World Dialogue on Regulation

The cost of internet access remains very high for African universities and what is needed is gigabits, not megabits (northern institutions are already talking in terms of terrabits).

While mobile connectivity is achieving a level of universal access (6-9% in Africa), the cost of this connectivity remains extremely high. And, although mobile telephony fills the gap for interpersonal communication it falls short of meeting research and education networking needs of universities, research institutions to access online materials, and contribute to the world of research.
 
Although public access in high density areas is improving, and telecentres in the cities are achieving business sustainability in places, this merely illustrates that cost of access is still high and too high for private access.

Extortionist rates for rural broadband access (in Mozambique for instance USD 600 per month for 64k bps connection) are why we have supported and have experimented with ways in which communities can amortise these costs through wireless connectivity to share the high cost of the access points, and various business and technical models have emerged, but due to their nature remain constrained by either regulatory issues (monopolies on frequency and rights of way, restricting WiFi mainly to CPE).
 
This all points to the issues of lack of fixed line infrastructure (which in itself makes the cost of cellular calls very expensive). It also reflects on the poor policy and regulatory regimes which have not geared the fixed line build out against the high revenues coming in through cellular.

Policy, regulation and market structure remain endemically pressing issues and the capacity that needs to be built requires endless funding. Research ICT Africa's work to inform academic and executive programmes and institutions like NeTel Africa via training will continue to rely on publicly funded and mostly foreign public funding to ensure that these capacities are built up over time. Three years of funding from the DOT Force era is not enough time to shift paradigms through education, training and exposure to market interventions and to public-private regulation management of market behaviour.
 
Content will follow communication infrastructure, so claims of insufficient “content“ for developing regions is less a concern for me. We continue to invest in localisation efforts through software, open source and programme development to make localisation processes easier, and there remains hardware (keyboards, etc.). 

An area we have started to work in, and convincingly so, is to promote public sector service delivery through more efficient services, such as electronic populations registration; electronic medical records; electronic management information systems, to make micro-credit institutions more efficient and able to scale up (we are promoting use of Grameen Technology Centre's Mifos management information system FOSS). This is relevant to the banking sector and to the mobile telecom sectors wanting to deliver banking.
 
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However, if the G8 chose only one theme, I would say it should be to strengthen public health systems in Africa, most of them groaning under the pressure of dealing with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and help make them able to deal with the burden of disease, scale up through efficient electronic medical records, report regularly to the donor community that is funding the anti-retroviral treatment (mainly US and Pepfar) and to commit to a this over a five to ten year period. We have found open source solutions that can go to scale without huge investment and can what is more it is saving lives, stemming the tide of untimely AIDS deaths and unnecessary parentless homes and growing numbers of AIDS orphans.