1. Introduction

The Information Society and Development Conference, held in South Africa in May 1996, focussed attention on the development potential of access to information and communication technologies by poor, mainly rural, communities in the developing world - and particularly in Africa. Among its many activities ISAD witnessed the launch of the Economic Commission for Africa’s African Information Society Initiative (AISI) which was the culmination of many years of ECA-led collaboration in support of the implementation and application of information and communication structures in the region.

Since 1996 a number of programmes and partnership mechanisms have been instituted by development agencies at the international and regional levels, some of them involving the private sector. These programmes merged two agendas: one reflected the belief, in a small but significant segment of the development community, that information, and the capacity to manage, apply and disseminate it, was an essential component of the development equation; the other reflected current theories that market liberalisation is necessary for the delivery of the infrastructure essential for development, in this case the ‘pipes’ through which information and communication flow. The core aim of most of these programmes is to create an enabling environment in which people and institutions in developing countries can effectively exploit knowledge for development. What is new, in the post-ISAD era, is an increasing acknowledgement of the importance of indigenous knowledge and the opportunities that the new technologies offer, not the least to developing communities themselves, to bring knowledge from a wide range of sources to bear on development processes and problems. It is understandable that ISAD crystallised the ICT debate around communities: although it was a global event there was a distinct African flavour and over 70% of Africa’s population lives in rural communities far from the urban hubs which are much better equipped with communications and information services.

ISAD was not the only watershed event in the information revolution of the 90s; but it was a significant international event that highlighted the challenges to the developing countries in the global information society. It accelerated the growth of enthusiasm for and interest in the application of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for development and as such is a good starting point for an examination of the impact of increasing public and private sector investment in communication programmes.

Many donors that had previously treated information and communications as a supporting mechanism for their operations and projects began to embrace the knowledge and development agenda. Over seventy donor programmes are now at work on a wide variety of information and communication projects in Africa . While many of these projects address local connectivity issues through some form of telecentre or school network there is also a recognition that the extension of access requires changes in policy and regulatory frameworks and a number of programmes focus in this area. While there is still considerable debate in development circles about the nature of the relationship between knowledge and development and the role of the new technologies, that there is a relationship and a role is now widely accepted.

This presentation will review the experience of the last three years from three points of view:

	the new institutional mechanisms and partnerships intended to improve the effectiveness of donor programmes in the ICT arena;
	the (mainly donor-sponsored) events that have followed ISAD with the intention of focussing political attention on the ICT and development connection; and
	the types of ICT projects that are emerging as priorities for support.

While it will not explore in detail the private sector initiatives which have also emerged to contest the last big telecommunications market, it will touch on these as an essential element of a collective drive to extend communications networks to rural areas and move closer towards the goal of universal access.

It will attempt to identify lessons that can be learned from this proliferation of post-ISAD activities and to assess the impact they have had on the development case for the use of ICTs in poor communities; it will point to strategies for exploiting the opportunities that have emerged from recent experience.

It will argue that the intense debate among donor agencies and international organisations must be opened more effectively to African institutions: governments, civil society (including the African private sector) and the communities that are the target of many ICT programmes. These institutions can bring a longer term perspective than is often possible within the donor community. And if there is one key feature of the ICT and development paradigm it is its capability to empower different voices to whom all those working on development issues must listen.

2. Institutional mechanisms and partnerships

The AISI

The African Information Society Initiative coordinated by ECA is widely accepted to be the framework in which collaboration on ICT programmes in Africa develops. AISI must accommodate the interests of relevant global initiatives, in particular the Global Knowledge Partnership and the Global Information Infrastructure Commission, and the particular interests of the donor agencies and other organisations which support its implementation through PICTA: the Partnership for Information and Communication Technologies in Africa.

The AISI process was conceived in 1995 at the African Regional Symposium on Telematics for Development organised by ECA, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) and Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and Bellanet. The Symposium united information technology experts, senior government officials and private sector leaders from over 50 countries and was the first multi-stakeholder attempt to place information and communications at the centre of African development decision-making. In 1995 also the ECA Conference of Ministers responsible for economic planning and development called for the establishment of a high level working group of African experts to draft the conceptual and implementation framework for AISI. AISI was launched at a special session of ISAD in May ‘96.

