Welcome everyone to this the third annual ACT Summit. ACT, as you all know, stands for African Computing & Telecommunications, but one of our delegates has suggested to me that it should stand for "AITEC Causes lots of Tension".
And I have to admit we do cause a lot of tension in your lives by hitting you with an irresistible conference programme, making it necessary for you to put pressure on your bosses and boards for the fees, book air tickets, organise visas, and possibly worst of all, subject yourselves to those dreaded Yellow Fever jabs - so that you can participate in the ACT experience.
But it is our job to create all this tension in your lives - to set up the challenge for you to be here to participate in this unique gathering of Africa`s IT and communications community. In fact, it is our job to make waves all year round by offering you a range of conference, exhibition and publishing services across the continent to broaden and update your knowledge.
The statement I made in my opening address last year applies even more strongly this year: Africa`s IT and telecommunications professionals, managers, entrepreneurs and policy-makers have an enormous responsibility in terms of the leadership role they have to play in the continent`s development. And AITEC is proud of the pan-African role it plays in supporting you all - and prompting you all - with education opportunities like this.
This year`s programme is even more diverse and rich than last year`s. And I`m afraid the tension is going to continue as you agonise over which equally informative sessions running at the same time you will attend. But this year we are going to help you (and hopefully reduce this particular tension) by providing daily reports on all the sessions which you will be able to access on our Web site (and here I`d like to thank and congratulate UUNET for the excellent Internet facilities they have provided delegates this year).
We have designed this year`s programme to deal with the current key issues we all face in making IT and communications work effectively across the region. And I`d like to try to summarise those elements now to provide a framework on which we can all hang the conference.
1. Education and training: Training IT professionals AND the utilisation of ICTs in spreading education are key on-going issues for our industry and both aspects are being covered in the Education & Training Forum.
2. Internet development: A research project AITEC undertook earlier this year for the UK`s Department for International Development highlighted the vital role that the continent`s ISPs have to play in the development of the Internet in Africa - and the hurdles they face in terms high connectivity costs (sometimes over 100 times what their counterparts in Europe pay) and restrictive and poor regulation. In our report we emphasized the need for ISPs to co-operate at national and regional levels to organize national exchanges to drive down international traffic costs; and also to lobby together for improvements in the regulatory environment, which in most countries is very restrictive.
This led us to creating the African ISP Forum as part of ACT this year to provide a platform for ISPs to exchange knowledge and experience and develop channels for future co-operation. I want to thank the UK`s Department for International Development for providing a scholarship fund for the Forum that has enabled over 70 ISP representatives from throughout Africa to attend. I`d also like to thank the ISP Association of SA for their support in developing the Forum programme and welcome Peter van Roste, the President of the newly formed Euro ISP Association, who will be sharing his members` experiences in developing the Internet across a continent.
We hope the Forum will act as a catalyst for extensive and on-going co-operation among the region`s ISPs, leading to the rapid development of the Internet across Africa.
3. eGovernance is currently a hot topic for donors and international organsations wanting to find ways to bring about political reform and good governance in Africa. But until we as African develop e-governance systems that fit the needs of our national political and administrative systems, it will remain a largely theoretical concept. I hope the eGovernance Forum at ACT this year will help this process of developing indigenous e-governance concepts and systems that are practical and applicable. I`d like to thank the Commonwealth Centre for e-Governance for the scholarships they have provided for a number of e-governance experts to attend the Forum.
4. The next pillar of the ACT programme is telecommunications development. Africa`s lack of telecommunications infrastructure is, I believe, the most important economic issue currently holding back the continent`s development. And what is most frustrating is that low-cost, efficient solutions are available now to satisfy the huge demand.
In fact, the tension we really have to worry about is the tension between Africa`s citizens - farmers, entrepreneurs, workers - on the one hand, and the incumbent monopolistic telcos and their cronies in the communications ministries and regulators who are concerned to serve their own established interests rather than the interests of national development. The Kenya Telcom share sale fiasco that has been running over the past few months is an extreme case in point.
To illustrate the huge bottled-up demand there is in Africa for phone connections, Uganda is a good example. Following the progressive liberalisation of that market, the growth in land and mobile connections has grown by 400% over four years - reaching only 250 000 in a population of 20 million. Imagine the potential at that growth rate!
In every country Africans have shown consistently that they are willing to spend far more as a proportion of their income on phone connections than Europeans and Americans. Not only is there the huge African worldwide diaspora to keep in contact with; a large proportion of urban Africans maintain rural links and even a relatively expensive phone call home is far cheaper than having to travel home to keep in touch.
Getting back to the low-cost technology that is available now, mobile telephony, voice over IP, VSAT satellite links and wireless connections are the immediate solutions that Africa needs to roll out urgently. VOIP, VSAT and wireless links are being held back by regulatory restrictions and high licence fees. We hope the coverage of these technologies at this year`s ACT will further promote development despite these restrictions. We would like to thank the Global VSAT Forum for providing the two detailed VSAT workshops we have this year. Africa`s VSAT market must be progressively liberalized in order to allow the rapid deployment of this increasingly cost-effective technology.
Even in Uganda, seen by many as the darling of telecommunications liberalization, the issuing of VSAT licences has been suspended since July last year. Internet services have actually deteriorated this year according to a number of users; and the established operators are entrenching their positions and influencing the regulator to protect their interests.
I don`t have the time to go through the full programme but I`d like just to highlight some of the other key themes:
eBusiness, mCommerce, Collaborative commerce have become pervasive in business today and we all need to sift out the hype from the reality and identify the systems and strategies that will enable our organisations to capitalise on the opportunities that have been created to develop direct links into the world economy. We have presentations from top experts that will help us develop the right strategies for our organizations.
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