WEST BUT HITS THE ROCKS IN AFRICA WHERE THE AVAILABILITY AND TELEPHONE LINE -- CANNOT BE SO EASILY TAKEN FOR GRANTED.

1:05 PM Apr 12, 1996

WEST BUT HITS THE ROCKS IN AFRICA WHERE THE AVAILABILITY AND TELEPHONE LINE -- CANNOT BE SO EASILY TAKEN FOR GRANTED.
But while the constraints are real, that does not mean that the super-information highway once it touches Africa peters out into the wilderness of the bush. A small but growing list of Sub-Saharan African countries already have full-connectivity to the global network of computers that is the Internet.

These at the moment are Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Unofficial access is available in Zimbabwe, while the rest of the continent has to make do with the bare-bones of e-mail and off-line Fidonets.

Getting Africa up to speed, and sensitising governments to the importance of providing a regulatory and infrastructural framework conducive to building an Internet culture, is the goal of a hard- working group of African telematics devotees within civil society and government.

A High Level Working Group on Information and Communication Technologies in Africa, which met in Ethiopia last year under the auspices of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), is spearheading an African Networking Initiative among decision-makers which aims to harness the developmental and economic advantages of global networking.

The Capacity Building for Electronic Communications in Africa, a project started in 1993, aims to have an impact in up to 24 African countries through the Pan African Development Information System (PADIS) based in the Ethiopian headquarters of the ECA.

On the ground, NGOs have been avid netters, hooking up to global networks such as GreenNet of the Association for Progressive Communications and attempting to spread the benefits locally. And there is also a growing number of commercial providers, selling access to the more than 6.5 million documents -- according to the Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh -- available on the World Wide Web last year.

In Kenya, the East African Internet Association (EAIA) is building a backbone of interlinked nodes across the region and plans to eventually lease an international line, costing $16,000 a month, for direct Net access. "The objective of the EAIA is to promote cost-effective use of the Internet by providing direct connectivity for a number of users, mainly NGOs, who are too small to lease an international line on their own," says Anne Heidenreich of EAIA.

The use of the Net, because of the types of clients at the moment in Africa, is less about the trivia and entertainment that personifies surfing and the chat-rooms in the West. It is more about the local application of the hard information and the globalisation of issue-based advocacy that telematics also provides.

HealthNet, a service pioneered by a U.S. NGO to help community-based health workers has saved lives. It allows doctors in the field, through e-mail, to get answers on difficult diagnosis problems.

"Last September, for example, a university student had kidney failure as a result of sickle-cell anaemia," says Fred Buckehi, the director of HealthNet in Kenya, 30% of whose subscribers are in the rural areas.

"The doctors were undecided as to whether to put him into a dialysis machine, which is known to be dangerous for sickle-cell patients. They used HealthNet to query treatment options and a smaller dosage of blood-thinners was recommended and it worked. I think that's remarkable."

On the impact of the Internet in Kenya, Buckehi believes "it helps in a variety of ways. Most importantly, it allows people access to a vast body of information and has significantly improved the means of communication in this country."

The sheer volume of the information though, and its Northern-bias, creates problems of relevance. "If we are well organised as NGOs, we can avoid the duplication of efforts and expenses involved in surfing, and hire target NGOs...to scan for specific information in a coordinated and focused way," Heidenreich says. "So, as NGOs, we get exactly what we want."

Although South Africa is miles ahead of the rest of the continent in terms of Internet access, it is extremely skewed, favouring the urban middle class, notes Kate Wilde of Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) which is currently working on a number of telecommunication projects to extend access to deprived rural communities.

"South Africa is way ahead in the use of these tools in the urban areas mainly in the business sector but in the rural areas there is as much to be done as in other African countries," notes Wilde.

There are probably more telephone lines in Manhattan, New York than in the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. Regional telephone calls within Africa, routed through Paris or London before returning to the continent, are in comparison with international calls from the West, extremely expensive. And the physical lines are usually still unreliable copper cables.

A personal computer for 1,500 dollars is not a major outlay for a person employed in an industrialised country. For a Nigerian university lecturer who earns just 50 dollars a month, it is unthinkable.

Deep in the Ndoki forest in northern Congo, the Nouabale-Ndoki project for the conservation of nature is using a donor-funded satellite phone to e-mail the results of its research right around the world. Fine for environmentalists, but the rest of this central African country has to struggle with its communications backwardness.

"We study new communications technology, but we neither see nor use it," confesses university student Goma Achile. "In the fourth year of communication science, I can't tell you what e-mail is. I've heard that it's two computers communicating with each other, but I've never had a chance to see it for myself."

That does not mean that people in the Congo are not interested. "I bought a book on the Internet. I know all about hooking up to the Internet. I only need a computer with a modem to get cracking," says university colleague, Yves Laurent Ngoma. For a small fee he is allowing other students to read the book, and if he ever finally manages to get his hardware together, "I'm sure the University will be grateful to me as it can't even hook up to Fidonet or other networks to access the research done by other students in the world."

And if it's not the wherewithal that is the stumbling block to Internet access in Africa, it is governments. Import tariff rates on information technology goods are over 40 percent in most African countries.

The Kenyan government has just reduced its import tax on computer hardware from 200 percent to 10 percent, but it refuses to allow private satellites for telephone communications. High-speed lines have been made available to a new commercial provider. But, according to press reports, the government is uncomfortable with the Internet which, for example, allows subscribers to read the latest book by jailed dissident Koigi wa Wamwere smuggled out of prison and available on the Net.

In Zimbabwe, a new commercial provider, Internet Africa, has "informally" hooked up to the Net via the lines of the government-owned Posts and Telecommunications Corporation (PTC).

"Things are happening informally in Zimbabwe and something must be done about it," says Chiko Musimwa, PTC Data and Technology manager. "Informal traders are offering services that are slow and you end up spending a lot of time on the Internet and it not useful."

Rob Borland of Internet Africa hits back: "The government wants to set up its own service but it should concentrate on good telecommunications rather than come into a sector that is not for them."