Suriname’s presence in Cyberspace, the Internet, the Web, the Information Society and developing countries…

Many new blogs entered the blogosphere last week, during my workshop e-learning and web 2.0 at the Anton de Kom University of Suriname. My pupils were academic staff members of this university in Paramaribo. I could see my social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook expanding every day.


It was just another tiny effort to help bridging the digital divide and increase Suriname’s presence in Cyberspace. Like in many developing countries, in Suriname the Internet connections are very expensive and generally of poor quality. The Anton de Kom University's internet connection is 2 Mb for a total 400 desktop computers on campus, not counting many private laptops. The overbooking ratio is 1:7 and the price paid for this connection is 1500 US$ per month. This situation is caused by lack of proper telecom infrastructures and by monopolies held by telecom companies in a producer dominated market, but there is also another important reason. The prices of Internet connectivity in developing countries remain high due to lack of local “internet content”. As long as developing countries continue to download data i.e. content from data centres hosted in America, Europe or Asia only, prices for connectivity will not really go down. Developing countries should not only build their local telecommunication infrastructures, they should start to develop local content, do e-business, share local music online, etc. and host all these local digital data in local data centres. I know the Internet problem in developing countries is complex and very difficult to solve overnight. There is still a lot of chicken ‘n egg problem involved, but we should not give up. I am sure the Internet will take off in the developing world, the next five or ten years. That is why I am so involved in this subject.




This week an important step was taken, in globalizing the Internet. ICANN, the organization responsible for assigning domain names (domain names are names such as www.vu.nl, annabon.nl, youtube.com or regreeningthesahel.org etc.) accepted an adaptation in the technical system which will allow non-Latin characters in the domain name system (DNS). This opens opportunities for Chinese, Japanese, Arab, Russian and many other internet users to register domain names in their own languages, thus creating a more global and less western dominated Internet.


Our world is changing so fast and many global trends are moving and things always happened overnight while I was sleeping, as Thomas Friedman wrote in his international bestseller "The World is Flat".
Last week, the Internet’s 40th birthday was commemorated, as the first small amount of data was packet-switched from one university computer to another over the ARPAnet (the network which later evolved into the Internet) in California, on 29th October, 1969. This small step in Cyberspace marked a giant leap for mankind, but without all that fuss. It was probably a more important step than Neil Armstrong’s one on the moon, that same year.
This year is also the 40th birthday of UNIX, the “operating system of enlightenment” as BBC reporter Bill Thompson wrote this week, the first Open source software experiment, and undoubtedly one of the most important ones up to present.


Also the World Wide Web is commemorating, this year was its 20th anniversary. Would World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee have overseen the impact of his proposal in 1989 at CERN which marked the beginning of a new global information era?




Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the VU Symposium for Social Development on October 20th


I would have liked to ask Sir Tim this question, when I met him a few weeks ago in Amsterdam, during the Symposium for Social Development at VU University. But as Sir Tim was always surrounded by many people, I did not dare to disturb him with my silly little question.


It is now 20 years since my first job in information technology at SARA, the Amsterdam academic computing centre, where I started working on July 17th 1989. Those days I could not possibly foresee the future of ICTs, but it was thrilling for me to have a login account on a Cray Y-MP supercomputer, being amongst the first few people in the Netherlands with an email address, spending my evenings writing my own small command-line navigation system for the Amsterdam’s public transport, in the Prolog programming language, just for fun, (There was no Tomtom in those old days) or entering text in UNIX' vi editor, the world's most user-unfriendly text editor ever built.
UNIX, the web, and even the principles of the internet itself, are achievements of people who helped to build the “people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented” Information Society, in stead of pursuing financial profits only. It is through the effort of these people that the digital divide will hopefully be bridged one day and knowledge will be available for people in all corners of the world.

Web for Regreening in Africa

Fact finding mission, Burkina Faso, september 2009

The Network Institute from VU and the VU Centre for International Cooperation embarked on a mission to initiate a link between farming in Africa and information and communication technologies. This has resulted in a project of higher education in Informatics, focussed on Web Technology with a component of outreach and social responsibility. The proposed name of the project is "Web Alliance for Regreening in Africa".