AISI is not a funding mechanism; it is a framework through which to identify priority strategies, programmes and projects to support the sustainable build up of an information society in African countries in accordance with regional integration goals. ECA has successfully sourced extra-budgetary funds to develop the AISI framework and fund specific initiatives. But for the most part the funding for the many projects and programmes needed to achieve AISI objectives must come from governments, the private sector or the donor community. Hence collaboration among the various players is key.

While early work on AISI was driven on the donor side by an alliance of the three organisations mentioned above (ITU, Unesco, IDRC within ANI: the African Networking Initiative), another grouping (the African Internet Foundation made up of UNDP, the World Bank and US/AID) was working with the Internet Society to promote access to the Internet in Africa.

PICTA

These two groupings came together in April 1997 in Rabat - along with other donors, governments and private sector organisations - to form PICTA: the Partnership for Information and Communication Technology in Africa. PICTA is a forum for the exchange of information and ideas and the generation of collaborative projects. All members can use PICTA as a forum to expose their programme proposals and to seek implementation partners. PICTA is supported by a series of databases and a discussion list managed by Bellanet. It has resulted in organisations sharing their proposed programmes at an earlier stage than would otherwise be the case but there is little evidence that it has led to real coordination or programme alignment. There are a number of issues at stake: agencies have their own agendas and mandates; to their governing bodies success may be measured more in terms of results that show ‘positioning and profile’ than in those that demonstrate collaboration and team work. More importantly perhaps, projects are implemented in countries where the national representatives of organisations are the key decision-makers and they are not always on the same wavelength as their colleagues designing schemes for regional or global collaboration. These schemes do not always mesh well with reality on the ground. PICTA meets formally once a year but small informal gatherings are organised whenever other conferences provide the opportunity. PICTA is a comprehensive and novel mechanism but it still needs to establish its power to exploit the synergies among the programmes of its members (within countries as well as regionally) and to translate them into real development benefit for recipients of its collective funding.

The Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP)

GKP emerged from cooperation among the many organisations involved in planning and implementing the Global Knowledge 97 Conference held in Toronto in June 97. It is an evolving informal partnership of public, private and not-for-profit organisations committed to sharing information, experience and resources to promote access to and use of information as tools of sustainable and equitable development. The United Nations (UNDP, Unicef, ECA, UNFPA, etc), its specialised agencies (ILO, FAO, UNESCO, WHO) and the World Bank are members of GKP along with a number of governments (Canada, Malaysia, Netherlands, Switzerland, US), multinational companies mainly but not exclusively in the information technology or telecommunications sectors and donor agencies. While membership is open to the non-governmental organisations the involvement of this sector is still at an early stage.

GKP is founded on the conviction that:

	access to and effective use of knowledge and information are increasingly important factors in sustainable economic and social development for individuals, communities and nations;
	the information revolution can be a positive force for empowering poor people; and
	increased partnerships and mutual learning are required to assure inclusion of the world’s poor in the global information society.

GKP partners can cooperate in a number of ways: pilot projects, conferences and workshops, capacity building, information sharing.

One of the most valuable services provided by GKP in support of its information exchange goals is the Global Knowledge Virtual Conference which hosts lively debate on both fundamental and practical questions concerning the link between knowledge and development (see Section 3 on electronic conferences).

GKP is also a potent force in shaping the knowledge and development agenda. Initially through the Toronto debates which put the empowerment issue at the core of the programme, and subsequently through the preparations for Global Knowledge II to be held in Malaysia in 2000, GKP is highlighting issues and helping place them on the global public agenda. GKP is a useful partner for AISI because it exposes African issues to an informed global audience and broadens the AISI partnership base.

