Blog – Page 152 of 158 – Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA)

08Jul

Seacom Expands Into Mozambique

admin July 8, 2011

By Farzana Rasool, ITWeb journalist.
Seacom has signed a master services agreement with Telecomunicações de Moçambique to allow access to the largest and most distributed fibre-optic network in Mozambique.
The agreement with the telecommunications service provider will see Seacom customers also get access to a diverse route into Zimbabwe and additional border presence into Malawi and SA.
This will allow customers in Zimbabwe to interconnect to the Seacom system in Maputo via Mutare.
The company says this additional route through Mozambique complements its existing route through SA, via Beit Bridge, and provides Zimbabwean customers with resiliency and redundancy.
Seacom, along with Main One, previously interconnected its West and East African cable systems, in order to provide connection between any of their points of presence (POPs) across Africa and between SA and Nigeria.
The partnership launched capacity services from POP to POP, from a STM-1 level and above.
“While efforts to implement a physical cable between Nigeria and SA continue, we have joined our cables together in Europe to satisfy many of our customers’ immediate requirements for capacity between Nigeria and SA,” says Main One CEO Funke Opeke.
“We hold the view that a ring-type system around the entire continent is the best way to attain adequate redundancy, while offering customers a comprehensive connectivity solution,” says Seacom CEO Brian Herlihy.
Source: ITWeb, Jun 22, 2011

20May

New Trends in ICT Could Foster African Development

admin May 20, 2011

Addis Ababa, 04 May 2011 (ECA) – Experts attending a session on new ICT trends in relation to fostering industrialisation and socio-economic development expressed optimism on the benefits that African can derive from using ICT-enabled services, such as open data access, social media, FOSS applications, and mobile computing.
“Although Africa is not up to speed when it comes to internet connectivity, the continent has 110 million users,” said Dr. Tarek Cheniti of the Said Business School. “Africans are responsive to technology and we have to build on that.”
The session was held during the May 2-5 Second Session of the Committee on Development Information, Science and Technology – CODIST II. According to the Information and Communication Service of the Economic Commission for Africa – ECA, participants focused on the uptake of ICTs in Africa and emphasised that the continent has led the global shift as one of the fastest to turn from fixed to mobile telephony.
Participants were awash with examples of initiatives impacting on society –the village phone operators in Uganda; the optimal grain market information via SMS initiative in Niger; and the e-Care initiative in Ghana.
An alternative to the social networking tool Facebook has emerged: Asanja, boasts a quarter of a million subscribers. In addition, various imitations of youtube and increased use of professional networks, such as linkedafrica.com are thriving.
Mobile applications, such as Mpesa, the famous Kenyan mobile money transfer service launched by Safaricom, are changing the way ordinary Kenyans conduct business. In Ethiopia the ECA is supporting researchers in Addis Ababa University to develop a health communication systems and an Ethiopian (script) keyboard for smart phones.
On the education front, the one laptop per child project has placed 100,000 laptops in as many children in Rwanda, according to the participants, that number could double by the end of 2011. These laptops are not only networked and linked to the internet, they carry 100 books. The country aims to see all its children equipped with one laptop each by 2015.
It was indicated that tablets with the capacity to carry 1,000 books are now under production for distribution to children. Participants stressed, however, that although the laptops are very helpful for advancing children’s education, they should be manufactured in Africa.
On other discussions, the session learnt that African governments are yet to venture into open (government) data systems, which give free access to data sets or information sets produced or commissioned by government or government controlled entities.
José M. Alonso, from CTIC (Spain) said, moving to open data systems, “generates economic return on investments via the creation of innovative products and services by third parties. It also increases transparency, accountability and democratisation of public data, and increases government efficiency and effectiveness.”
In order to reap all the benefits of innovations in science and technology, though, African countries have been urged to first have sound policies for agriculture, education and all other sectors, which could then be complemented by Science and Technology Policies.
– ECA Press Release No. 61/2011

