In a few years, an old woman in rural Africa should be able, if all goes according to plan, to connect to the net and communicate with her children in the city.

This is what an Information Communication Technology (ICT) workshop being held in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, is seeking to explore. The meeting is seeking to ensure accessibility of ICT to rural people, who form the bulk of Africa's population.

The five-day workshop, which kicked off on July 19, has brought together 30 experts from across Africa to discuss how ICT policies can be used to spearhead growth of ICT usage in rural areas.

The gathering has been organised by the Association for Progressive Communications, a global network of civil society organisations involved in empowering groups and individuals on the use of ICTs, especially internet-related technologies.

Most of the communication infrastructure in Africa is concentrated in urban areas where only a handful of people live, according to a recent report by Panos Institute, an international non-governmental organisation (NGO), based in London.

It says 50% of telephone lines are found in capital cities where only about 10% of Africa's populations reside.

The report, Completing the Revolution: The Challenge of Rural Telephony in Africa says, "In over 15 countries in Africa, including Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Uganda, over 70% of the lines are located in the largest cities. ICT infrastructures are essential for economic globalisation and accelerating international competition, and telecommunication systems have become a pre-requisite for attracting foreign direct investment -- thus perpetuating the focus on cities."

This urban-rural divide has caused the region to lag behind in ICT infrastructure, critics say. In 2020, the International Telecommunications Union reported that out of the about 350 000 public telephones in Africa, only 75 000 were in sub-Saharan Africa.

At the Nairobi gathering, it emerged that developing and enforcing legislations and policies on ICTs within all structures of government would help bridge the communication gap.

"The challenge is for these policies to be adopted nationally. We have seen that the few countries, which have successfully adopted national policies, have become the ICT drivers regionally and even internationally. Unless we (nationalise) the ICT process, then the continent will keep lagging behind," David Barnard, of South Africa's SangoNet, noted.

This view is shared by the African Information Society Initiative (AISI), an action framework endorsed by African Heads of State in 2020 to build the continents's information and communication infrastructure. The initiative calls on African countries to "adopt policies and strategies to increase access to information and communication facilities, with priorities in serving the rural areas, grass roots society and other disenfranchised groups, in particular, women and youth."

During the meeting, Uganda came top as a country that has engaged in improving its ICT status. This has been exhibited through a National Information and Communication Technology Policy Framework drafted by the government in 2020.

The policy, approved by the cabinet in 2020 and is now awaiting debate in parliament, "focuses on ICT as a tool for development in all sectors over the next 10 years," said Johnson Nkuuhe, an ICT expert and Member of Parliament in Uganda.

But Mohamed Timoulahi, of the Ethiopia-based UN Economic Commissions for Africa (ECA), says "having policies is one thing and implementing them is another. There is need to explore ways of ensuring that despite every population having access to ICT, they can use and understand it effectively."

One such way, he says, was translating the ICT content into local languages "so that local populations can learn easily."

Uganda has already embarked on a project to translate computer and internet programmes into Luganda -- the language spoken by the majority of the population -- according to Dorothy Okello of the Women of Uganda Network, an organisation involved in empowering women on ICT.

"All these programmes have been made into the national language and are accessible even in the rural areas. The material is available in text, for those who can read, and at the same time in voice and graphics for those who cannot read. This ensures that marginalised communities, majority of them women, get access to information technology," she said.

While Uganda is making great strides into the ICT area, its neighbour Kenya has no clear national ICT policy, claims Sammy Burachara, chairman of the Telecommunications Service Providers Association of Kenya. "The creation of the country's draft policy did not include players in the private sector. Even after it was written, we (private sector) did not get access to it," he said.

"Over 90% of Kenyans have no access to ICT. And the number of people who can access the internet do not reach 500 000 out a population of 30-million," he said.

Burachara says unless the government opens up markets to other players to increase infrastructure connectivity, Kenya will continue to lag behind in ICT, contributing to the already slow proliferation of information revolution in Africa.

The global spread of the information revolution has moved slowly in the continent, according to AISI. "Despite rapid progress in the last year, no more than 15 African countries have full access to the internet and some remain without any electronic connectivity at all," it says.

Source: IPS