The distress call comes early in the morning. A siren sounds on the bridge, while a screen flashes the co-ordinates of the ship sending the alert. It could be anything - a fire, a sinking ship, simple human error... or what's feared most in these waters: pirate attack. A short while later, the worst is confirmed: Somali pirates have captured another not-too-distant vessel, the Maersk Alabama, and its all-American crew. Over the next five days, the balance of power will swing between crew and pirates, finally culminating in a daring Navy Seals sniper attack to rescue the captain held hostage on a lifeboat.
A few hundred miles south, on the bridge of the Tyco Resolute, Captain Alejandro Fernández is monitoring the situation closely.
His vessel is docked in Mombasa, Kenya, taking on board fresh supplies and crew. In two days, he will sail north, into the world's most dangerous waters, to complete the job his crew has been working on over the past several months: laying the very first submarine fibre-optic cable down the coast of East Africa.
Fernández, a tall, trim 55-year-old with a closely cropped greying beard, follows the drawn-out stand-off until, with relief, he eventually notes its successful resolution. But he's also conscious that he's about to take his 73-strong crew into the waters of Somalia, the planet's most utterly failed state. "Every day there are one or two attacks - every day," says Fernández. "The pirates were using fishing boats. Today, the problem is increased, because they use tanker ships, supply vessels, fishing boats. First they hijack it, then they use it as a mother ship. For me it's difficult to know if it's a normal vessel or a pirate ship."
Tension on the boat is high - with good reason. The pirates used to operate at a range of up to 200 nautical miles off the coast, but are now reaching up to 600 miles - and the rate of attacks has soared in recent months. "Since March 21, it's gone absolutely crazy," says one of the ship's security personnel, an ex-British Army officer. "Attacks have gone blisteringly high in this area.
Their capabilities are getting bigger and better." In the midst of this, the Tyco Resolute will be laying cable at a speed of no more than one knot, just 300 miles off the coast. Meanwhile, the resolution of the attack on the Maersk Alabama is a mixed blessing: for the next few weeks, the area will be swarming with warships; but then the pirates have also sworn to avenge the killing of their crew with future attacks. And although the Resolute's crew is primarily Spanish, they have American nationals on board - and, in the 30-year-old second mate, Martha Garcia, a woman.
None of this will stop the job at hand; at worst it will delay the arrival of the cable. The Resolute is just one of a fleet of Tyco ships working off the coast of East Africa and in the Red Sea.
They've been contracted by Seacom, a Mauritian-incorporated company with funding from African and American partners, to lay a 8,400-mile cable stretching from Ras Sidr in Egypt, around the horn of Africa, and down to Mtunzini, a small coastal town in South Africa. One branch of the cable will link to Mumbai, India, and the cable itself will terminate in London, via Marseilles. Along the way, branches will split off into Djibouti, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar and Mozambique, with a possible future link planned for the United Arab Emirates too. When it is completed and the fibre is lit, it will deliver up to 1.28 terabits per second of bandwidth into these countries at just a tenth of the cost of current capacity.
In other words, Captain Fernández's mission is nothing less than to plug a continent into cheap, fast internet.
Right now, countries such as Kenya rely solely on satellites for internet connection. This means limited bandwidth and high latency, causing long delays on telephone calls and rendering streaming video a waste of time. Network engineers in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, currently experience delays of up to 600ms when pinging remote servers; they expect this to drop to as little as 20ms when the cable goes live. Costs will also fall sharply. Bandwidth wholesalers in Kenya currently pay about $2,300 per month for a 1Mbps duplex satellite connection. Via Seacom's cable, they should be able to get this for less than $100.
The end-June go-live date is a goal upon which Seacom is staking its reputation. Achieving this depends on ships such as the Tyco Resolute laying its final 620 miles of cable out of Mombasa and up the coast of Somalia, before splicing together other cables arriving from the Red Sea and Mumbai. All of this will take place within range of the pirates. "We are worried," nods Eugenio Nieto, one of the ship's cable engineers, a well-built 41-year-old from Madrid, with dark hair and a Spanish complexion not dissimilar to Antonio Banderas's. "Of course we are worried - we have families, wives." He pauses, before adding: "I've told her where the insurance papers are."