Global Information Infrastructure Commission (GIIC) - Africa

GIIC Africa is intended as a forum to enable African business leaders in the ICT sector, policy makers, academics and other decision-makers to share their perspectives on the steps needed to rapidly expand the information infrastructure and access to information society tools in the region. The GIIC Africa programme is intended to support the African Information Society Initiative and, more broadly, the goals of the African Renaissance.

GIIC’s global mission is to foster private sector leadership and private-public sector cooperation in the development of information networks and services to advance global economic growth, education and quality of life. It brings together leaders from developed and developing worlds around common goals:

	strengthening the leadership role of the private sector in the development of affordable and accessible information infrastructure;
	promoting the involvement of developing countries in the construction and use of global, open information infrastructure; and
	identifying policy options which foster effective applications of telecommunications, broadcasting and information services.

Its role is essentially promotional and facilitating. Its three current areas of focus are global information infrastructure development, electronic commerce and education.

GIIC Africa was launched during Africa Telecom 98 in South Africa and has been in operation for close to one year. Its work programme covers infrastructure development and financing, business development, policy and pilot projects. Its main mode of operation is advocacy through regional and international meetings on issues related to its work programme.

GIIC Africa has been effective at using the platforms offered by various regional and global bodies to articulate its views and in drawing the private sector into development debates on telecommunication and information technology issues. In the South African environment it has been a powerful intellectual presence which has contributed to the shaping of a number of initiatives. Since it is essentially a promotional and facilitating body its is under no pressure to define and implement projects. But the resources at the disposal of its collective membership - and its focus on partnerships - could reasonably lead to expectations of more concrete outputs: in the form, for example, of mentoring arrangements between African ICT companies and the companies represented in its membership.

The African Connection

The African Connection was born at a meeting of African Ministers of Communication held in Capetown in February 1998. The idea was refined during Africa Telecom 98 when Ministers reached a number of agreements in principle concerning rural telecommunications in the region, policy and regulatory frameworks, human resources development, financing and funding and priority projects. The African Connection is testimony to the commitment of the African Ministers of Communication to ensuring Africa’s journey into the Information Society. Most recently the African Connection concept has been symbolized by a Rally from Bizerte on Tunisia’s coast to Cape Argulhas in South Africa, led by Jay Naidoo the previous South African Minister of Communication. The Rally was meant to draw attention to the need for a new kind of communication network linking African countries among themselves so that it becomes as easy for a Malawian to contact a Senegalese as it is for either to make contact with Europe or North America.

The African Connection is guided by a Steering Committee presently chaired by the South African Minister. Its secretariat will be located in the Development Bank of Southern Africa.

Unlike the other mechanisms outlined above (with the exception of ECA’s AISI) the African Connection is led from within the continent and is a political initiative. Apart from the infrastructure projects it aims to encourage it also will serve to strengthen Africa’s voice in regional and international fora dealing with telecommunications issues, in particular ITU and WTO.

The African Development Forum (ADF)

The ADF is an ECA initiative which in its first phase will focus on globalisation and information society issues. ADF ‘99 is intended to initiate an African process for identifying progress towards AISI goals and concrete projects designed to speed that progress. Its underlying aim is to reinforce African capacity to define and implement information society programmes and African leadership to shape the multifold donor and private sector interest in the potential of ICTs in the region.

The ADF is in some sense a reaction to the many initiatives outlined above which magnify external voices more than those originating in the region.

3. Conferences on - or related to - ICTs in Africa: the electronic dimension

Twenty three regional or international conferences, held since ISAD, have addressed, either centrally or as an important part of their agendas, the potential of the new information and communication technologies to accelerate African development (See Annex One).

Two important trends have emerged. The first is an increasing awareness that dialogue within the telecommunications, information and technology communities can only lead so far - if the new technologies are to be applied to the critical development sectors (education, health, employment creation) then debate must involve decision-makers and innovators in those sectors. The second is an increasing trend to associate electronic virtual discussions with actual, physical conferences.

Both these trends can provide important foundations for future attempts to reap the development benefits of the new technologies: the first if it can encourage innovative cross sectoral policy approaches; the second if it can draw voices into the debate from users of the technologies at the community level. It is in facilitating the links between these two groups and supporting the identification of synergies among the ideas emerging from them that the technologies show most promise.