VU’s rural development expert Chris Reij has worked in the Sahel since the late 1970s. Chris Reij’s work is aimed at improving conditions of subsistence farmers who live and work in rural areas with harsh climate conditions and poor soils.
In the 1980s several periods of drought severely deteriorated living conditions in many of the rural communities in the Sahel. However, through perseverance a number of innovative farmers in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali, using simple but effective techniques, succeeded in rehabilitating a large area of degraded land. Now, 25 years later, an area of 5 million hectares has been restored and converted in fertile fields with crops and trees through the arduous work of these farmers. Sahel in these areas has literally been regreened. There are more trees now, more crops, and living conditions have been spectacularly improved for the local communities. Not only from a socio-economic but also from an environmental point of view this is an important achievement.

The Sahel Regreening Initiative (SRI) is a grassroots initiative to enhance communication and dissemination of information amongst farmers. Some agro-forestry experts from Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso are also involved in the initiative. SRI’s objective is to disseminate knowledge about regreening techniques from one farmer community to another, from one region to another, and even from one African country to another. This communication and spread of knowledge helps farmers to better fight land degradation to improve crops and preserve trees. Chris Reij coordinates and animates the initiatives.

Another project is now being linked to the existing Sahel Regreening Initiative, a similar project named SCI-SLM (Stimulating Community Initiatives - Sustainable Land Manage) involving farmers from four African countries: South-Africa, Ghana, Uganda and Morocco, with a similar objective to disseminate knowledge amongst farmers. This project is also coordinated by VU/CIS, (co-funded by the Global Environment Facility) and has just started this month. Since the objectives and the conditions are similar, it is good to link both projects to each other.

Apart from regreening initiatives, another great development is taking place in Africa since the last decade: the almost overwhelming growth of mobile telephony into all levels of society. Almost 40 % of the population in the whole of Africa owned a mobile phone in March 2009, and the figure is rising, as we are talking. Millions of new subscribers are joining the mobile telephony network every month, in Africa. The lowering of prices and the prepaid paying systems have made mobile phones affordable, even for the very poor.

The farmers of the SRI initiative are amongst the groups that benefit from the availability of mobile telephones. These recent developments are boosting dissemination of indigenous and rural knowledge. Opportunities now exist for SRI, to be supported in the near future by new, innovative information and communication technologies.

Activities during the mission
A four day excursion was organized as a fact finding mission, to meet each other and to synchronize ideas and make future plans.

Saturday September 26, 2009 – Arrival of Hans Akkermans and Anna Bon in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. Meeting with Chris Reij, Wendelien Tuyp and Saah Dittoh, professor from the University of Development Studies in Tamale, Ghana, and Ghanaian coordinator for the SCI-SLM project.


Sunday September 27, 2009 – Meeting with Mathieu Ouedraogo and Adama Belemviré, both Burkinabés, agro-forest specialists, and both involved in SRI since many years. Mr. Ouedrago is invited to be one of the key-note speakers at the VU Dies Natalis Symposium on October 20th.

Departure to a village named Gourcy and a larger city named Ouahigouya at 7.30. It is a 140 km drive north, on a very good asphalt road.

The first excursion stop is a visit to a rural community named Ranawa. It has about 2300 inhabitants, and is located a few kilometres east of Gourcy. This village is an example of a rural community that has actively been regreened the past two decades and that widely benefited from its own proper and innovative land management. We visit the fields and watch the growing crops of sorghum, millet, maize, sesame, okra, egg plant, tomato etc. and the large number of trees that have grown, and now offer shade and benefit to the crops, livestock and to the farmers.

After the walk on the field we all gather in the shade of a large tree, and discuss the actual situation with the farmers, a group of about twelve inhabitants of Ranawa. The village chief, is an elderly person of probably over 80 years is; a younger person acts as his spokes person. Translations are made almost simultaneously, from, the local language Moré into French, and English and vice-versa. Ten women join our group, but separately in an adjacent circle, next to ours. The younger people here speak French, the elderly ones only communicate in their local language. Despite the language gap, communication goes very well; the farmers are open and share their experiences with us, and are willing to answer all of our questions.




In this village up to 98 % of the households use mobile phones. Phones are not only used for social communication but also for business, to check market prices in town, to negotiate with potential customers about prices of commodities and crops, etc. People seem to spend about 1000 up to 5000 francs CFA (2 -10 euros) per month on mobile telephony. Some people in the village earn money selling airtime (telephone units) in very small units. Even charging the phones through mobilette batteries represents a business opportunity here, since the electricity net has not yet reached this village. Useful options such as remote charging of airtime and possibilities for airtime transfer are services offered by the telecom providers, and offered as a service named SAP-SAP. These activities generate income for local people reselling these mobile services.




The community as a whole is aware of the importance of mobile telephony for improvement of their livelihoods. The farmers and their families are open to innovation and new systems of communication.

