AFRO-NETS> The Wiring of a Continent - Africa goes online

[Dieter Neuvians MD <neuvians@mweb.co.zw>]

The Wiring of a Continent - Africa goes online
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http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/203/nation/Africa_goes_onlineP.shtml

Hardly any of Africa's 800 million people have a telephone or access
to the Internet. Now digital entrepreneurs are seeking to bridge the
telecommunications divide.

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 7/22/2001

First of three parts

CAPE TOWN - It was just a length of cable dangling from a ship off
the coast of South Africa that ran along the bottom of the sea and
then up onto shore here on June 19, like a mooring line.

Except that this line didn't bind the ship to the shore. It estab-
lished a key beachhead for an advanced undersea communications cable
that by year's end will give sub-Saharan Africa its first world-class
connections to the global telephone network and the Internet.

After its stop off Cape Town last month, the ship began to slowly
troll its way northward on the western coast of Africa, laying cable
along the way. The line will come ashore at Nigeria, Ghana, the Ivory
Coast, and five other landing points before finally ending its run
9,000 miles away, off Spain. From there, the data moving along the
cable can easily be routed onto the communications networks of Europe
and the United States. Back in Cape Town, the line will also tap into
another cable, 7,800 miles long, which runs from South Africa to In-
dia and Malaysia, binding Africa to Asia.

At last, Africa will have the beginnings of a communications backbone
of the sort considered commonplace in most of the world. And that
backbone may become even stronger in a few years, if a Massachusetts
woman gets her way. Patricia Bagnell, a telecommunications consult-
ant, is seeking financing for a second undersea cable, an extraordi-
nary $1.8 billion plan known as Africa One that would wrap the entire
continent in a fiber-optic ring, with connections to every African
country with a coastline.

More than 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa remain largely
isolated from one another and the outside world. But things are
starting to change. Using limited satellite connections, businessmen
now confined to local markets are beginning to make deals all over
the continent, and beyond. Students who lack modern textbooks are
starting to learn directly from the finest scholars of America,
Europe, and Asia at a fledgling "virtual university." And political
activists in Nigeria, Ghana, and other countries are using the Inter-
net to rally international opposition to corrupt or oppressive rul-
ers.

Africa is ground zero in the effort to solve what many think is one
of the world's most serious emerging problems: bridging the digital
divide between the developed and developing worlds.

In America, the gap is rapidly dwindling. Nearly 60 percent of US
homes have computers; nearly half are on the Internet. According to
the Pew Internet and American Life Project, as of the second half of
last year, 43 percent of black Americans had Internet access compared
to 34 percent in the first half of 2000.

The survey also found that 47 percent of Latinos were online, versus
40 percent in the first half of the year. The figures for whites were
57 and 49 percent respectively. But there remains a cavernous dis-
tance, digitally, between the typical American and the average citi-
zen of the developing world.

The US and other industrialized nations have 15 percent of the
world's 6 billion people, but 88 percent of the Internet users, the
United Nations reports. Eighty percent of the world's population has
still never even placed a telephone call. And a large percentage of
those disconnected masses live in Africa.

According to the International Telecommunications Union, Africa has
less than two percent of the world's telephone lines. There are 70
phone lines for every 100 Americans, but just 2.5 lines for every 100
Africans. Computers are even scarcer. There are just six million com-
puters on the entire continent, less than one for every hundred peo-
ple. More people use the Internet in London than in all of Africa.

Africa is still desperately poor. In 1999, the US economy produced
over $33,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Sub-
Saharan Africa produced $490, according to the World Bank. Take away
the contribution of South Africa, by far the most advanced nation in
the region, and the number falls to just over $300. Life expectancy
has fallen from just under 50 years in 1995 to less than 47 years in
1999 because of the world's worst incidence of AIDS, as well as
bloody civil wars in Liberia, Congo, Burundi, and Angola.

High-tech gamble

To some people, Africa seems like the last place on earth to invest
billions in high technology. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates certainly
thinks so. At a conference in Seattle last October, Gates mocked
"World E-Inclusion," a proposal by Hewlett-Packard Co. to increase
high-tech investment in Third World countries. "What percentage of
HP's growth in the future will come from customers who live on less
than $1 a day?" asked Gates. "There are things those people need at
that level other than technology."

But Gates appears to be swimming against the tide in downplaying the
role that technology can play in tackling the problems of the devel-
oping world. Increasingly, governments of major developed countries,
the World Bank, the United Nations, an array of nonprofit groups, and
other high tech corporations are all committing themselves to ad-
dressing the digital divide.