Cross sectoral debate

The Global Knowledge Conference in Toronto in June 97 was the first global, multi-sectoral international conference on the information society and development. It brought together 1500 participants: senior government officials, the UN and other international organisations, the NGO community, business leaders and development specialists. Earlier conferences, notably the Buenos Aires conference of the ITU in 1995, had drawn attention to some of the implications of the new information and communication tools for development and had sketched out a plan of action which led to the EU conference in Brussels in ‘96 and, indirectly, to ISAD. But the Buenos Aires conference was primarily a meeting of experts in telecommunications and related fields. The Global Knowledge Conference was driven by the development agenda and the ‘hope’ that the new technologies could enable developing countries to leapfrog traditional development stages and break through some of the development blockages that impede progress towards poverty alleviation. It gave political recognition to the global impact of the new technologies and to the notion of a global responsibility to ensure that the new technologies did not serve merely to increase the divide between rich and poor countries - or between pockets of wealth and poverty within countries. It began to explore possibilities for collaboration and sharing of experience between communities around the globe experimenting with the new technologies to reduce marginalisation and increase access to resources. It gave further credence to the notion of community put forward at the ISAD conference.

The African Development Forum ‘99 will reinforce that trend and lay the foundation in the region for more intensive debate at national, subregional and regional levels.

Electronic discussions

A number of the twenty three conferences mentioned above have been accompanied by electronic debates which have helped define the issues from a broader base than would have been possible through face-to-face interaction alone.

Electronic discussions offer the promise of a much wider spectrum of participation than discussions that require physical presence. At the same time participation in electronic debate requires access to the technologies needed to connect to the Internet, the confidence to use the tools and a willingness to expose ideas to an unknown and unseen audience. To generate truly broad-based participation involves new notions of community and challenges that go far beyond the technologies.

The history of development over the last five decades could be described to some extent as a case of two solitudes: the world of the development experts (local and international) on the one hand and that of those living development on the other; the ability to communicate in a neutral space and to access debate on issues of local importance suggests the possibility of bridging those solitudes. To suggest the possibility does not mean its realisation; many of the discussions that have preceded conferences that addressed issues of community access to the new technologies have not managed to draw practitioners with direct knowledge of the problems of access on the ground. A recent study commissioned by IDRC’s Regional Office for Southern Africa established that the African voice was very limited and proposed a number of strategies to encourage more participation from practitioners - community leaders, educators, and technicians involved in projects intended to extend access and encourage application of the new technologies to local problems.

The study proposed that:

	Lists be facilitated and be open (anyone can send a message to all) to allow the debate to flow freely.
	Postings be kept short since bandwidth is low and expensive in many countries.
	The manner in which people treat others on the list ("netiquette") effects the level of participation. For instance, the study found that "flaming" (confrontational emails) reduces the willingness of new people to get involved. Therefore, netiquette should be enforced.
	Inviting people to post introductions for themselves and their organizations is very useful - both for everyone learning who is around, and in encouraging new people to join the discussion.
	Weekly summaries and a website which keeps an archive of the discussion are useful.
	It should not be forgotten that many people have limited technology. For example, messages should be sent as text rather than in fancy formats and it should not be assumed that everyone has web access (support email postings of web documents).

Creative ways should be developed to allow those without electronic connections to be involved. Perhaps ways can be found to link electronic lists to fax lists, or to encourage dissemination and feedback through community radio projects or other community media work.

GKP: Knowledge for Development in the Information Age: A Global Dialogue and Partnership

As a result of Global Knowledge the World Bank initiated a set of electronic mailing lists that have been most successful in generating inclusive debate. The anchor list provides an ongoing forum for discussion of a range of issues related to the role of knowledge and information as tools for sustainable development. At the same time GKP hosts a number of virtual working groups on specific issues. All these constitute the Development Forum.

