D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 3, May 2001, p. 28)

Africa Catches up on the Internet

A satellite-based Internet backbone (a set of paths that local or regional networks link to for long-distance interconnection), is to make access to the Net faster and more reliable in African countries. The Internet service providers (ISPs) Africa Online, based in Kenya, and UUNET South Africa formed a 50-50 joint venture late last year and said they would invest US$ 3.4 million in the satellite technology. Named UUNET Africa, and operating at first from South Africa, the joint company plans initially to develop Internet services across eight African countries and in a further six later on. Describing the current status of Internet services in Africa, Richard Beddow, Managing Director of UUNET Africa, said: “If you send an e-mail from Harare to Lusaka it goes first to the USA, then arrives in Zambia via a dozen different servers.” The satellite, stationed over Africa, will enable direct access from across the entire continent, meaning e-mail traffic within it will be much faster.

The new backbone link was to go online by the middle of this year The company said the first eight countries to benefit from it would be those where Africa Online was already present. These are Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ghana and Ivory Coast. The company plans to roll out its services to another six African countries by the end of this year. Africa Online is a subsidiary of the African Lakes Corporation. UUNET SA is part of the Datatec Group. UUNET, a WorldCom telecommunications group company, has a minority holding in UUNET SA.

The joint venture’s founding followed a wave of concentration on the African ISP market last year. Only four out of a former 10 major ISPs are still in business. These are M-Web, Africa Online, EcoWeb and Zimbabwe Online, which have a combined market share of 98 per cent. The joint company’s investment in satellite technology will enable many smaller ISPs to buy or rent broadband capacity from it to enhance their offers to their own customers.

The planned satellite-based backbone will greatly improve Africa’s access to the Internet, which despite high growth rates in users still trails global development. African Internet users are estimated to total three million, of whom two million live in South Africa. That corresponds to one user per 250 inhabitants, whereas the world average ratio is 1:35. In North America and Europe the ratio is 1:3.

Rapid growth of Internet

But Internet usage is spreading ever faster across Africa as well. While at the end of 1996 only 11 African countries were linked to the Internet, all except Liberia (where the local ISP went bankrupt) are now online. More than 100 towns in South Africa have their own Internet access nodes. Sixteen other countries each have nodes in their capitals and in another major town. Other countries facilitate Internet access from rural areas by national telecoms companies charging only local-call rates for dialling-up via central nodes.

While full-service Internet access at about US$ 50 per month is relatively expensive, more and more African ISPs are offering a cheaper, e-mail only, service. Internet cafés and computers in community centres, schools and hospitals also offer relatively cheap access. Surveys have shown that Internet users in Africa are predominantly men (86 per cent in Ethiopia, 83 per cent in Senegal, 64 per cent in Zambia) with a very high level of education. At the beginning of 1999, only 20 African universities had full access to the Internet. Due to the high costs, higher education institutions also restrict Internet access to staff members and postgraduates. Undergraduates have no general access via university computers. The Francophone African countries have much better Internet access than the others. They are supported by France and Canada, which want to limit the dominance of English on the Net.
(epd)

Press Freedom and the Internet

Censorship in the Internet is the subject of a new report by the watchdog organisation “Reporters without Borders”. In view of the enormous opportunities offered by the Internet for the free propagation of ideas and opinions, governments were often reacting with repression, says the organisation. Censorship of access to the Internet as a whole or to individual pages is wide spread. The most extreme case is North Korea which is the only country without any Internet connection. In Algeria, the only Internet provider of the country was switched off during the 1999 elections - for technical reasons, as was said at the time.

n other developing countries with strong censorship, there is at least the possibility to send e-mails as for instance in Afghanistan, where the Taliban use websides in Pakistan to issue their propaganda. In China, 20 million people are using the Internet regularly. While the government refrains from controlling individual homepages, ‘cyber crimes’ can be punished even by the death penalty. In India and eleven other countries, there are also laws against ‘cyber crimes’.

However, an example from Africa shows that control of the Internet is not very effective. Zambia was the first country on the continent which tried to censor a text on the Internet. The text dealt with a report of the opposition newspaper ‘The Post’ on a planned constitutional reform. The text was then published on an American webside - out of reach of Zambian authorities.
(epd)