Internet and governance and problems facing African Countries

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The following are what is are issues facing most African countries
when it comes to IT..

Information Technology in Africa: A Proactive Approach and the
Prospects of Leapfrogging Decades in the Development Process
S. Yunkap Kwankam <ykwankam@cam.healthnet.org>
N. Ntomambang Ningo <nningo@camfido.gn.apc.org>
University of Yaounde I
Cameroon

Abstract
This paper examines perspectives for the growth of information
technology (IT) in Africa. The central thesis is that, as in other
development sectors, technological solutions are more readily
available than the political will to implement them. Policy aspects
of IT therefore need to be addressed, in terms of formulation,
dissemination, and implementation. In the absence of clear and
enforceable policy, the African information industry is likely to
evolve in a haphazard manner in reaction to uncoordinated external
motives, thus allowing improper practices that would impair the
growth of enthusiasm for IT. One strategy proposed is to concentrate
IT development in priority sectors identified by governments
themselves, such as education, health, and the environment, thereby
opening new vistas of application. Examples are given of how this
can be done. Another strategy is to pursue IT at the regional level
with strong interagency collaboration, given the interdisciplinary
nature of the technology. This would have two positive outcomes. It
would contribute to bringing down the barriers that currently
circumscribe countries into fairly closed information entities.
Second, it would exploit the bandwagon effect, which has worked
successfully in the health sector, to commit African governments to
IT development programs. Such development should take a long-term
view and reach for the cutting edge of technology, for which some
institutional capacity already exists. The continent could thus
leapfrog decades in the development of IT and provide an empowering
environment for development in other sectors.

Contents
Introduction
A proactive approach
The IT policy environment in Africa
The need for government policy
Strategy 1: build IT into other development sectors
Area of application: health
Epidemiological data
Consultations
Adult health literacy
Medical records
Management and maintenance of equipment
Area of application: education
Area of application: environment
Area of application: development
Strategy 2: regional action and the bandwagon effect
Strategy 3: strong interagency cooperation
Technology leapfrogging in Africa
The IT development process elsewhere
Low technological inertia and IT leapfrogging
Introduction
In the continuum of human development five overlapping phases can be
identified: the nomadic/agrarian, agrarian, industrial, service, and
knowledge. In the latter stages Africa has lagged behind the rest of
the world. During the industrial phase, this lag was attributable to
the colonial experience, which denied most of this region its
sovereignty over decisions and policies affecting its development
and imposed on it activities that contributed to the development of
the colonial powers. The colonial period was one during which Africa
lost control over its political, economic, administrative, and
technological destiny.

If the lag in development in the past can be attributed to the loss
of sovereignty, it will be difficult to explain the continuing lag
in this era of political and administrative independence. Africa
must avoid the specter of a new form of colonialism based on the
generation, storage, processing, retrieval, transmission, and
distribution of information. Many African countries are saddled with
inadequate communications infrastructure. The development of IT in
African countries will be influenced by answers, if any, to
questions concerning the economic benefits of IT, IT policy, and its
impact on government, society, business, and the security of the
state. It is not clear how these concerns will be handled, given the
limited experience of other societies. Nevertheless, they deserve
consideration because acceptance of IT will depend on its perceived
benefits in solving some of society's pressing and anticipated
problems in education, health care, business, governance, and
sustainable rural development. This paper examines perspectives for
the growth of IT in Africa. The central thesis is that, as in other
development sectors, technological solutions are more readily
available than the political will to implement them. We will sketch
in broad terms our views on how African countries can leapfrog
decades of IT development.

A proactive approach
African countries, by virtue of their potential market size, should
not be obligated simply to react to trends in the IT industry, but
should play an active part in their determination. A proactive
rather than a reactive approach should be adopted in the development
of IT in Africa. This means anticipating problems and designing
strategies to resolve them before they occur. Kwankam [1] addresses
this issue in these terms:

Our vision should not be limited to catching up with what exists in
the developed world. This will simply guarantee the propagation of
the gap between them and us. Secondly, it will perpetuate problems
of appropriateness, adaptability, etc., perennial issues which will
continue to eat up our meager resources.
The paper cites, as a prime example, backup power supplies for
microcomputers, which cause power to be converted from d.c. to a.c.
and back to d.c. Proactivity would lead to Africans being at the
forefront of such developments as a microcomputer insensitive to
power line fluctuations and even total outages, or seamless
integration of various platforms used for e-mail in the region.