The list of most interest here is Knowledge and Information for Development (IKD). It focuses on the challenges to developing countries in joining the global information economy. Its point of departure is the World Bank Development Report on Knowledge for Development and the Panos Institute’s response to that report. The list is co-sponsored and co-moderated by Panos - an encouraging indication of the Bank’s willingness to expose its ideas to public skepticism.

IKD - along with other lists managed by the Bank in the context of GKP - is well managed and moderated (in this case by both Panos and the Bank) with the inclusion of regular summaries and suggested topics for the week as well as a complete set of archives. It is an active list (between February 1 and 19, 130 messages were posted). In the study mentioned above the role of the moderator was considered a key to extending participation beyond communities already in touch with each other.

The African Development Forum

ADF ‘99 initiated a discussion list in May; it is shaped around the four theme areas of the conference: the information economy; policy and infrastructure; applications for improved governance; and democratisation of access to the information society. In its first few weeks more than 200 participants have expressed their views - an active debate is underway with many African voices from a wide variety of sectors.

The ADF list has the benefit of the experience of earlier lists; but other factors may be in play to explain its early success. It is managed by a group within ECA that has been working on information issues for a number of years and has established both credibility and contacts within the region. The moderator is thus a known quantity to many. Statements from the moderator are relatively frequent - on both substance and etiquette. More important perhaps, the ADF ‘99 list seems to have established its African ownership - while all voices are welcome there is an underlying assumption that it is a forum for Africans to explore African information society issues.

4. ICT projects: priorities for donor support

Preceding sections of this paper have demonstrated that the discourse of the international and bilateral development agencies has shifted strongly in favour of the knowledge agenda. This final section will look briefly at the kind of projects that partner the discourse.

Projects fall generally into three categories: policy; infrastructure; and applications. Annex Two provides an indication of some of the more important initiatives in these areas in Africa and shows where partnerships are emerging.

Policy reform

Policy reform is a key component of the AISI and a number of the programmes implemented in association with it: Acacia (IDRC), the International Institute for Communications in Development, UNESCO, US/AID and UNDP are examples. Most projects focus on raising the level of policy awareness in countries and creating multi-stakeholder processes to involve civil society in decision-making. Policy reform is set generally in the context of liberalisation and some degree of privatisation of the national operator. There is still a tension between maintaining the operator under government control in order to address issues of universal access and opening the market in order to increase foreign investment. Reform in South Africa was one of the earliest experiments which led to new legislation in 1996; the monopoly of Telkom was maintained but for a limited period of time. Since there are few, if any, examples of countries having achieved universal access through competitive mechanisms this is an issue which the development community and the international private sector need to address.

Since market size is limited in most African countries regional integration is also an important issue. The Southern African Regional Telecoms Restructuring Program Project (supported by US/AID) works with the telecommunications industry and governments in the region to undertake policy reform and restructuring in order to attract private investment and improve service quality and delivery. SADC has recently approved a regional policy which will eliminate some of the barriers within Southern Africa.

As part of the preparation for ADF ‘99 ECA (with cooperation from IDRC) is undertaking a number of missions to countries at different stages of readiness to address policy reform; the result will be concrete action plans which will be discussed (and which will hopefully find support) at the conference in October. ADF ‘99 will also explore the regional integration dimension of the proposed plans.

Infrastructure

Few of the projects of the development agencies concentrate purely on infrastructure; there is a consensus that their role is to encourage an enabling environment (US/AID’s Leland Initiative) or to demonstrate the viability of new technologies at the community level (IDRC’s Acacia) - both strategies aim at encouraging private sector investment. Earlier programmes such as UNDP’s Sustainable Development Networking Programme which did focus on connectivity have shifted towards networking among organisations with a sustainable development focus and the creation of information materials to support this goal. This reflects the fact that Internet has penetrated the African continent faster than most development agencies predicted, the recognition that the delivery of infrastructure on a universal scale is beyond the means of the public purse (held by either the development community or national governments) - and an assumption (still to be tested) that the private sector will fill the infrastructure gap. The information highway can be accessed today in most major African cities; but there is still much to be done to extend access to poor peri-urban and above all rural communities.

