TELECENTERS AND THE FUTURE OF AFRICA

INFORMATION SOCIETY

TECHNOLOGY AT THE SERVICE OF RURAL AFRICA

By Father GODFREY NZAMUJO, Director of Songhaï

There is no secret about it. The major or fundamental problem facing Africa today is Poverty. We believe that most of the talked about strategies in vogue today – generally called poverty alleviation schemes or programs are more or less band-aid exercises.

What we forget is that poverty is the result of a dysfunctional state of affairs in any given community. It is not a disease that you cure just by administering medication.

Over the next fifty years, the earth population may double, soaring from about 5 billion to nearly if not more than 10 billion people. And as resources get scarcer, people will tend to develop a culture of survival with the concomitant selfish and other anti-social attitudes.

The result is a situation we largely describe as a downward spiral – where most of the communities are not capable of generating the social and economic forces to meet their needs and desires.

The deterioration of the living condition of millions in Africa should have convinced all those involved in its development that something is radically wrong with the development strategies in use today.

We are fast approaching a situation of a “tale of two cities” – where a small portion of the world population will be sufficiently sheltered and an increasingly large number of people will be stuck in history.

The picture is rather gloomy. To illustrate the level of Africa’s marginalization, let us have a look at this table that shows the winners and losers of our fast globalizing world with the Gatt and WTO framework.

GATT WINNERS AND LOOSERS

REGION/COUNTRY	Losses/Gains
EUROPEAN COMMUNITY	US $ + 80.7 billions
CHINA	US $ + 37 billions
USA	US $ + 18.8 billions
EAST EUROPA/EX URSS	US $ + 2.2 billions
GULF/MEXICO	US $ 1.5 billions
AFRICA	US $ - 2.6 billions

This gap is likely to increase, given the fact that the world economy is fast-moving from a resource-based economy to a knowledge-based economy. The key concept here is “Resource based to knowledge based” - We shall come back to this later -.

So what Songhai is all about is a new and bold attempt to tackle the problem of poverty and marginalization by creating an empowering environment so that people can be put on the driver’s seat and become stakeholders in a common project of a viable society. We believe that the only effective way to fight poverty is to help the poor to become productive.

The situation today

Most Africans and their partners do not yet grasp the seriousness of these problems. The picture is really gloomy. With the present population growth coupled with a formidable disabling environment in terms of the capacity of production, Africa needs to multiply its agricultural growth by at least a factor of 4, its energy use by at least a factor of 6, and its economic output by at least a factor of 8 in the next ten years if we are to avert serious consequences. You can easily see that business as usual is no longer an acceptable option.

Africa must design its way out of the present socio-economic crisis. If this is true, the most important questions in our development effort should change from “what is the situation today” to “what is possible”, “what are the possibility sets that exist in our world”. This requires new maps, new concepts and a capacity of creativity and innovation.

The central element in the possibility sets that exist today is the fact that the world with all its promises and problems is now potentially present in every community. The question now is “How do we harness these new possibility sets?”.

We must endeavor to reactualize these words of Diogens – spoken more than two thousand years ago.

“I am not an Athenian or a greek, but a citizen of the world”. – He was a cosmic dancer – today we could become netizens – modern cosmic dancers.

The information technology is therefore creating new fertile grounds for innovations and new possibility sets that can strike an answering chord to our present problem.

The guide lines in our information technology projects are :

1) How could the local or rural African communities (especially those that are poor) be empowered to harness the new possibilities provided by the web and not be swept away by it ?

2) What are the vectors or elements that the web must embody to contribute to the viability of the human and environmental capital in the different African communities.

So, the Songhai project is not just how to send young people to the farm, but rather a bold effort to ensure high productivity by unleashing new human capacities, increasing the level of creativeness and inventiveness. The arena for this process is not just in the agricultural sector but also in the non-farm sector.

In this arena, we strongly believe that the quantity and quality of the wealth produced (financial, services and goods, intellectual, cultural and organizational) is a function of the quality and quantity of information this community has at its disposal. It is also a function of the capacity of this given society to continually access, absorb useful information selectively anywhere they are found in the world.

This is what we refer to as the antenna-receiver logic. Not just being capable of accessing information anywhere in the world, but also the capacity to select and fine-tune information that is relevant to the development process of this community – a demand driven logic is what will make these communities avoid the pit fall of passive information consumerism – a real danger in the developing countries today.

It is therefore within the logic of the drive for productivity that the use of ICT could become not only sustainable but an important leverage parameter.

Songhai believes that the need for innovation in Africa is crucial in this process. For the past 17 years, we have been developing a system of identifying, selecting, adapting and improving techniques from a wide range of sources for different application areas and levels. As we said earlier, the world is moving from a resource-based economy to a knowledge-based economy. Africa has no choice but to develop tools to move in this direction if it wants to reverse the marginalization process and effectively fight poverty. We must design our way out of poverty.

From the foregoing therefore, one can see why the debate on the use of technology is a waste of time – a misplaced exercise -. It is rather a question of developing appropriate tools and capacities (efficient production environment) to meet its present and future needs.