But the ship is as prepared as any nonmilitary vessel could be for such threats. An impressive range of security measures is in place - Wired has agreed not to disclose the details, but defences include a professional security team, all with years of military experience, on board 24/7. Many are Gurkhas, the legendary fighters from Nepal, with years of British Army service.
Pirates taking on Fernández's ship will certainly have a fight on their hands. Behind the captain's reserved manner is an appetite for exploration and excitement, which is why he got into the industry in the first place: "I came to look for adventure," he says. In his spare time, he climbs Europe's mountains with his son and is already dreaming of his retirement project - ice climbing in Patagonia. Right now, however, he's part of another mission - one which has the hopes of millions of bandwidth-starved African consumers riding on it. Pirates or not, his crew will deliver this cable, enclosed in steel wire and black plastic to protect the precious hair-thin strands of fibre at its core, into Mombasa, Dar Es Salaam and various other ports along the coast of East Africa.
About two-and-a-half hours north of Nairobi, undulating hills become steadily greener as you drive towards Nyeri. These are the fertile highlands of Kenya, over 370 miles away from the hot tropical coastline. In the distance, Mount Kenya rises into the skyline. The land here is covered in trees, and cows and goats graze near the edge of the road. Simple shops are dotted along the way, advertising a range of wares on bright signs hand-painted on their walls. One of these signs, in lurid green, tells you that you've reached "Wa-Nicks".
This is the site of Kenya's first "digital village kiosk", launched in July last year. It turns out to be a dimly lit room with a dusty concrete floor that hosts five Dell PCs and a meagre internet connection. Nevertheless, the introduction of this link to the country's internet backbone has already started to change lives in the local community.
Nyeri is farming country, with coffee in particular being grown for export to Britain and other markets. The coffee is known for a particular taste, which buyers refer to as "bright acidity".
Farming the cherry-like arabica fruits that deliver these beans is the livelihood of thousands of small-scale farmers in the area.
They sell their crops to local co-operative societies, which process them and grade and sort the beans into bundles of varying qualities, before auctioning them off to foreign buyers.
Gerald Maruhi is one of these farmers. A cowboy-hat-wearing septuagenarian, he walks slowly with the aid of a wooden stick, but remains obviously energetic. He and his wife live on their smallholding and harvest up to 3,500kg of coffee every season. His smile masks a tough working life and heartbreaking negotiations with the local co-ops. "There have been problems in the coffee industry, especially around this area," he explains in his native Kikuyu tongue. "The people responsible for operating and running the coffee, in terms of getting the markets and buying the product, have been doing a lot of mismanagement."
But with internet access, his economic prospects are suddenly being transformed.
Some years, Maruhi has received as little as 20 to 50 Kenyan cents per kilo of coffee from them - less than half a penny - even though the final auction price can be 100 shillings or better, as much as 500 times more than his cut. The margin is somehow siphoned off by middlemen who lie between the farmers and overseas buyers. At harvesting time, Maruhi has to hire seasonal labourers to help bring in the crop, without knowing whether he'll earn enough from the co-ops to repay these costs. It is a precarious existence. "Having worked for one year on the farm, and then to get only about 50 cents on a kilo, when the market is quite OK and prices are much higher..." He shakes his head bitterly. "A lot of middlemen are taking advantage of us."
Since Wa-Nicks internet kiosk opened in July 2008, Maruhi has gained access to crucial information. "We want to get to know the market ourselves," he says. Although he doesn't know how to use the computers inside, he gets the sharply dressed 24-year-old who runs the kiosk, Evans Waithaka, to help him. He checks what a kilo of arabica coffee is currently selling for in various markets, which in turn gives Maruhi a crucial bargaining tool when negotiating with the co-ops. "Then we can say to the middlemen: 'Why don't you try this alternative market, where you can get this price per kilo?'" he explains. This also helps him decide whether or not the price will warrant hiring extra help for harvesting. Other local farmers are also using Wa-Nicks to research auction prices and shipping costs and check weather forecasts. As most of them don't yet know how to use the net, Waithaka is their conduit, a kind of human Google. "They say: 'Look this up for me,' and the internet gives it," explains Waithaka, with obvious pride. "The greatest task now is to make people understand the internet and put them in a position to use it."
