Digital Divide, eGY-Africa and the way forward Victor CHUKWUMA 1, Babatunde RABIU 2, Monique PETITDIDIER 3, Les COTTRELL 4, Charles BARTON 5, 1 Department of Physics, Olabisi Onabanjo University, PO Box 351, Ago-Iwoye Ogun State, NIGERIA Tel: , 2Department of Physics,Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria. Tel: , 3 Laboratoire Atmosphères, Milieux, Observations Spatiales, Avenue de l'Europe, Velizy, France. 4Stanford Linear Accelerator, Computer Services, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, 2575 Sand Hill Rd, M/S 97, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA Tel: , 5Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200., Australia Tel: , Fax: , 1

Intoduction African universities can be the continent’s gateways into the global information highway for ideas and local diffusion of new technologies. They are also the most critical links in international research cooperation. This potential is largely not being realized because of the rising digital divide between Africa and industrialized countries. Lack of resources (infrastructure, equipment, financial ) Isolation of researchers/research teams. Aging faculty Brain drain The problems can mitigated by ICT- This depends on internet penetration. 2

According to Boubakar et al.(2008) measurements to over 99% of the world’s Internet connected population shows that: Not only is Africa many (~20) years but is falling further behind each year Africa have the poorest Internet connectivity of any region in almost all PingER measured metrics (loss, jitter, unreachability, Telecommunications Industry’s Mean Opinion Score (MOS) voice- quality metric, etc. Routing of Internet traffic from SA to hosts in other African countries: apart from hosts in SA, Botswana and Zimbabwe, all routes go via Europe or the US or both 3

Internet penetration as March

Update on the internet penetration 2 5

Update on the internet penetration 3 6

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AAU member-Universities and Internet Usage in Africa As at May 2009, Association of African Universities has 213 members from 45 African countries. 8

AAU member-Universities and Internet Usage in Africa 2 9

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Update on Digital Divide The current update on internet penetration presents a problem that will be solved to decelerate and reverse the digital divide. Recent survey of selected African Universities by Boubakar et al (2008) shows  Each university had tens of 1000’s of students, with typically around 1000 or so staff  The best had 2 Mbits/s Internet access to the outside world.  The worst were using dial up 56kbps.  Often the access was restricted to faculty only.  Most of the respondents used commercial services such as Gmail, Yahoo, etc.  Reliability of the internet, i.e. difficulty to have it available on a 24h basis, seven days a week basis.  Very low speed: it would take almost half an hour to transfer the 22 MByte file or 15 hours for a a 700MByte CD (at 100 kbps).  Answers were consistent with the Internet penetration statistics published by the ITU.  Reliable power was often cited as a major problem. 11

The problems impeding eGY-Africa from its goals and Recommendations To decelerate and reverse the digital divide eGY-Africa is confronted with the problem of cyber infrastructure and bandwidth for Universities and Research Institutes; these institutions are left to market forces. Bandwidth cost for African universities are 50 times or more higher than for universities in developed countries (Boubakar et al(2008)) As a solution, African scientists should initiate solution-oriented projects with identifiable goals which corporate organisations/Government can buy-in creating synergy. The solution also very much lies in policy advocacy: eGY-Africa should transform into an NGO- eG-Africa. NGOs give a semblance of power and purpose; Service providers are partnering with NGOs on other issues. Boubakar et al(2008) recommended policy advocacy, collaboration between Institutions and formation of partnership between institution and Internet Services Providers eGY-Africa should also collaborate with NREN and Regional REN like UbuntuNet Alliance 12

Collaboration with Service Providers: MTNN’s national microwave and fibre optic transmission network 13

Partnership with Internet Providers MTNN’s backbone transmission infrastructure consists of over 7,000 Km of microwave link and fibre optics cable. Globacom and Zain have their networks The networks connects nearly all University towns. NgREN can leverage on the infrastructure if the service providers see synergy in partnership eGY-Africa, as an NGO, should work out strategies for synergistic partnership for individual countries. Main Street Technologies: 7,000 kilometres Main-One Cable System will run from Portugal to Nigeria with branches to the Canary Islands, Morocco, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana. The cable will deliver 1.92Tbps of bandwidth, equivalent to 10 times the available capacity of the existing fibre optic cable serving the west coast of Africa. Main-One will offer about 200 times the satellite capacity currently available across sub-Saharan Africa, would operate on an open-access basis to telecoms, Internet and data providers in West Africa 14

Collaborations with NRENs in Africa Established NRENs:TENET (South Africa), KENET (Kenya), MAREN (Malawi),EUN Egypt), MARWAN (Morocco), RNU (Tunisia),CERIST (Algeria) New NRENs (UbuntuNet momentum): (DRC), MoRENet (Mozambique),RENU (Uganda), RwNet (Rwanda),SUIN (Sudan),TERNET (Tanzania) Emerging NRENS: ZAMREN (Zambia), NAMREN (Namibia), NgREN (Nigeria, Commitment of 10s of VCs to have it established by end of 2008), GARNET (Ghana),Cameroonian REN (embryo exists with RIC),Senegal (RENER), Côte d'Ivoire 15

Collaborations with UbuntNet Alliance Connected to GEANT since January 2008 through 1 Gbps link Formal REN, advanced network and sufficient bandwidth: NONE Formal REN and underlying operational infrastructure: Kenya, South Africa, Sudan Formal REN but no underlying operational infrastructure: Rwanda, Tanzania, Zambia, DRC, Uganda, Malawi, Mozambique REN in formation: Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Ethiopia, Namibia, Somalia, Eritrea 16