Digital Reach

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incomes dramatically through exports by cutting out the middle-

man via information systems.

I have gathered much evidence like this since I started track-

ing the grassroots changes the Information Society is driving in

Africa. What it all has in common is its spontaneous occurrence.

These people didn’t wait for decision makers to assert a link

between the Internet and development for them to step in and

take their future into their own hands.

The implication of this is the risk of disconnection between

the prevalent discourse on Internet and development and the

grassroots realities. At the time when most African countries are

racing to adopt some form of broad-based ICT policies, the lack

of resources, unrealistic targets and the complex nature of the

global economy are making the linkage between the Internet and

development a mere incantation. Despite great awareness around

Information and communication technology (ICT) by the ongoing

World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process, most

of the continent is still to hear the ringing of a fixed phone, not

to mention holding a mouse. For the 90 per cent of the African

population still on the other side of the digital divide, commu-

nicating with the outside world is still an obstacle race. African

governments are sharing the view that the solution lies through

a universal access strategy. The African regional meeting held in

Accra, Ghana in February 2005, has strongly advocated univer-

sal access as a major strategy to harness ICT for development

purposes and build modern information infrastructures and

knowledge capability in order to bridge the digital divide in Africa.

The trouble is, 70 per cent of telephone infrastructure in Africa

is cellular. Therefore, the issue of universal access goes beyond

being purely a matter of telecommunications policy and regula-

tion. It’s a matter of access to ICT in the context of human

development. It encompasses the new forms of Internet access,

the building of community-based or community-driven networks,

traditional telephony, as well as broadcasting media such as

community radio. More than 60 countries have begun to estab-

lish Universal Access Funding (UAF) mechanisms as a core

component of their ICT development policies. Successful models

of UAF introduced in Africa and elsewhere have indicated that,

properly implemented in a competitive environment, these mech-

anisms can play a critical role in leveraging market forces to

expand access to public telephone services, multipurpose

community telecentres, and other ICT facilities. But these expe-

riences are still too scarce to enable general assumptions. The

low teledensity levels in most African countries have two distinct

causes: undersupply of telecommunications or ICT services due

to inadequate sector policies, and/or low demand due to low

incomes.

Telecommunications reform which led to the privatization or

partial opening of the market in many African countries doesn’t

suffice to address the second cause of universality problems –

insufficient local incomes to support the rollout of telecommu-

nications or ICT networks. The privatization of telecom

operations, combined with the adoption of new technologies, has

greatly reduced net financial flows to African countries. Their

largely state-owned telecom operators have seen massive reduc-

tions in their primary source of revenue – from incoming

international calls – due to the increasingly competitive inter-

national environment and the use of bypass technologies such

as VoIP and VSAT.

The growth and adoption of the Internet is being hampered by

this environment. The high tariffs charged by monopoly operators,

the inability of internet service providers (ISPs) to service their

customers with adequate telecom infrastructure, the fact that ISPs

must pay for both ends of their international telecom links, as

well as the transit charges to pass their traffic through to the rest

of the Internet and to carry the incoming traffic from developed

countries, lead to inequitable access by developing nations to the

global Internet backbones.

Addressing these various difficulties will require a major shift

in the course of policy making. The complexity of issues places

an enormous burden on African countries and requires expen-

sive and skilled regulatory machinery to operate effectively.

Addressing the market structure, the credibility problem and the

lack of skilled human resources issues will require a major shift

in the policy and a clear repartition of roles and attribution

amongst the various stakeholders.

The question is no longer whether the Internet leads to devel-

opment. It does, and the ladies in Yaoundé cyber cafés, the

fishermen in Senegal, the farmers in Kenya, proved just that. The

challenge is, how to turn the back against the ‘one size fits all’

policy imposed upon the developing countries by international

institutions. The International Telecommunication Union, the

International Monetary Fund and the World Bank determine most

of the priorities at the national level. Those priorities are unfor-

tunately not always in coherence with the needs expressed at the

grassroots level. As a first step towards addressing this develop-

ment policy divide, together with developing policy tools and

approaches that can further the integration of Internet and devel-

opment strategies, and place the grassroots change brokers at the

heart of the Information Society which copes with the central

principles of transparency, public accountability, public partici-

pation and equity, and at the same time stimulate universal access

to ICT and the use, we need to listen carefully to those who daily

reinvent the use of the Internet for development purposes.

Photo: Sanjay Acharya/MAP