WorldSpace, Iridium and AT&T are just three of the multinational companies investing in the provision of satellite access to rural Africa. Sustainability is still an issue for these companies as is the cost and ease of access for their potential users.

COMESA announced in September 1998 a 3 billion US dollar programme to interconnect the telecommunications systems in the region. It will be carried out in conjunction with SADC and implement transit centres in Addis Ababa, Johannesburg, Lusaka and Nairobi.

ITU’s Afritel project will provide seed money to attract other funding to strengthen the capabilities of national telecommunication operators to better manage, operate and maintain their networks.

Within the African Connection, African telecommunications ministers from many countries in the region have agreed to develop infrastructure and connections within the region and are in process of establishing the necessary institutional mechanisms to support this goal.

UNDP’s Internet Initiative for Africa is building partnerships between governments, the operators, the private sector and UNDP to enhance Internet connectivity in twelve countries of the region. The government must provide 50% of the project funds, to a maximum of $500,000, which will then be matched by UNDP.

US/AID’s Leland Initiative provides support to national telecommunications operators in the form of equipment, expertise, training and free circuits for the first year of the project. Support is contingent upon agreements to open the market to private sector ISPs, adopt cost-based pricing of Internet services and adopt policies that allow for the unrestricted flow of information. These constraints have led to policy disputes in some countries.

IDRC’s Acacia Initiative has produced research on new technologies to extend infrastructure to rural areas in order to test their applicability in specific development environments. Community-based natural resource management projects in remote areas in Mozambique has been the focus of one such study but it is not clear yet whether IDRC will support the next step of actually testing the technologies in the project environment.

Applications

Applications provide the main justification for the drive towards policy reform and investments in infrastructure. For the development agencies it is through applications in support of education, health, business development, democratisation and broader empowerment goals that gains in poverty alleviation and development can be made. For the private sector it is applications that will provide the users for their products who will ultimately generate profits.

Education

The application area that appears to be of most interest is education - the established area of distance education with which the new technologies form a natural marriage, and the newer area of school networking. Education is considered by many to be a priority area and one in which ICTs have the potential to make a significant impact. A wide range of initiatives are currently being undertaken across Africa by international development agencies, local organisations, governments and educational institutions. The involvement of local educators, students, teachers unions and education ministries is an essential component if projects are to be sustainable within the national education programme.

The World Bank’s World Links for Development Programme (WorLD) aims to establish global, educational on-line communities for secondary school students and teachers around the world in order to expand distance learning opportunities, enhance cultural understanding, train teachers to integrate information technology into the classroom and build broad awareness of and support for economic and social development. WorLD works in five areas:

	Internet connectivity for secondary schools
	training and educational content on development issues
	regional and global partnerships with public, private and non-governmental organisations
	telecommunications policy advice in the education sector
	monitoring and evaluation support.

WorLD is working jointly with Acacia in South Africa, Mozambique and Uganda. It is exploring links with Unesco and IDRC in Zambia, Zimbabwe and Namibia. It is in an ongoing partnership with I*EARN (International Education and Research Network) which developed from a prototype project linking schools in New York State and Moscow. From the WorLD programme has emerged the Alliance for Global Learning, a strategic partnership in which procurement and delivery of equipment, teacher training and evaluation and management of the online teacher community will be the responsibility of different partners.

SchoolNet South Africa derives support from IDRC, the Open Society Foundation and a number of other organisations, and includes a WorLD component, but it is a national organisation working under a Board led by the Ministry of Education. It responds very much to concerns to reflect national goals and priorities in both its connectivity and its curriculum development components. It has been successful in attracting significant private sector funding from both international and local companies and is evoking considerable interest elsewhere in the region.

Particularly in the education sector - where school networking is built upon very substantial investments of national government - there is an urgent need to balance inputs from outside the region with the need to reflect local culture and involve the local education establishment. Local ownership of programmes, and their capacity to access private sector resources - will probably be determining factors in their success.

