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The Internet in Africa - A Status Report

• Subject: The Internet in Africa - A Status Report
• From: openeconomies(at)cyber.law.harvard.edu (Riesner, Ria)
• Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 09:47:09 -0400

Thank you to Kwami Ahiabenu from Accra, Ghana, for this post.  Kwami is
involved with many groups concerned with IT development in Africa.


The African Internet - A Status Report
URL: <http://demiurge.wn.apc.org/africa/afstat.htm>

May 2001

Mike Jensen- mikej@sn.apc.org <mailto:mikej@sn.apc.org>[1]

The Internet has continued to grow rapidly in Africa, reaching some
important milestones over the last 12 months. In November last year,
Eritrea obtained a local Internet connection, finally bringing all 54
countries and territories online. Last year the number of dialup
Internet subscribers passed the million mark and the total
international Internet bandwidth reached over 1 gigabyte per second.

But despite the relatively rapid growth of Internet in Africa, it has
been largely confined to the major cities, where a minority of the
population lives. However, a growing number of countries[2] do have
points of presence (POPs) in some of the secondary towns, and in
South Africa, POPs are now present in about 100 cities and towns,
bringing the total to about 250 locations across the continent. In
addition, a growing number of countries now have local call charges
for all calls to the Internet regardless of distance. To do this,
telecom operators are required to set up special 'area-codes' for
Internet providers that are charged at local call tariffs, 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 18 countries
have adopted this strategy - Benin, Burkina Faso, Cap Vert, Ethiopia,
Gabon, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mauritania, Morocco, Namibia, Niger,
Senegal, South Africa, Tchad, Togo, Tunisia, and Zimbabwe. In the
case of the Seychelles, to further encourage use, charges for calls
to the Internet are actually 50% lower than normal voice calls.

After many years of relative inactivity, the recent opening up of the
Nigerian Internet market has only just begun to have an impact the
African internet picture. The telecom regulator has licensed over 40
ISPs to sell services and about 15 are currently active. With a fifth
of Sub Sahara's population, Nigeria was one of the slumbering giants
of the African Internet world which until mid '98 only had a few
dialup email providers and a couple of full ISPs operating on very
low bandwidth links. Many ISPs now operate their own VSAT links
directly into the US backbone, broadband wireless links are now
available and Nitel has now established a POP in Lagos with a 2MB
link to Global One in the US and has put POPs in 4 other cities. The
major outstanding problem is the sparse and unreliable fixed line
network which suffers from inter-exchange congestion. The imminent
privatisation of the PTO (which also has a new GSM license) and the
introduction of a second network operator is expected this year, and
will complement the GSM network roll out of two of the recently
licensed mobile operators MTN and Econet.

The total number of computers permanently connected to the Internet
in Africa (excluding South Africa) broke the 10 000 mark in 1999 as
measured by Network Wizards.[3] However these figures have become
increasingly meaningless in Africa with the widespread use of .com
and .net domains and more importantly, the frequent use of Network
Address Translation (NAT) which allows the re-use of the same address
across many computers in different networks. As a result many of the
African countries in the Network Wizards surveys show zero or only a
handful of hosts when in actual fact there might hundreds if not
thousands of machines connected to the Internet there.

It is difficult to measure the total numbers of Internet users, but
figures for the number of dialup subscriber accounts of the ISPs are
more readily available, for which it is estimated that there are now
over 1 300 000 subscribers in Africa. Of these, North Africa is
responsible for about 250 000 and South Africa for 750 000, leaving
about 300 000 for the remaining 50 African countries. But each
computer with an Internet or email connection usually supports a
range of three to five users. This puts current estimates of the
number of African Internet users at somewhere around 4 million in
total, with about 1.5 million outside of South Africa. This works out
at about one Internet user for every 200 people, compared to a world
average of about one user for every 30 people, and a North American
and European average of about one in every 3 people. (The UNDP World
Development Report[4] figures for other developing regions in '99
were: 1 in 125 for Latin America and the Caribbean, 1 in 200 for
South East Asia & the Pacific, 1 in 250 for East Asia, 1 in 500 for
the Arab States and 1 in 2500 for South Asia). 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 38 countries with 1000 or more dialup
subscribers, 19 countries with more than 5000 and 11 countries with
more than 20 000 subscribers - Algeria, Botswana, Egypt, Kenya,
Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Tunisia, Tanzania, and
Zimbabwe. Other countries bubbling under the 20K subscriber mark
which could have as many effective users due to the extensive use of
wireless links and university networks include: Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana,
Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Senegal, Uganda and Zambia.

