Africa needs to cross other bridges before crossing the digital divide

[Terry White]

I have a friend who is the Chief Information Officer of a Government Department here in South Africa. The other day, he said: “The problem with our Government Ministers and Director Generals, is that they are buzz-word-compliant. They use all the latest buzzwords without having a clue as to what the implications of their words are”.

A survey of a number of recent news articles reveals this to probably be true of most of Africa, and who knows, possibly true of many other Governments in the world. Indeed my colleague Mike Davis alludes to this need for deeper understanding of technology in government circles in his July Butler Group Review article: “IT’s man in Westminster”, in which he says: “In May 2006 Stephen Timms, UK Member of Parliament (MP) for East Ham in London, was placed in the post of Chief Secretary to the Treasury, an appointment which means that we have, for the first time, a member of the Cabinet with a decent understanding of what technology can, and most importantly cannot, do for business and the public sector”.

Of course the UK is not necessarily ahead of Africa in this regard. Indeed Uganda appointed an ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Minister in May this year: The Editorial of the AllAfrica Global Media website (allAfrica.com) sings the praises of such a move, saying that “The appointment of a technocrat as a minister means that ICT will have its political leadership invested in able technical hands”.

But it’s the old form versus function argument: Just because you have an ICT Minister, doesn’t mean that you will have better ICT. And in this regard, Africa has some unique challenges. As I write this article, the Democratic Republic of Congo (the DRC) has just held its first democratic elections in forty years. What brought the technological issue home to me was a picture in our newspapers of ballot sheets being delivered to voting stations by dugout canoe. The DRC is vast, being about the same size as Europe, but they have few roads, fewer electrical trunks and sparse telecommunications networks. Counting and collating votes will take a week or so. What makes this relevant is that this story is true of many African countries. In South Africa our Education Minister published a White Paper on “e-Education” in which she says: “We want to ensure that every school has access to a wide choice of diverse, high-quality communication services which will benefit all learners and local communities”. Currently just over on quarter of our schools use computers for teaching and learning, but this figure understates the challenge facing us. The worst-case example is the Eastern Cape Province in which a mere 4.5% of schools use computers in the classroom. Why? Because most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked – those schools in metropolitan areas that could afford computers have done so. But when faced with the fact that 30% of schools in the Eastern Cape do not have power and only one-third had telephone connections, it is understandable that technology roll-out is challenging.

There is much talk of “crossing the digital divide” but there are other bridges to cross first. Indeed there are other bridges to be built before we can cross them.

It is an exciting place to be: The further behind we are in terms of ICT, the better off we are – Moore’s Law works in our favour. We can leapfrog the rest of the world with the latest technologies which are more powerful and cheaper in terms of bang-for-buck. We can take advantage of the bandwidth explosion. We can use Open Source software. And the Internet can educate, inform and entertain.

And this is where the real thinking is needed: We need more technological savvy than most because we need to take advantage of newer cheaper technologies in an integrated way. And because of buzz-word compliance we need to be really good at matching our Public Service and Business requirements to technological solutions – at the moment it works the other way round – A minister will use words like e-government, e-education, e-taxation, and e-services without fully understanding the need that these technologies should be filling. A recent article on describes how the “e-registration” programme of the Nigerian government targeting their teachers because of their “e-readiness and e-preparedness”. I kid you not.

Of course providing technology without the basic infrastructures (water, electricity, telephones and in some cases buildings) will be a serious waste of money and resources. So we need to be really smart at programme and project management to get our infrastructure ducks and dependencies all aligned.

So roll on the ICT Ministers who understand buzzwords and their implications and can translate real needs into technological solutions.

[Terry White]

I think the last four paragraphs capture the essence of what I was trying to say: While it is relatively easy to start a silver-bullet initiative that will "solve the problem", I have seen many examples of IT projects that started without considering the environment into which we are injecting the technology. An example that comes to mind is an initiative that was going to link all the documents in the justice chain - case-files, affidavits, statements, court proceedings and social welfare initiatives. Sounds great, but the project, which was budgeted at 30 million, spent 80 million before it was realised that it could not work - there wasn't enough computing infrastructure (in this case UPS and generators) to institute a system that would be totally online. The project was stopped and 80 million was wasted.

I was involved in stopping it, but recommended that they rather go step by step. Initiate a few pilots where one element of the process was tested and honed, before starting the big-bang approach. I call it "chunking" - do what you can do with what you have, and let that drive further developments.

I remain poisitive about African ingenuity - I think we get a lot right without government 'big-bang' programmes. The trick is to build on what we get right.

[Justus Ekeigwe]

Alexander, if I understand your response, you are saying we should not sit back and wait for the government to put infrastructure in place to starting building IT services? If that is what you are saying, I would agree that we can get started down that route and move forward but would never be competitive, let alone catch up with developed economies.

I agree with Jason White's post the more because the basic infrastructure, business and social landscape needed to build the so-called "e-everything" and "bridge the digital divide" could not be done by the private sector without the support of government. Businesses are naturally repulsed to high cost of doing business and would readily move their business to wherever doing business is cheaper. That was why Africa couldn't cut its teeth into the outsourcing revolution of the early 2000s.

[Alexandre Drahon]

Nice article, and an interesting subject matter, but I don't see how this is "crossing other bridges before crossing the digital divide". It's just that we must develop IT infrastructures in a context where other infrastructure is lacking, just as Telcos have to develop their infrastructure without an ideal power grid infrastructure, and so on. We can't say "oh no! we can't build IT services, we need good public services first", just like we couldn't say "we can't build airlines, we need a good train service first". Also, I don't think that's the lesson of so-called "emerging economies".

Another point is that I don't think it's really useful to say that "Africa should do this" or "Africa should do that", there are millions of people shaping the future of Africa by their everyday actions and choices according to their environment, and modifying their environment in return. There not waiting to see what bridges Africa have to cross, they're trying to cross the bridges they have to cross. So what bridge(s) do we IT pros have to cross next?

Anyway it's an interesting discussion to have and I'm sure we IT pros often think about it. I hope I didn't simplify what you were saying to much, this is the Internet, we debate ruthlessly!