Telemedicine and TeleHealth

A number of innovative projects apply ICTs to improve the delivery of healthcare in Africa. Some are carried out in partnership with organisations outside the region while others are based, controlled and driven from within. However most are funded by foreign foundations or development agencies.

Most of the regional networks focus on building contacts and information sharing; Droits et sante pour les femmes d’Afrique Francophone, based in Senegal, aims to apply ICTs to strengthen communication and coordination between women in Francophone countries on womens rights and womens health. Mapping Malaria Risk in Africa is a continental initiative aimed at developing a geographic information system to improve the control and spread of malaria.

One of the longest established initiatives is HealthNet now active in twenty countries in Africa. HealthNet was conceived as a means of combating the isolation of health workers in developing countries and their lack of access to information. Its users include government departments and agencies, medical facilities and schools, medical libraries and individual health workers.

Most health applications aim at meeting broad health goals but ITU’s African Medicine programme intends to initiate pilot medical projects in Cameroon, Mozambique and Uganda. A recent development is the creation of the African Telemedecine Association which will meet in Durban in July and is likely to stimulate telehealth and telemedecine pilot projects in the region and the creation of regional telehealth centres.

Electronic commerce

E-commerce is taking on increasing importance at the international level within, in particular, the ITU and OECD. It is capturing the imagination of the popular press in the North. But, with only one or two exceptions, its implications for Africa are receiving little attention.

South Africa has undertaken an audit of its legislation with the intention of aligning it with e-commerce requirements.

The WTO issued a declaration on electronic commerce in May 1998 which called for the establishment of a comprehensive work programme on global electronic commerce taking account, iter alia of, the development needs of developing countries.

UNCTAD’s Global Trade Point Network is established in a number of countries in Africa including Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, Tunisia and Zimbabwe to facilitate linkages among the different partners in commercial transactions and provide information on trade regulations, banking practices and market intelligence. UNCTAD has also convened conferences to assess the opportunities that electronic commerce could open to developing countries and address capacity building requirements.

GIIC has identified as one of its focus areas the understanding of the type of framework needed to promote electronic commerce and to identify barriers to its full global development. The GIIC will review the various legal and policy issues related to e-commerce, taking account of different stages of economic development. GIIC will also attempt to bridge the gap between private and public international organisations working on these issues.

Surveys of African-generated Web content currently being undertaken by ECA and UNESCO should shed some light on the use of the Internet by African business.

There has been considerable discussion within the development community of the potential of the new technologies to support small business and projects are underway in at least Zambia, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ghana.

There is an urgent need to document the results of these projects, to demonstrate that the beginnings of e-commerce are emerging in the region and to incorporate the particular situation of Africa into global thinking on the issue.

Agriculture, natural resources and the environment

Much of the donor interest in agriculture and natural resource management focuses on the collection, processing and provision of information of the type traditionally provided through extension agents or agricultural research networks.

CTA, the agricultural information support agency of the ACP/Lome Convention based in the Netherlands, carried out a connectivity survey in its African members and has established a project for a Regional Agricultural Information Service for Sate in Southern Africa based at the University of the Free State in South Africa to respond to queries for agricultural information. FAO has a long established database of agricultural information created through decentralised mechanisms in developing countries but is also exploring the use of the Internet to support extension efforts. The World Bank is supporting environmental information management in Central Africa in collaboration with the Global Environment Fund and UNDP’s Sustainable Development Network Programme. SDNP programmes in the region all aim at networking among the main stakeholders to support sustainable development.

As mentioned earlier IDRC is examining, with the Ford Foundation, the potential of the new communication technologies to link the components of community-based natural resource management projects in rural Mozambique: linking scouts collecting data on the ground who are often away from base for up to two weeks, with community based research and management units and provincial governments. Another interesting initiative, the African Highlands Initiative of the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in East and Central Africa (ASARECA) brings together national research organisations, extension agencies, NGOs and farmers to exchange information about natural resource management in the Highlands region. This project too is experimenting with new wireless technologies.

