[Kictanet] Does Africa need an IGF or Internet Development Forum?

[alice at apc.org]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Vincent Waiswa Bagiire" <vincent at cipesa.org>
To: "Africa ICT Policy Forum" <africtic at dgroups.org>


> Does Africa need an IGF or Internet Development Forum?
>
> The Internet Government Forum (IGF) convenes in Athens at the end of 
> October (next week) to chart a way forward for making the running of the 
> Internet more inclusive, and more democratic. Several key issues of 
> concern for various governments and members of the Internet community 
> worldwide were amply articulated in the run-up to the World Summits on the 
> Information Society (WSIS) – a process that has continued ahead of the 
> IGF. Simply put, these issues revolve around enabling control of the 
> ‘Internet’ and its technical arms to be decentralised from ICANN and its 
> few chosen agents, increasing security of the Internet, having 
> international oversight over the Internet, among others.
>
> Africa stands to be a great beneficiary of the Internet, in areas ranging 
> from communication to education, health to trade, and governance to 
> knowledge creation. The case of how Africa embraced the mobile phone when 
> conditions were created for more players to come in, and when technology 
> allowed connecting thousands of people at lower costs, could be a learning 
> example. Africa has got the highest growth rate of mobile phone 
> connections in the world, and the mobile phone has become the centre of 
> the continent’s connectivity successes. But Africa has also been 
> registering high bandwidth consumption rates. According to the African 
> Internet Service Providers Association, bandwidth demand in Africa rose by 
> 19% in 2001, 28% in 2002, and 37% in 2003. This high growth rate comes 
> against the background of very high bandwidth prices in Africa - which are 
> several times higher than in Europe, America, and even Asia – and the 
> acute shortage of Internet infrastructure in most of Africa.
> As far as Internet usage is concerned, Africa is doing pretty badly. The 
> ITU World Telecom/ ICT Development Report 2006 says while in a number of 
> countries more than 50% of the population is using the Internet, an 
> average of 2.6 percent of Africans are online. This compares miserably 
> with the Americas (28.2%), Europe (31.1%), and Asia (8.1%). In the 
> broadband sector, Africa’s show is even gloomier, as it has just 0.1% of 
> the world’s connections. Comparatively, in the mobile phone sector the 
> continent boasts 4% of global totals. The continent is not doing any 
> superbly in terms of ownership of personal computers, the main medium on 
> which the Internet is run. According to the Information Economy Report 
> 2005 of the UN Conference on Trade and Investment, while the Republic of 
> Korea in 2003 had 26.7 m PCs, the whole of Africa had 11.5 m PCs. Clearly, 
> too few Africans are using the Internet at the moment, and this needs to 
> be addressed for the continent to harvest benefits from the Internet.
> The question to ask then is, why are so few Africans using the Internet? 
> And the answer to this question should provide the pointer to what needs 
> to be done for more Africans to be brought into cyberspace. Are issues 
> related to Internet Governance the main hindrance to African’s usage of 
> the Internet? The answer is a plain no. Africans are not using the 
> Internet because the technology deployed tends to be expensive, often the 
> licensing procedures for Internet Service provision are expensive and 
> cumbersome, ISPs charge exorbitantly for their services, monopoly 
> providers do not give little attention to improving affordability, the 
> content on the Internet is often irrelevant or not in a language many 
> Africans understand, governments are rarely acting proactively and smartly 
> to enable the poor and remote parts of their countries to have 
> connectivity. Now those are the issues that need to be at the top of the 
> agenda for those promoting Internet usage in Africa. Those are issues that 
> should be addressed by an envisaged ‘Internet Development Forum’ (ADF).
>
> As it is, African countries have been working towards developing a common 
> position on the issues they will be addressing at the IGF in Athens. Among 
> these are the need for security of the Internet, freedom of expression, 
> multilingualism and local content on the Internet, Internet 
> infrastructure, and Intellectual Property Rights. Reining in SPAM or 
> unsolicited mail mainly used for commercial promotion, social or political 
> activism, the need for cyber laws, and need for “international” management 
> of the internet are the other issues African delegates will be 
> passionately addressing themselves to. They say management of the Internet 
> should be “multilateral, transparent and democratic, with the full 
> involvement of governments, the private sector, civil society and 
> international organisations. It should ensure an equitable distribution of 
> resources, facilitate access for all and ensure a stable and secure 
> functioning of the Internet.”
>
> Who controls the Internet has not hindered vast number of Asians and 
> Europeans from using the Internet. And it has not been the key hinderance 
> to Africa’ use of the Internet. So Africa must lay its emphasis elsewhere: 
> the emphasis should be on improving connectivity (and this connectivity 
> should be low-cost, including wireless and VSAT), giving more Africans to 
> know-how of using the internet, and generating content that is relevant to 
> Africans, and easy for them to access and use.
