with the developed world.

Table 2. Barriers to Internet and Content development in Africa

The high cost of access is exacerbated by two major factors: the lack of enabling policy environment that fosters competition, foreign direct investment and private sector participation; and inadequate cooperation among local actors. The good news is that several institutions and initiatives such as those of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the World Bank, the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) are working in sustained partnership to improve the policy environment in Africa. One commonly accepted framework is the African Information Society Initiative (AISI) a mission statement for a development-serving African information superhighway developed by ECA and adopted by African countries in 1996. Through its Partners in information and Communication Technologies for Africa (PICTA) network, ECA is leading advocacy efforts at the policy level, towards such an enabling environment.

Network peering among local service providers is not well practiced. Although most countries have at least one node with full (TCP/IP) connectivity, intra-regional connectivity is not available -- with the exception of in southern Africa, Egypt and Tunisia. Each country has a handful of local nodes connected to a gateway linked via satellite or cable directly to a major international carrier’s network in Europe or North America. Africa’s connectivity to the outside world is dominated by 5 Internet Service Providers: Alter.net, MCI, Sprint (sprintlink.net and gip.net), the Verio group and Teleglobe [12].

Links are for the most part limited to capital cities, constituting a major barrier to democratization of access so as to enable the participation of non-urban communities and entrepreneurs. Secondary cities account for less than 40% of Internet access points, known as Points of Presence (POP). Remote areas access is only available in a few countries -- Burkina Faso, Gabon, Malawi, Mauritius, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Chad, Tunisia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Remote access is supplied by the local telecom operator which sets up a special 'area-code’, which is charged at local call tariffs. Except in South Africa, which boasts over half a million users, network density in Africa is very limited (Fig. 1). Although there is no known demographic survey of institutional and individual use of the Internet in Africa (except for a survey conducted by PADIS between 1995-1997 on the impact of networking in Africa in Zambia, Ethiopia, Senegal and Uganda), one can safely say that on average, the density of connectivity in Africa is very small. The average network density in Africa excluding South Africa is about 1 to 10,000. This is 250 times lower than the global average of 1 to 40. These figures, however, mask the reality in Africa where one computer or an Internet connection often shared among two to four users. Taking this into consideration it safe to say that the net density in Africa could be regarded as 1 link for 5000 people. Still this is 100 times less than the global average. While individuals have continued to access the Internet and expand their share of knowledge and personal libraries, the majority of Africans still remain very much in the dark about this phenomenon.

Figure 1

Based on: Mike Jensen survey (http://www3.wn.apc.org/africa/)

At the institutional level, whilst the cost of entry to the information superhighway is relatively insignificant compared to the advantages to be accrued, a dearth of information as to what is possible has left them missing the opportunities and benefits of freely accessible information. Due to a lack of understanding of the potential and fear of high costs, institutions that have access often impose stringent restrictions on levels of access. For example, Internet access in most of the universities is restricted to the staff only. Postgraduate students are often able to obtain access, but the general student population is usually not.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to content development in Africa is the limited service bandwidth. Local loop bandwidth is often limited to 64Kbps. International circuits range from 9.6 Kbps (kilobits per second) to 2 Mbits (megabits per second). Four African countries (7.5%) connect to the outside world on analog lines at 9.6 Kbps while 19 countries constituting 35% of African countries have only 64Kbps connections to the international circuits. Although 40% of countries have connections of more than 64Kbps, many of them are between 64Kbs and 256Kbps, except in countries such as South Africa, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco where connections up to 2 Mbits are available [13]. Generally bandwidth is the scarcest resource in Africa and more scarce than in any other part of the world. It is not uncommon to have lines disconnected intermittently, take long hours before getting connections, and wait half an hour to draw a WWW page on a screen. When travelling in Africa, a good error correcting modem is needed.

Technology for the Future

Web-based information systems (WIS) that integrate Intranets (to support organizational and campus-wide activities), web-presence (sites used for marketing products and institutions), electronic commerce (systems that support consumer and business) as well as administration interaction and the blend of these in the form of Extranet have become the technology of the future. As Internet becomes pervasive in Africa, the traditional standalone and legacy information systems and those based on client/server technologies will continue to be phased out (although the traditional and modern tools will continue to work side by side for the coming years.) In addition to explosion of WIS, new tools such as Extended Markup Language (XML) that are designed to make structured information available on the Internet will continue to advance during the coming years. Structured information contains both content (words, pictures, etc.) and some indication of what role that content plays (for example, content in a section heading has a different meaning from content in a footnote, which means something different than content in a figure caption or content in a database table, etc.). Almost all documents have some structure. These tools would separate the display elements from content structure, help to deliver content to different platforms, improve ability to take action on content, make it easier to reuse content and enable document exchange independent of platform. Thus traditional text retrieval and document management techniques will become phased out.

Another pressing problem is the expanding audience of web-based information systems. The next generation of information users will become browsers of information as opposed to traditional readers. Growing need for document that contains text, audio and moving picture in structured and linked hypermedia format makes content development a challenge. Legacy databases have to be restructured to satisfy this new form of audience. Obviously concerted strategies have to be developed for improving content from Africa, about African development problems and by those residing in Africa.

