Global Policy Forum

By Arthur Goldstuck

While taking a break from Web Feet for a few months, my mind has turned again and again to the problem of bringing the benefits of the Internet to the mass market. The sense of personal empowerment that I experienced when I first embraced this medium seven years ago was so fundamental, it seemed a given that the Internet would eventually transform most lives.

After super-fast growth in usage of the Internet during those first few years, that expectation seemed on the way to being realised. But, since 1998, growth in usage in Africa has been slowing down rapidly. This is a result of Internet penetration among the economic elite approaching saturation levels and regulatory restrictions slowing down the growth of infrastructure. Hidden in the statistics is the concept that has now become a buzz-phrase, the "digital divide".

We are constantly told that a digital divide between rich and poor in the United States and between rich nations and poor nations globally is the greatest flaw in the supposed empowerment offered by the Internet. But the real flaw goes much deeper. At the Highway Africa conference hosted by Rhodes University in Grahamstown from September 10 to 15, the single most common theme raised by speakers and delegates was the question of the relevance of Internet access in an environment where a literacy crisis prevails. The problem is as common to the American inner-city as in rural Africa. Executive director of BlackPlanet.com Omar Wasow argued that, while universal access to phones, computers and the Internet was an ideal to be worked towards, it was not a practical ideal until people have universal access to quality education.

"The information economy raises the value of education and the ability to make good decisions, but information technology is a means to wisdom, not an end," he said. "Therefore we should focus our energies not on expensive and misguided efforts to bridge the digital divide, but rather to ending the literacy divide." That is just the beginning of the problem. In vast areas, there is no access at all, and the debate on access vs literacy does not even have a starting point. As Dr Tawana Kupe, who will head up the Rhodes University Journalism School next year, pointed out, "in rural areas where most Africans actually live, there is no access at all and no prospect of getting any access. It is (these) people ... who will die without ever making or receiving a phone call."

The conference newspaper, The Highway Daily, asked a range of speakers for their take on the issue of Internet access for the poor. Fackson Banda of Panos put the issue neatly in perspective, arguing that the telephone represented old media, and even that was not accessible. "Unless we meet the basic condition of accessing the old forms of media we cannot entertain the idea of achieving universal access to media," he said.

Peter de Costa, senior communications adviser at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, added that "we will need to invest heavily in developing technologies and points of entry for people who may not be able to read, write or even understand the utility of a computer".

These are issues entirely alien to Internet strategies and philosophies developed around telecommunications technology in the developed world. As such, it is the soft underbelly of the Internet, and the most likely point of attack if the Internet becomes part of the catch-all campaign against globalisation of national economies. This point is underscored by the warning from Peter Benjamin of Wits University's Link Centre that the current telecentres - computer, telephone and Internet access points in rural or disadvantaged communities - "are mainly providing access to be consumers of information and products developed elsewhere".

In short, current attempts to bring the Internet to the African masses are nothing less than a 21st century equivalent of cargo culture, that bizarre one-time idea of parachuting consumer goods down to isolated communities on islands and in jungles, where there was either a wholesale inability to make use of them, or localised economic collapse as a result of the need for productivity disappearing in the face of this largesse from the heavens.

In the absence of an integrated and interactive solution that matches telecentres with the needs and involvement of communities, and develops communities to the point where the telecentres become merely an added means of upliftment, these communities will continue to be marginalised from the Internet, even as they are presented with the keys to the very doorway of the e-commerce revolution.

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