Clearly a number of countries such as those in North Africa and
Southern Africa have more highly developed economies and better
infrastructures which would naturally result in larger populations of
Internet users. Most of these countries were also among the first on
the continent to obtain Internet access and so have had the most time
to develop the market. There are now local Internet Society chapters
in all of the African regions and in most of the countries with large
Internet user populations.

Currently, the average total cost of using a local dialup Internet
account for 20 hours a month in Africa is about $68/month (usage fees
and local call telephone time included, but not telephone line
rental). ISP subscription charges vary greatly - between $10 and $100
a month, largely reflecting the different levels of maturity of the
markets, the varying tariff policies of the telecom operators, the
different regulations on private wireless data services and on access
to international telecommunications bandwidth. According to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in '97, 20
hours of Internet access in the U.S. cost $29, including telephone
charges. Although European costs were higher ($74 in Germany, $52 in
France, $65 in Britain, and $53 in Italy). Costs have likely dropped
since 97 and all of these countries have per capita incomes which are
at least 10 times greater than the African average.

Most African capitals now have more than one ISP and in early 2001
there were about 575 public ISPs across the region (excluding SA,
where the market has consolidated into 3 major players with 90% of
the market and 75 small players with the remainder). Fourteen
countries had 5 or more ISPs , while seven countries had 10 or more
active ISPs: Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania
and Togo, and 20 countries had only one ISP. Although Ethiopia and
Mauritius are the only countries where a monopoly ISP is still
national policy (i.e. where private companies are barred from
reselling Internet services), there are other countries in which this
practice still continues, predominantly in the Sahel sub-region where
markets are small.

In response to the high cost of Internet services and the slow speed
of the web, and also because of the overriding importance of
electronic mail, lower-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 and cumbersome than using standard email software, because
extra online time is needed to maintain the connection to the remote
site. But they do provide the added advantages of anonymity and
perhaps greater perceived stability than a local ISP who may not be
in business next year.

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. In addition a growing number of
hotels and business centres provide a PC with Internet access.
Regional ISP AfricaOnline has rolled out hundreds of public access
kiosks as part of its e-Touch franchise programme in which local
stores are provided with a PC to provide email and Internet access.
AfricaOnline had approximately 100 000 users spread across 740
outlets in Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe before
it began its new programme of fewer, llarge branded I-cafes.

The rapidity with which most African public telecom operators have
moved into the Internet services market is also noteworthy. In the
last few years PTOs have brought Internet services on stream in 33
countries. This follows trends in the developed countries where
almost all of the PTOs have established Internet services. In many
Francophone countries the PTO operates the major value added service
provider as a joint venture with France Cable and Radio, called
Telecom-Plus in many countries and DTS in Madagascar.

In all the countries where the PTO has established the international
Internet backbone, it has usually been the sole International link
provider, although a growing number of countries (Côte d'Ivoire,
Nigeria, Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia) they compete
with private sector international VSAT links. Usually the PTOs
operate the international gateway and access to the national
backbone, and leave the resale of end-user Internet access to the
private sector. In a few countries the PTO also competes with the
private sector in the provision of end-user dialup accounts, namely,
Botswana, Cameroun, South Africa and Zambia, although this is in
effect true also in many francophone countries where the PTO has a
majority ownership of one of the major ISPs.

