Wireless Points the Way in Africa

by Tim Lougheed

With unfortunate regularity, the African continent is portrayed in the industrialized world as a carnival of needs. Depending on the specific region or circumstances, those needs can range from such basics as food and water to more complicated infrastructure like roads or hospitals.

In this context, innovative telecommunications applications would seem to be fairly far down the list. According to Laurent Elder, though, there is good reason to bump high technology closer to the top. Doing so, Elder insists, is an effective way of addressing many of the more essential needs.

Elder works in Dakar, Senegal as a program officer for the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), a public corporation created by the Canadian government in 1970. IDRC's mandate includes helping developing countries use science and technology to find practical, long-term solutions to their social, economic, and environmental challenges, otherwise known as "information and communication technologies for development" (ICT4D). The most effective African ICT4D research projects are taking advantage of wireless communications systems, which have been growing dramatically in many countries.

"The old line was that there were as many fixed phone lines in all of Africa as there are in Manhattan," says Elder. "Somehow, in five years, the place has been transformed. A cell phone is not a luxury item. Everybody has cell phones, and the use of cell phones is a lot more sophisticated than in North America."

Steve Song, who manages the ICT4D program for IDRC at its Ottawa headquarters, points out that upward of 70 per cent of the continent's telecommunications infrastructure now consists of mobile technology. That poses a problem for anyone seeking to introduce African users to the kind of high speed, optically based hardware and software platforms now commonly found in industrialized nations. By the same token, Song adds, powerful wireless applications that have yet to find a place in the industrialized world are starting to thrive in Africa.

"We live under the illusion that we need 500 megabits per second access and an 80 gigabyte hard drive in order to set up a connection," says Song. "If seven out of 10 phones you have in Africa aren't really suitable for doing that kind of connectivity, it occurred to us that maybe we should be looking at different kinds of solutions."

By way of example, he displays a nondescript plastic box about the size of a hardcover book. Manufactured by a California company called WideRay, these units are wireless servers that are small, light, and robust enough to operate wherever they are required.

WideRay servers, equipped with a GSM cell phone and StrongARM processor, have become the centrepiece of an undertaking in Uganda by IDRC and SATELLIFE, a Massachusetts non-profit company dedicated to improving health care in developing countries. With $761,000 in funding from Canada's Fund for Africa, IDRC has provided hundreds of Palm Pilots to health care workers throughout the country.

Using these devices, details on patients and their cases -- which once languished undistributed in a paper format, if they ever got written at all -- are now quickly and accurately uploaded through the servers to Uganda's medical authorities. Meanwhile, doctors and nurses can use these same Palm Pilots to download current medical information or reference material that might otherwise be much harder to obtain.

Hardy personal digital assistants (PDAs) like the Palm Pilot are getting cheaper all the time, Song notes, with growing functionality that makes them a much better choice for this setting than a desktop computer.

"You can buy a dozen Palm Pilots, and equip a dozen staff, where you might have bought one computer," he says. Moreover, each of those staff can use their PDAs to send and receive for e-mail more conveniently than they could do on a larger machine.

The project's objective goes well beyond administrative efficiency. Researchers with an earlier IDRC initiative in Tanzania have witnessed the advantages of having a health care overview for the purposes of managing medical supplies and setting treatment guidelines.

"They've spent the last five or six years testing the hypothesis that if you had much better national comprehensive census information, you could actually save on the order of 25 or 30 per cent of your health budget simply by knowing where the burden of disease was in various parts of the country," says Song.

Song indicates that when it comes to sorting out needs in Africa, information should be a major priority. And by helping to provide the tools to transmit and receive information wirelessly in parts of the continent that have yet to see a conventional telephone line, Song expects to see many other needs addressed at the same time.

"What we're pushing towards is empowering a generation of Africans who will be able to string up connectivity in the middle of nowhere," he concludes. (WRI Features, 807 words)

Learn about more ICT4D projects at World Resources Institute’s Digital Dividends Project Clearinghouse