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