20May

Policy And Regulation Crucial to ICT Progress in Africa

admin May 20, 2011

Addis Ababa, 03 May 2011 (ECA) – The ICT, Science and Technology Division (ISTD) of the UN Economic Commission for Africa reported at the ICT sub-committee meeting Tuesday that it had concentrated during the year 2009-2010 on supporting countries to implement their ICT policies and strategies.
Ms. Eskedar Nega, Programme Officer said that the Division had extended its policy and strategy support to countries that made requests. She highlighted Burkina Faso that needed to develop e-government and e-health strategies and the Gambia that needed support for the development of its National Information and Communication Implementation Plan (NICI).
Other countries such as Mali requested support for sectoral e-strategies on e-commerce and e-agriculture, and Niger, the development of e-commerce, e-education and e-health strategies.
“ECA is trying to promote the need to build a conducive environment for economic growth and employment creation,” she said, adding: “We have supported in revising and adopting new laws for the ICT sector in Ethiopia and in Ghana.”
These e-Legislation activities include developing a national e-commerce law and supporting the newly-created Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Ethiopia as well as reviewing Ghana’s cyber security policy and helping to set up a Computer Emergency Response Team.
At the sub-regional level, the ECA has been working with the SADC on eSADC, a programme aimed at promoting regional cooperation and trade in the region.
“We have received requests from COMESA and CEMAC and we are mobilising resources to respond to their requests.” Nega said.
The ECA is partnering with the ITU and UNCTAD, supported by the Government of Finland, to continue with its work on measuring how well countries are performing in ICTs. This work on measurement and evaluation includes: Capacity-building on ICT Measurement in Africa; Development of e-government indicators; Scan-ICT programme in Nigeria; Capacity-building for Parliamentarians; African eLearning Initiative; and the Technology in Government Awards (TIGA).
ECA’s collaboration with the African Union during the reporting period was also highlighted. “In terms of collaborating with the AUC, we have worked very closely,” She said.
The ECA is looking forward to even more work for the 2012-2013 period. Several activities are envisaged in capacity-building, advocacy and gender sensitive strategies.
Among the many lessons learnt, Ms. Nega said that commitment to policy and regulatory change as well as developing an enabling ICT environment was crucial.
“Where we have a clear vision to promote ICTs, to ensure political leadership at the highest level, member states need to ensure ownership by all stakeholders.”
The session was marked by a successful motion from one of the participants requesting the re-establishment of the Knowledge, Library and Information Service (KLIS) Committee. Following unanimous support from participants, the ECA will take the case forward for CODIST III. If reintroduced, it will bring back the number of subcommittees under ISTD to four including Geo, ICT and S&T.
The order of business for the ICT subcommittee included the selection of new members to spearhead the work of the bureau for the next reporting period. The new bureau included Gambia and Rwanda as chair and vice-chair and Angola and Sudan as first and second rapporteurs.
– UNECA Press release

20May

Africa-Europe Research Collaboration Gets Infrastructure Boost

admin May 20, 2011

Gaborone, Botswana, and Cambridge, UK, 11 May 2011: DANTE, the international research network operator, and the European Commission’s EuropeAid Cooperation Office today announce the signature of a €14.75M contract for support to a sub-Saharan African intra-regional research networking infrastructure which is already interconnected to the pan-European research network, GÉANT. Eighty percent of the project’s funding will come from the European Commission’s EuropeAid Co-operation Office, and the remainder will be contributed by the African partners in the project.
The contract represents a significant injection of capital to develop research networking infrastructure across sub-Saharan Africa and with Europe. The initiative will dramatically accelerate the development of the Information Society in Africa, providing advanced data communications infrastructure and enabling African researchers to collaborate more easily in advanced international research projects.
Within the framework of the Africa Caribbean Pacific Islands (ACP) programme, the AfricaConnect project will establish a high-capacity Internet network for research and education in Southern and Eastern Africa to provide the region with a gateway to global research collaboration, the objective of which is to overcome the current limitations of international research collaboration within sub-Saharan Africa and towards Europe, and to foster research and education collaboration and advancement within and between these regions.
The project will be strongly collaborative, so whilst DANTE will coordinate AfricaConnect, they will be partnered by DANTE’s regional counterpart organisations in Africa – UbuntuNet Alliance covering Eastern and Southern Africa, and WACREN covering Western and Central Africa – as well as the Association of African Universities; existing National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in Africa (DRC, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia); and several European NRENs (Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and the UK). All will work to ensure that the project benefits all of sub-Saharan Africa.
“We are delighted to see this project underway,” said Cathrin Stöver, DANTE’s International Relations Manager. “DANTE has a strong history of supporting regional connectivity including actions in South America and Asia, and we will build on this experience to support African research and education networks as together they transform the research environment in Africa. DANTE always puts the emphasis on partnership in this kind of activity, and we are therefore excited to be working with such a strong group of partners on a project of this importance.”
Eng. Dr Francis Tusubira, CEO of the UbuntuNet Alliance agrees: “For the Alliance, this support is invaluable, since our challenges run from the macro-challenge of establishing regional connectivity in a geographical area that could contain the whole of Europe several times over, to the comparative micro-challenge of ensuring that each NREN has the human capacity to set up and operate their national network. Achievement of the impossible is our mantra, and we appreciate the support of the European Commission in this respect – their funding makes the achievement of the impossible a whole lot easier!”
DANTE will soon announce an international tender for the connectivity and equipment required for the AfricaConnect project. The infrastructure is expected to be operational by early 2012.
The AfricaConnect project is expected to last for four years, after which time the African Project Partners of AfricaConnect will ensure the sustainability of the intra-regional African research network and its direct connection to GÉANT.
-Press release by DANTE (www.dante.net) and the UbuntuNet Alliance (www.ubuntunet.net).

