Digital Divide in Sub-Saharan Africa Universities: recommendations and monitoring

1. Digital Divide in Sub-Saharan Africa Universities: recommendations and monitoring Boubakar Barry Association of African Universities Ghana

2. Motivation, problem area • Cyber-infrastructure and Internet access underpins development and human welfare • Poor Internet connectivity prevents many countries in Africa from taking advantage of these opportunities • Internet conditions have impacts on the research conducted by African scientists and the education of future executives • Better cyber-infrastructure is needed for African scientists to participate actively in international research activities • Bandwidth cost for African universities are 50 times or more higher than for universities in developed countries

3. Research Objectives • Several surveys on Internet in Africa, but mainly focused on countries as a whole. This research looks at situation in universities • Objectives of this research: • Provide a quantitative survey of leading universities in selected African countries • Provide continuous end-to-end performance monitoring of the Internet in African universities • Using the cyber-infrastructure, promote through the research findings, the implementation of a programme aiming to catalyse scientific collaboration • among African scientists • African scientists with scientists in Europe,

4. Research approach, Methodology • Research carried out using questionnaires • Development of an initial questionnaire with 5 main sections (personal details, National Internet facilities, Institution’s Internet facility, Problems and priorities, Suggested next steps) • Questionnaire sent to representatives of leading universities and research institutions in 19 countries • Responses received through email and through one-on-one face-to-face discussions • Responses received from 17 countries

5. Major Outcomes/Results • Each university had tens of 1000’s of students, with typically around 1000 or so staff • The best had 2 Mbits/s Internet access to the outside world • The worst were using dial up 56kbps • Often the access was restricted to faculty only • Most of the email respondents used commercial email services such as Gmail, Yahoo, etc. • Answers were consistent with the Internet penetration statistics published by the ITU • Reliable power was often cited as a major problem

6. Major Outcomes/Results (cont’d) • Other issues raised: • Reliability of the internet, i.e. difficulty to have it available on a 24h basis, seven days a week basis • Very low speed: it would take almost half an hour to transfer the 22 MByte file or 15 hours for a a 700MByte CD (at 100 kbps) • Most respondents wanted more bandwidth and reduced costs • Suggestions were to increase competition, remove monopolies, open markets to international service providers

7. Performance monitoring • PingER Project: started in 1995 to provide active end-to-end network performance measurements for the High Energy Physics (HEP) community • Extra measurement traffic added to the network is low (~100bit/sec for each monitor/remote site pair) • Early 2000s: extension to gather information related to quantifying the Digital Divide (for Africa: universities involved in the IHY and eGY targeted) • Today: measurements to over 150 countries (45 in Africa); over 99% of the world’s Internet connected population

8. Performance monitoring (Cont’d) • Situation in Sub-Saharan Africa shows that: • Not only is Africa many (~20) years behind developed regions such as Europe but is falling further behind each year • The throughput of about 100 kbits/s is less than that typically available to a residence in developed countries • Africa having the poorest Internet connectivity of any region in almost all PingER measured metrics (loss, jitter, unreachability, Telecommunications Industry’s Mean Opinion Score (MOS) voice-quality metric, etc. • Routing of Internet traffic from SA to hosts in other African countries: apart from hosts in SA, Botswana and Zimbabwe, all routes go via Europe or the US or both • PingER results also compared with eight Human and Economic development indices. • Strong correlation between the normalized derived PingER throughputs and the DOI • Similar correlations also seen for jitter and loss

9. Performance monitoring (Cont’d)

10. Performance monitoring (Cont’d)

11. Recommendations • Recognize: can’t fix all ills for all people over night. • Identify focus areas: • educate teachers & students, attract research (reverse brain drain) • applications: e.g. education, telemedicine, distance learning … • Find energetic leaders from country/region • Engage policy makers for science, technology, education … • Encourage ICT development, Internet adoption • Collaborate between institutions, regions to increase leverage • Form partnerships with vendors & providers • Drive market penetration, create demand, long term investments… • Get support: funding agencies, diaspora, organizations like IHY, eGY, ICTP, professional societies … • Make & use measurements to illustrate case for improvement • Acknowledge need for new business models appropriate for region

12. Initiatives to improve the situation • Several initiatives aiming to improve the situation • These include: • AAU: ICT Policy and Research and Education Networking • eGY: Building of network of African scientists and linkage with colleagues in developed countries • Sharing Knowledge Foundation: Sensitisation and networks development • Many others

13. From IGY to eGY www.egy.org Data access Data discovery Data release Data preservation Data rescue Outreach & Education Capacity building (eGY-Africa)

14. Management team: Alem Mebrahru (Ethiopia), Victor Chukwume (Nigeria), Monique Petitdidier (France), Abebe Kibede (USA), Larry Amaeshi (Nigeria), Mohamed Gaye (Senegal), Colin Reeves (The Netherlands), Jean-Pierre Tchouanchoue (Cameroun), Victor Rochon (Purdue U.), Les Cottrell (Stanford U.), Charles Barton (Australia) eGY-Africa - reducing the Digital Divide Help improve internet access for scientists in AfricaUse the voice of the international scientific community- map present status and problem- map present efforts and policy- influence decision making- hold workshop in 2009, W. Africa- cooperate with others

15. Conclusion and outlook • Survey confirms that Internet capacity of many African universities only comparable to that of a broadband connection at home in North America, Europe or Japan • This situation is a major drawback for research and education in Africa • Recommendations brought to national, regional and international administrations and organizations • The monitoring of the internet performance is an important point. Support is needed to extend the survey to all the African countries. • Several meetings organized in 2007 with a large African participation point out the real need of meetings at regional and continental level for periodic follow-up of the actions • eGY 2009 planned in Ivory Coast or Senegal • In parallel, pilot programmes in collaboration with Europe, are needed • to facilitate the scientific collaboration by using ICT on a regional base • to anticipate the arrival of new technology like Grids (EUMEDGrid, EELA)

16. For Further Information THANK YOU ! • For further information: • The authors: • Boubakar Barry (barry@aau.org) • Victor Chukwuma (victorchukwuma@yahoo.com) • Monique Petitdidier (monique.petitdidier@cetp.ipsl.fr) • Les Cottrell (cottrell@slac.stanford.edu) • Charles Barton (cebarton@gmail.com) • AAU:http://www.aau.org • eGY: http://www.egy.org • PingER:http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/ • Case Study: https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Sub-Sahara+Case+Study