In an earlier posting, “Africa and the Information Age”, I wrote that IT offered a lot of opportunity for Africa. Now that I’ve been here, I think that there is more reason to hope than before.
Africa has been nearly invisible in the open-source community, but a graph that adjusts for open-source contributors as a percentage of Internet connections shows that people here are much more adept than the raw numbers would suggest.
It is hard for an outsider to understand how badly South Africa has been hobbled by their telecom monopoly and government. Even at the universities, Internet is expensive, slow, and unreliable. The situation is so bad that it is hard to know what these folks could do if they had the kind of Internet access that people in rich countries have taken for granted since the 1990s.
Bringing high-speed Internet to South Africa would be ridiculously cheap compared to other development initiatives and therefore, presumably, it will eventually happen. When it does, we should see huge growth in industries that are enabled by IT.
[And if the demographers’ darkest predictions come true, and life expectancy falls to 35, getting more people into computer programming will be a great idea. Computer nerds require only a few years of training, often reach high productivity in their teenage years, and tend to have be shunned by members of the opposite sex (thus reducing the spread of HIV).]
I agree that there is huge potential but until serious changes are made, IT growth will be hampered. The process for registering a simple domain is little more than a glorified paper process (ie. download the form, fill it out and submit it via email), and this service is only available from a sole registrar http://co.za.
Bandwidth connections, from what I can tell, are negotiated via TENET for universities. See http://www.tenet.ac.za/ for details. UWC is on the list and appears to have 10Mb connection that performed poorly during the Digital Freedom Expo. One would think that with TENET representing most of the universities and research centers, bandwidth would be more available and cost much less. It almost makes one wonder if Telkom isn’t keeping landline scarce to drive people to their cellular alternative VodaCom.
But, as you say, “it’s hard for an outsider to understand…”
While I disagree with the position that you only have know more than the person asking the question to be good teacher, your talk about online communities was great.
Phil,
I just spent some time in Senegal. Lamine Ba, a Senegalese developer and I co-founded the West African Java User Group, http://www.senejug.com
There’s some activity in Dakar worth mentioning. The manager of the .sn domain is the chairman of the Polytechnic Univ of Dakar http://www.esp.sn Alex Corenthin.
Another Dakar person is making inroads on the domain registration process, Diop founded http://kheweul.com/ and has plans to help the average African cheaply get a domain name and a website.
http://www.miranetworks.net is focused on cellphone applications.
I gave a talk on the Web and Web2.0 with an idea the girls could chew on about entrepreneurship that was well received at an org called 10,000 Girls http://www.10000girls.org in a rural Senegal city called Kaolack. Some pictures on my blog at http://www.mikelevin.net
We visited a new private sector call center with 4 employees that was nearly entirely run from a web app that services the US Embassy calls about Visas
The students at http://www.esp.sn were all over IPV6 and networking, linux and anything having to do with development. Over 50 people showed up for our first meeting! Archive and details about the next meeting at http://www.senejug.com
Yes, lots of students don’t have their own computers. That’s a handicap. There are a lot of depreciated computers people have rescued from the landfill running PIII’s there. Internet connectivity is sketchy and I was only in Senegal, so no telling what the rest of the continent is like.
There’s even a little school on Goree Island off the coast of Dakar. The guy who runs it asked me to take a look at his network because a few of the PC’s were acting up. These guys are dying to learn Info Technology and software development, etc… He runs a little cyber cafe to support his school.
I could go on and on, but it was such an eye opener.
Some takeaways:
Not everybody has a computer or even access to one, but nearly everyone has a cellphone.
Jargon/slang is very difficult for people to understand when English is a second language.
I hope to go back again and again. The SeneJUG has attracted a lot of attention and it’s fun!
Regards,
Mike Levin