In remote eastern Zambia, people were dying from meningitis. Medics at a clinic days away from any semblance of a hospital emailed the nation's health ministry asking about similar incidents. The ministry in turn emailed clinics throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and within a day, doctors in Mozambique replied that they too had recently treated a meningitis outbreak. Their information helped contain the Zambian outbreak.
That's not a futuristic scenario. In Net time, in fact, it's an old story - it happened more than two years ago. And since then, governments in southern Africa have begun taking aggressive steps to speed onto the Net. And a Clinton administration program dedicated to the memory of a congressman considered a saint in the cause of African development is lending a hand.
"In the United States, we went through so many stages of Net access. What's happening in Africa is they are starting at the fourth or fifth generation of information technology," says Larry Irving, assistant secretary for communications and information at the Commerce Department, who last month talked with sub-Saharan African leaders at a meeting in Botswana about better and faster telecommunications.
Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, Internet use is increasing, though the national and individual use profiles don't resemble anything found in the West. South Africa, by far the region's most wired country, has 34 PCs per 1,000 people (comparison: the United States has 300 per 1,000). In Africa, Net users tend to be health professionals working for non-governmental organizations, or foreigners.
Clinton administration officials hold up Madagascar as an illustration of how a desperately poor country can nonetheless begin the process of getting on the Net - and in the process, perhaps, begin an economic transformation.
The island off the continent's southeastern coast has been online only 15 months. In the past few weeks, the national phone monopoly, Telecom Malagasy, has given up its Net monopoly and opened the way for independent service providers. Already, 10 ISPs are licensed to serve a total of about 1,000 clients, and additional 1,500 users are expected to be added within a year.
The competition means that service will be available for about US$10 a month. True, the context is desperate poverty - the country's per capita annual income is US$820 and its gross domestic product growth just keeps up with the rate of population increase. But in a place where it costs $15 a minute to send a fax to the United States, the cheap Net connection is practically revolutionary.
"Madagascar suffers from 'double isolation' - geographic and communication. Nothing can change geography, but the Internet will enable Madagascar to take its proper place in the world community," says David Flavell. He's the Internet coordinator in Madagascar for the Clinton administration's Leland Initiative, a year-old US Agency for International Development effort to connect sub-Saharan Africa to the Net.
The initiative is named after late Texas Representative Mickey Leland, who died in a plane crash while on a 1989 aid mission to Ethiopia. The project sends people like Flavell to Africa to act as go-betweens with telecom companies, Internet service providers, and governments. Flavell, for instance, was dispatched to Madagascar to work with Telecom Malagasy and US high-tech firms interested in doing business on the island. He also helped license the new ISPs and order and install equipment for them.
Madagascar has problems, but it is not a total loser looking to the Net for salvation. Lemurs and other exotic wildlife draw tourists, and the country produces 90 percent of the world's vanilla. A former French colony long ruled by the military, it now has an elected government. Maybe most important of all from the standpoint of connectivity potential, the nation went digital with its telecom switching two years ago and began using satellites for city-to-city and overseas phone calls.
Outsiders doing business on the island say that's made a world of difference.
"One of our biggest problems was getting access to information for our clients - but now the Net is radically changing the way that business is being done in Madagascar," says Mark Heim, financial officer for Chemonics International, a Washington consulting firm in agriculture and agribusiness.
Heim, who has worked in Madagascar for the past five years, says that small Malagasy companies are getting on the Net. Internet centers similar to Western cybercafes are popping up around the country, allowing firms and people who don't own computers to use email and surf the Web. Such activity is crucial, Heim says, in developing commerce in a sprawling nation with lousy transportation.
Developing the Net has big social implications, too. Lack of basic tools for learning and communicating has contributed to a continentwide brain drain. By bringing Africa closer to the rest of the world and putting state-of-the-art resources close at hand, technology could slow that trend.
"The development benefits are so great that it is extremely important that this continent get connected," says John Mack, a policy analyst at the US State Department who works on the Leland Initiative.
But US officials concede that the biggest hurdle to wiring Africa is getting governments to take the leap that Madagascar took in giving up its telecom monopoly.
"The US government can help facilitate the transition, but ultimately, they've got to come up with their own solutions," says the Commerce Department's Irving.
