Mike Jensen is a South African ICT expert with wide-ranging experience in ICT on the African continent. CIPESA spoke to him about Africa’s connectivity problems. Excerpts:

CIPESA: How do interconnection rates work as a barrier to affordable services in Africa, and what can be done to improve on the situation?

Jensen: Interconnection rates are a problem, but hopefully they will be phased out completely as operators move over to Internet-based architectures for their networks, when peering arrangements take over and are generally more equitable and competitive. In the meantime regulators need to be vigilant to the problem of high interconnect rates and ensure that there is a level playing field for all operators. Having test equipment for the regulators is important for them to be able to test the quality of interconnect arrangements, not only to ensure reasonable pricing, but also [minimise] congestion levels on gateways between networks.

CIPESA: Telecom service providers in Africa seem averse to sharing infrastructure. What possibly informs this and how can this culture be changed?

Jensen: This is a tough one, as naturally in a competitive environment operators will act to maximise the utility of the networks at the expense of competitors. The only way to change this is to legislate that the incumbent operators, who built their networks with taxpayer money, are forced to open their networks to competing operators. The other strategy is to bring together all existing state-operated telecom infrastructure (such as telecom networks, railway and power line networks) into a single open access network that is made available to all players on an equal basis at cost.

CIPESA: What would you see as the benefits countries in Sub-Saharan Africa could get if service providers shared infrastructure?

Jensen: If the strategy above is taken then the service providers will be able to obtain access to national and international backbones at cost, rather than at the high tariffs charged at monopoly prices by the incumbent operators. These cost savings in a competitive environment will then be passed on to users.

CIPESA: In your view, what are the steps Africa needs to take to minimise its bandwidth headaches?

Anybody remember the cute little French word Enonchong used to describe a desirable criterion for doing ICT business in SSA -- “incontournable”? Telemedicine is a definite incontournable in the ICT4D world, even more so in SSA. 

Here’s a condensed presentation by Peter Corr, of the University of Natal ZA, which gives a quick overview on telemedicine: history, goals, definitions, applications, hardware and software requirements, etc.

It is interesting to note that the earliest application of telemedicine was in radiography, back in the sixties – a ‘relatively’ simple transmittal of radiographs from one hospital to another. As simplistic as sending a facsimile today – big deal, eh?  Today, the Radiology applications alone of telemedicine have grown into CT/CAT, MR/MRI, Ultrasound/Medical Sonography, Nuclear medicine, Angiograms/Arteriography, etc. A brief overview of a typical modern Hospital Information system (HIS) – more or less hospital ERP / CRM systems, will facilitate a more complete picture of current systems and practices in telemedicine.

 

Reiterating the obvious; telemedicine can provide much-needed respite in SSA, a region characterized by a dearth of medical professionals, allied health skills and applications -- Doctors, HIS, etc.

At the very basic, telemedicine can be as simple as an online chat/ consultation between a patient and a qualified physician (for-profit or pro-bono). An inexpensive ICT bridge across the health access gap, facilitated by a very simple combination of pre-existing ICT tools – the Internet and chat application. A 3^rd party could also conduct the chat session on behalf of a computer-illiterate patient. People are running with these ideas in SSA of course, Bridges.org has a bunch of real life examples of such ground level initiatives.

 

There’s a plethora of buzzwords in the myriad of technological innovation/process improvement circles out there; “thinking outside the box” (some college courses are actually totally devoted to this), Six-sigma, Knowledge (Insight and discovery) Models, abstract Mandala, Kaizen, etc. And they are all modern day abstractions of the age-old cogitation on how the early man invented medicinal treatments from leaves, tools and utensils like, Hammer, Spear and Spoon from sticks and stones.

 

Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Albert Einstein)

Just so you know I’m not circling point Zany in Gulag, this piece on artistic entrepreneurship by John C. Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund group, has lots of science fiction qualities that stirred me into a fairly awkward mental deportment vis a vis moving SSA forward via ICT. And did I mention Mr. Bogle founded Vanguard Mutual group based on his senior thesis at Princeton? And how many companies can be founded on science fiction?

In pursuit of making  “real ICT impacts” in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the framework for technological innovation may incorporate solid facts along with certain degrees of information abstraction. On one hand, we gather facts and present them in logical, professional, and scientific manner/formats. Science fiction, on the other hand, leans heavily on (fairly loose) inductive reasoning – you take a little bit of fact, and extrapolate way into the future! Every so often bordering on fantasy. This fantasy quality however, does not diminish science fiction as a tool for innovation since the seeds of innovation subsist in imagination. Imagination is the greatest tool of the innovator.

 

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth. (Archimedes )

According to Walter Mosley, in Black to the Future, “The power of imagination is the power to change the world …The [science fiction] genre speaks most clearly to those who are dissatisfied with the way things are: adolescents, post adolescents, escapists, dreamers, and those who have been made to feel powerless. And this may explain the appeal that science fiction holds for a great many [Africans].... Through science fiction you can have a black president, a black world, or simply a say in the way things are. This power to imagine is the first step in changing the world.”

Since I really strive to practice what I preach, If I were to join this African science fiction writing competition (strict SSA theme/focus). I think I have an idea what I would write;

 

The Africa Research Bridge [ARB] is a collaborative research project that seeks to connect professionals and students working in the field of Information and Communications Technology [ICT] from the US and Africa. The project is an initiative of bridges.org, a non-profit corporation with offices in Washington, DC and Kampala, Uganda. Bridges.org works to promote the effective use of ICT in the developing world and to bring a practical vision to the realities of ICT-enabled socio-economic development.

The ARB project contributes to bridges.org’s mission by facilitating collaboration among a team of leaders and future leaders from Africa with their counterparts in the US. Thus, each ARB team will consist of a professional within the field of ICT who is based in Africa, an ICT professional based in the US, a student in the field of ICT who is based in Africa, and an ICT student who is based in the US. The final product of this collaboration will be a 5 – 10 page research paper on a pertinent issue within the ICT field. Some sample research topics include:

• The Question of E-readiness in the Developing World
• The Cost-benefit of Domain Registration
• International Property Rights Regimes and Foreign Direct Investment
• Global Wifi potential
• E-commerce and International Law

Go to Africa Research Bridge Page

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