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The African Internet - A Connectivity Status ReportThe Internet has grown rapidly on the continent over the last few years. At the end of 1996 only 11 countries had local access, but now only Eritrea and Somalia are still without local Internet services, and they both have plans to be online shortly. However, although a growing number of countries have Internet services in some of the secondary towns, Internet access in Africa has been largely confined to the capital cities, cutting off the majority of the population - over 70% of Africa's population lives in rural areas. Fortunately some nations have local call Internet access across the whole country. To do this, the local telecom operator simply sets up a special 'area-code' for Internet access that is charged at local call rates, allowing Internet providers to immediately roll out a network with national coverage. With the massively reduced costs for those in remote areas that this provides, it is surprising that so far only 14 of the 53 countries have adopted this strategy - Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Gabon, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Chad, Togo, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.
It is difficult to measure actual numbers of Internet users in Africa, but figures for the number of dialup accounts provided by ISPs are more readily available, for which it is estimated that there are now over 500,000 subscribers in Africa. Each computer with an Internet or email connection supports an average of three users, a recent study by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) has found. This puts current estimates of the number of Internet users at somewhere around 1.5 million. Most of these are in South Africa (about 1 million) leaving only about 500,000 amongst the remaining 734 million people on the continent. This works out at about one Internet user for every 1,500 people, compared to a world average of about one user for every 38 people, and a North American and European average of about one in every 4 people. No studies have been made in Africa of the number of rural vs urban users, but it is safe to say that users in the cities and towns vastly outnumber rural users. There are now about 26 countries with 1,000 or more dialup subscribers, but only about 9 countries with 5,000 or more - Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, Ghana, Mozambique, South Africa, Tunisia, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Clearly most of these countries, are in North Africa and Southern Africa, which have more highly developed economies and better infrastructures which would naturally result in larger populations of Internet users. But the high level of Internet use in Ghana, Uganda and Mozambique is clearly of special interest to the other developing countries. Having been early adopters of innovative communication policies, these countries are were among the first on the continent to obtain Internet access and so have had the most time to develop their user-base.
Currently, the average cost of using a local dialup Internet account for 20 hours a month in Africa is over $100/month (usage fees, and telephone time included, but not telephone line rental). According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 20 hours of Internet access in the U.S. costs $29, including telephone charges. Although European costs are higher ($74 in Germany, $52 in France, $65 in Britain, and $53 in Italy) these figures are 4 times the amount of access, and all of these countries have per capita incomes which are at least 10 times greater than the African average. Two-way satellite-based Internet services to connect directly the US or Europe have also been quickly adopted wherever regulations allow, because of their much lower costs. Namely in Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia which all have ISPs that are not dependent on the monopoly telecom operator for their international bandwidth.
With the exception of some ISPs in Southern Africa, almost all of the international Internet circuits in Africa connect to the USA, with a few to the United Kingdom and France. However, Internet Service Providers in countries which border South Africa benefit from the low tariff policies instituted by the South African telecom operator for international links to neighbouring countries. As a result South Africa acts as a hub for some of its neighbouring countries - Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland. Aside from the South African hub and a link between Mauritius and Madagascar, there are no other regional backbones or links between neighbouring countries. The main reason for this is that the high international tariffs charged by telecom operators discourages Internet Service Providers from establishing multiple international links. As a result ISPs are forced to consolidate all of their traffic over a single high cost international circuit, which also means that there are rapidly increasing payments being made the US and European operators for traffic between African countries. In response to the high cost of Internet services and the slow speed of the web, but also because of the overriding importance of electronic mail, low-cost email-only services have been launched by many ISPs and are continuing to attract subscribers. Similarly, because of the relatively high cost of local electronic mailbox services from African ISPs, a large proportion of African email users make use of the free Web-based services such as Hotmail, Yahoo or Excite, most of which are in the US. These services can be more costly to use and more cumbersome than using standard email software, because extra online time is needed to maintain the connection to the remote site. There is also a rapidly growing interest in kiosks, cybercafes and other forms of public Internet access, such as adding PCs to community phone-shops, schools, police stations and clinics which can share the cost of equipment and access amongst a larger number of users. Many existing 'phone shops' are now adding Internet access to their services, even in remote towns where it is a long-distance call to the nearest dialup access point. Due to high costs for international data lines, obtaining sufficient international bandwidth for delivering web pages over the Internet is still a major problem in most African countries. As a result, a growing number of African Internet sites are hosted on servers that are in Europe or the U.S. This is especially necessary for countries where ISPs operate their own independent international links without local interconnections (peering), such as in Kenya and Tanzania, which means that traffic between the subscribers of two ISPs in the same city must travel to the US or Europe and back. This makes it more efficient to host outside-country, and is further being encouraged because of the high local web hosting charges, and the large number of free hosting sites in the US and Europe. The only countries in the region with an X.400 service South Africa and Mauritius. Other advanced services such as ISDN and video conferencing are also generally not available on the continent - the only countries able to provide ISDN services are Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, the Seychelles, and South Africa, (which had 35,000 subscribers in 1996).
