Nelson Nganga (standing) works with students in a classroom at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. (Globe Photo/Khalil Senosi).

THE WIRING OF A CONTINENT

Beyond bandwidth

To power new infrastructure, Africa needs technicians

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 7/24/2001

SUNDAY: New undersea cables will provide Africa with its first world-class connections to the global telephone network and the Internet. Africa goes online A $1.8 billion ring around Africa MONDAY: Thousands of people are flocking to African cybercafes to get online. Entering the queue Internet visionary hopes his plan has the E-Touch TUESDAY: To put its fledgling telecommunications infrastructure to use, Afriva needs all the computer programmers and technicians it can get. Dearth of talent frustrates fledgling Internet efforts Critics don't deter Internet visionary

Last of three parts

AIROBI - In a dimly-lit lecture hall, students hunker down over piles of old parts that were once working computers, piecing them back together.

If this were a university in Boston, London, or Tokyo, they wouldn't bother. They'd sweep the cramped hard drives and sluggish processor chips into a rubbish heap, then work on something manufactured less than five years ago.

But this is Kenyatta University in Nairobi, and this is the best gear they've got. The students here are doing what they can with what they have - an old African tradition that still applies in the age of the computer.

Despite pitifully limited access to the global Internet, a million Africans have found ways to get online, and to build computer networks of growing sophistication. Now, companies like Africa One and Telkom South Africa are building massive data pipelines that within the next five years are expected to give Africa a communications backbone that is competitive with other regions in the world.

But bandwidth isn't enough. Somebody still has to build the corporate and government computer networks, and the local Internet service providers, that will let Africans put these pipelines to use. Which means the continent needs thousands of highly trained engineers, computer programmers, and technicians.

Africa needs geeks, and lots of them.

And little by little, it is getting them. Ill-equipped classrooms and steamy cybercafes are beginning to produce a new technical elite, bolstered by the hard-won skills of returning expatriates, many of them veterans of the colleges and computer firms of Massachusetts.

''The enthusiasm is there. The brains are there. It's just that they lack people to guide them,'' said Paul Njoroge, an MIT student who returned to his native Kenya last year to teach computer programming at the college that gave him his start. Now back at MIT pursuing his doctorate in electrical engineering, Njoroge may work for a few years at an American company to polish his skills. Then he's going home.

''I think that people like me who have... seen how successful societies are run can bring that back home,'' Njoroge said.

Kenyan Ayisi Makatiani, an MIT track star and electrical engineer, has already gone back to Nairobi. He's trying to build his firm, Africa Online, into one of Africa's leading Internet companies. And Nii Quaynor of Ghana, former research scientist at Digital Equipment Corp., now runs his country's top Internet provider.

Even Nelson Nganga, leading a tour of Kenyatta University's computer classrooms, has a Massachusetts connection. In 1988, after earning an engineering degree at the University of Nairobi, he came to Digital Equipment Corp., then Massachusetts' leading computer firm, to be trained on that company's VAX minicomputer systems.

These men would be elite technologists anywhere. But in Africa, you can qualify for elite status merely by owning a computer. There are about six million PCs in Africa serving three-quarters of a billion people. Most American children routinely work and play with computers; millions of African children have never seen one.

More fundamental than the shortage of hardware is the dearth of education. In South Africa, the most advanced nation on the continent, nearly half the population hasn't completed grade school. In Kenya and Ghana, the number approaches 60 percent. Even those who get an education attend schools with inadequate equipment and dated textbooks.

Internet technologies could go a long way toward solving these problems, computer experts and others say. With high-speed data access, African students could forge links to the finest libraries and classrooms in the world. But because of decrepit communications systems, even Africa's major universities are isolated from this potential treasure trove of knowledge.

''Without doubt the liberating effect of access to information and communications is tangible, it's real,'' said Lane Smith, who leads the Leland Initiative, a US government program to bring Internet access to African schools and government agencies. ''It's not going to be in and of itself the magic bullet, but it's going to be about as close as you can get for the overall benefit of a village.''

Nelson Nganga of Kenyatta University using a satellite link to pipe in college classes from the United States. (Globe Photo / Khalil Senosi)

Linked by satellite

At Kenyatta University, they're using the next best thing to high-speed Internet training. The school's African Virtual University offers courses beamed via satellite from American and European universities, including Babson College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Classes are broadcast live, and students can speak directly to instructors over a telephone conference link.

The students at African Virtual University are like the students at any commuter college in the United States: uninterested in high-flown theory, utterly focused on the mundane goal of learning their way to a better life.

''They say that things are getting computerized,'' said 24-year-old George Adira from Mombasa, a student in the school's advanced Internet program. ''This will help me in getting a good job in future.''

Prior to attending this program, Adira's only experience with computers was the occasional trip to a cybercafe. Now he hopes to build a livelihood online. ''I'll have more advanced computers,'' he said. ''I can become a Web designer. I can make more money.''

Colleges all over the continent are using Virtual University courses in languages and business administration as well as computer training. But Nganga said he could accomplish far more with high-speed Internet access: ''If you visit our library here, our books are 10 years old.'' But with the Internet, he said, students and faculty members could get round-the-clock access to the world's best libraries and databases. They could send e-mail messages to experts in every field, and keep up with the newest research.

Getting access is the hard part. Here at one of Kenya's top universities, the only Internet link is through dial-up modems. The school is just now getting a permanent digital link to the Internet. At 128,000 bits per second, it's state-of-the-art for Kenya, but absurdly slow by American standards. This limited bandwidth will cost the school about $3,500 a month, even with a half-price educational discount.

