The Connect Africa Summit
The Connect Africa Summit was held a couple of weeks ago in Rwanda. Over 1000 people took part, and it seems like the results are potentially quite promising.
The driving force behind this Summit, which is one of a series planned across the world, is the need to speed up the development process to attain the goals defined at the World Summit on the Information Society in 2003.
The key point seemed to be that it has been established that ICT must take the lead in development of Africa as a whole, and that broadband is the next big step in this process. The opinion that this can be successfully implemented by a estimated date of 2012 is drawn from consideration of the growing mobile phone market, which is currently surpassing any other country in terms of growth rate (and has been for several years), and had nearly 200m subscribers in Africa at the end of last year.
Funds and Aims Promised:
An estimated total of US$55,892,750,000 has been promised.
US$50b from mobile operators who have committed to increasing connectivity to interconnect all African cities, and strengthen the connection to rest of world, with 90% coverage of the population by 2012.
Over Euro100m of grants, along with over Euro200m of loans from the European Commission to develop projects that have multi-nation impact, either through cross-border projects or country projects that will develop the continent as a whole (this fund is intended to be added to at the end of 2008). This project mentions specifically the use of ICT.
The World Bank Group has not committed to, but has talked about the likelihood that they will increase their US$1b per year to US$2b per year by 2012, which is a fund aimed at development of the private sector.
The Africa Development Bank has committed nearly US$65m towards infrastructure development (and is intending to spend 60% of its resources on infrastructure in the next few years).
These outcomes seem very positive in terms of infrastructure development, and helping to achieve the 2015 goals. However, it does raise a concern that appears to me to be potentially critical in terms of the overall development of Africa through connectivity, which is - whilst it is very positive that there is clearly to be plenty of money and technical progress in terms of this development, what exactly is the connectivity to be used for?
The one target relating to this is one of the 10 connectivity goals from the 2003 Summit which states:
‘encourage the development of content and to put in place technical conditions in order to facilitate the presence and use of all world languages on the Internet’.
This goal seem quite ambiguous in terms of what content they are referring to. Who is going to develop it? Who is it going to be developed for? What are the aims of this content? How are they going to find out what content people want? The list of questions goes on… I have not yet found (and someone please send me links or information if you have the answers to this) any information as to what software or hardware is to be developed specifically to accompany this newfound connectivity.
My concern lies with the fact that technology is only as good as the applications that it supports. People don’t buy a computer because it has the fastest processor, they buy it because that fast processor can make their software run faster.
It is also concerning that this drive may fall into the same trap as many other drives for African development in the past. A factor that could be linked to the cause of these could be the assumptions made by the people, governments and corporations funding or developing the projects as to what is needed to encourage development, whereas perhaps the reality, as seen by the end users of these projects, is very different.
So maybe in the case of African connectivity, the first question should be – What do we specifically want to be able to do that we can’t do now? (And by this, I don’t mean ‘access the internet’, rather, ‘farmers want to communicate directly with buyers in developed countries’ for example). And then secondly - What will enable us to do that in terms of technology?
Otherwise the risk is that perhaps the huge amount of money and time will not be used to their maximum potential, and the goals set out in 2003 will be achieved in theory, but not in practice.
There does appear to be some evidence that corporations have in some cases recognised this need – Nokia’s head of mobile division was quoted last month saying that they see the key as the content the phones deliver to the potential users.
“We are looking as a company as to how to facilitate and participate in creating content that is actually relevant for the consumers in emerging markets… the biggest barrier in emerging markets to people using the mobile internet was lack of interest.” (Kai Oistamo, Oct 2007)
However, if the Nokia 2626 is anything to go by in terms of what Nokia think is appropriate development of technology, then this company policy may not amount to much in practice…(I will be writing a post overviewing emerging market handsets shortly, where I will go into more detail on the phones themselves).
However, another concern regarding this huge investment in infrastructure comes for a conversation I recently had regarding African infrastructure development with a retired managing director for global infrastructure investment at CDC. With regard to developing infrastructure for Africa, he said:
‘There is lots of evidence that unless a country is spending 4-5% of its GDP on infrastructure development, they will not sustain any increase in GDP per capita.’
And I would question as to whether many of the coutries being provided with this infrastructure do spend this amount? If they don’t, it appears that any development projects will be futile, as in the long-term, how will they be able to achieve the aims of overall development in the country?
Relevant links:
The Nokia 2626:
Tech Digest article
pocketpicks.co.uk article
The Connect Africa Summit:
allafrica.com article
International Telecoms Union (itu.int) article
