Good news often seems to be an endangered species in Africa, even if many parts of the continent are making quiet progress while others occupy the headlines with stories of conflict and disaster. Still, it is surprising to learn that one of its poorer countries is spending 10 per cent of its annual GDP on a broadband, satellite-based internet system.
The Ethiopian government faced some puzzlement four years ago when it embarked upon a plan to bring the worldwide web to every school and local government office, but ministers insist that this is the quickest, most cost-effective way of building a national infrastructure. "If I have to connect the most remote region by road, it will take a long time," says Ato Tefera Waluma, the minister of capacity building. "If you take in a satellite then it’s connected. It’s the easiest way to do it. We are connecting the citizen who is in the most remote place not only to his next village, but to the whole world."
The aim is to use the technology to overcome some of the geographical disadvantages faced by this vast country. The remoter regions are beyond the reach of existing road and telephone networks, and connecting every village with Tarmac and copper wires would cost far more than the high-tech alternative. Fibre-optic cables now link the main towns and form the backbone of a network that uses VSAT satellites to reach the more isolated villages, where the cost of building a physical connection would be prohibitive.
With the infrastructure in place, politicians, engineers and users now face the challenge of realising its potential. The network is intended to deliver high-quality education, agricultural training and, eventually, a telemedicine service, as well as to provide the foundation for an internet-based telephone system that could replace the antiquated equipment used in most of the country.
Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian prime minister, acknowledges that many of his countrymen were initially unconvinced that so large a share of the country’s limited resources should be pumped into ICT, or information and communication technology. "The first mental block that we had to cross was the view that ICT is for the rich," he says, "but it became clear that the quality of education was likely to be substandard for a long period of time unless we could come up with a shortcut, and people seemed to suggest that ICT could provide that shortcut. Because we are poor, we can’t afford not to use ICT."
Using the broadband network, the government is mounting a two-pronged campaign to drive up educational standards, employing internet-based training to boost the calibre of teachers at the same time as delivering educational material direct to pupils via the web.
Most secondary schools have now received the huge plasma-screen televisions that will soon display internet-streamed MPEG 2 digital video, including instructional films and quizzes. In the meantime, the screens are used to show recorded lessons broadcast over the country’s TV network, but the internet-based system will allow teachers greater flexibility in the way they use their high-tech teaching materials. With TV broadcasts, everyone has to go at the same pre-determined speed, but streamed lessons can be paused or fast-forwarded, allowing the teacher to repeat information for struggling students or skip ahead for those who are doing well. It will also let teachers see the material in advance and plan lessons to make best use of it, instead of going into the broadcast blind.
While Ethiopian schools await their e-lessons, Addis Ababa University is already making use of the internet to broaden the opportunities available to students. Apart from staff salaries, IT is the biggest single expense for the university, but its president, Andreas Esheté, is confident that the investment is worthwhile.
"The technology has enabled us to introduce new activities that would have been very difficult without it," he explains. "If a student wants to do a thesis on a subject for which we don’t have an expert, we get a person outside the university to supervise the thesis using the internet." Students in the computer department have also been able to work on joint projects with their counterparts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which could not have happened in the pre-internet era.
Although some local businesses are making use of IT, the government remains the primary internet user in Ethiopia, and beyond the education sector the main customer is local government. Each of the 600 local offices and 11 regional centres is now connected by video conferencing equipment, which has replaced two-way military radios as the main form of communications in some areas, and in others has given villages their first link with the outside world.
For most of the time the network will facilitate the mundane but important business of efficient government, allowing the dispersal of advice, instructions and feedback without the need for long journeys on foot, but the links could also prove invaluable during emergencies. In the past, when food stocks began to run low in the more remote areas, news of looming famine and requests for help would travel from the villages at a walking pace. Now, each village is only an e-mail or phone call away.
Amid all this optimism – and the tangible progress – there are obstacles still to overcome. The minister of capacity building, who has overall responsibility for the project, says that Ethiopia does not yet have the software, content or expertise to make the most of the hardware it has installed, and admits that the pace of implementation has not been as fast as he would have liked. More fundamentally, he acknowledges that many Ethiopians are illiterate (less than half can read and write), and few are familiar with telephones, let alone computers. Huge cultural and social changes will be needed if the population is to embrace IT in the manner that its government hopes.
In spite of these difficulties, the country’s politicians have won a great deal of praise for their commitment to the project. "Ethiopia is a model of how things should be done," says Anthony Vonsee, the vice-president in Africa of Cisco Systems, the main contractor involved in building the network. "Often there are a lot of fuzzy words, but here they’re being matched with action."
Mr Vonsee suggests that Ethiopia, along with other African countries, has the opportunity to leapfrog the technologies of the last century and progress directly from subsistence agriculture to the digital age. "Many countries are doing what the US did, what Europe did, and putting a lot of money into going from analogue to digital networks, then digital to IP [internet] networks. Why not jump that digital divide right away?"
The digital divide between Africa and the West remains vast, but it is narrowing. Few Ethiopians can expect to own their own computers in the foreseeable future, but with school and local government machines being opened up to the community at the end of the working day, there is the potential for technology to reach large numbers of people.
Genet Zewdie, the Ethiopian education minister, says this will have a profound social and economic effect on the country. "It will help us to eliminate poverty, because the gap between the rich and the poor is not just money, it’s the know-how," she says, adding that future generations of Ethiopians will not only use technology but help to create it too. Even so, can the internet really succeed where two decades of aid and collective hand-wringing have failed, and lift this stubbornly poor country out of poverty? "In the next 20 or 30 years we hope that we will be one of the middle-income countries," says Mrs Zewdie. "It will be done."
Holden Frith travelled to Ethiopia as a guest of Cisco Systems