As far as the multinational ISPs are concerned, AfricaOnline (
<http://www.africaonline.com>), is the largest operation. The group is
consolidating its two years of growth which saw local branches open
in Egypt, Namibia, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe, adding
to its stable in Ghana, Kenya, and Côte d'Ivoire. AfricaOnline has
plans to open up in additional countries over the coming months and
has engaged in a partnership with multinational backbone provider
UUNET which will provide AfricaOnline's infrastructure. After selling
its Ugandan operation to AfricaOnline, Swift Global is now only
present in Kenya and Tanzania, making South African ISP Mweb the
second largest regional player, having recently purchased ISPs in
Namibia, Uganda and Zimbabwe. However, due to the opening of the a
large free ISP backed by one of the major banks in South Africa, its
primary market, Mweb has scaled back its regional plans.

Due to high international tariffs and lack of circuit capacity,
obtaining sufficient international bandwidth for delivering web pages
over the Internet is still a major problem in most countries. Until
recently few of the countries outside of South Africa had
international Internet links larger than 64Kbps, but today 23
countries have links carrying 2Mbps or more, and 10 countries have
outgoing links of 5Mbps or more - Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius,
Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.
Excluding South Africa, the total international outgoing Internet
bandwidth installed in Africa is about 250Mbps.

Incoming bandwidth is considerably more but is not as easy to monitor
because much of it comes in via variable bit rate satellite broadcast
circuits. This is a common response to the bandwidth problem in which
data broadcasting services are now being installed by ISPs in Africa.
These use a basic satellite dish to receive a stream of popular web
data for caching locally, as well as encoded broadcasts of their
private traffic. These can provide incoming bandwidth in chunks of
64Kbps for about US$30-$1000/month (depending on usage) which is
often far cheaper than services available via local operators.

The assymetric service can deliver up to 8Mpbs incoming, while the
normal terrestrial phone circuit or leased line is used for all
outgoing traffic. This arrangement uses a standard digital KU-Band or
C-Band satellite television antenna costing $175-$500 (depending on
size required) and a decoder card for the PC costing US$450. In
Southern Africa the service is provided by four South African
companies - Infosat (<http://www.infosat.co.za>), Siyanda (
<http://www.siyanda.co.za>[5]), Hixsat (<http://www.hixsat.co.za>[6]) and
GIT (<http://www.git.co.za>[7]). A similar service covering larger
regions of Africa via different satellites is provided by Interpacket
(<http://www.interpacket.net>[8]). These systems allow ISPs to limit
traffic on their expensive existing links to outgoing data only, and
to use a low-cost TV satellite dish for receiving the higher volumes
of incoming traffic. This can substantially reduce the operating
costs for the ISPs and increases the speed of access to the web for
their users.

Two-way satellite-based Internet services using very small aperture
terminals (VSAT) to connect directly the US or Europe have also been
quickly adopted where ever regulations allow. Namely in DRC, Ghana,
Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia which all have ISPs
that are not dependent on the monopoly telecom operator for their
international bandwidth. It is expected that before the end of 2001 a
number of consumer oriented VSAT services will be launched by the
satellite operators, similar to services now available in the US and
Europe such as Tachyon and Starband. Target pricing is likely to be
$700-$900 for two-way KU-band VSAT equipment providing 'better than
dialup' speeds (i.e 56Kbps outgoing and 200-400Kbps incoming).

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, Italy, France and Singapore. However,
Internet Service Providers in countries with borders shared with
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.

The major international Internet suppliers are AT&T, BT, Global
One/Sprint, UUNET/AlterNet, MCI, NSN, BBN, Teleglobe, Verio,
Verestar, and France Telecom/FCR. A number of other links are
provided by PanamSat and Intelsat direct to private and PTO
groundstations in the US and UK, circumventing local PTO
infrastructure.

Aside from local Internet links between South Africa, Lesotho and
Swaziland network 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 discourage 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.

This is also the reason behind the common practice amongst popular
African Internet sites which are hosted on servers that are in Europe
or the U.S. This is especially necessary for the many countries where
ISPs operate their own independent international links without local
interconnections (peering), such as in Tanzania and Nigeria, 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 also being encouraged
because web hosting costs can be very high, while there are even a
number of free hosting sites in the US and Europe.