19May

What’s Driving The Social Media Rage in Africa?

admin May 19, 2011

By Ashnah Kalemera
In recent years, web 2.0 technologies (such as wikis, blogs, and social networking sites) have been added to the effectiveness of the internet as an enabler for developing, storing and disseminating information to large audiences of people in diverse locations, instantly, and at fairly low cost.
And, as a three months web information analysis has recently found, there are a significant – and rising – number of users of web 2.0 technologies in Africa.
Wikis are conversational technologies with broad knowledge management capabilities that employ an unconventional knowledge creating and sharing paradigm where there is no cast-in-stone circle of authors. Rather, the knowledge creation process is incremental.
Whereas wikis have been hailed for revolutionising the information age (for instance, Wikipedia has within a few years become the world’s largest Open Content project achieving millions of articles and outnumbering all other encyclopedias), they have also been faced with criticism of the validity of their information.
Amongst internet users, Wikipedia is the 8^th top site in the world. In Africa, it is most popular in South Africa and Madagascar, ranking 6^th and 7^th respectively.
Being edited by everyone capable of doing so, the validity of wikis depends on the knowledge of who does the editing, as well as on the more frequently visited subject matters that are continuously improved and commented upon. Moreover, some wiki pages that are not visited at all lack combined knowledge contributions and thus may not be accurate or may be speculative.
The social networking site Facebook to date has 500 million active users. Half of them log in daily and the average user has 130 friends in use. It is ranked the 2^nd most visited site in the world. Amongst African countries, it is either the number 1 [9 countries] or number 2 [5 countries] most used website.
Users of social networking sites form a network that provides a powerful means of sharing, organising, and finding content and contacts.
Blogs (online diaries maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events or material, graphics and video) are popular too. They combine text, images, links and other media and also allows interactivity by way of comments. According to Alexa.com traffic figures, Blogger is the fifth most popular website in the world. On the African continent, it is the 5^th most popular in Nigeria, 6^th in Kenya and 8^th in Uganda, Mauritius and South Africa.
Twitter, a social networking and micro blogging service that utilises instant messaging, or a web interface is the 9^th most popular website globally. South Africans, Nigerians, Kenyans and Ugandans are at par with the rest of the world; ranking 7^th – 8^th of their internet traffic.
Table 1: Website traffic rankings (Source: www.alexa.com)

	Facebook	Twitter	Blogger	Wikipedia
Algeria	2^nd	49^th	9^th	12^th
Cameroon	2^nd	51^st	23^rd	9^th
Congo	2^nd	11^th	12^th	9^th
Egypt	1^st	23^rd	7^th	22^nd
Ghana	1^st	15^th	12^th	10^th
Ivory Coast	1^st	34^th	26^th	10^th
Kenya	1^st	8^th	6^th	7^th
Madagascar	1^st	39^th	11^th	7^th
Mauritius	1^st	16^th	8^th	7^th
Morocco	1^st	34^th	9^th	13^th
Nigeria	1^st	8^th	5^th	9^th
South Africa	2^nd	7^th	8^th	6^th
Sudan	1^st	54^th	8^th	20^th
Uganda	2^nd	10^th	8^th	9^th

Clearly, web 2.0 technologies allow for more efficient and speedier generation, exchange, sharing and modification of multimedia content.
The key features of the interactive, online media, that often make them popular with users include their interactivity (users may communicate on a many-to-many reciprocal basis); and they are a global network as communication is not fettered by nation-state boundaries. Besides, there’s free speech as internet users may express their opinions with limited state censorship; and they enable free association since net users may join virtual communities of common interest. But do these advantages explain why social media has caught a fire in Africa?

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