Digital Divide, eGY-Africa and the way forward

Victor CHUKWUMA1, Babatunde RABIU2, Monique PETITDIDIER3, Les COTTRELL4, Charles BARTON5, 1 Department of Physics, Olabisi Onabanjo University, PO Box 351, Ago-Iwoye

Ogun State, NIGERIA Tel: +234 805 5075 270, Email: victorchukwuma@yahoo.com

2Department of Physics,Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria.

Tel: +234 803 070 5787, Email: tunderabiu@yahoo.com

3 Laboratoire Atmosphères, Milieux, Observations Spatiales, 10-12 Avenue de l'Europe, 78140 Velizy, France. Email: monique.petitdidier@latmos.ipsl.fr

4Stanford Linear Accelerator, Computer Services, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, 2575 Sand Hill

Rd, M/S 97, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA Tel: +1 650 926 2523, Email: cottrell@slac.stanford.edu

5Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200., Australia

Tel: +61 2 62737477, Fax: + 61 2 6257 2737, Email: cebarton@gmail.com

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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.

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• 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

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Internet penetration as March 2009

World Regions Population Internet Users Internet Users Penetration Users Users( 2008 Est.) Dec. 31, 2000 Latest Data (% Population) Growth % of

2000-2008 TableAfrica 975,330,899 4,514,400 54,171,500 5.60% 1100.00% 3.40%Asia 3,780,819,792 114,304,000 657,170,816 17.40% 474.90% 41.20%Europe 803,903,540 105,096,093 393,373,398 48.90% 274.30% 24.60%Middle East 196,767,614 3,284,800 45,861,346 23.30% 1296.20% 2.90%North America 337,572,949 108,096,800 251,290,489 74.40% 132.50% 15.70%Latin America/Caribbean 581,249,892 18,068,919 173,619,140 29.90% 860.90% 10.90%Oceania / Australia 34,384,384 7,620,480 20,783,419 60.40% 172.70% 1.30%WORLD TOTAL 6,710,029,070 360,985,492 1,596,270,108 23.80% 342.20% 100.00%

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Update on the internet penetration 2

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Update on the internet penetration 3

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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.

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Country Number of Universities

Penetration (% Population)

% Users in Africa

Algeria 8 10.4 6.5 Angola 1 4.0 0.9 Benin 2 1.8 0.3 Botswana 1 5.1 0.2 Burkina Faso 2 0.5 0.1 Burundi 1 0.7 0.1 Cameroun 6 2.0 0.7 Cape Verde 1 8.7 0.1 Central African Republic 1 0.3 0.0 Chad 1 0.6 0.1 Congo 1 1.8 0.1 Cote D’Ivoire 4 1.5 0.6 Dem. Rep. Congo 4 0.3 0.4 Egypt 15 12.9 19.4 Eritrea 1 2.2 0.2 Ethiopia 3 0.4 0.5 Gabon 3 5.5 0.2 Ghana 9 3.8 1.6 Kenya 14 7.9 5.5 Lesotho 1 3.3 0.1 Liberia 3 0.6 0.0 Libya 5 4.2 6.5 Malawi 1 1.0 0.3

AAU member-Universities and Internet Usage in Africa 2

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Country Number of Universities

Penetration (% Population)

% Users in Africa

Mali 1 0.8 0.2 Mauritius 1 26.7 0.6 Morocc0 4 19.2 12.2 Mozambique 4 0.9 0.4 Namibia 2 4.8 0.2 Niger 1 0.3 0.1 Nigeria 34 6.8 18.5 Reunion 1 27.4 0.4 Rwanda 3 1.0 0.2 Senegal 2 6.1 1.5 Sierra Lone 1 0.2 0.0 South Africa 17 9.4 8.5 Sudan 24 8.7 6.5 Swaziland 1 3.7 0.1 Tanzania 7 1.0 0.7 Togo 3 5.5 0.6 Tunisia 1 27.0 5.2 Uganda 4 2.4 1.4 Zambia

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4.3

0.9

Zimbabwe 9 11.9 2.5

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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 email respondents used commercial email 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.

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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

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

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SDH Microw ave Complete

MPLS Fibre Rings 1 & 2 Complete

MPLS Fibre Ring 3 Complete

MPLS Fibre Ring 4 Complete

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

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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): Eb@le (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

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Collaborations with UbuntNet AllianceConnected 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

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