After lunch in the Crocodile Bar in Ouahigouya by our group, a visit is made to the field of another innovative farmer: Ousseni Kindo, near a village named Bogaya. Ousseni Kindo is one of the farmers who restored degraded land and protected trees on his fields. We witness the successful outcomes of twenty years of hard labour and innovation.

Afterwards another farmer-innovator is visited: 70 year old, famous Yacouba Sawadogo. This man regained an area of more than 100 hectares of degraded land and turned it into a green forest. This is the vastest area of restored biodiversity in Burkina Faso, probably even in the Sahel. This is an example of good sustainable land management.



From left to right: Mathieu Ouedraogo, Yacouba Sawadogo, Chris Reij, Hans Akkermans

Yacouba Sawadogo has already received international acknowledgement for his achievements. Mr. Sawadogo who only speaks Moré, will be VU’s special guest on October 20th, at the Dies Symposium World Wide Web for Social Development. A few days after the Dies Symposium, Mr. Sawadogo will proceed to a conference named “Greening the Sahel”, which is organized by Oxfam America and IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute) in Washington, US, together with Chris Reij and Mathieu Ouedraogo. Mr. Sawadogo will be a special guest at the White House during this visit.



Yacouba Sawadogo working on the field

Late in the afternoon a visit is made to a local radio station, La voix du paysan, the voice of the farmer. Radio is a highly effective medium of communication in rural areas in Africa. Almost all households own a radio and the coverage is high. This radio station reaches about one million people every day. Radio might play an important role for communication within the W4RA project. Radio broadcasting could possibly be used in combination with podcasting, and other web enabled systems. The owners of the radio station are open to innovation and willing to collaborate with us in this initiative.

Spontaneously, an interview is held with Chris, about the history of SRI and the W4RA. This clear, enthusiastic and lively account of the current initiative is broadcasted live, while we all listen to the car radio, standing outside the studio in the falling evening light.


Sunday September 27, 2009 - Visit to the mayor of Ouahigouya.

Issues are discussed regarding the ownership of lands and threats to Yacouba Sawadogo’s forest due to regional politics. The mayor expresses his personal support for our initiative.



Visits are made to a few telecentres in the neighbourhood of Ouahigouya and Gourcy. Some of the internet cafés have a 128 kbps connection to the internet and charge about 200 f CFA per hour usage(about 0,30 EUR). Other telecentres lack internet connection and offer only applications and printing as a service.


Return to Ouagadougou by all mission participants

In the capital a visit is made by our mission participants to the Burkina Faso headquarters of mobile provider Zain, former Celtel and now Kuwaiti owned pan-African mobile telephony company, with presence in 19 African countries. We meet sales manager Mr.Carlos Yanogo and Ms Alice Gisèle Coulidiati, sales adviser. We ask them whether Zain would be open for collaboration or even sponsorship in an initiative such as SRI and W4RA, when it comes to mobile-web integration etc. in the benefit of the farmers in the Sahel. Mr Yanogo expresses his interest and tells about the corporate responsibility of Zain, in which policy some activities might be positioned. Obviously the executive officers of this company will still have to approve our plans. However, Mr Yanogo gives us the impression that opportunities of collaboration with Zain may occur in the near future of our project.


Zain marketing campaigns in Ouagadougou


The last evening we have a brainstorming session at Hotel Ricardo’s, in Ouagadougou, where we are staying, all mission participants: Hans, Chris, Mathieu, Adama, Saah, Wendelien and myself (Anna). We discuss the possibilities of introducing the Web Science, Web-based technology, Web-mobile integration, training to local staff in information and communication technologies and many more possibilities, which will be in the benefit of the regreening initiative and farmers in Burkina Faso, the Sahel, and possibly the whole of Africa. The Network Institute will imbed these activities within the faculty’s research and education, to ensure sustainability of the project within the VU. Research and education in mobile-web technologies will become part of MSc. and a new minor in Web Science at the department of Informatics of VU. A PhD research by a Ghanaian candidate, funded by a Nuffic project will be part of the project.



From left to right: Hans Akkermans, Saah Dittoh, Mathieu Ouedraogo, Chris Reij, Adama Belemviré, Wendelien Tuyp. Only Anna Bon (the photographer) is missing on the picture.

A huge information revolution is taking place at an unimaginable pace in Africa. Now is the moment for action. We should therefore start small but not forget to think big.