But Kenyatta University is ready to use whatever Internet access it can get. Every building on campus already has wireless networks installed, so that students with laptops will be able to use them from any location. Only a handful of American colleges can make that claim.

Still, Nganga is pessimistic. He said that as long as Telkom Kenya, the local phone company, maintains its monopoly on satellite links to the Internet, schools and businesses will never be able to afford the kind of access that could transform the country. ''Africa is the Dark Continent,'' he said. ''And I'm afraid it will remain dark. Most of the problem is caused by ourselves.''

Others aren't nearly as gloomy. On the other side of Nairobi stands Madaraka Estates, a region of dingy housing projects, unpaved sidewalks, and rutted streets. But the Madaraka campus of Strathmore College, protected by a steel gate and watchful guards, is an attractive and comfortable place. The school was founded in 1961 and is run by the Roman Catholic organization Opus Dei. Its Madaraka facility, one of two campuses operated by the school, was completed in 1991 with funds from the Italian government and the European Union.

There are about 2,200 students at Strathmore studying accounting, business management, and computing. Most of them get jobs as soon as they graduate, snapped up by Kenyan businesses and government agencies hungry for skilled professionals. A Strathmore diploma often means an escape from poverty, not just for the graduate, but his entire family.

''Our students have won many prizes,'' said Joseph Sevilla, the school's computer systems manager who came to Strathmore 18 years ago after earning a master's degree in computer science in his native Spain. ''Here our quality standards are very high.'' Indeed, Sevilla said the school will send two of its graduates to Massachusetts this year - one to Harvard, another to MIT.

Bound for MIT

Paul Njoroge parlayed a year of computer training at Strathmore into a scholarship to MIT. He earned a bachelor's in electrical engineering degree in 2000, is finishing up a master's, and will soon start work on a doctorate. Last summer, he and some other students from MIT returned to Strathmore to teach an advanced computer programming class.

Njoroge also helped arrange a donation of modern computer-networking gear from 3Com Inc. As a result, Strathmore, like Kenyatta University, has an internal computer network that an American college would be proud to own. But getting connected to the outside world is where the system breaks down.

Denise Odhiambo is doing what he can to help. Odhiambo runs the African Regional Centre for Computing from a dusty, shabby Nairobi house. There's a large room littered with computers and modems - not industrial strength equipment, but the sort a consumer would buy at CompUSA. One machine has its lid removed, and a fan blows dusty air against the motherboard. ''This is our air conditioning,'' Odhiambo joked.

The overheated machine is called Agony; it took days to get the software just right. It's connected to a bank of modems. Local nongovernmental organizations and small Internet providers dial into Agony to use the center's Internet satellite feed, and to check e-mail on a neighboring machine called Ecstasy. A third computer, Excited, is the machine that keeps all of Kenya connected to the Internet. It's the ''root server'' for .ke, the nation's official Internet domain.

The US National Science Foundation and the British government funded ARCC to help get African scientists online with their overseas counterparts. But the center has also become a bandwidth provider for private Internet companies and even for the Kenyan government. Kenyan soldiers on peacekeeping missions with the United Nations route their e-mail through ARCC, Odhiambo said.

Odhiambo has a degree in electronics engineering from Kenyatta University. He's also studied at Keio University in Japan, San Jose State in California, and City University in Switzerland. He said he wants to build up technology in his homeland, but he confessed that if he could land his dream job - as an engineer for Cisco Systems - he'd leave in a heartbeat.

That sort of brain drain poses a threat to Africa's fledgling high-tech culture. Even at African Virtual University, students dream of taking their newfound computer skills out of Kenya. In December, 20-year-old Julia Mwangi will complete her Internet studies. ''I'm going to get a well-paying job using these skills,'' she said. But she doesn't expect to find one in her native town of Nyeri, about 100 miles from Nairobi. She wants to move to the United States. ''I think they are more advanced,'' Mwangi said. ''Not like other countries.''

South Africa is finding it especially difficult to hang onto its trained computer experts. According to the Markle Foundation, a nonprofit group that studies the impact of communications technologies on developing countries, South Africa loses 200-300 trained computer specialists every month because of a lack of job opportunities.

Manuel Ribiero, cofounder of Fusion Interactive, a Cape Town Web-hosting firm, said that so many South Africans became Microsoft Certified Software Engineers, or MCSEs, that the economy can't absorb them all. ''What do you say to an MCSE?'' asked Ribiero. ''Can I have fries with that?'' Desperate for work, many have left for Europe, he said.

Ghana and Kenya are far poorer than South Africa, and the temptation to emigrate for a better life is even stronger. Besides, America has a high-tech culture that can seem intensely attractive compared to the often primitive environs of Accra or Nairobi.

Francis Quartey, founder of the Ghanaian Internet provider IDN, was educated in America and worked for AT&T. He's often dismayed by the quality of computer science graduates produced by Ghanaian universities. ''You find a lot of folks here... good at theories, but not practical,'' Quartey said. ''It's almost the most difficult aspect of the job, getting people to think.''

To help them learn practical programming, Quartey sends his new hires to America for more schooling. ''If you want to be a movie star,'' he said, ''you have to go to the United States.'' He assumes that workers who've learned to satisfy American customers and bosses will be unbeatable competitors in Ghana.

Quartey has no illusions about the difficulties of doing business in Ghana. He was jailed for three days last year for offering voice telephone service to his Internet customers without first getting a government license. But he thinks the new government, elected last December, won't repeat that mistake. ''They are probusiness, very probusiness,'' he said. And in the global economy, being probusiness means being progeek.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]

This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 7/24/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.