Strategy for content development in Africa

The potential for content development and Internet growth in Africa is tremendous. The coming years will witness a growing web presence of private sector sites that seizes opportunities offered by electronic commerce. News and tourism will also expand considerably. However, participation of public institutions and communities in content development will remain marginal unless national, regional and international efforts are expanded.

Primarily, there is a need to democratize access, to improve the infrastructure and to create conditions for communities to participate in the development of content. Telecentres for providing communication, education and healthcare information, generating income and facilitating the exchange of government documents constitute important tools for democratizing access to the majority. These are being piloted in many African countries, among them South Africa, Tanzania, Benin, Senegal, Mali, Mozambique and Uganda, where telecentres are being tested to demonstrate the efficacy of information and communication technologies at rural community level [14].

Coupled with growth of community centers is the need for human resources development in community content generation, packaging and transmission. Voice, image and other easy to use tools for the illiterate have no substitute. It is also important to raise the level of English as Second Language (ESL) skills while promoting research on search and access to content in local languages.

Information management is the key ingredient for improving African development and the growth content on the web. Information should continuously be gathered and produced in a digital multimedia formats (text, graphics, audio and motion pictures). Recent trends that present information and communication technology as "cure all" tool and pressure from various vendors have led to overemphasis on acquiring the technology with little or no attention to information content and its management in Africa. Africa has seen hundreds of information technology projects that are synonymous to pipes without water. The focus on technology, not information and emphasis on tools, not people will continue to have drastic consequences for organizational development. The future of success of organizations, nations and individuals is not high-level technology but rather innovative and well managed content. Thus it is important to continue to focus on information management – its collection in digital format and qualitative processing and dissemination.

The World Wide Web is an ideal tool for making well-organized information available to users. The Web is an effective distribution tool - a document or data available on the web could reach millions instantaneously. However, the Web’s major benefit is not limited to bringing access to content. Web is the best tool for getting feedback on the quality and utility of information. It is a best marketing tool and opens up opportunities that are beyond imagination. Embarking on local and as well as global web presence through Intranet and Internet is a key to institutional survival in the information age.

Web presence is not a "one term" job but requires adding value to what exists in an affordable as well as continuous efforts to update and build new sites. Serious attention should be given to the issue of the quality of web sites. Web sites must be designed in the same way that a home or office building is designed. Quality should be encouraged by cooperatively developing, maintaining and promoting a Web site based on peer review systems.

To make the most effective use of Internet content, users must know where to find the information they need. With the explosive growth of information sources, the need for directories and clearinghouses has become significant. A consolidated and evaluated knowledge base (meta information) on scientific and technical content in Africa is paramount. In addition, there is a need for efforts to:

train users in Web site development not only the technical aspects, which have been given priority in the past, but also the aesthetic ones and approaches to defining user needs;

provide support for the creation and recognition of sites which are useful for development, e.g. [www.piac.org] ;

access national and international information sources on a regular basis so as to provide tips and guidelines to users;

establish content building service centres at local levels, or encourage the private sector to build them, to provide site development advice to small and medium-scale organizations especially for electronic commerce sites to take the lead;

establish systems and institutions to build tools that address the many languages of Africa; and

support and train information brokers such as librarians to act as intermediaries between information sources and the knowledge base, and to develop diverse techniques that address information access to the disadvantaged and the disabled.

The above recommendations point to a two-pronged approach to African content development. In the private and business sphere, a web presence involving global inter-linkage and accessibility will lead to a significant increase of African content. For such content to take hold, governments must create enabling regulatory, legal and policy frameworks to protect security, privacy and copyright ownership, and must encourage accessibility and competition at affordable prices. Such environments will facilitate partnerships between all stakeholders – NGO activists, academics, ICT specialists, the media, brokers, consumers and publishers.

In the public sphere, a substantial effort is needed to improve "content creation" or "publishing". While a wealth of information exists, it is largely inaccessible, dispersed, often unpublished and consequently under-valued. Africa has 12% of the world's population but publishes 2% of the world's books [15]. It is thus necessary to intensify the collection, organization of information in digital format. Information management is a prerequisite to information dissemination on the web. Information cannot be disseminated if it is not organized.

A substantial growth of African content cannot be achieved without building the requisite human capacity. Content development must begin by taking into account real needs of local users. It requires an approach that catalyzes local participation, encompasses needs assessments, builds awareness of potential Internet uses and builds communities of users to develop locally managed, and self-supporting content.

Reference:

[http://www.wired.com/wired/6.01/barlow.html]

[http://demiurge.wn.apc.org:80/africa]

[http://www.alexainternet.com]

[http://www.nw.com]

[http://cnn.com/world/africa/]

[http://www3.wn.apc.org/africa/]

[http://www.africapositive.co.za/]

[http://www.yahoo.com – travel Africa]

[http://www.dieknoop.co.za/index.stm]

[http://www.hotbot.com]

[http://www.dogpile.com]

[http://www.ctr.columbia.edu/~nemo]

[http://www.nsrc.org]

[http://www.idrc.ca/acacia]

Wresch, William (1996). Disconnected: Haves and have-nots in the information age. Rutgers University Press: New Jersey.

Annex I. List of some online radios

Annex II: Web sites of Interest on African social and economic development

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Last updated: 25 May, 2001