Jetting from dinners with Nelson Mandela to meetings with Egypt's ministry of education to brief sojourns at his company headquarters in Washington, DC, Noah Samara, a 41-year-old Ethiopian-born lawyer, is positioned to become the Rupert Murdoch of the developing world. Samara's US$850 million venture, WorldSpace Management Corp., plans to eventually bring Net access, TV, and quality phone service to the 4.6 billion-person market in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Given the low per capita income of developing nations, however, he's jump-starting the business with a more modest marvel: digital radio.
In June, WorldSpace plans to launch the AfriStar satellite to broadcast up to 100 channels of CD-quality sound from Cairo to Capetown. With two additional satellites, AsiaStar and AmeriStar, operational by late 1999, WorldSpace's hugely ambitious service hopes to drive social reform – and revenue – in 103 countries through radio programming.
When the global digital spectrum went up for auction in 1992, Samara was an early bidder, having worked as a regulatory official for the International Telecommunication Union, which allocated the frequencies. He wants to turn his company into equal parts "business success" and "leader of social policy in global development." For Samara, progress in the developing world hinges on the proliferation of educational conduits such as mass media. "People are as developed as the information they can access," he says. "We want to create information affluence."
WorldSpace brings in money by licensing airwaves to the highest bidder (Bloomberg has already snagged 23 channels), while an independent sister foundation doles out 5 percent of the channels to educational programs, including distance-learning efforts. Unesco and the West Africa Distance Learning Association have already begun brokering deals for airtime. "We think of this as education with a small e," says foundation spokesperson Kube Jones. "We want to support grade-school teachers, adult education, and humanitarian outreach."
The only question is, who will be listening? Even if the airwaves are jammed with valuable programming, the $200 to $250 digital radios (made by Hitachi, Sanyo, and Panasonic) will have trouble taking off in developing countries. According to Samara, there are more than 300 million households in the company's three regional markets that can afford the receivers at the current rate. But for the remaining 4.3 billion people, information affluence may take a while.
This article originally appeared in the February issue of Wired magazine.
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