Roaming dialup Internet access is now a reality for travellers to
most African countries courtesy of SITA, the airline co-operative,
which has by far the largest network in Africa. SITA's commercial
division, SCITOR (renamed Equant), which was formed to service the
non-airline market, now operates dialup points of presence in 40
African countries. Subscribers to Internet service providers who are
members of IPASS (a group of ISPs, including SITA, who share their
POPs) can access their home ISPs for about $0.22c a minute. See
<http://www.ipass.com>[9].

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 Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco,
the Seychelles, Tunisia, South Africa and Uganda. The only country in
the region with an X.400 service is South Africa.

Public use of Voice over Internet (VOIP) services is not widely
available anywhere in the region, although a number of operators such
as in Egypt, Gambia, Nigeria, Senegal and Zimbabwe have begun go into
joint ventures with international VOIP companies to implement
services (see separate article on VOIP in Africa).

There have been few attempts to establish email-to-fax gateways in
Africa despite the apparent need, given the low penetration of the
Internet. Currently the co-operative project known as the Experiment
in Remote Printing (TPC) only has two African countries among the 27
in its coverage list - South Africa and Botswana. Likewise, none of
the commercial services have local delivery facilities outside of
South Africa.

In the area of Internet content development, the African web-space is
expanding rapidly and almost all countries have some form of local or
internationally hosted web server, unofficially or officially
representing the country with varying degrees of comprehensiveness.
However, there are still generally few institutions that are using
the Web to deliver significant quantities of information.While
increasing numbers of organisations have a 'brochure' Web site with
basic descriptive and contact information, many are hosted by
international development agency sites, and very few actually use the
Web for their activities. This is partly explained by the limited
number of local people that have access to the Internet (and thus the
limited importance of a web presence to the institution), the limited
skills available for digitising and coding pages, and also by the
high costs of local web hosting services.

It can be observed that the French speaking countries have a 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.

Although there are a few notable official general government web
sites, such as those of Angola, Egypt, Gabon, Lesotho, Mauritius,
Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, Togo, Tunisia and Zambia,
there is as yet little 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.

As far as regional intergovernmental agencies are concerned, so far
ACMAD[10], ADB[11], CEDEAO[12], COMESA [13], ECA[14], and IGAD[15]
have built web sites with a substantial amount of information on
their activities and their member states.

There are about 140 electronic mailing lists and UseNet newsgroups on
the Internet which discuss issues relating to Africa (although a
significant proportion of them are more closely affiliated with US
African-American issues). These lists and newsgroups are almost
entirely hosted off-continent except for a number in South Africa,
North Africa and Kenya. There is a list for almost every nation as
well as others on more general topics ranging from African Cinema to
Post Colonialism. In the area of ICTs in Africa, AFRIK-IT is the only
notable public list, and it is run from Ireland by the University
College of Dublin.

There are other announcement and discussion lists with a smaller
circulation, many of which focus on some of the programmes the
international communities are carrying out in Africa, such as the
African Information Society Initiative's AISI-HITD-CL and its
associated African Technical Advisory Committee ATAC-CL, the PICTA-CL
and SCAN-ICT-CL mailing lists hosted by Bellanet.There are also some
more specialised lists relating to African ICTs in particular
sectors, regions or countries, notably:

* AFAGRICT-L - The use of ICTs in agriculture and natural
resource management in Africa, initiated by CTA and hosted by
Bellanet
* AFRINIC-DISCUSS - The list of the Interim Committee and
interested parties to establish Africa's NIC, hosted by ISP
UUNET/Iafrica in Johannesburg.
* IOZ - The South African Internet Service providers list hosted
by ISP Citec in Johannesburg
* EAIA - The East African Internet Service Providers
Association, hosted by UNON in Nairobi.
* Linux user-group lists hosted in Nairobi, Durban and
Johannesburg

The news media are now relatively well represented on the web. As
early as 1999, the US Columbia University African Studies department
identified over 120 different newspapers and news magazines that were
available on the Internet, of which over 60 percent were 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 - Côte d'Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, South
Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Also of note are the efforts
to develop local content and host daily newspapers by the ISP
AfricaOnline which has offices in 8 countries. There are two major
continent-wide African traditional news agencies, both of which
extensively use electronic media - Inter Press Service (IPS) and the
Pan African News Agency (PANA). There are also a growing number of
Internet-only Africa news portals such as newafrica.com and
allafrica.com As well as web search engines specialising on Africa
such as - Orientation Africa -http://af.orientation.com[16] and Woyaa
- <http://www.woyaa.com>[17]. As with other similar services elsewhere,
these are run by commercial companies which generate revenue through
advertising. Orientation is run by Hong Kong based BlackBox and Woyaa
by a Belgian company.

