Session 9b, 9 May 2008 IST-Africa 2008 Copyright 2008 Insert Org Logo in Master slide Digital Divide...

Session 9b, 9 May 2008 IST-Africa 2008 Copyright 2008 <The Authors>

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

Boubakar Barry

Association of African Universities

Ghana



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



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,



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



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



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



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

•



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









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



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



From IGY to eGY

www.egy.org

Data access

Data discovery

Data release

Data preservation

Data rescue

Outreach & Education

Capacity building (eGY-Africa)



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 Africa

Use 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



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)



For Further Information

THANK YOU !

• For further information:– The authors:

• Boubakar Barry ([email protected]) • Victor Chukwuma ([email protected])• Monique Petitdidier ([email protected]) • Les Cottrell ([email protected])• Charles Barton ([email protected])

– 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

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Session 9b, 9 May 2008 IST-Africa 2008 Copyright 2008 Insert Org Logo in Master slide Digital Divide...

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