Last year, the seven leading industrialized nations created the
"Digital Opportunity Task Force" to study the problem, with Japan
alone committing $15 billion over five years to send computer tech-
nology to the Third World.

The Clinton administration responded on a much smaller scale with a
mix of public and private initiatives. There are also a number of
volunteer efforts based in the United States. Geekcorps, founded by
successful Internet entrepreneur and Williams College graduate Ethan
Zuckerman, sends engineers and programmers to Ghana to train small
business people in computer skills. Then there are the high-tech
firms, whose motives are only partly charitable.

Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina believes she's hit upon the next
great growth market for high technology. "As part of a long-term HP
effort to find new revenues one, three, five, and 10 years down the
line, World E-Inclusion targets the four billion people that are sel-
dom, if ever, served by traditional information technology compa-
nies," Fiorina said.

Tom Kwanya, publisher of Kenyan Netwatch, a Nairobi-based computer
magazine, argues that committing to digital technology will help Af-
rica end its dependence on others.

"As long as I can remember, we get drugs and food and all kinds of
handouts. And our problems are still perpetual," Kwanya said. "I
think it is time that we try IT [information technology] and we try
PCs."

Many experts agree. Economic development is the ultimate solution to
many of Africa's problems, they argue, and that won't happen in coun-
tries that lack a decent telecommunications infrastructure. Moreover,
it is the digital economy that will offer some of the best business
opportunities in the near future. And it is by getting wired, com-
puter specialists say, that this economically moribund continent has
its best chance of catching up with the rest of the world by trans-
forming itself from a pre-industrial society directly to an informa-
tion-based economy.

Untapped potential

Consider the booming business of outsourcing. According to the re-
search firm IDC, American firms spent $5.5 billion last year to hire
workers in countries like India and Ireland - clerical workers, com-
puter programmers, even scientists and doctors. That figure is ex-
pected to grow to $17.6 billion by 2005. Outsourcing is a game any
country can play - any country with reliable and reasonably cheap
telephone and Internet links, that is. That's why Africa presently
gets very little outsourcing trade, despite its plentiful supply of
low-cost labor.

A few firms have begun tapping the African market. For instance,
there's a good chance that many Americans who have recently filed a
health insurance claim have had it processed by a clerical worker in
Ghana. Affiliated Computer Services of Dallas sends digital images of
the information from Lexington, Ky. to Accra through a high-speed
satellite link. The arrangement allows ACS to tap Ghana's ample sup-
ply of low-wage workers.

But ACS needed a hefty discount on satellite fees charged by the Gha-
naian government. Besides, says Tom Blodgett, president of ACS's
Business Process Solutions unit, Ghana, on Africa's west coast, is
just one satellite hop away. It would cost far more to set up a simi-
lar operation in the east African nation of Kenya, which requires two
satellite hops - Kentucky to Europe and then to Kenya. "We're doing
OK in Ghana," said Blodgett. "We would not be OK on the east coast of
Africa."

But with a high-speed optical network like Africa One, Ghana, Kenya,
and Kentucky would become digital next-door neighbors. And with their
massive capacity, the cables could lead to sharply lower connection
costs, and a major new incentive for companies to set up shop in Af-
rica.

Still, companies like ACS only offer low-paying clerical work. No
matter what improvements are made to Africa's communications net-
works, foreign firms are unlikely to come to the continent for highly
skilled workers; they'd be wasting their time. Nearly a third of the
men and nearly half the women are illiterate, and most people have no
more than a grade-school education.

A more traditional approach to this problem would be to spend bil-
lions on new schools, more teachers, and well-stocked libraries, in-
stead of a grandiose scheme to wire the continent. But digital evan-
gelists argue that in fact, wiring Africa is a huge investment in
education. The continent's colleges presently lack the kind of high-
speed Internet access taken for granted by every American freshman.
Plug African schools into the global network, and for the first time,
students will gain unlimited access to the shared knowledge of the
world.

"Students here can't afford books," said Joseph Sevilla, an adminis-
trator of Strathmore College in Nairobi. "And the books aren't avail-
able in the bookshops.... But they can get access to the information
through the Internet."

The Internet is more than a glorified library. With high-speed ac-
cess, it's possible for students in African cities to take "distance
learning" courses offered in the best American, Asian, and European
colleges and universities. Already the African Virtual University,
part of Nairobi's Kenyatta University, uses satellite video technol-
ogy to provide such courses. But satellite bandwidth is far too ex-
pensive, and classes must be held in classrooms crammed with special
equipment. With Internet-based education, any computer center in Af-
rica with a high-speed connection can have access to courses at the
best American universities.