>
> At Athens, African delegates are likely to strongly express their concern 
> about Internet naming and addressing. In this light, they are likely to 
> talk about the need for a dotAfrica as the continental Top-Level Domain 
> name. The African Networks Operators Group (AfNOG) is spearheading the 
> building of a dotAfrica, purportedly to attend to African interests. AfNOG 
> argues that it is important to have a dotAfrica to help Africa get its 
> recognition as an entity with a high stake in Internet Governance. This 
> proposed dotAfrica would target 100,000 organisations under the 
> name.Africa or nom.Africa (for Francophone Africa). Many proponents of 
> dotAfrica tend to justify its need by arguing that since regions like Asia 
> and the European Union have adopted the idea of having dotAsia and dotEU, 
> it would also be good for Africa to adopt dotAfrica. They also point out 
> that dotAfrica would help Africa to market itself in the area of 
> innovation. But some critics feel the clamour for dotAfrica appears to 
> merely be a matter of emulating what the Asians and Europeans are doing, 
> or engendering ‘African pride’, and will not translate into cheaper 
> connectivity and accessibility of the Internet on the continent.
>
> The Athens IGF, which is providing the basis for Africans to define their 
> priorities as far as the Internet is concerned, was a blueprint for global 
> Internet governance. As such its concerns are not targeted at Africa; 
> instead they tend to reflect the interests and concerns of the vast 
> majority of users mainly outside of America – the Internet as a democratic 
> and inclusive forum whose management is not monopolised by the Americans 
> and those they handpick. It can hence be argued that the core spirit of 
> the IGF is therefore not necessarily about making more people use this 
> medium, because this is not exactly at the top of the list of priorities 
> for concerned parties in Europe and much of Asia, who in any case have had 
> a louder and more enlightened voice in Internet governance discourse.
> Back in Tunis in November 2005 at the World Summit on the Information 
> Society, the Tunis Agenda adopted by heads of state called for development 
> in the broader Internet governance arrangements to include international 
> interconnection costs, capacity building and technology/know-how transfer. 
> It called for realisation of multilingualism on the Internet, development 
> of software that is easy to localise and enables users to choose 
> appropriate solutions from different software models including 
> open-source, free and proprietary software. Those are some of the great 
> pronouncements made at Tunis, which could help develop Internet usage in 
> Africa, but which few Africans are articulating.
> Africa has its humongous work to do in the area of content, since content 
> drives access to new technologies and vice versa. But the development of 
> content cannot be achieved without empowering people and organisations in 
> Africa, and enabling them to develop and disseminate their content, and to 
> use globally available information resources for their day-to-day 
> challenges. The majority of the African population lives in rural areas 
> and depends on local content. Specific attention should therefore be paid 
> to the advancement of indigenous content including its sharing and 
> localisation.
>
> And low-cost technologies like Wi-Fi and VSAT must be adopted to play a 
> leading role in Africa’s Internet development. A good example of how to go 
> about this is provided by Knysna municipality in South Africa, which is 
> touted as “the first completely Wi-Fi covered town in Africa”. The 
> municipality awarded a tender to build a wireless local-loop access and 
> transit infrastructure to cover its entire jurisdiction. Outdoor hotspots 
> are installed throughout the region, including in informal settlements, 
> and the municipality uses the network to provide free basic Internet and 
> voice services to the community. And while UniNet, which built the 
> network, provides sustainable low-cost commercial internet, VOIP and data 
> services to the community, other service providers in the region can 
> utilise the network for delivery of services to their clients – 
> effectively creating the first open access network in South Africa. To the 
> users, there are high quality low-cost fixed line telephony and internet, 
> access to low cost VOIP and data services, free local calls (on-net), free 
> basic internet services in libraries and on all hotspots. If such 
> innovative policies and actions as informed the Knysna connectivity 
> project are replicated across municipalities and nations in Africa, the 
> continent could potentially witness an Internet boom in a couple of years.
>
> In a nutshell, Africa needs to be concerned about developing Internet 
> usage first, rather than dwelling on who governs the Internet and how. 
> Africa needs low cost equipment, affordable services and applications, a 
> better quality and greater numbers of ICT graduates, accessibility of the 
> Internet on mobile phones, cheaper bandwidth including through fibre 
> optics, eradication of monopolies and duopolies in Internet service 
> provision. Africa also needs government subsidies to extend Internet 
> access to all communities; it needs free and open source software that can 
> support e-governance, education and health; and it needs to attract 
> investment in ICT activities like business process outsourcing. The way 
> the Internet is governed now allows for all these; the way most African 
> governments are positioned now and planning on putting their issues 
> forward at Athens, doesn’t quite allow it.
>
> Best regards,
> Vincent
>
> -- 
> Vincent Waiswa Bagiire,
> Director, CIPESA
> Plot 30, Bukoto Street, P.O. Box 26970 Kampala
> Tel: 256-41-533057
> Fax: 256-41-533054
> Cell: 256-77-702256 or 256-71-702256
> Email: vincent at cipesa.org
> www.cipesa.org
>
>
>
>
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