Sub-regionally, Southern Africa has the only active regional news
agencies using the Internet - the Southern African Broadcasters
Association (SABA) and the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA.
In other regions, use of Internet amongst the media is much lower,
but in West Africa, WANAD (West African News Media and Development
Centre) is assisting journalists and media outlets to adopt the use
of ICTs. Of course international news correspondents in Africa are
heavily dependant on the Internet to deliver material to their
operations in the US and Europe. CNN and the other international
television news companies regularly rent temporary space segments all
over Africa with the local representatives of IntelSat and PanamSat
to deliver reports and live coverage. Radio journalists (even
freelancers) are now sending edited sound files by email to agencies
such as the BBC World Service.

Current and Planned initiatives to improve Africa's Information
Infrastructure

Regional collaboration within Africa 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 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.

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. (see
Infrastructure Summary[18])

The next stage of the project is to open an African Connection
Telecentre in all 52 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.

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, IDRC, ITU, UNESCO, the World Bank and USAID.

At a sub-regional level, SADC and COMESA have both adopted a variety
of measures to improve the use of ICTs, most notably:

SADC's model telecom legislation which has been adopted by a
majority of member states and is therefore a legally binding
protocol. The formation of the Telecommunication Regulators
Association of Southern Africa (TRASA) which acts as a forum for
regulators in the region to exchange information and experience.
The ComTel project to develop the terrestrial telecommunication
links between neighbouring states in COMESA, harmonise and upgrade
the cross-border information systems in transport, customs,
import/export and trade.

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. Aside from projects aimed directly
at the African market, a number of the LEO satellite projects planned
for the much larger European and North American markets will also
cover Africa. With the worldwide recognition of the importance of
ICTs in accelerating development, a number of other recent
international development assistance initiatives have improved the
prospects for wider access to information and communication networks
on the continent, especially in rural areas. Many of the initiatives
are part of the AISI Framework Sub-programme on Connectivity being
co-ordinated by ECA and UNDP. In addition, to address the growing
need for co-ordination and collaboration, donors and executing
agencies involved in ICTs in Africa have agreed to establish an
ongoing forum for information exchange on projects called
Partnerships for ICTs in Africa (PICTA). A large number of ICT
development projects in Africa have been identified, among the
potentially most important are: The UN Secretary General's
System-Wide Initiative on Africa, which includes ICTs as one of the
major components in a $11.5 million programme called 'Harnessing
Information Technology for Development' (HITD/SiA), and is supported
by the various UN partners. The US's USAID/Leland Initiatives which
are assisting with developing Internet connectivity in 20 African
countries in return for agreements to liberalise the market to 3rd
party Internet service providers and to adopt policies which allow
for the unrestricted flow of information. New initiatives for Leland
announced by vice president Al Gore recently include a programme for:
'1 Million PCs for Africa, 1000 schools connected and 100
Universities connected'. In June '99 new initiative to increase
Internet access and use in developing countries was announced. The
ten targeted developing countries include Guatemala, Jamaica,
Bulgaria, Egypt, Morocco, Ghana, Guinea, Uganda, South Africa, and
Mozambique. The U.S. is actively encouraging other interested
countries to join in this initiative, which is part of a broad effort
by the U.S. to foster the information industryworldwide. Through the
initiative, these countries will collaborate with the U.S.
government, the private sector, multilateral organizations, and
non-profits to help them use electronic-commerce and the Internet as
tools for economic development. Specific aims of the initiative
include fostering the deployment of specific Internet applications
such as micro-e-commerce, telemedicine, distance education, and
improved access to government services. The ITU's programme for
Africa which involves various rural, community telecentre, health and
satellite projects emanating from the Buenos Aires Action Plan, is
being conducted in co-operation with UNESCO, IDRC, WHO and others.
The World Bank's activities to assist in telecommunication and ICT
development in about 25 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Initiatives
include the African Virtual University (AVU), Economic Toolkit and
Workshops for Internet Connectivity in Africa, the Rural
Telecommunications Field Trial and Commercialization Pilot in Kenya,
and the Global Connectivity in Africa Conference. The Bank expects to
be heavily involved in sector reforms and privatization over the next
few years with a view to mobilizing private participation for public
objectives, to help remove market imperfections, and, where
necessary, to attract private investment. It will focus on the rural
sector and on information strategies, building infrastructure and
applications. IDRC's Acacia programme which has allocated CAN$60m
over the next 5 years to developing the use of ICTs in local
communities in Africa. UNESCO's IIP programme, which has already
(with funding from the Italian and Dutch Governments) been executing
the RINAF (Regional Informatics Network for Africa) project to
develop a self-governing programme of cooperation with African Member
States in this area. UNESCO has also recently established the
Creating Learning Networks for African Teachers project to assist
teacher training colleges develop literacy in ICTs and their use for
education, and to connect them to the Internet. The project,already
been implemented in Zimbabwe, is being initiated in Senegal, and is
intended to be extended to twenty countries with extrabudgetary
support. The multi-donor InfoDev fund established by the World Bank,
which has supported the South African Telematics for African
Development Consortium and the $1 million African Virtual University
Project. UNDP's Africa Bureau has agreed to a $6m fund to improve
Internet connectivity in Africa in a project called the Internet
Initiative for Africa (IIA). The countries currently participating
are: Angola, Burkina Faso, Cap-Verde, Gambia, Mauritania, Namibia,
Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sao Tome et Principe,
Swaziland, Chad and Togo.