Claims that the Internet can "change everything" ring hollow to
American ears these days, as the US economy suffers through the dot-
com downturn. Yet the Internet was just the latest phase in a techni-
cal transformation which started 130 years ago in the United States,
but that has scarcely begun in Africa.

America has been building out its telephone systems for decades, with
big cables between the major cities and millions of copper wires run-
ning into every house. In the early 1990s, when the Internet was
thrown open for public use, this same telephone network was quickly
adapted and upgraded to handle digital data, and many additional
backbones were built.

In addition, the United States has plugged into dozens of undersea
cables spanning the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, making a phone call
to London or Tokyo as easy as dialing across the street, and rela-
tively inexpensive too.

When the first transatlantic phone cables to Europe were installed
after World War II, it cost the phone company $2.44 per minute to
carry a call overseas; today the cost is under a penny. And it's even
cheaper to communicate via e-mail, which is why those cables are now
crammed with Internet traffic. Voice or data is all the same to a
length of optical fiber; just billions of pulses of laser light.
But there's only one fiber optic cable between sub-Saharan Africa and
Europe. That cable, called SAT-2, was built by Telkom South Africa
and begun in the apartheid era. It shows. SAT-2 begins north of Cape
Town, then arcs far west into the Atlantic as if repelled from the
African coast by a magnetic field, before swooping east to a landfall
on the Canary Islands, near Morocco.

"It was a system that was basically built by Telkom South Africa,
paid by ourselves as well, and... it sort of went past the rest of
Africa," said Wouter Myburgh, a Telkom executive.

Today, SAT-2 doesn't even have enough capacity for South Africa, by
far the continent's leading Internet user. The new cable, to be
called SAT-3, will carry up to 120 gigabits of data traffic, enough
for South Africa and its neighbors as well.

This time, national phone companies in eight other African countries
are helping to pay the $600 million cost of the new system. In ex-
change, they'll get far cheaper international connections than the
satellite links they now use.

Still not enough

Even with the new SAT-3 undersea cable, Africa still needs overland
connections between countries. South Africa's electric utility, Eskom
Enterprises, thinks it has the answer. The company has begun building
a vast network of power plants and transmission lines that will run
from Cape Town all the way north to Cairo. It will take 10 years to
complete, including the construction of major electric power plants
along the way.

At the same time, Eskom is also stringing optical fiber from its
transmission towers, forming Africa's first overland data backbone. A
multinational grid, the Eskom network will be able to handle data
traffic between African countries as well as contacts with the out-
side world.

But the Eskom initiative still won't put communication services into
the hands of ordinary people. In most parts of Africa, it's no use
trying to order a phone line, since none are available. The so-called
last-mile networks that link individual homes and offices to tele-
phone companies in America simply don't exist here. According to the
World Bank, most Africans must travel two hours from home to find a
phone.

Still, as countries like Nigeria and Ghana have begun deregulating
their telephone services, the situation is improving, especially in
the realm of wireless telephone systems, which can be installed
faster than a wire-based network. According to African Cellular, a
company that runs a Web portal devoted to tracking the cellular in-
dustry in Africa, there are 15 million cellphones on the continent,
up 135 percent from the same period last year. Nearly all the phones
are based on the common European cellular standard, and many include
text messaging, a feature rarely found on US cell phones. On nearly
every street corner in Accra and Nairobi, vendors hawk cellphone re-
charger cords and leather phone cases to passing drivers.

The surging cellphone market attests to Africa's hunger for good, af-
fordable communication services, and the shabby state of its tradi-
tional telephone system. It's not just the lack of lines running to
the rural areas, where most Africans live. Even in the big cities,
it's often impossible to get a phone line connected.

Rory Bamber, a senior account executive at Bytes Technology Group, a
South African telecommunications firm, says that in many places
there's no spare capacity on the trunk cables coming into the
neighborhood. "You could wait up to 18 months to get cable into the
ground," Bamber said. And that's in relatively affluent South Africa.
It's worse in places like Nairobi, where  roads are barely passable,
garbage rots uncollected in the street, and tap water is rationed. So
there's no rush to put in new phone cables.

But even in the poorest parts of Africa's cities, it's relatively
cheap and simple to throw up a few cell towers. And governments can
make money by selling cellular franchises to foreign entrepreneurs.
In Ghana, four companies now compete for cellular customers, and us-
age rose from 22,000 to 132,000 subscribers between 1999 and 2000.
Wireless isn't just for voice communication. American entrepreneur
Charles Johnson wants to use it to deliver high-speed Internet data
to businesses in the leading cities of Ghana. His company, United
Communications Systems International, is already building a network
to serve the cities of Accra, Kumasi, and Tema. Clients use antennas
attached to their buildings to receive data, bypassing the local
phone network.

