Adding flesh to EA’s fibre backbone

Goal 5: Adopt a national e-strategy, including a cyber-security framework, and deploy at least one flagship e-government service as well as e-education, e-commerce and e-health services.

These would use accessible technologies in each country in Africa by 2012, with the aim of making multiple e-government and other e-services widely available by 2015.

To help achieve the connect Africa Summit Goals, many participants announced major commitments during the summit, totalling about $55 billion.

The commitments included:

• Mobile operators of GSM Association announced the provision of $50 billion between now and 2012 in new investment across the continent to expand and upgrade networks.
This builds on more than $35 billion invested in recent years in sub-Saharan Africa.

• The World Bank Group said it expects to double its commitment to ICT in Africa to $2 billion per year by 2012 from its current investment programme of $1 billion a year, over the past five years.

• The European Commission announced that the EU-Africa Partnership for Infrastructure had been established to support trans-African networks that facilitate interconnectivity.

• African Development Bank would scale up its investments in infrastructure, and was expecting to invest 60 per cent of its concessional resources on infrastructure, including ICT, in the next three years.

• New centres of excellence (in support of Goal 4) were announced (Rwanda and Tunisia with African Development Bank).

Spain also announced about $1 million contribution to ITU for the establishment of a centre of excellence for Portuguese and Spanish speaking countries in Africa, as well as ICT scholarships and internships for the youth and support for ICT training centres.

Benefits of greater bandwidth at low costs are enormous.

In our region, the East African Community, with its key partners like the ITU, the African Development Bank, the World Bank and the European Union are putting in place modalities that will lead to interconnecting our capitals and major cities with ICT broadband infrastructure and strengthen connectivity to the rest of the world.

The realisation of this target is set for 2012.

With such a clear vision and strategic direction, commercial entities like Seacom, other consortia like Teams, and the Private-Public-Partnership of EASSy (to land in early 2010), are playing an important role in achieving Goals 1 and 2, directly and indirectly.

The EAC is cognisant of the fact that, in any venture, there will inevitably be some “teething” problems, which will however be sorted out in due time.