Participants:

Hans Akkermans (VU Network Institute)

Chris Reij (CIS/VU)

Wendelien Tuyp (CIS/VU)

Anna Bon (CIS/VU)

Mathieu Ouedraogo (Réseau MARP)

Adama Belemviré (Réseau MARP)

Saah Dittoh (University of Developement Studies Ghana)


Report by Anna Bon, Burkina Faso, September 2009

Wat nou autovrije zondag...?

Gisteren ben ik bijna van de sokken gereden toen ik vanuit de Plantage naar de Pijp fietste. Niet één keer, maar wel bijna drie keer. Nou fiets ik elke dag een uur door de stad, van en naar mijn werk. Ik ben wel wat gewend: afslaande vrachtauto's, brommende scooters, gehaaste suvs, allemaal in de ochtendspits van Amsterdam. Maar gisteren was het erger: het was namelijk autovrije zondag.
Dit milieusparende en voetgangervriendelijke evenement is anders dan je zou verwachten. Volgens plan is heel Amsterdam, (heel Amsterdam?), een hele zondag niet toegankelijk voor auto's. Welke auto's? Auto's die de stad in willen rijden. Politiewagens, brandweerauto's, ambulances mogen natuurlijk rijden, en ook uiteraard taxi's, bussen, trams, o ja, en binnenstadbewoners met auto mogen gewoon rondrijden. Je mag immers de stad wel uit, maar niet in. Je mag ook gewoon naar de brievenbus met de auto, of met de auto naar je tante of oma, als zij maar binnen de stad woont. Verder waren er gisteren in de stad veel evenementen, en alle mensen die ze organiseerden waren dus ook met de auto gekomen. Zij hadden ontheffing.

Kortom, de autovrije zondag was dus helemaal niet autovrij, integendeel. Er werd hard gejakkerd, gescheurd en geronkt.

Ik liep laatst in Brasília op een autovrije zondag. (Brasilia, dat is toch die autostad? Jazeker.) Brasília is elke zondag autovrij, en dan ook echt autovrij. Niet de hele stad, natuurlijk, dat kan niet. Maar wel de eixão, die enorme verkeersader die de stad doorsnijdt. Die is echt helemaal autovrij, vrij van taxi's, ambulances, politiewagens, taxi's, motors, brommers en ander gemotoriseerd verkeer. De eixão is elke zondag het domein van stepjes, joggers, honden met baas, kinderen op driewielertjes, racefietsers en kinderwagens, alles, als het maar niet ronkt....Heerlijk !

No news from Plantage

School en werk zijn weer begonnen, de stad bruist, raast en toetert in de spits. Over het water zie ik de oneindige stroom fietsers zich door de Sarphatistraat naar werk, school of crèche haasten. In de verte hoor ik de twee seriema's (dat zijn grijsgevederde loopvogels), in Artis hun dagelijkse duetje gillen. De vakantietijd is echt voorbij.
Wat leek de drukte van het Amsterdamse bestaan ver weg, toen ik twee weken geleden zittend op een gammel ijzeren stoeltje aan het eind van een trouwfeest van twee van mijn familieleden de zon zag opkomen boven een buitenwijk van Fortaleza en de geur van deze ontwakende metropool opsnoof. Het liedje van Chico Buarque "Eu faço samba e amor até mais tarde, e tenho muito sono demanhã, escuto a correria da cidade que alarde e apressa o dia de amanhã..." neuride door mijn hoofd. Die ontsnapping aan de dagelijkse hectiek was maar heel kort. Ik ben weer thuis. Nieuwsberichten twitteren met seconden tussenpozen op mijn beeldscherm. De lijsten ongelezen emails, uitgeprinte papieren in stapels, mijn beker met lauwe automaatkoffie, het monotone maar ontwikkelingsbeleidrelevante geprevel van collega's aan de koffietafel, alles dwingt me de werkelijkheid onder ogen te zien. Het werkseizoen is weer begonnen...

