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.
Earlier this year, the total number of mobile phone subscribers in Africa (over 300 million) passed the total in North America and, while access to the Internet via mobile phones is still low across the continent, it is growing quickly.
In Nigeria, for example, published reports now have mobile phones as the primary access device to the Internet in Africa’s most populous country.
There is even increasing talk (and some action) of connecting African educational institutions to the ‘cloud’ in various ways.
That said, it also undeniable that improvements in connectivity are not coming fast enough, or at a high enough speed or quality, or cheaply enough, for all citizens and schools, especially outside major population centres—and won’t any time in the near future.
For years, groups have been attempting a variety of grassroots solutions and approaches across the continent to provide better options for schools than simply waiting.
Tools such as loband, for example, were designed to strip out the ‘extra’ stuff in web pages so that they download quicker over slow connections.
Some groups have supported training activities related to bandwidth management and optimisation, recognising that many universities (for example) could do a much better job of managing the current bandwidth that they already have.
Other have advocated for more attention to designing web pages for faster access in low-bandwidth contexts.
While the connectivity environment for many may not be changing fast enough, one thing that is changing very quickly for everyone is the cost of data storage.
Back in 2007, a vice president at Google noted that, since 1982, the price of data storage has fallen by a factor of 3.6 million, and that “if this trend continues, and the cost of storage continues to decrease, we estimate that somewhere around 2020, all the world’s content will fit inside an iPod, and all the world’s music would sit in your palm as early as 2015.”
Share lessons
Recognising this trend, some groups have championed approaches to ‘cache’ content locally and/or to provide content on physical media like USB sticks or DVDs (one well-known example in ICT4D circles is the Wizzy Digital Courier), physically delivered to remote communities (this is affectionately known as the ‘sneakernet’, as a nod to the early sneaker-clad ‘geeks’ who would walk floppy disks between unconnected computers and computer networks).
The eGranary Digital Library has been involved in different aspects of these sorts of activities in Africa for almost a decade.
Cliff Missen of the University of Iowa (USA), the driving force behind the eGranary project, recently stopped by the World Bank to share lessons from experiences across Africa and the results of a recent evaluation report.
For those unfamiliar with the eGranary initiative, here’s a short description from the project website.
The eGranary Digital Library —also known as “The Internet in a Box”— provides millions of digital educational resources to institutions lacking adequate Internet access.
Through a process of garnering permissions, copying websites, and delivering them to intranet Web servers inside partner institutions in developing countries and other places around the globe, we deliver millions of multimedia documents that can be instantly accessed by patrons over their local area networks at no cost.
The eGranary currently includes about 14 million documents across multiple sectors (this equates to about 2 terabytes of data), with a heavy representation of resources from the health sector. Included in this document cache are full text papers from over 250 academic and scientific journals.
It has been recently re-architected, so that it can work more seemlessly with multiple hard drives, and new security tools have been introduced.
300 centres
Researchers at the University of British Columbia (Canada) are studying the impact of programmes like the eGranary helping to promote information and digital literacy (in Uganda and elsewhere).
Currently, the eGranary is installed at over 300 educational institutions in Africa and elsewhere, with ambitious plans for expansion.
One criticism that I hear of projects of this sort goes something like this: ‘Stuffing the Internet in a box and shipping it to Africa — do you think that all we are need is your ‘knowledge’, and that we have nothing to contribute and share ourselves?’
This is a sentiment that the eGranary project has apparently heard, and content creation and management tools like Wordpress and Moodle are now bundled as part of the eGranary as a way to help enable local content creation and curation.
However, as the folks at eGranary will be the first to tell you, providing the tool alone isn’t usually enough to catalyse local content creation— a variety of other things need to be done as well.
There is no reason, of course, that initiatives like this can’t be used as triggers to help with the creation/digitisation and dissemination of digital content in local communities.
Better access
One thing that the eGranary folks highlight, and which they are clearly passionate about, is the need for additional capacity building for librarians throughout much of Africa around issues related to digitised resources.
They note that it is not enough to help support better access to, and the development, of digital resources if sufficient energies are not also expended around creating related competence and expertise around the curation of such resources, so that users can find them in ways that are useful and relevant.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Michael Trucano
Quelle/Source: Business Daily Africa, 29.10.2010
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