The IT policy environment in Africa
Policy issues are central to most development efforts. Problem trees
in most sectors of the African economy usually show policy issues at
the base, driving everything else. In most countries there is a
policy vacuum in IT, with only inadequate coverage (if any) being
provided from related areas such as telecommunications and the
computer industry. The policy aspects of IT therefore need to be
addressed, in terms of formulation, dissemination, and
implementation. In the absence of clear and enforceable policy, the
industry is likely to evolve in a haphazard manner in reaction to
uncoordinated external motives, thus allowing improper practices
that would impair the growth of enthusiasm for IT. As George
Sadowsky puts it, one stroke of the pen by a government official may
be more important than the enthusiasm of a host of practitioners.

The need for government policy
Fortunately, there is some overlap between policy issues for IT and
for computer technology, which only a few years back was a
preoccupation of many African countries. These latter issues are
discussed by Kwankam [2]. We echo some of the ideas advanced in
these documents.

The prospect of a technology with such potential impact as IT
evolving totally unchecked within our countries is disquieting.
Although there are many successful instances of IT introduction, a
few bad examples are sufficient to give the industry a bad name,
particularly with potential users who are not fully committed to the
idea. The rational transfer and application of this technology
requires that some guidelines be set down for service providers,
distributors of equipment, and end users alike. Such guidelines must
have the backing of government in order to be effective, and should
cover:

acquisition of information technology,
use and application of the technology,
human resource development, and
regulation/deregulation and management.
The most pressing needs are for:

government policies and legislation to support IT development;
informatics policy and management infrastructure;
establishment of financing mechanisms, with adequate financial
analysis, controls, and accounting;
a clear position on the level of control to be exercised locally and
a desired level of dependency on foreign sources; and
coordination and integration of the needs of the public and private
sectors' continuing awareness of the state of the art in IT.
Strategy 1: build IT into other development sectors
One strategy to ensure IT's growth is to build it into priority
development sectors identified by African governments themselves:
areas such as education, health, and the environment, which open up
new vistas of application. We give examples below of areas where IT
can be used not only to promote development of the sector but also
to serve a hidden agenda of promoting use of the technology. This
development should take a long-term view, reaching for the cutting
edge of the technology, for which some institutional capacity
already exists.

Area of application: health
Epidemiological data
Planning of public health interventions is based on epidemiological
data, which is collected from health districts on a regular basis.
Most countries are plagued with problems of this data either
arriving late or getting lost en route. There is a dire need to
ensure that these statistics get to planners in health ministries,
and as soon as possible after the end of the collection period.
Computer-mediated communications using connectivity among health
care facilities would provide a means of meeting this need.

Consultations
Although most Africans live in rural areas, the bulk of the health
care dollar is spent on facilities in urban areas. This raises
issues of equity, an area of increasing concern to funding and aid
agencies. IT can provide improved access to specialists for rural
populations who are now concentrated in tertiary care and teaching
institutions in urban centers, and thus partially address the equity
issue without costly replication of infrastructure.

Adult health literacy
Adult health literacy is one of three major aspects in the Health-
for-All package in the WHO (World Health Organization) African
Region. Health care interventions for the vast majority of people in
the region occur in the home and the community. As one goes from
health centers through district and provincial hospitals to tertiary
care facilities, progressively fewer interventions take place in
each type of facility [3]. However, as neither the home nor the
community is an "organized" health care institution, there is a
tendency for ministries to focus health literacy programs elsewhere.
The resulting mismatch between where people receive their health
care and where they are instructed about health care leads to
inefficiency and ineffectiveness. There is therefore a need to
reorient adult health literacy toward delivery in homes and the
community. Connectivity offered by electronic networking and
distance learning technology can be used to fulfill this need.

Medical records
Availability of computers and communications facilities in health
care institutions would allow national standardized systems of
medical recordkeeping, thus permitting the transfer of records from
one facility to another as patients move around the country. Terms
such as "health passport" or "smart card" have been given to
portable condensed versions of medical records--credit card-sized
electronic data banks--envisioned in this scenario.

Management and maintenance of equipment
Remote consultation of databases and knowledge bases (using
inference engines built into expert systems) would permit multiple
simultaneous access to the limited know-how that currently exists on
the management and maintenance of equipment. Broken-down equipment
represents anywhere from 50% to 80% of the stock of health care
equipment in African countries. The same scheme could be used for
planned preventive maintenance (PPM) of the IT infrastructure
itself.

Area of application: education
As far back as 1988, the World Bank proposed distance learning as an
alternative to Africa's current educational delivery systems [4]. IT
offers such a mechanism. This must be accompanied by proper design
that takes into account the local context, as suggested by
Papagiannis, Douglas, Williamson, and Le Mon in connection with
earlier technologies [5].

