IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone begin 2015 still carrying the burden of Ebola, with total cases nearly touching 20,000 by the end of 2014, and over 7,600 deaths.

The dilapidated health care systems in these countries, plus denial and turf wars among the various health agencies in the region have been blamed for the lethargic response.

As I understand it, it’s what NGO’s do in places like Africa and Asia, but if the same things are done in poor communities in the US or Europe, it’s not called ICT4D, it’s called civil society innovation or a disruptive product.

I’ll be the first to say that I think more communications and technology tools in the hands of ordinary people is good, it’s what we need. For this reason I didn’t come down on the OLPC project, not because I agreed with it’s strategy or reason for existing, but because I simply think that getting more computers in kids hands is good idea.

Around the world, cities are exploring how they can best make use of technology to improve quality of life for their citizens, run public services more effectively and provide businesses with a springboard for growth. The various applications of Smart City technology are numerous, from managing a city’s waste or road networks to making citizens safer or improving sustainability.

It’s time that we start to embrace that in Africa. We’ve already started, with deployments across Africa with the City of Tshwane and Western Cape in South Africa setting examples for municipalities across the country to follow. It’s great to see that there is government level support too, with municipalities going digital in their efforts to boost service delivery.

The event, aimed at facilitating and promoting information and communications technology development through knowledge-sharing events, is scheduled for Maputo, Mozambique, from 23 to 25 March.

Come Jan. 1, Africa will be home to the largest free trade area in the world. Although the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), doesn’t go so far as to create a common market or customs union like the European Union, it represents a major step in that direction. That trend presents an opportunity for a forward-thinking first-mover nation to follow Estonia’s example in Europe and become the e-Residency pioneer for Africa.

Given the country’s tiny population, post-Soviet Estonia could never hope to enjoy economic influence in Europe like that of Germany and France, or even smaller nations like Sweden and Czechia. To remain competitive in an increasingly integrated Europe, Estonia focused on developing transformative, technology-driven government services.

While the Internet has not wrought the similar types of profound, broad societal changes in Africa that it has in other parts of the world, the connectivity landscape in Africa is in fact changing very quickly in many places, with macro-level announcements about progress with new fibre optic cables coming on what seems like a weekly basis.

Mobile money services, which are all the rage in Africa, come in handy here.

The ubiquity of mobile phones makes them the e-commerce platform of choice for many citizens, most of whom lack access to electricity to power computers, that is if they can afford them.

Intel and Futures Group are working together to transform eHealth in order to improve healthcare in Africa through information communications technology.

Government officials from Zambia, Namibia, Malawi and Tanzania have been to Uganda to see for themselves what the country is doing, with the aim of using the Ugandan experience as a blueprint for their respective countries.

The African continent is the fastest-growing cellular phone market of any region over the last five years, but has not been able to replicate that success with the Internet. Fewer than four out of every 100 Africans have access to the worldwide web.

Wacs aims to reduce the cost of connecting the west coast of Africa to the high-speed global telecommunications network.

It joins other submarine cables such as Seacom and the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System, also targeted at increasing bandwidth capacity and reducing the cost of communication in Africa.

African healthcare providers are gradually recognising the convenience and cost benefits of adopting patient portals integrating financial and clinical data, according to Frost & Sullivan, giving a boost to a number of startups operating in the e-health sector.

In its Patient Portals in Africa analysis, Frost & Sullivan said healthcare providers were realising such services offered easy and secure access to patient data, while also reducing cost of care and eliminating penalties such as readmissions.

The future competitiveness of sub-Saharan Africa’s agriculture and its contribution to national economies will depend on how countries position themselves to utilise and exploit digital technologies.

African countries, however, are far from reaching the expected levels of development and are at various phases of the changeover to digital agriculture.

The $650 million open-access cable system is the biggest to land on the Africa continent and will link southern Africa and Europe.

The 14,000 kilometre ultra-high-capacity fibreoptic system will also land in Namibia, Angola, Congo-Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Cape Verde, the Canary Islands, Portugal and the UK.

Touted as the largest design capacity submarine cable to land on the African Continent, the WACS landing will mean increased network capacity for Mobile Telecommunications Network (MTN) subscribers and an additional diversity for its enterprise customers' Internet Protocol (IP), data and voice communication needs.

The cable, the product of a consortium of companies including Gateway Communications, Angola Telecom and Telkom South Africa, has a 5.12 Tbit/s capacity, making it substantially faster than the celebrated SEACOM cable with its 1.28 Tbit/s design capacity. The speed of the WACS cable is such that one could theoretically download about eight million MP3 files or over eight thousand DVDs per minute.

John Kieti, manager of m:lab East Africa, a mobile innovation and entrepreneurship development facility, points at internet connectivity as one of the major challenges in the region.

“Infrastructure is still not even across the countries. The density of connectivity points in Kenya, for instance, is much more in Nairobi than in other towns across the country. If we assume that Nairobi is the infrastructure centre, we might as well say that Nairobi is the hub, not the country or the region,” notes Kieti.

Dr. Derege Kebede, head of the African Health Observatory (AHO) and Knowledge Management Unit at the WHO Regional Office for Africa Office (WHO/AFRO) in Brazzaville, Congo made the call here, on the sidelines of the ongoing 63rd session of the WHO Regional Committee for Africa.

The initiative was set up in Pretoria last month and is being led by the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research's (CSIR's) Meraka Institute.

Project leader Chris Morris believes wireless technology is a solution to connect remote communities on the world's least wired continent. “Why should rural, poor and remote areas in Africa be denied access to the information society through lack of infrastructure, or because of exorbitantly high telecommunications costs?” he asks.