Africa's long road to WSIS

By

Segun Oruame (IT Edge, Nigeria)

For West African countries, particularly Nigeria, it
is still a long road to plugging into the emerging
Information Society (IS). Other countries outside the
continent have since the first phase of WSIS at
Geneva, about two years ago, made considerable
progress at opening ICT access to a larger number of
their population, particularly in the rural areas.

 

Inne

While India and China, for instance, have been able to
improve on building both human and policy capacities
to contend with the challenges of the new knowledge
economy, there appears to be very little in place to
show that African countries are ready for the IS.

In Nigeria, government has made several policy
statements on the WSIS agenda but there is still poor
understanding of the IS and its global implications
for well over 98% of the population in the country of
more than 130 million people.

“Only a few people know what that grammar means,” says
Lagos based telecom analyst Titi Omo-Ettu. Like
several others in Nigeria’s commercial capital of 13
million people, there is marked cynicism on what
government and other major stakeholders are doing to
encourage awareness on the IS.

“Terrific growth in telephone lines is an encouraging
sign but that does not mean that we are getting any
nearer to the information society,” says cybercafe
owner and president of Association of Telecentres and
Cybercafe Operators of Nigeria Lai Omotola.

Omotola thinks the Internet penetration is still
“frighteningly low” and the problem of inadequate
manpower is far from being addressed. “How can we have
these problems and say we are ready for the
information society?” He queries.
Nigeria’s telephone number has recorded an upswing
from less than 450,000 active lines in 1999 to more
than eight million by third quarter of 2004. In the
same period, Internet uptake grew by over 1000% to
offer access to more than seven million people. A good
number of this figure access the Internet from a
cybercafe and virtually all of them are concentrated
in large cities like Lagos and Port Harcourt.
In essence, more than 120 million Nigerians still
cannot click online and do not have ready access to
dial tones. “People who are still grappling with
meeting the basic requirements to talk cannot begin to
discuss more fundamental issues that concern the
information age. We are ready for this thing yet,”
declares
But Nigeria’s story is not peculiar. Virtually all of
West Africa is faced with the challenge of providing
basic telephony access to the more than 200 million
people in the sub-region. Ghana has about 1.5 million
active lines for a population of more than 20 million.
In Togo, there are less than 600,000 lines for the
smaller population of not more than 6.2 million.

There is no country where telephone access or Internet
penetration impacts on more than 25% of the
population, though all countries have recorded
phenomenal growth in mobile uptake in the last two
years. There is also no country where there has been a
systematic and aggressive approach to create awareness
on the IS or push deliberate policy at closing the
digital divide as is the case in China and India. In
these countries, governments have sustainable
strategies to encourage software development,
outsourcing, and IT infrastructure buildouts.

The Accra preparatory meeting is focusing on issues
raging from Information Society and Regulation: Access
and infrastructure; National and Regional
e-strategies; Open-Source Software and local
languages/content; to Cyberlaw and Intellectual
Property Rights. Others are ‘Capacity building for
policy-makers; ICT applications in education, health,
trade and governance; ICT and Poverty Reduction;
Monitoring the Information Society and Local
governance.’

Not many analysts are convinced that Africa is ready
to tackle these issues, considered as the meat in the
evolving society. But there are optimists though,
Sunday Afolayan, managing director of Skannet and
director, Afrinic believes these challenges should not
keep Africa from actively participating in fashioning
action plans for the WSIS. “Africa has the experts,”
says Afolayan  adding “creating the a conducive
environment to keep them here” is the problem.

Anne-Rachel Inne, policy analyst, Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) shares
Afolayan’s views. She believes Africa has sufficient
manpower to articulate its own clear-cut action plans
on resolving the two key components of the Information
society: Internet Governance and Financing of the
Information Society. The two experts spoke at a
recently ended four-day media training programme for
journalists from West Africa in Accra, Ghana.

The programme was organised by the ICANN, .Org,
Afilias and the International Institute of ICT
Journalism (Pen Plus Bytes) based in Accra.


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