Area of application: environment
The potential advantages of IT in the management of the environment
are clearly exemplified by the joint efforts of USAID's Central
African Project for the Environment (CARPE) and the World Bank's
Regional Environmental Information Management Project (REIMP). The
latter is a component of the former. CARPE, in seeking to promote
rational exploitation of the forest resources of the Congo Basin,
has introduced a connectivity component to enable stakeholders to
freely, effectively, and seamlessly exchange information through
Internet service providers using technology that is locally
available. REIMP builds on the Sustainable Development Networking
Program (SDNP) servers in the subregion to facilitate exchange of
information among government ministries concerned with the
implementation of national environmental management plans (NEMPs).

Area of application: development
The United Nations has recently set up interagency task forces and
committees to provide integrated support to country-level efforts to
follow up recent global conferences such as Rio (environment), Cairo
(population), and Copenhagen (social development). IT is glaringly
absent in this lineup, either as the focus of a task force or as a
specific issue to be addressed. We assume that this is because of
the ubiquitous nature of IT in development and that IT will be woven
into the activities of all the task forces.

Strategy 2: regional action and the bandwagon effect
Another strategy, given the similarity of problems faced by various
countries, is to pursue IT at the regional level. Experience from
the health sector has confirmed the wisdom of pursuing common goals
in common forums. In the African region, the Alma Ata Declaration
(primary health care) and the Bamako Initiative (cost recovery) are
outstanding examples of how the bandwagon effect can be used to
propel otherwise lethargic governments into action. Although the
individual governments participated in these declarations, it can be
argued that few would have made the significant progress they have
achieved if the declarations had never been made--a classic case of
the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Similarly, it can
be argued that a declaration on IT at an Africa-wide forum would
have the same effect on the development of the technology in the
region. The UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) is well placed
to play a lead role in bringing about such an outcome.

The ECA is charged with management of the task force concerned with
harnessing information technology for development within the UN
Special Initiative for Africa. Along with the World Bank, UNESCO,
and other participants, it is expected to:

bring about policy reforms to enable full participation in the
information age,
set up infrastructure for Internet access in a number of countries,
build human capacity for computer networking, and
improve African capacity to use information for development.
The ECA also plans to establish and operate "outreach electronic
clearinghouses on African development." Although this is simply a
new delivery mechanism associated with the Pan African Development
Information System (PADIS), which has functioned in the past as a
hierarchical network, the idea is to be applauded . The very
structure of the PADIS network severely limited its ability to
disseminate information; the gatekeeper role of the national and
subregional centers was the major limitation. Although service will
be offered through local Internet service providers in the new
structure, and thus physically the network will still have all the
features of a hierarchical network, logically it will operate as a
star-connected network, with the PADIS server in Addis Ababa as the
hub. The use of IT will eliminate the filtering effect of the
national and subregional centers.

Strategy 3: strong interagency cooperation
There are a number of initiatives under way to address the
successful development of IT in Africa. UNESCO's INFORMAFRICA
project aims to introduce IT by using such strategies as training
specialists (maintenance personnel and software producers) in and
through IT and creating awareness among the public. UNESCO also
claims to be the only international agency offering an information
technology program, the Intergovernmental Informatics Program (IIP),
which supposedly operates in all UNESCO member states.
Unfortunately, the very existence of this program is not known to
many IT enthusiasts in African countries.

UNDP's Sustainable Development Networking Program (SDNP), which
among other objectives seeks to bring about increased connectivity
between sources and users of information, is in operation in several
African countries, and the World Bank's Infodev project will begin
shortly. What is needed is strong interagency cooperation to bring
about mechanisms for collaboration among these projects, which all
seek to solve all or some of the same problems.

Technology leapfrogging in Africa
The IT development process elsewhere
To understand the opportunities for Africa to leapfrog decades of
development, it is necessary to briefly review the development of IT
in advanced countries at both the technological and policy levels.

The development of connectivity has been intimately linked to
developments in telecommunications, especially telephony [6] [7].
From the telegraph through the telephone to wireless, the
information transmission industry developed in distinct and
segregated segments with deep cleavages between broadcasting, cable
television, wireless, and point-to-point communications. Each sector
had a specific line of technology and services it offered to its
customers. Through legislation or mutual agreement, one sector did
not compete with another even when its technology permitted it or
its services were of interest to clients of another sector. As
segmented as the telecommunications industry had become, it was
further categorized into providers of common carrier services and
providers of content. In this regard, telephone companies as common
carriers provided the local and long distance network necessary for
the provision of content through network radio and television
broadcasting.

This state of affairs was put into question by developments in
digital technology in general and more particularly by the near
ubiquity of computers and their eventual connectivity. With the
entities at both ends of the connection no longer necessarily two
humans, and with communication no longer confined to voice, the
rigid division was no longer tenable and cross-sector competition
began to appear. Through legal or regulatory changes or through
cross-sector mergers and acquisitions, companies originally in
different media or content began to seek to provide information
services by advocating removal of the limits imposed by earlier
regulations.