Voice over Internet (VOIP) services are not officially available anywhere in the region, and none of the telecom operators have implemented voice over IP technology for their traffic except for Egypt Telecom, which is routing some of its voice traffic to the US over IP. Demand for most of these services is only expected to increase once there, as a broader penetration of computers and data processing equipment arrives on the sub-continent. Evidence gathered by ECA suggests the average level of Internet email use in Africa is about one incoming and one outgoing email per day, averaging 3 to 4 pages, in communications which are most often with people outside the continent. Surveys indicated that about 25 percent of the email are replacing faxes, while 10 percent are replacing phone calls and the other 65 percent are communications that would not have been made in the absence of an email system. The highest number of users surveyed belonged to non-government organizations (NGOs), private companies and universities. The ratio of nationals to non-nationals varied between countries: 44 percent of users surveyed in Zambia were nationals as compared to 90 percent in Ghana. Most users were male: 86 percent in Ethiopia, 83 percent in Senegal, and 64 percent in Zambia. The large majority of users were well educated: 87 percent of users in Zambia and 98 percent in Ethiopia had a university degree. Email is used for general correspondence and document exchange, technical advice, managing projects, arranging meetings, and exchanging research ideas, although its use is still limited for accessing formal information resources. Across the continent, users report that email has increased efficiency and reduced the cost of communication but as yet it is used almost exclusively for contacting individuals in other regions. The Web is still a relatively under-utilised resource, although 40 percent of Zambian users questioned had conducted literature searches on the web. Universities were initially at the vanguard of Internet developments in Africa and most of them provide email services, however in early 1999 only about 20 countries had universities with full Internet connectivity. Because of the limited resources and high costs of providing computer facilities and bandwidth, full Internet access at the universities where it exists is usually restricted to staff. Post graduates are often able to obtain access but the general student population usually has no access. It can be observed that the French speaking countries have a far higher profile on the Web and greater institutional connectivity than the non-French speaking countries. This is largely due to the strong assistance provided by the various Francophone support agencies, and the Canadian and French governments, which are concerned about the dominance of English on the Internet. ACCT's BIEF and AUPELF-UREF/REFER's Syfed Centres, which are building Web sites of local information as well as providing access, are the two dominant content developers in this respect. (ACCT = Agence de la Francophonie; BIEF = Banque Internationale d'Information sur les Etats Francophones; AUPELF = Association des Universites Partiellement ou Entierement de Langue Francaise; UREF = Agence Francophone pour l'Enseignement superieur et la Recherche; REFER = Réseau Electronique Francophone d'Enseignement et la Recherche).
