Technology Is Catching on in Africa Quickly But Tech Services Are Moving Slowly ... Very Slowly

(Nairobi, Kenya) - Caspar Pedo is the training coordinator at NairoBits, a digital design school serving young slum dwellers in Kenya's capital.

When Pedo clicks on his organization's homepage he doesn't wait for the pictures to load. The available bandwidth in Kenya means that even the design school's simple logo and scrolling banner are will take more time to load that he can afford.

But when it comes to showing off one of his students' project, a flash-scripted documentary about Nairobi's taxi touts, he has no choice but to tap his fingers while the content loads, slowly, very slowly.

"You can see, it's about waiting," says Pedo, as the kilobytes trickle in.

Internet bandwidth is just one of the problems facing NairoBits and other African organizations as they try to bridge the digital divide between the world's richest and poorest.

When the Internet first came to Africa, many expected it to be a great equalizer, affording the same access to information to an African student struggling on a few dollars a day as it did to stock broker in Manhattan. Africa, it was hoped, would be able to leapfrog technologies, catapult over the industrial revolution into the information age. After all, a car plant requires millions of dollars of investments, and then the shipping and road infrastructure to get the raw material in and the finished cars out.

To access the internet, and all the information and communication potential it offers, one needs simply to hook up a computer.

But more than a decade after the dawn of the internet era, progress in Africa remains largely stagnant. With 14 percent of the world's population, the continent has just 0.3 percent of the globe's Internet activity, with fewer than one million internet hosts, compared with 72 million in Europe, according to Giancarlo Livraghi, publisher of the online newsletter Netmarketing, and a complier of a Internet statistics.

"Most of the continent is awful, " says Livraghi. "Nobody's connected."

Just two countries, South Africa and Morocco, make up 83.6 percent of the activity.

Rwanda is more typical, where despite a hug push towards information technology, only 7 percent of the population has ever used the Internet. According to a report by the Infrastructure Ministry, 29 percent had never heard of it.

"You can find the money to put a simple computer in every village if you want, but is anybody doing anything," says Livraghi. "The whole energy is for the rich, and nobody is doing anything about these poor countries."

A big part of the problem is the internet's cost. NairoBits pays roughly $1,300 a month for a reliable 128kbps connection. To blunt the expense, it shares this bandwidth - twice that of a dial-up modem - with other organizations in the art center in which it operates.

"If we have a heavy document to download, sometimes we have to leave it the whole night," says Pedo. "Sometimes it gets me so mad. The amount of patience that you require is just not there."

Poverty and low education levels are another issue. Pedo's students are from the slum's honor roll, teenagers and young adults who have been referred by other community organizations for their leadership abililty. Most had rarely touched a computer.

As part of her coursework, Stella Pamba. designed a page about the daycare centers in the Kariobamgi slums of Nairobi, where parents can leave children for about 25 cents a day.

Her neighborhood is nicknamed "Darfur," for its crime rate.

"Before I came here I didn't know anything about computers," says Pamba, 21, "I didn't even have an email address. Now I have three, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail for chatting mostly," she says.

But if anything, the digital divide is widening. As the west rolls out broadband and websites flood with pictures, flash and video, slow connections in Africa are increasingly unable to download the information.

"That cost is much higher in places where there's less people connected," Bill Gates told a technology conference in Cape Town Tuesday. " In urban Africa the costs are higher, and in rural Africa, not only is it much higher... in many places it's simply not available."

Whether they're paying by the megabyte or by the minute, high-density websites are more expensive. Many sites are, if not out of reach for most Africans, at least on a pretty high shelf.

"The access is still not there," says Anriette Esterhuysen, Executive Director of the Association for Progressive Communications. "The cost is really, really high."

Mobile phone usage hints at some of the potential. In Uganda, for instance, where only 100,000 people have ready access to the Internet, there are 1.6 million mobile phone lines.

"Even those who haven't gone to school, they can access the mobile phones," said Kaliisa Ibrahim, a technology advisor to Uganda's president.

In a sense, mobile phones have become the internet for the poor. SMS message serve as rough and ready emails, and companies offer information - from football scores to the price of grain in the capital to medical advice - for the cost of a text message.

"People don't have a lot of money, but they need the information," says Stephen Banage, Managing Director of SMS Media, a Ugandan mobile content provider.

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