Until recently the transmission medium in telephone systems was
overwhelmingly twisted-pair and coaxial (copper) cable. Though
entirely adequate for speech, this placed profound limitations on
connectivity in terms of capacity, speed, and bandwidth for
transmission of other types of signals, such as video and sound.
Even though recent developments in telephony have resulted in high-
bandwidth systems - microwave, satellite, optical fiber, radio,
cellular, and so on - these systems have been introduced only on
major transmission routes. The connection between subscriber and
local exchange still remains twisted-pair copper wire.

If a certain degree of order reigned during the autocratic period
imposed by regulation, then the democratization of the industry
brought about by the computer and deregulation is leading to policy
chaos. Major questions about the public interest and (de)regulation
of the IT industry have not received satisfactory answers. In
essence, how is the spread of IT to be regulated in order to assure
universal service, or at least universal accessibility?

Low technological inertia and IT leapfrogging
Africa's lack of infrastructure, at first glance, may be seen as a
disadvantage. But, on closer examination, this can be turned into an
advantage if properly managed. African countries are not encumbered
by extensive networks built on obsolete technology, which will
require an evolutionary process of replacement. The technological
inertia is thus quite low. In technology leapfrogging the extent of
the leap is in inverse proportion to the technological inertia
carried along. The push should therefore be for the cutting edge.
The latest technology should be used in building new infrastructure.
African countries will thus leapfrog several stages and decades in
the IT development process. In doing so, they will learn from the
experience of more advanced countries the ways and means of
providing the greatest social benefits to a large fraction of the
population while avoiding any unpleasant side effects.

http://www.isoc.org/inet97/proceedings/B7/B7_1.HTM

***************

South Africa:-

Empowerment, Network Costs Bedevil Telecoms Liberalisation
Business Day (Johannesburg)

OPINION
January 21, 2005
Posted to the web January 21, 2005

Information Technology Editor
Johannesburg

MAJOR points of contention at hearings into the deregulation of the
telecommunications sector have been the degree of black economic
empowerment ownership and how much networking companies should pay
for a licence to operate.

Established players in the Value Added Networking Services (Vans)
market are fighting to prevent new rules being imposed which they
fear may strangle the sector. Other groups are calling for stronger
steps to help more black people enter the industry.

The services provided by the Vans operators include internet access,
email, corporate data networks and website hosting.

Regulations drawn up by the Independent Communications Authority of
SA (Icasa) propose a licence application fee of R30 000 a 600% hike
from the current fee of R5 000.

<snipped>

http://allafrica.com/stories/200501210171.html

**************

Zambia:-

Empower Communications Authority to Check Interconnector Charges -
ZCC
Business Reporter

THE Zambia Competition Commission (ZCC) says the Communications
Authority (CA) should be given powers to control the interconnection
charges by mobile phone providers because they are too high.

ZCC executive director George Lipimile said in reviewing the
commission's performance since its establishment that there was need
for a legal provision to compel the Zambia Telecommunications
Company (ZAMTEL) to maintain cost-oriented interconnection charges.

He said it was evident that the current interconnection charges by
all service providers were too high to be considered to be based on
costs only.

The Communications Authority should therefore have legal powers,
clearly stated, to review and approve or ratify interconnection
charges. The onus should be on each service provider to prove that
the interconnection charge is cost-oriented.

He said the CA should prescribe an unambiguous and objective
calculation base for the operators in order to determine whether the
prevailing charges corresponded with the requirement for cost
orientation.

Mr Lipimile also said ZCC had continued to receive complaints from
traditional cattle farmers of Western and Southern provinces
concerning the anti-competitive effects arising from the ban on the
movement of live animals from the said provinces.

He said the commission was considering the main issues surrounding
the continued sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) ban on the movement
of the traditional cattle from rural areas.

It had wide range of consultations with the stakeholders as to the
likely social, economic and anti-competitive effects of the ban on
the local communities, and was still liaising with the department of
veterinary services for professional guidance on the matter.

Mr Lipimile said the commission's sensitisation programme last year
received an overwhelming response from consumers where the number of
cases reported increased from 29 cases in 2003 to about 136 cases
received by November 2004.

Out of the 136 cases, the commission secured refunds for 42
consumers amounting to more than K10.7 million. About 46 consumers
were given replacements with a total value of approximately K12
million during the same period.

Most of these cases involved consumers being sold defective and sub-
standard items and deceptive conduct by some traders towards
consumers, all of which are a breach of sections 12 (b) and 12 (d)
respectively.

He said the main focus of these outreach programmes for 2005 was to
strengthen the capacity of local consumer advisers in the districts,
through regular workshops and seminars to improve their capacities.

Mr Lipimile said there was need to come up with effective
communication methods of reaching all the consumers in Zambia in
order to afford them effective protection from unfair trading
practices.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200501190033.html