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THE WIRING OF A CONTINENT Africa goes online Hardly any of Africa's 800 million people have a telephone or access to the Internet. Now digital entrepreneurs are seeking to bridge the telecommunications divide.
CAPE TOWN - It was just a length of cable dangling from a ship off the coast of South Africa that ran along the bottom of the sea and then up onto shore here on June 19, like a mooring line.
Except that this line didn't bind the ship to the shore. It established a key beachhead for an advanced undersea communications cable that by year's end will give sub-Saharan Africa its first world-class connections to the global telephone network and the Internet.
After its stop off Cape Town last month, the ship began to slowly troll its way northward on the western coast of Africa, laying cable along the way. The line will come ashore at Nigeria, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and five other landing points before finally ending its run 9,000 miles away, off Spain. From there, the data moving along the cable can easily be routed onto the communications networks of Europe and the United States. Back in Cape Town, the line will also tap into another cable, 7,800 miles long, which runs from South Africa to India and Malaysia, binding Africa to Asia.
At last, Africa will have the beginnings of a communications backbone of the sort considered commonplace in most of the world. And that backbone may become even stronger in a few years, if a Massachusetts woman gets her way. Patricia Bagnell, a telecommunications consultant, is seeking financing for a second undersea cable, an extraordinary $1.8 billion plan known as Africa One that would wrap the entire continent in a fiber-optic ring, with connections to every African country with a coastline.
More than 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa remain largely isolated from one another and the outside world. But things are starting to change. Using limited satellite connections, businessmen now confined to local markets are beginning to make deals all over the continent, and beyond. Students who lack modern textbooks are starting to learn directly from the finest scholars of America, Europe, and Asia at a fledgling ''virtual university.'' And political activists in Nigeria, Ghana, and other countries are using the Internet to rally international opposition to corrupt or oppressive rulers.
Africa is ground zero in the effort to solve what many think is one of the world's most serious emerging problems: bridging the digital divide between the developed and developing worlds.
In America, the gap is rapidly dwindling. Nearly 60 percent of US homes have computers; nearly half are on the Internet. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, as of the second half of last year, 43 percent of black Americans had Internet access compared to 34 percent in the first half of 2000.
The survey also found that 47 percent of Latinos were online, versus 40 percent in the first half of the year. The figures for whites were 57 and 49 percent respectively. But there remains a cavernous distance, digitally, between the typical American and the average citizen of the developing world.
The US and other industrialized nations have 15 percent of the world's 6 billion people, but 88 percent of the Internet users, the United Nations reports. Eighty percent of the world's population has still never even placed a telephone call. And a large percentage of those disconnected masses live in Africa.
According to the International Telecommunications Union, Africa has less than two percent of the world's telephone lines. There are 70 phone lines for every 100 Americans, but just 2.5 lines for every 100 Africans. Computers are even scarcer. There are just six million computers on the entire continent, less than one for every hundred people. More people use the Internet in London than in all of Africa.
Africa is still desperately poor. In 1999, the US economy produced over $33,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Sub-Saharan Africa produced $490, according to the World Bank. Take away the contribution of South Africa, by far the most advanced nation in the region, and the number falls to just over $300. Life expectancy has fallen from just under 50 years in 1995 to less than 47 years in 1999 because of the world's worst incidence of AIDS, as well as bloody civil wars in Liberia, Congo, Burundi, and Angola.
High-tech gamble
To some people, Africa seems like the last place on earth to invest billions in high technology. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates certainly thinks so. At a conference in Seattle last October, Gates mocked ''World E-Inclusion,'' a proposal by Hewlett-Packard Co. to increase high-tech investment in Third World countries. ''What percentage of HP's growth in the future will come from customers who live on less than $1 a day?'' asked Gates. ''There are things those people need at that level other than technology.''
But Gates appears to be swimming against the tide in downplaying the role that technology can play in tackling the problems of the developing world. Increasingly, governments of major developed countries, the World Bank, the United Nations, an array of nonprofit groups, and other high tech corporations are all committing themselves to addressing the digital divide.
Last year, the seven leading industrialized nations created the ''Digital Opportunity Task Force'' to study the problem, with Japan alone committing $15 billion over five years to send computer technology to the Third World.
