TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE
In telecommunications infrastructure, South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, and Tunisia, were clear standouts on the continent, but Africa faced a massive degree of internal inequality in this area. Most sub-Saharan countries, which counted among them some of the poorest nations in the world, had little reliable telecommunications infrastructure to speak of, particularly in rural areas.
On the other hand, many analysts noted that Africa's infrastructure problems pose some key advantages as well. Most notably, the relative lack of telecommunications systems in Africa may allow developers to bypass the less efficient first-and second-generation networks and systems adopted by Europe and North America. This could potentially enable the implementation of more sophisticated setups under development in the early 2000s, featuring, for instance, widespread convergence between fixed-line and mobile networks. In fact, mobile technology was expected to be a primary means of escalating Internet penetration in Africa.
Some countries, such as South Africa and Botswana, already were successful in laying down sophisticated fiber-optic and mobile networks that reached substantial portions of their populations. In South Africa, the number of mobile Internet users surpassed that of fixed-line users in August 2000. Several other major investment schemes in the late 1990s and early 2000s aimed at placing fiber-optic networks in various African sub-regions, according to African Business. For example, AT&T launched Africa One, an initiative to line the entire continent with a fiber-optic backbone, while Telkom of South Africa implemented a project known as SAFE to set up fiber optics between South Africa and Malaysia. The United States government also has been directly involved in lending a hand to the development of the African Internet. In 1995, the U.S. Agency for International Development launched the Leland Initiative, which allocated $15 million to bring Internet access to the whole continent.
The late 1990s and early 2000s were characterized by the deregulation and privatization of telecommunications sectors in many African countries, in the hope that less stringent barriers would invite greater influxes of foreign investment. While most countries—Ethiopia and Mauritius are the exceptions—have abandoned government monopolies for ISPs as an element of official state policy, many governments still retained such control in practice.
In an effort to stimulate the Internet sector, open its telecommunications industry to outside investment, and reduce its public debt, in 2001 the South African government decided to take its telecommunications monopoly, Telkom, public. Beginning in 1997, Telkom Malaysia and SBC Communications owned 30 percent of the firm, while the remaining 70 percent belonged to the government. The government planned to sell up to 30 percent of its share. With a monopoly as the sole fixed-line operator in South Africa, and with a majority interest in the country's leading cellular phone operator, Telkom was highly coveted as an entry into this highly prized African e-commerce market.
African governments took the lead at the International Telecommunications Union's Telecom '98 conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, where they produced a policy document called African Connection. The thrust of the paper was to build a common agenda that the entire African business community could rally behind to establish an information-technology backbone for the whole continent. Before devising technical solutions, however, the African Connection working groups were first devoted to creating the institutional foundation that would be able to coordinate and provide for future development of Internet and e-commerce sectors. This work enjoyed support from major governments and institutions around the world, including the World Bank, the European Union, the United Nations Economic Commission on Africa, and the African Development Bank.
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