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20May

Policy And Regulation Crucial to ICT Progress in Africa

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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

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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?

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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 8th top site in the world. In Africa, it is most popular in South Africa and Madagascar, ranking 6th and 7th 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 2nd 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 5th most popular in Nigeria, 6th in Kenya and 8th in Uganda, Mauritius and South Africa.
Twitter, a social networking and micro blogging service that utilises instant messaging, or a web interface is the 9th most popular website globally. South Africans, Nigerians, Kenyans and Ugandans are at par with the rest of the world; ranking 7th – 8th of their internet traffic.
Table 1: Website traffic rankings (Source: www.alexa.com)

Facebook Twitter Blogger Wikipedia
Algeria

2nd

49th

9th

12th
Cameroon

2nd

51st

23rd

9th
Congo

2nd

11th

12th

9th
Egypt

1st

23rd

7th

22nd
Ghana

1st

15th

12th

10th
Ivory Coast

1st

34th

26th

10th
Kenya

1st

8th

6th

7th
Madagascar

1st

39th

11th

7th
Mauritius

1st

16th

8th

7th
Morocco

1st

34th

9th

13th
Nigeria

1st

8th

5th

9th
South Africa

2nd

7th

8th

6th
Sudan

1st

54th

8th

20th
Uganda

2nd

10th

8th

9th

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?

11Apr

EGov Africa

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Technology is becoming a key tool in the delivery of a wide array of government services and information. Today, eGovernance is a broad topic that deals with the broad spectrum of the relationship and networks within government regarding the use of ICTs.
While eGovernment programmes potentially have great benefits, many times they do not deliver the rosy results which their designers set out to achieve. For instance, some scholars have reported that “eGovernment studies consistently report a lack of the much hoped-for efficiency gains by reorganisation and cross-organisational integration, particularly at local level” (Grönlund, 2007). It is then important to explore the link between ICTs and successful implementation of governmental development programmes and improvement in efficiency and transparency of public sector operations. Besides, at CIPESA we view EGovernment programmes very much from the lenses of the citizen. Thus, we are keen to see how eGovernment directly involves and benefits the ordinary person.
CIPESA has started a programme to track developments in eGovernment in Africa, publish occasional papers and research highlighting success stories, advocate the adoption of inclusive and progressive eGov policies and practices, and offer advice to African governments in designing and implementing eGovernment plans and programmes.

11Apr

Sixth Annual Internet Governance Forum Comes to East Africa

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By Lillian Nalwoga
The Sixth Annual IGF Meeting will be held in Nairobi, Kenya, on 27-30 September 2011 at the United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON). With the main theme of ‘Internet as a catalyst for change: access, development, freedoms and innovation’, it is hoped that the IGF will strengthen the Internet governance debate in East Africa.
Prior to the global forum, East African countries will once again – this time in the Rwandan capital Kigali – convene to deliberate internet governance issues pertinent to the region.
The East African-Internet Governance Forum (EA-IGF) was first convened in 2008 with participation from four East African countries (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda). The forum aims at creating a Community of Practice that will build a sustaining foundation for meaningful participation of East African stakeholders in Internet public policy debates at the national, regional and international level.
The EA-IGF model allows for the informed participation, contribution and engagement of community members through the sharing of experiences and skills, solving common problems and challenges, the creation of new knowledge and increasing local capacity and talent in Internet Governance issues. The EAIGF follows a bottom-up multi-stakeholder approach, which begins at the national level with mailing list discussions in the five East African countries moderated by national animators, followed by national face-to-face IGFs. The national IGFs then form the building block for the regional East African IGF.
CIPESA in collaboration with the Ugandan Ministry of ICT, Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), I-Network Uganda and the Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) hosted the 3rd East African Internet Governance Forum (EA-IGF) in 2010. The forum focused on “Strengthening East Africa’s Critical Internet Resources”.
The 2010 EA-IGF called for multi-stakeholder participation by redefining the term ‘internet governance’ and also recommended the formation of a working group to develop strategies that will strengthen ccTLDs in the region in light of competition for gTLDs.
More about the EAIGF:  http://eaigf.or.ke/eaigf/eaigf.html

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