The Clinton administration responded on a much smaller scale with a mix of public and private initiatives. There are also a number of volunteer efforts based in the United States. Geekcorps, founded by successful Internet entrepreneur and Williams College graduate Ethan Zuckerman, sends engineers and programmers to Ghana to train small business people in computer skills. Then there are the high-tech firms, whose motives are only partly charitable.
Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina believes she's hit upon the next great growth market for high technology. ''As part of a long-term HP effort to find new revenues one, three, five, and 10 years down the line, World E-Inclusion targets the four billion people that are seldom, if ever, served by traditional information technology companies,'' Fiorina said.
Tom Kwanya, publisher of Kenyan Netwatch, a Nairobi-based computer magazine, argues that committing to digital technology will help Africa end its dependence on others.
''As long as I can remember, we get drugs and food and all kinds of handouts. And our problems are still perpetual,'' Kwanya said. ''I think it is time that we try IT [information technology] and we try PCs.''
Many experts agree. Economic development is the ultimate solution to many of Africa's problems, they argue, and that won't happen in countries that lack a decent telecommunications infrastructure. Moreover, it is the digital economy that will offer some of the best business opportunities in the near future. And it is by getting wired, computer specialists say, that this economically moribund continent has its best chance of catching up with the rest of the world by transforming itself from a pre-industrial society directly to an information-based economy.
Untapped potential
Consider the booming business of outsourcing. According to the research firm IDC, American firms spent $5.5 billion last year to hire workers in countries like India and Ireland - clerical workers, computer programmers, even scientists and doctors. That figure is expected to grow to $17.6 billion by 2005. Outsourcing is a game any country can play - any country with reliable and reasonably cheap telephone and Internet links, that is. That's why Africa presently gets very little outsourcing trade, despite its plentiful supply of low-cost labor.
A few firms have begun tapping the African market. For instance, there's a good chance that many Americans who have recently filed a health insurance claim have had it processed by a clerical worker in Ghana. Affiliated Computer Services of Dallas sends digital images of the information from Lexington, Ky. to Accra through a high-speed satellite link. The arrangement allows ACS to tap Ghana's ample supply of low-wage workers.
But ACS needed a hefty discount on satellite fees charged by the Ghanaian government. Besides, says Tom Blodgett, president of ACS's Business Process Solutions unit, Ghana, on Africa's west coast, is just one satellite hop away. It would cost far more to set up a similar operation in the east African nation of Kenya, which requires two satellite hops - Kentucky to Europe and then to Kenya. ''We're doing OK in Ghana,'' said Blodgett. ''We would not be OK on the east coast of Africa.''
But with a high-speed optical network like Africa One, Ghana, Kenya, and Kentucky would become digital next-door neighbors. And with their massive capacity, the cables could lead to sharply lower connection costs, and a major new incentive for companies to set up shop in Africa.
Still, companies like ACS only offer low-paying clerical work. No matter what improvements are made to Africa's communications networks, foreign firms are unlikely to come to the continent for highly skilled workers; they'd be wasting their time. Nearly a third of the men and nearly half the women are illiterate, and most people have no more than a grade-school education.
A more traditional approach to this problem would be to spend billions on new schools, more teachers, and well-stocked libraries, instead of a grandiose scheme to wire the continent. But digital evangelists argue that in fact, wiring Africa is a huge investment in education. The continent's colleges presently lack the kind of high-speed Internet access taken for granted by every American freshman. Plug African schools into the global network, and for the first time, students will gain unlimited access to the shared knowledge of the world.
''Students here can't afford books,'' said Joseph Sevilla, an administrator of Strathmore College in Nairobi. ''And the books aren't available in the bookshops.... But they can get access to the information through the Internet.''
The Internet is more than a glorified library. With high-speed access, it's possible for students in African cities to take ''distance learning'' courses offered in the best American, Asian, and European colleges and universities. Already the African Virtual University, part of Nairobi's Kenyatta University, uses satellite video technology to provide such courses. But satellite bandwidth is far too expensive, and classes must be held in classrooms crammed with special equipment. With Internet-based education, any computer center in Africa with a high-speed connection can have access to courses at the best American universities.
Claims that the Internet can ''change everything'' ring hollow to American ears these days, as the US economy suffers through the dot-com downturn. Yet the Internet was just the latest phase in a technical transformation which started 130 years ago in the United States, but that has scarcely begun in Africa.
