The disparity is even worse when you exclude North Africa and South Africa. After all, while at AfriNIC (the African registry) I wrote software that auto-generated charts on IPv4 resource usage (www.afrinic.net/statistics) and you find that South Africa ALONE accounts for 60% of IPv4 usage with Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria accounting for another 15% or so. Those countries happen to be highly urbanized, have much higher per capita income than much of Africa and have inexpensive fibre connectivity to the rest of the world.
On the bright side African countries can catch up with the rest of the world as long as they invest in all the associated infrastructure like power, fibre connectivity, like teaching computers in schools, like training on open-source technologies. The growth of mobile shows that there is a demand in the African market for technology like anywhere else and having a young population can only be an asset for the rise of the internet because the young are everywhere eager and ready to learn.
]]>We are already seeing the lifting in some areas. There is a sizable amount of work going into outsoursed content creation in these parts of the world, and we are quickly going to get into a human resource problem.
Say, the fiber optic kicks in by the end of next week (SEACOM is on the 23rd July 09, but hey?) , are we ready for the opportunities that will be staring at us in the eyes, once we shut our mouths after the celebrations?
]]>Branding is critical, but ultimately information sharing between African countries will lead to greater transparency which makes Africa easier to ‘sell.’
]]>And on the other hand we have businesses that are corrupt. We can argue a lot about how much corruption by private or public individuals impacts the free market, but the reality is that the rest of the world won’t engage when they don’t feel safe about how their money is being used, when information isn’t available, when maps without any info on Africa keep popping up.
Kind of looks like it’s taking on a chicken and egg scenario.
I tend to think it’s more an issue of your first note, education. Media focuses in on what people want to hear. If the population isn’t educated, they’ll just listen to what’s cool instead of what is reality. Another chick/egg problem. Which comes first? I know the idea is that media educates, but that’s some of the problem. Real, actual, book & school education is needed. Quality media should follow. We shouldn’t rely solely on the media to educate us.
Dare I say it’s a case of branding? A conversation is happening on twitter #brandafrica discussing all kinds of issues. Who is branding Africa? How should it be branded? What should be branded? Should it be branded as 1 or as 53 countries?
Perhaps I’m going off a bit off topic, but I feel like all these issues (and many, many more) play into your theory of ‘Africa Blindness’.
]]>On a more personal note, these statistic questions are annoying to me personally as I get asked them about my projects all the time to which I’ve just started responding, “Oh, we have 230 million users. We’re just staying ahead of Facebook. Why do you ask?” Rarely have I seen any numbers question turn in to any kind of interesting conversation, although I’m still trying to keep an open mind.
As to the IP mapping chart, it would be a lot more fair if people tracked which VSAT IPs that are currently linked with Europe are actually the front for African traffic. I know that friends in Liberia appear as being from Israel or England and when I was in Congo, I appeared to be from Belgium or Italy (if at a UN office.) This will sort out better once all of this new cable comes online.
-miquel
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