By Molly Slothower
16 May 2009 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: African universities are emerging as the winners of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, scoring vastly improved Internet connectivity, and with it, new opportunities for education partnership and research.
Universities and research institutions in Africa are crippled by very high-cost, low-speed Internet connection that hinders their technological cooperation with the rest of the world. But the World Cup is helping to change this, thanks to three new high-speed broadband cables that are being laid to connect the continent to the billions of people who will watch the matches next summer.
This could have a valuable impact on development in Africa if universities, businesses, development agencies, and donors take advantage of the opportunity it provides.
“The new cables are the most important investment in Africa since the construction of the colonial railroads,” said Calestous Juma, Director of the Science, Technology, and Innovation project at Harvard University, to MediaGlobal. The cables will bring the price of Internet from about $5,000 per megabyte per second to about $200 per megabyte per second, a monumental drop in price.
Today, 30,000 students at a given university in Africa have access to Internet through the same size access point as a single household in the United States, according to Juma. This is prohibitive for students and professors, and universities are, for the most part, not taking advantage of the worldwide web.
“Access to new information is the lifeline of universities and should be given the same priority as other critical infrastructure services in society such as access roads, power and water supply,” Juma argued in a recent op-ed.
He pointed out that the volume of scientific and technical knowledge in the world just about doubles every year, making it all the more critical for academic institutions to access research to stay relevant in today’s world.
Seacom, the service provider for one of the cables, has already made deals with some universities to purchase broadband at a small fraction of the price that the schools are currently paying, and other negotiations are underway.
“We are actively initiating, as our own corporate policy, access to research institutions and universities so that African universities can become premier universities. So we have been in negotiations so that 80 to 90 percent of the cost of our connecting to our system will be waived. And in many cases it will be just a negligible amount [that universities will pay],” Haskell Ward, Assistant Vice President of Seacom and a strong advocate for the recognition of long-term investment in African development as good a business strategy, said to MediaGlobal.
And indeed, between Seacom and the other two cables underway, The East African Marine System (TEAMs) and EASSy, the connectivity will penetrate far beyond the coastal regions and the relatively wealthier South Africa. Plans are in the works to provide land networks to reach rural schools as well, an important aspect for a more equitable distribution of the benefits of the cables. Many African nations, including some of the poorest countries in the world, will be impacted.
“[Poor Internet access has been] training young scientists, engineers, business people, and virtually every student at universities in Africa to get by with little or no bandwidth rather than how to achieve the most they can with a lot of bandwidth,” said Martin Duncan, CEO of the Tertiary Education and Research Network of South Africa (TENET), an organization of South African universities, speaking to MediaGlobal.
Once universities have access to affordable Internet, Duncan said, “they will begin training African professionals to live in the modern era and be able to use the tools that people in the Northern Hemisphere take for granted. Our graduates will be going to companies [for work] knowing how to enable their employers to benefit from the bandwidth rather than how to struggle along without it.”
Grid computing is one example of an opportunity that has eluded African universities but will be possible with the new cables. Grid computing, the connection of many computer processes working together through high-bandwidth connections to form super computers, is a major priority for scientists and engineers in Africa.
Through grid computing, researchers could get access to the super computers of the world’s most advanced research institutions.
“The kind of bandwidth that Seacom is providing now will give South African scientists access to grid computing in the Northern Hemisphere,” said Duncan. “There is already tremendous effort and money going into building our own supercomputing grids in South Africa. The new bandwidth in South Africa is going to enable scientifically intensive computing on a much larger scale than has been possible in the past.”
But bandwidth is not sufficient to spur development and innovation on its own. It must be accompanied with a lot more funding, and intense technical assistance.
“Research capacity doesn’t generally exist in higher education institutions in Africa,” Ransford Bekoe of the Association of African Universities, told MediaGlobal. “Even if you put broadband into those universities, there’s no money for research.”
An interesting comparison to Africa’s situation is India, with its pervasive, largely rural poverty and its historic experience of a large influx of connectivity to academic institutions. Unlike in Africa, India’s internet connections were originally created as subsidized academic networks in the 1980s.
But Bekoe explained that while India is benefiting from its relatively connected schools, this is mostly due to the large push by the Indian government to send engineers to get PhDs in prestigious universities in the United States and Europe at the same time as the academic network was created.
“The Indian engineers with degrees from prestigious universities returned in the 90s with the capacity to both create business models and do research,” said Bekoe. “In Africa, its different. Most of the countries don’t have this advantage. Most countries have very good [PhD level] people, but very few people. They have five, ten PhDs from the US or Europe, but there are only five or ten.”
With luck, said Bekoe, donors and investors may find that the freedom from connectivity limits will make investing in higher education a worthwhile cause.