America has been building out its telephone systems for decades, with big cables between the major cities and millions of copper wires running into every house. In the early 1990s, when the Internet was thrown open for public use, this same telephone network was quickly adapted and upgraded to handle digital data, and many additional backbones were built.
In addition, the United States has plugged into dozens of undersea cables spanning the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, making a phone call to London or Tokyo as easy as dialing across the street, and relatively inexpensive too.
When the first transatlantic phone cables to Europe were installed after World War II, it cost the phone company $2.44 per minute to carry a call overseas; today the cost is under a penny. And it's even cheaper to communicate via e-mail, which is why those cables are now crammed with Internet traffic. Voice or data is all the same to a length of optical fiber; just billions of pulses of laser light.
But there's only one fiber optic cable between sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. That cable, called SAT-2, was built by Telkom South Africa and begun in the apartheid era. It shows. SAT-2 begins north of Cape Town, then arcs far west into the Atlantic as if repelled from the African coast by a magnetic field, before swooping east to a landfall on the Canary Islands, near Morocco.
''It was a system that was basically built by Telkom South Africa, paid by ourselves as well, and... it sort of went past the rest of Africa,'' said Wouter Myburgh, a Telkom executive.
Today, SAT-2 doesn't even have enough capacity for South Africa, by far the continent's leading Internet user. The new cable, to be called SAT-3, will carry up to 120 gigabits of data traffic, enough for South Africa and its neighbors as well.
This time, national phone companies in eight other African countries are helping to pay the $600 million cost of the new system. In exchange, they'll get far cheaper international connections than the satellite links they now use.
Still not enough
Even with the new SAT-3 undersea cable, Africa still needs overland connections between countries. South Africa's electric utility, Eskom Enterprises, thinks it has the answer. The company has begun building a vast network of power plants and transmission lines that will run from Cape Town all the way north to Cairo. It will take 10 years to complete, including the construction of major electric power plants along the way.
At the same time, Eskom is also stringing optical fiber from its transmission towers, forming Africa's first overland data backbone. A multinational grid, the Eskom network will be able to handle data traffic between African countries as well as contacts with the outside world.
But the Eskom initiative still won't put communication services into the hands of ordinary people. In most parts of Africa, it's no use trying to order a phone line, since none are available. The so-called last-mile networks that link individual homes and offices to telephone companies in America simply don't exist here. According to the World Bank, most Africans must travel two hours from home to find a phone.
Still, as countries like Nigeria and Ghana have begun deregulating their telephone services, the situation is improving, especially in the realm of wireless telephone systems, which can be installed faster than a wire-based network. According to African Cellular, a company that runs a Web portal devoted to tracking the cellular industry in Africa, there are 15 million cellphones on the continent, up 135 percent from the same period last year. Nearly all the phones are based on the common European cellular standard, and many include text messaging, a feature rarely found on US cell phones. On nearly every street corner in Accra and Nairobi, vendors hawk cellphone recharger cords and leather phone cases to passing drivers.
The surging cellphone market attests to Africa's hunger for good, affordable communication services, and the shabby state of its traditional telephone system. It's not just the lack of lines running to the rural areas, where most Africans live. Even in the big cities, it's often impossible to get a phone line connected.
Rory Bamber, a senior account executive at Bytes Technology Group, a South African telecommunications firm, says that in many places there's no spare capacity on the trunk cables coming into the neighborhood. ''You could wait up to 18 months to get cable into the ground,'' Bamber said. And that's in relatively affluent South Africa. It's worse in places like Nairobi, where roads are barely passable, garbage rots uncollected in the street, and tap water is rationed. So there's no rush to put in new phone cables.
But even in the poorest parts of Africa's cities, it's relatively cheap and simple to throw up a few cell towers. And governments can make money by selling cellular franchises to foreign entrepreneurs. In Ghana, four companies now compete for cellular customers, and usage rose from 22,000 to 132,000 subscribers between 1999 and 2000.
Wireless isn't just for voice communication. American entrepreneur Charles Johnson wants to use it to deliver high-speed Internet data to businesses in the leading cities of Ghana. His company, United Communications Systems International, is already building a network to serve the cities of Accra, Kumasi, and Tema. Clients use antennas attached to their buildings to receive data, bypassing the local phone network.
