Africa: Connecting The Unconnected

In today’s edition of The New York Times, a front-page article in the Business portion of the paper caught my eye immediately. It’s title is “Africa, Offline: Waiting for the Web.”

I felt compelled to write something on the subject because 1) many of you, being the globally-connected generation that gives a damn about the globe to which you are connected and the people which live upon it, likely do take an interest in how the developing world is faring – both in sociological and economical terms, as well as where technological matters are concerned, and 2) it’s just too interesting of a Web development story to pass over without a comment.

The article’s author, Ron Nixon, gives a big-picture update to the progress of Web access saturation on the continent. The message is mixed. On the one hand, more people are connected today than yesterday, but not nearly as many were predicted would be online at this point in time. Things are moving along, only much more slowly than expected. According to Nixon, “Less than 4 percent of Africa’s population is connected to the Web; most subscribers are in North African countries and the republic of South Africa.”

Rwanda is the country most highlighted in the piece. Nixon talks of a Western entrepreneur by the name of Greg Wyler and how he postulated several years ago that by investing in a modern infrastructure (the aged and slow Internet service provided by satellite-based services were eventually planned to be done away with) of fiber optic cable, he’d be able to connect roughly 300 schools to a speedy grid that would bring the country’s collection of educational institutions to a level on par with the developed world. Presumably, the network would then steadily grow out to commercial sectors, and, eventually, to residential areas. Unfortunately, due to mismanagement of Terracom, Mr Wyler’s company, and due to the lack of investment in the nation’s basic services – electricity being the most crucial – the initiative lagged. Nearly four years after it was begun, “only one-third of the 300 schools covered in Terracom’s contract had high-speed Internet service. All 300 were supposed to have been connected by 2006…. Over all, less than 1 percent of the [Rwandan] population is connected to the Internet.”

Today, Terracom has a new CEO, Christopher Lundh, and the company has competition by way of the Rwanda Information Technology Authority, a good sign and a necessity to ensure prices drop as quickly as possible. The director general of RITA “hopes to bring the price of Internet service down to about $10 a month.”

Keep in mind that the average per capita income in Rwanda is currently at $220. Terracom states that a fixed-line hookup will run its customers $90 per month; wireless connectivity is less, at $63 per month. It’s safe to say one needs to be a quite wealthy, relatively speaking, to even have a chance at maintaining a connection for an extensive period of time.

Rwanda – and the vast majority of the continent, really – is no doubt a long way from the kind of saturation the developed world, and even developing countries like China and India, are experiencing today. The biggest obstacle is clearly price. Price for those putting the networks up; price for those with a desire to connect to those networks. I can’t possibly predict whether the pace of distribution will pick up in the next few years, but as prices drop – as they indeed shall – I think we’ll see more connections made with more frequency. If Rwanda turns out to be an outstanding success, we could even witness a sort of snowball effect occur, allowing more and more developing nations in Africa to adopt current technologies without having to deal with major hurdles like high prices and such. That’d be a really, really great thing.

Note to our readers: Let us know what you think Africa’s future holds in the comments section below.