There are obvious opportunities in the e-commerce area to exploit the new technologies for both the marketing of agricultural products and of environmental tourism opportunities.

Community access through telecentres

Many of the applications mentioned above can be implemented through community telecentres. The concept of a telecentre has been seen by many to be the way to include rural communities in the information society. A telecentre unites people living in poor communities with the technologies that enable them to communicate, access information, and exchange ideas with close neighbours and potential partners all over the world . At one end of the spectrum the telecentre may be a simple phone shop - at the other a community centre equipped with phone, fax, copiers, computers and Internet access. Telecentres may also be located in schools or clinics and function as nodes of education or health networks. There are many telecentre models but there is consensus that access to the Internet is the goal which offers the most benefit.

Telecentres may be owned by entrepreneurs (either individually or as part of a franchise) or by community organisations. In the latter case they are often subsidized (by donors or by governments indirectly through universal service obligations generated by the telcom sector). Private sector opportunities abound for developing new infrastructure, technologies and tools adapted to community use. These include the design of secure physical facilities, new approaches to delivering the communications infrastructure, hardware, software and content. At the moment donors and governments are taking the lead in what is in effect an attempt to prime emerging markets for the private sector.

Many experimental telecentre programs are underway in Africa. In South Africa the main actor is the Universal Service Agency which is currently developing a number of private and public sector models. On the donor side, IDRC, UNDP, UNESCO, ITU and the World Bank are all funding pilot centres in Egypt, Tanzania, Mali, Benin, Mozambique and South Africa, to cite just a few examples.

5. Conclusions

What can we learn from this proliferation of activity aimed at introducing the new information and communication technologies into African development?

We on the donor side need to work harder at incorporating non-specialist African voices into discussions both virtual and real. The different development circles are not intersecting very much yet. Donors must listen more; both to their own staff on the ground and to their national partners - and they must dig deeper to seek their partners in developing countries. Their regional programmes need to be more grounded in national experience. We must tap the new constituencies that are expanding their horizons through application of the technologies and pay particular attention to community-based organisations and youth. International coalitions such as the Global Knowledge Partnership must more actively seek partners representing civil society.

The private sector can explore different models to fulfill both social responsibility and investment goals. On the social responsibility side relationships can be built on a range of business skills: schools, clinics, community-based organisations implementing computer systems and Internet access need help with business planning, accounting and financial control, management and monitoring as well as with technical skills. On the investment side small African businesses can benefit from close mentoring of staff as well as from financial inputs.

More research needs to be done to establish the case that competition will bring universal access. The developed world contains few examples - if developing countries in Africa are to accept the hypothesis work needs to done to strengthen the theoretical underpinnings of the argument in an African context.

Very little research at all in Africa addresses the implications of ICTs for development. African policy research and analysis institutions need to place the issue on their own agendas and build capacities to address them. Issues to be addressed include both project level impact on quality of life and ways of integrating ICT dimensions into policy processes in other sectors.

Finally, in spite of the rhetoric of the donors and the frequent references to best practice, few organisations are following their own advice and building learning capacities into ICT projects in the region. The technologies offer the possibility of sharing learning at the project level and at the programme level. Building knowledge bases that facilitate project management by linking like-projects in different locations is just as important as feeding lessons to managers in donor organisations. There is little evidence that either is happening in any systematic way yet. Here perhaps is another opportunity for the private sector: to help development organisations build and implement the tools that are needed to create an effective learning environment for development.

Referring to the impact of e-commerce on business leaders the Economist states: the Internet is in an entirely different category from the technology-driven changes they have either embraced or had thrust upon them in the past. Is this also the case for development? Will the new ICTs empower the poor in developing countries sufficiently to break through existing political and economic constraints? Is the donor community prepared to support enough exploratory work to decide the case - or will it leave the stage before the results are in now that the glamorous period of international meetings and press coverage may be nearing its end - and the long and more difficult road of experimenting, learning, replicating, just beginning?

The following lists the conferences on ICTs in Africa (or that are of direct relevance to Africa) between ISAD in May ‘96 and March ‘99.