Women of the World, this time in Liberia

Historic moment

ICTs, Africa and the paradox of sustainable development

Are ICTs really contributing to sustainable development and supporting poverty alleviation or are they just another technocratic hype which is being imposed on development countries? Working in Ghana in several ICT projects, I experienced the complexity of the above question.
At a first sight, I was fully convinced of the need to connect Africa to the global information society, to provide access to valuable information, to enhance online collaboration. It was easy to find arguments for an information revolution for Africa, and for bridging the digital divide.
All the global development agencies support ICTs in their development agendas. World Bank, UN, DFID, Nuffic, SIDA, IDRC, UNDP, WTO, NGOs, African governments and pan-African organisations as the African Union, NEPAD and Association of African Universities and many others embraced ICTs as part of their development policies.
Despite the apparent consensus on this subject, there is also criticism.
In November 2008 I attended the International Conference on Rethinking Development Studies at Cape Coast in Ghana. I presented a paper on ICTs and development myself, and discussed with conference participants, development researchers from universities in Africa and the US, who were very sceptical on development policies. One important issue came up.
It seems that the focus on ICTs within development started in the mid 90s, as a new approach to development, in a period of public “compassion fatigue” and falling levels of foreign assistance. The introduction of ICTs in development fitted well in the neoliberal discourse of trade-not-aid, promoting the Information Revolution as the new ‘development paradigm’. The idea was adopted by the Clinton Administration and rapidly disseminated worldwide to global governance institutions. In this newly created actuality, the main obstacles to the information were identified as technological and thus solvable. The “advantage of technological backwardness” of Africa not having a fixed telecommunication infrastructure, was mentioned as an asset for the introduction of wireless internet technology and mobile telephony. The opening of the markets, by cutting tariffs on imported computer equipments, the transition of state-run to privatised, deregulated telecom markets, and the creation of an open competitive trade environment, were all strong arguments which fitted very well in the existing neoliberal discourse of the day. These ideas were enthusiastically integrated into the donor’s structural reform strategies and the IMF and World Bank’s structural adjustment programs for developing countries. In this way, the information revolution was discursively marketed by linking “poverty” to “lack of information”.
As a result to the proposed reforms, the telecom state companies of several African countries, was privatised and successfully acquired by international companies. Vodafone is currently the number one telecom company in Africa. It acquired Ghana Telecom lately.
Basically, the information revolution might be necessary for African development, it is an excellent opportunity for global markets.
Africa does not participate in global ICT productivity. Nor does it participate in the production of hardware, nor in software, not in services. The global supply chains for the delivery of computer hardware are in Asia, Europe and North America. Service delivery and software design shifted from the US to India and China. Not to Africa until date.
In the meantime, Africa is paying a high price for its participation in the global information age. We can see the information revolution taking place in Africa. Mobile telephony has infiltrated African society, even used by the rural societies and the very poor.
Private telecom companies, aimed at short term profits, benefit from the deregulated market by charging high prices, and deliberately holding back available internet bandwidth capacity, in order not to spoil their market shares.
ICTs and the internet, however indispensable for collaboration, knowledge and education, are not very sustainable. ICT equipments have very short lives. According to Moore’s law, processor capacity and data storage capacity double every 18 months. Software is adapted to this pace of technological and commercial developments. We are still in the middle of a technological evolutionary phase, in which concepts change very fast, and in which much is being invested. You could say the the concept of ICT is not fully mature. Developing countries are confronted with gigantic costs to catch up and keep up to this global technological playground, which makes it fundamentally not sustainable.
There are now about 4 billion mobile telephones in the World in 2008, and approximately 1 billion computers (Source ITU and the Gartner). In 2008 180 million computers have been replaced by new machines, and 35 million computers were dumped, despite the toxic substances they contain. Of the world’s energy consumption, about
1 % is estimated to be consumed by data centres, and 0,25 % is consumed by the data flows of the Internet. The internet flows in the Netherlands have doubled again over the passed 15 months. Since the number of users has stabilised, this increase is especially attributed to the data traffic of music, images and motion pictures (I-tunes!).
When returning to the scale and level of our projects in higher education in Africa, we can see the demand of internet connectivity by our partners in e.g. Ghanaian universities and polytechnics. Despite our own reluctance to impose ICT policies and to create a so called situation of ‘eiland automatisering’, we have unsustainably contributed to the increase of the number of VSAT dishes in Africa, and introduced our own ICT isle e.g. at the university of Cape Coast, bringing our own backup energy supply, equipment, subscription to the internet, connectivity via the Netherlands, software and maintenance activity, going against all existing or non-existing university ICT policies. The subscriptions to the internet are paid from the budget and will expire one year from the end of the project.
How can we justify these activities?
First of all, it was the urgent need from our project partners, the time frame and the result focus of the project, and the lack of human capacity at ICT management and technical level of the university, compelled us to take these actions.
This is probably the way ICTs are implemented anywhere in Africa, by lack of existing management structures or due to the volatile nature of ICTs themselves.
There is no conclusion in this continuing story of ICTs for development. But, when talking about ICTs and sustainable development, there is, first of all a "critical need to be critical... and to look beyond that which is given to you" [Büscher 2009].