Why Africa must resolve the challenge of the digital technology

According to Global Information Technology Report for 2012 that was released at the beginning of April 2012 on Network Readiness Index (NRI), Rwanda came in position number three in Africa with regard to Network Readiness Index. At a global level, Sweden comes first with Singapore taking the second position.Despite the foregoing, two thirds of humanity today remains excluded from the benefits of digital technology according to a report by the United Nations Organization. Rachel Rivera says “Governments, Companies and NGOs must forge stronger partnerships to promote ICTs in developing countries”.There is no doubt that access to information is an essential condition of development. The Internet has altered the development thinking to the extent that many donors and multilateral lending organizations have radically reshaped their policies for the new information age. The debate that many people tend to be engaged currently is that of prioritization.Some venture to ask, for instance, the importance of the Internet access in an era without safe drinking water or even an affordable telephone service. While, as some health workers have a lot of praise for the satellite system that has brought them e-mail connections and cheap access to health, others are full of complaints that Internet connections will not pay for aspirin or syringes. Others even get worried that the glamour of the Internet will divert or undermine the education services and that basic costs such as paying teachers may ultimately suffer as more and more resources are diverted to hook up to the information highway.Sometime in 1999, the then Vice President of United States Al Gore asserted that the Internet is bringing about a brave new world with an “electronic agora” and “online democracy”. While this may have been feasible for the US, in Africa and many developing countries it is far from being true. For instance, more than 80 per cent of people in the world have never even heard a dial tone, let alone surfed the Web. The gap between the information haves and have-nots is ever widening. In Geneva sometime in 1999, the then UN Secretary General Kofi Anan warned of the danger of excluding the world’s poor from the information revolution. “People lack many things: Jobs, shelter, food, healthcare and drinkable water. Today, being cut off from basic telecommunications services is a hardship almost as acute as these other deprivations and may indeed reduce the chances of finding remedies to them”, he said. Kofi Anan could not have expressed it any better.To comment about the digital divide, one needs to examine some facts and figures. According to a recent UN Human Development Report, industrialized countries, with only 15 per cent of the world’s population, are home to 88 per cent of all Internet users. Less than 3 per cent of people in South Asia are online even though it is home to one-fifth of the world’s population.For Africa, the situation is even worse. With a population now of over 740 million people, there are about 15 million phone lines. That is fewer than the phone lines in Manhattan or Tokyo! Eighty per cent of those phone lines are in only six countries. There are now slightly over 10 million Internet users on the entire continent compared with over 14 million in the UK alone.There are more reasons besides the usual lack of resources that explain the technological gap. In the developing world, resistance to the idea that technology is a quick fix is still very much in place. African Virtual University, a World Bank-sponsored programme, has broadcast over 3000 hours of instruction to over 10,000 students in all regions of sub-Saharan Africa. As a result of this initiative, AVU students are able to take courses given by Professors from world-renowned educational institutions in Africa, Europe and North America.But while this sounds an impressive ‘breakthrough’ in as far as sharing of knowledge is concerned, some scholars from Africa are not impressed. For instance, Meghistab Haile from Ethiopia says that with good resources and money, you would have enough lecturers and would encourage the return of many of our academics who are developing the west today. He insists that “in the end it is only the Africans who can solve their problems”.There are other murmurs of discontent with regard to high-tech education. This type of education appears to be available for a select elite, given that there are many places on our continent where tap water and electricity remains a fairy tale. These critics say that they would rather have ‘hygiene, sanitation and safe drinking water’ as priorities!

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Why Africa must resolve the challenge of the digital technology