UNDP's Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) has 10
operational nodes in Africa - Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Gabon,
Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Togo and Tunisia. National SDNP projects
are funded for 2-3 years and are expected to provide seed money
towards sustainability, either through sale of services or adoption
within government budget.

UNEP's Mercure project which uses VSAT technology to establish an
environmental information exchange network in Africa. UNEP is
co-operating with the ITU to examine the possibility of using the
spare bandwidth of the network for other functions.

The UN Office for Outer Space Affairs is proposing the COPINE project
to donate groundstations and transponder time to African research
institutions.

The various activities of Agence de la Francophonie and related
international organisations such as ORSTOM, AUPLEF, UREF, REFER,
which are providing support for ICTs in Francophone countries, most
of which are in Africa. Recently the AFRINET project was launched
which is providing web servers and related support at a ministerial
level to Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Madagascar,
Mali, Mauritius, Mauritania and Senegal. Also, the Banque
Internationale d'Information sur les Etats Francophones (BIEF)
project is establishing web servers in Benin, Tunisia, Mauritius and
Morocco where databases and information from a number of other
countries is hosted.


SEE Maps and Tables[19]

African Internet Infrastructure Home Page[20]




*** References from this document ***

[orig] <http://demiurge.wn.apc.org/africa/afstat.htm>
[1] <mailto:mikej@sn.apc.org>
[2] <http://demiurge.wn.apc.org/tmp/partial.htm>
[3] <http://www.nw.com/>
[4] <http://www.undp.org/hdro/index2.html>
[5] <http://www.siyanda.co.za/>
[6] <http://www.hixsat.co.za/>
[7] <http://www.git.co.za/>
[8] <http://www.interpacket.net/>
[9] <http://www.ipass.com/>
[10] <http://www.acmad.ne/>
[11] <http://www.afdb.org/>
[12] <http://www.cedeao.org/>
[13] <http://www.comesa.int/>
[14] <http://www.un.org/depts/eca>
[15] <http://www.igad.org/>
[16] <http://af.orientation.com/>
[17] <http://www.woyaa.com/>
[18] <http://www3.sn.apc.org/africa/infra.htm>
[19] <http://www3.sn.apc.org/africa/afrmain.htm>
[20] <http://www3.sn.apc.org/africa/index.html>




Ria Merrill Riesner
Director of Research
Geopartners Ventures
ria@geopartners.com
617-492-3600 

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