Although there are a few notable official general government web sites, such as those of Angola, Egypt, Gabon, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, Togo, Tunisia and Zambia, there is as yet no discernible government use of the Internet for existing administrative purposes. Web presence is higher in some sectors, particularly those involved in tourism and foreign investment, and these often have more mature sites, aimed at developing an international market presence. While most ministries and national research centres may have access to electronic mail, very few have a web site. Reflecting the limited resources of the public sector, the ECA survey found that government employees made up only one percent of users in Ethiopia and only six percent in Zambia. As far as regional intergovernmental agencies are concerned, so far ACMAD, ADB, CEDEAO, COMESA , ECA, IGAD and SADC have built web sites with a substantial amount of information on their activities and their member states. (ACMAD = African Centre of Meteorological Applications for Development; ADB = African Development Bank; CEDEAO = Communaute Economique des Etats de l'Afrique de l'Ouest; COMESA = Community of Eastern and Southern Africa; IGAD - InterGovernmental Authority on Development; SADC - Southern African Development Community). The news media are now relatively well represented on the web. The US Columbia University African Studies department has identified in the region over 120 different newspapers and news magazines that are now available on the Internet, of which over 60 percent are published on the sub-continent, in about half of the countries (23). Those most well represented in this area are again those with more advanced Internet sectors – Ivory Coast, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, enegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Also of note are the efforts to host daily newspapers by the ISP AfricaOnline which has offices in 6 countries. The use of e-commerce in Africa is still in its infancy but there are some notable initiatives now appearing, such as the sale of African crafts on the web in many countries, and the appearance of finance and banking groups in Morocco, Mauritius, South Africa and Tunisia. Increased use of e-commerce is expected shortly in the many countries where legislators are now making the needed changes to laws in order to better accommodate electronic transactions. Regional collaboration between countries is being increasingly seen as an important means of addressing the need for improved ICT infrastructure. Action has been seen on a number of fronts in this area, starting with the Conference of African Ministers of social and economic planning who requested the UN Economic Commission for Africa to set up a 'High-Level Working Group' to chart Africa's path onto the global information highways. Hosted by the Egyptian Cabinet Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC) in Cairo, an expert group developed a framework document http://www.bellanet.org/partners/aisi entitled the African Information Society Initiative (AISI), which was adopted by all of Africa's planning Ministers at the subsequent meeting of the Conference of African Ministers in May 1996.
AISI calls for the formulation and development of a national information and communication infrastructure (NICI) plan in every African country, driven by national development priorities, and proposes co-operation among African countries to share the success of experiences. The countries that have so far begun the process for developing in-depth national information infrastructure and communication development plans are Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Comoros, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Namibia, Mozambique, Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda. The experience developed by these countries in trying to formulate new policies will be of considerable interest to others considering the same undertaking.
This has resulted in over 20 pilot telecentres scattered through the continent (with the majority in Ghana, Mozambique and Uganda, as well as in Benin, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe) set up to test different models, means of implementation and mechanisms for sustainability. Development agencies active in this area include the British Council, International Development Research Council, ITU, UNESCO, the World Bank and USAID (US Agency for International Development). At a sub-regional level, SADC and COMESA have both adopted a variety of measures to improve the use of ICTs, most notably:
The region's telecommunication links to the rest of the world are also in for substantial change with a large number of international telecommunication infrastructure building initiatives having been announced in the last 2-3 years, including fibre links to Asia, Latin America and a cable around the continent.
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Since then, communications ministers from over 40 African countries have provided high-level endorsement for telecommunications development policies encapsulated in their common vision document published last year called the African Connection. The next stage of the project is to open an African Connection Telecentre in all 53 African states. This is in concert with recent efforts to improve accessibility to ICTs in rural areas through the use of shared public access facilities which exploit the convergence of technologies to provide cost effective services in under-serviced and remote locations. Some of the these services have grown out of existing public phone shops, such as in Senegal where about 70 phone shops now provide Internet access. The concept has also received considerable support from the ITU and other members of the international community, as well as a number of national governments and public telecom operators.
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