'Ex Africa semper aliquid novi' said Pliny. Or, as the 100 million or so Kiswahili speakers of East Africa might put it: kitu pya sikuzote njoo Afrika. I do not open this article with Kiswahili on a whim: while there are many languages in use throughout Africa, this is the most strategic Bantu tongue. Of the 100 million Kiswahili speakers in East Africa, an estimated 10 million have access to computers. Establishing software within this language is currently a major theatre of development and contention.
There is a widespread view of Africa as the perennial beggar of the global village. But the reality is different. Africa is a continent awash with cultural richness of great diversity and complexity, containing people as keen and able to take part in the 21st century on their own terms as anyone else.
Of course, problems exist and outside assistance is a vital part of dealing with them - partly from common humanity but, partly, in the hard realities of the world, for selfish reasons. Africa has massive resources - a quarter of US oil could be coming from Africa within a decade, according to many estimates. Politics and big business alike have begun to recognise Africa as a potential power and as a huge market in the future.
Signs of this awareness stretch from the Make Poverty History campaign1,through Tony Blair's Commission on Africa report2, and books by formerly hard-line figures, such as Jeffrey Sachs' The End of Poverty3 and the publicised humanitarian concerns of Microsoft's Bill Gates.
Africa's peoples have a thirst for education and mental challenge. In many countries, rural children often get up before dawn, do a day's work, and then walk miles to school. Some US and European companies have made a commercial success of scouring the developing world for talent to be recruited for clients in the developed world. But, in a world of explosive technological change, there is a need for resources to feed the will: the new coming out of Africa is as much in need of input as anywhere else. In particular, there is a need for information and communication technologies.
There are many conduits by which vigorous self-help in Africa is abetted by transfer of ICT hardware and software. In some ways, hardware is less of an issue than software: once obtained (and its maintenance provided for) it is flexible. Software, my main interest here, is vulnerable to compatibility issues: there is limited value in gaining a foot on the ICT ladder, if that ladder doesn't lead up to a progressing ICT community.
1.Make Poverty History. www.makepovertyhistory.org
2.Commission for Africa report. www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page7310.asp
3.Sachs, J. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. 2005: Penguin Press.
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