Johnson is now negotiating with officials in Senegal and Nigeria, hoping to slowly extend his wireless data network across the continent. He thinks he can become a major player in Africa, before the big American communication firms even realize what they're missing. ''You talk to certain people, and they say Africa's not on their radar screens,'' said Johnson. ''Good. Good.''
Reshaping politics
Still, wireless phones and data services are out of reach of most Africans. For voice communications, millions rely on neighborhood ''call centers'' where they can pay to use a community telephone. In the same way, Africans have embraced the concept of public Internet service centers, or cybercafes, where people who could never afford to buy their own computers pay small sums to surf the Web and send e-mail messages around the world.
The cybercafes are concentrated in Africa's major cities. They areinaccessible to millions of rural citizens, and even many city-dwellers can't afford to use them, or don't know how. But simply by connecting better-educated residents of the continent with each other and with expatriates abroad, Internet access is beginning to reshape the politics of Africa.
Jerry Rawlings, the former Ghanaian dictator turned elected president, held power for over 20 years. In the process, he suppressed political protest, imprisoned journalists, and bought off rivals. But he couldn't buy off Yaw Owusu, an MBA student at Columbia University and founder of Ghana Cyber Group, an Internet-based organization that opposes Rawlings.
Owusu says that Rawlings is deeply unpopular among Ghanaian expatriates. But Ghana doesn't allow absentee voting by citizens abroad. At home, elections meant free food and clothing, doled out by Rawlings allies who worked impoverished neighborhoods with the skill of Chicago aldermen.
''During election time,'' said Owusu, ''they go around the rural areas where most Ghanaians live, and they literally buy their votes.''
Owusu decided to do the same. Ghanaians abroad send $350 million back home each year to help support their families. So Ghana Cyber Group turned to its Internet mailing list of 4,000 members, some inside Ghana, but mostly expatriates. Between them, they raised about $50,000 for opposition candidates in the Ghanaian elections. In addition, the group launched a campaign of friendly blackmail, using e-mail, phone calls, and letters to the folks back home.
''We tell them, `If you keep voting these people into power, then we're going to stop sending you money,' '' said Owusu.
It's hard to judge the impact of Ghana Cyber Group's campaign. But Rawlings' handpicked successor was defeated at the polls last year, and the reformist National Democratic Congress came to power. Now Ghana Cyber Group has set itself a new goal - the arrest and trial of Rawlings for human rights abuses. Its Web site, prosecute-rawlings.com, features a litany of accusations against the former president, including theft of public funds, torture, and murder.
So far, African rulers haven't sought to restrict access to the Internet in order to protect their power. But there is a different kind of political repression going on, the kind that put Francis Quartey in a Ghanaian jail. His crime: Competing with the local telephone company.
In 1994, after eight years at AT&T Corp. in the United States, Quartey returned to his native Ghana; in 1998, he launched an Internet service provider called IDN. In 2000, IDN began offering ''voice over IP,'' the technical term for placing voice telephone calls over Internet circuits. Because Internet phone calls bypassed the state-run phone monopoly, Ghana Telecom, and its high rates for local and international calls, voice over IP could save some users hundreds of dollars a month. But it would also subtract that amount from the ledgers of Ghana Telecom.
''One day they just walked in there with guns and stuff, and took me out, and the equipment,'' said Quartey. He spent three days in jail before a judge threw out the case against him. ''When I got my equipment, some had been destroyed, some was stolen.'' While Quartey still insists he did nothing wrong, he hasn't resumed offering the Internet phone service, saying he wants to avoid any hassle.
As long as state-sanctioned monopolies control Africa's communications networks, they'll have an incentive to maintain high prices, even after undersea cables like SAT-3 and Africa One flood the market with low-cost data capacity. But the deregulation of African communications has begun. And pressure to speed up the process will come from entrepreneurs who are demanding a chance to plug into the global economy.
''I'm one of those people who don't get frustrated,'' said Tom Kwanya of Kenyan Netwatch, ''because getting frustrated means giving up.... We need to make it work.''
It's beginning to. Meter by meter, the skein of fiber that binds the rest of the world together is finally reaching out toward Africa. In a few years' time, for the first time, it really will be a worldwide web.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 7/22/2001.
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Technicians in Cape Town last month anchored a 9,000-mile-long cable that will slash the cost of telephone and Internet services in West Africa. (Cape Argus Photo)