Songhai has provided a leadership role in this direction – we are one of the first grassroot institutions to make use of ICT tools to increase productivity by developing communities where the information technology is viewed not only as a key element in unleashing innovation and creativity but also has a potential of qualitatively improving the management of our operations. It is no wonder that Songhai saw as imperative, the investment in communication equipment to connect its different Centers in Benin – and soon Nigeria to overcome the geographical and infrastructural constraints.

This is what many people refer to as “building Smart Communities”. This does not mean turning our people into PhD or geek communities but rather making the “thirst” for information a demand driven affair – in an arena where a logic of socio-economic development is a big game in town – where the information technology is primarily seen as a key element in the drive to increase productivity because people have come to believe that, the quality and quantity of the products of a given community is a function of the quality and quantity of information available and accessible to them.

This is the raison d’être of the “Information and Communications Network for Sustainable Agriculture in West Africa” – a partnership between Songhai and the Canadian International Development Agency (IDRC). In this project, the Information and Communications Technology will not only be developed and applied to increase Songhai’s productivity and optimize its organizational system, to reduce costs and become more competitive, but this exercise is also designed to provide a window of opportunity for others to reap the same benefits.

The overall objective here is to create “smart communities” that can harness the socio-economic benefits of ICT and at the same time impact the communities around by serving as resource Centers for Information and ideas relative to their socio-economic or professional activities.

Given the fact that agricultural growth is a pre-requisite for economic development in general and rural development in particular, ICT must seek ways to galvanize and leverage this sector and its linkages.

CONTEXTUAL ICT IN RURAL AFRICA : A TAKEOFF POINT

A MODEL OF APPLIED ICT IN RURAL DEVELOPMENT

It must be contextual – Hence the term dear to us at Songhai – Contextual ICT processes.

The Benin case

Benin like a good number of African countries relies on export crops like cotton. It is no secret to anyone that this has lead to a stagnant or rather low food-crop productivity sector.

Result :

1) growing instability of the price of food items. (most food crop items have increased by more than 45% since July last year)

2) growing inability to feed our growth population – (particularly urban – 4 to 6% urban growth) in the near future.

The change here is : build a sustainable and solid agricultural base for any meaningful economic takeoff. We must understand the fact that until the food problem was solved, the development of the non-agricultural sector will continue to be constrained.

A technologically and environmentally driven transformation of agricultural sector is an inescapable option for us today. In fact, we believe that it is a necessary condition for our national economic growth.

THE CRITICAL TRIANGLE

The Songhai Telecenters (Benin Community Networking Services) are designed to serve as a catalyst for rural development by serving as an arena for innovation and development of sustainable integrated system of production. They are centers that reflect not only what is going on in the production zones, but also the problems of these centers of production. They are where these problems and constraints are exposed, analyzed and where solutions are “searched” to overcome the constraints. These range from farming systems, genetic information of seeds and breeds, fertilization problem, marketing problem, credit problems, legislative and socio-economic environments, etc.

We are now trying to make it the forum of different groups of entrepreneurs, students and teachers to meet and share their experiences.

The services below constitute the back bone of the services at each center.

Office services	Internet services	Other services	New project
§ Telephone	§ Internet navigation	§ Training classes in computer science and electronics
§ Photocopy	§ Email (on songhai.org)	§ Use of javelin 9000 HF system	§ Fast internet navigation
§ Lamination	§ Net2phone	- Fax	§ Distance education
§ Binding	§ Fax by internet	- Telephone	§ e-commerce
§ Word processing	§ CD Burning	- File transfer	§ Net2phone
§ CVs	§ Multimedia products	- Email	§ ISP Provider
§ Design/creation of badges	§ Digital video editing		§ Videoconferencing
§ Business cards	§ Chart rooms
§ Greeting cards, post cards, logos
§ Scanning
§ Photo albums with the aid of a digital camera

In order to provide the above services, Songhai has been steadily increasing the availability of hardware and software and has been making new purchases to improve speed and reliability. The current items available (in place and on order) include the following :

§ High speed workstations/servers :

§ Computers (Pentium III or higher)

§ Local Area Network

§ Digital cameras Webcam

§ Digital camcorders

§ Computer screen projectors

Songhai’s main goal for the future of the Telecenters is to create a smart communities within Benin and other African countries that are accessible by as many people as possible, in as many locations as possible. To that end, Songhai has been concentrating on establishing a dedicated connection to the Internet in the Porto-Novo facility and linkages to the other centers in Benin and elsewhere. The communication system between Telecenters is shown in the schematic below :

We are also developing linkages with international institutions whose resources could be harnessed by Songhai and its stakeholders.

- Institution like Colorado State University, International Rice Research Institute Los Barnos etc.

Before the end of April, the three Songhai main sites will be equipped with direct satellite communication equipment. We are now negotiating with some companies to provide these services in the French West African region. We will buy bandwidths at reasonable prices and spread the savings among participants. Four Songhai engineers have been trained to install and run these equipments.