Johnson is now negotiating with officials in Senegal and Nigeria,
hoping to slowly extend his wireless data network across the conti-
nent. He thinks he can become a major player in Africa, before the
big American communication firms even realize what they're missing.
"You talk to certain people, and they say Africa's not on their radar
screens," said Johnson. "Good. Good."

Reshaping politics

Still, wireless phones and data services are out of reach of most Af-
ricans. For voice communications, millions rely on neighborhood "call
centers" where they can pay to use a community telephone. In the same
way, Africans have embraced the concept of public Internet service
centers, or cybercafes, where people who could never afford to buy
their own computers pay small sums to surf the Web and send e-mail
messages around the world.

The cybercafes are concentrated in Africa's major cities. They are
inaccessible to millions of rural citizens, and even many city-
dwellers can't afford to use them, or don't know how. But simply by
connecting better-educated residents of the continent with each other
and with expatriates abroad, Internet access is beginning to reshape
the politics of Africa.

Jerry Rawlings, the former Ghanaian dictator turned elected presi-
dent, held power for over 20 years. In the process, he suppressed po-
litical protest, imprisoned journalists, and bought off rivals. But
he couldn't buy off Yaw Owusu, an MBA student at Columbia University
and founder of Ghana Cyber Group, an Internet-based organization that
opposes Rawlings.

Owusu says that Rawlings is deeply unpopular among Ghanaian expatri-
ates. But Ghana doesn't allow absentee voting by citizens abroad. At
home, elections meant free food and clothing, doled out by Rawlings
allies who worked impoverished neighborhoods with the skill of Chi-
cago aldermen.

"During election time," said Owusu, "they go around the rural areas
where most Ghanaians live, and they literally buy their votes."
Owusu decided to do the same. Ghanaians abroad send $350 million back
home each year to help support their families. So Ghana Cyber Group
turned to its Internet mailing list of 4,000 members, some inside
Ghana, but mostly expatriates. Between them, they raised about
$50,000 for opposition candidates in the Ghanaian elections. In addi-
tion, the group launched a campaign of friendly blackmail, using e-
mail, phone calls, and letters to the folks back home.

"We tell them, `If you keep voting these people into power, then
we're going to stop sending you money,' " said Owusu.

It's hard to judge the impact of Ghana Cyber Group's campaign. But
Rawlings' handpicked successor was defeated at the polls last year,
and the reformist National Democratic Congress came to power. Now
Ghana Cyber Group has set itself a new goal - the arrest and trial of
Rawlings for human rights abuses. Its Web site, prosecute-
rawlings.com, features a litany of accusations against the former
president, including theft of public funds, torture, and murder.

So far, African rulers haven't sought to restrict access to the
Internet in order to protect their power. But there is a different
kind of political repression going on, the kind that put Francis
Quartey in a Ghanaian jail. His crime: Competing with the local tele-
phone company.

In 1994, after eight years at AT&T Corp. in the United States,
Quartey returned to his native Ghana; in 1998, he launched an Inter-
net service provider called IDN. In 2000, IDN began offering "voice
over IP," the technical term for placing voice telephone calls over
Internet circuits. Because Internet phone calls bypassed the state-
run phone monopoly, Ghana Telecom, and its high rates for local and
international calls, voice over IP could save some users hundreds of
dollars a month. But it would also subtract that amount from the
ledgers of Ghana Telecom.

"One day they just walked in there with guns and stuff, and took me
out, and the equipment," said Quartey. He spent three days in jail
before a judge threw out the case against him.  "When I got my equip-
ment, some had been destroyed, some was stolen." While Quartey still
insists he did nothing wrong, he hasn't resumed offering the Internet
phone service, saying he wants to avoid any hassle.

As long as state-sanctioned monopolies control Africa's communica-
tions networks, they'll have an incentive to maintain high prices,
even after undersea cables like SAT-3 and Africa One flood the market
with low-cost data capacity. But the deregulation of African communi-
cations has begun. And pressure to speed up the process will come
from entrepreneurs who are demanding a chance to plug into the global
economy.

"I'm one of those people who don't get frustrated," said Tom Kwanya
of Kenyan Netwatch, "because getting frustrated means giving up....
We need to make it work."

It's beginning to. Meter by meter, the skein of fiber that binds the
rest of the world together is finally reaching out toward Africa. In
a few years' time, for the first time, it really will be a worldwide
web.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached by e-mail at:
mailto:bray@globe.com
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 7/22/2001.
Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.


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