[Kictanet] Does Africa need an IGF or Internet Development Forum?
Eric Osiakwan
eric at afrispa.org
Wed Oct 25 03:50:09 EAT 2006
Loud Applause, Vincent
---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: <alice at apc.org>
Reply-To: Kenya ICT Policy - kictanet <kictanet at kictanet.or.ke>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:30:23 +0300
>----- 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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--
Eric M.K Osiakwan
Executive Secretary
AfrISPA (www.afrispa.org)
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