Message-ID: <19960422230218893.AAA100@BUGS> Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 18:02:19 -0500 From: "Henry, Daniel" <mailto:dhenry@LSUMC.EDU> To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
I thought this might be appropos of discussions going on here recently regarding the use/spread of Internet access in Africa/Subsaharan Africa...does anyone know anything about the East African Internet Society, or the Working Group on Information and Communication Technologies in Africa mentioned in the article below?
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Quoted from: http://netday.iworld.com/business/ iWORLD's weekly feature "Net Across the World"
The Internet In Africa: Information Superhypeway Or Highway?
Surfing the Internet is plain sailing in the West but hits the rocks in Africa where the availability and affordability of the tools cannot be so easily taken for granted. But a growing list of Sub-Saharan African countries already have full connectivity to the Internet: Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. Unofficial access is available in Zimbabwe, while the rest of the continent has to make do with the bare bones of e-mail and offline Fidonets. There are probably more telephone lines in Manhattan than in the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. A personal computer for 1,500 dollars is not a major outlay for a person employed in an industrialised country. For a Nigerian university lecturer who earns just 50 dollars a month, it is unthinkable. Although South Africa is miles ahead of the rest of the continent in terms of Internet access, it is extremely skewed in favour of the urban middle class.
Getting Africa up to speed, and sensitising governments to the importance of providing a regulatory and infrastructural framework conducive to building an Internet culture, is the goal of a hard-working group of African telematics devotees within civil society and government. A High Level Working Group on Information and Communication Technologies in Africa, which met in Ethiopia last year under the auspices of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa, is spearheading an African Networking Initiative. In Kenya, the East African Internet Association is building a regional backbone of interlinked nodes and plans to lease an international line for direct Internet access. The use of the Net in Africa is less about the trivia and entertainment that personifies surfing and the chat rooms in the West. It is more about the local application of the hard information and the globalisation of issue-based advocacy. For instance, HealthNet, a service for community-based health workers, has saved lives by allowing doctors get answers on difficult diagnosis problems. The sheer volume of the information though, and its Northern-bias, creates problems of relevance for users in Africa. (Inter Press Service; April 11, 1996)
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Dan Henry __o LSU Medical Center Computing Support _ \<,_ <mailto:dhenry@lsumc.edu> Academic Affairs (_)/ (_) (504) 568-8623