Until Seacom completes its cable link, connectivity in such a place, far away from any major cities and with paltry infrastructure, comes courtesy of a small aerial latched on to the roof. "The receiver up here gets the connection through the telephone waves," explains Waithaka. This is a WiMAX receiver, installed by Kenya Data Networks (KDN) as part of a "digital villages" scheme to provide internet connectivity in such communities. Speeds are slow and connections often drop off, but the service is heavily subsidised by KDN to make it as affordable as possible.
This is how the last mile has so far been covered in Africa. The future is already here; but it's about to be supercharged by a cable emerging from the sea in Mombasa, removing the need to rely on frustratingly slow and expensive satellite connections. And as it happens, Kenya will soon have no fewer than three fibre-optic submarine cables, all beaming traffic back and forth to the rest of the world at the speed of light.
Kenya's seemingly zero-to-hero cable situation has not been an overnight change. Along with other African governments, it has watched with envy as countries around the world have benefited from falling internet costs and rising capacity. It's not that the continent has no line to the outside world; a thin strand snakes down the west coast, linking nine countries, including South Africa, to Portugal and Spain. Another cable comes in from Malaysia to South Africa, completing the loop. But that's it. Countries on the east coast have had no wired link, relying solely on satellite connections, as do all the landlocked states in between. Even users in South Africa, the continent's economic powerhouse, with the best internet links anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa, pay over the odds for internet access. It's not even the net as we know it. Much of what is taken for granted by those online in Europe remains impractical for Africa, even for those people who are connected.
This is how Vincent Cassar, an online entrepreneur in South Africa who recently launched neoaid.com, a site that combines web search with philanthropy, describes it: "My servers are based in the US or in Europe, not in South Africa, due to bandwidth constraints. I don't watch online video. I think twice before downloading a 25MB attachment. I don't use Skype for business calls because the latency affects the quality. I see business plans with internet access as an expense category of its own. Studying in Montreal, we paid C$40 [£22] for 200GB [data transfer]. If we were to use 200GB in South Africa, it would cost something like R13,000
[£1,000]."
It shouldn't still be this way. Since early this decade, African governments have been arguing about how to wire up the east coast.
But talks have been mired in government bureaucracy and red tape.
Progress has inched forward, with only a few projects getting off the ground at all.
Spotting opportunity amid the torpor, Seacom entered the market in late 2006. It eyed the pent-up demand for connectivity, having noted how mobile-phone connections exploded exponentially once competitive offerings entered the market, massively exceeding original forecasts. Brian Herlihy, Seacom's president, assembled a range of private-sector stakeholders and told them of his intention to move, and fast. Back then, few believed him.
"People were just saying, 'Well, that's Africa, of course it's going to take ten years'," says Herlihy in his faint American accent. Using his depth of experience in completing major capital projects across the continent, he got on board and fired up the operation - taking the cable from concept to near-delivery in just over two years. The company's sales proposition has been similarly audacious for a continent stuffed with telecom monopolies: offer an open access connection down the east coast, providing a link all the way back to London or out to Mumbai - all at just a tenth of current prices. It's a hell of a bet. Seacom is investing some $650 million in the project, way more than its main competitors. But it's gambling, in part, on the huge benefit of being the first to market.
Its primary rival for pole position is a $130-million project known as Teams (The East Africa Marine System), which was set up by the Kenyan government along with various private partners. It will be a 1.2Tbps cable, running some 2,800 miles from Fujairah in the UAE to Mombasa. The contrast between Teams and Seacom is striking. Seacom has a detailed website, updated regularly with maps of its planned route and frequent status updates, all part of its efforts to drum up early sales. Teams doesn't appear to have a website. It also doesn't appear to have a dedicated office, telephone number, email address or anything else one might reasonably expect. But work is definitely underway. Alcatel- Lucent has been contracted to lay the cable, and installation of the Fujairah shore end began in April.
A much bigger rival is an unwieldy consortium known as the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System, or Eass y (pronounced "easy"). Its work has been anything but, with as many as 26 partners involved, all haggling for their own aims. Originally launched in 2003, the organisation has been bogged down in negotiations and infighting.
Years later, it is still not quite ready to start laying cable. But competition is a wonderful thing: Seacom's rapid progress has clearly spurred some action. In October last year, a new British CEO, Chris Wood, was appointed to run West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC), an offshoot of Eassy formed by 11 of the 26 carriers invested in the project, with the intention of actually getting things moving. Wood is determined to get the $260 million, 1.4Tbps cable delivered as fast as possible. But though his operation has noticeably picked up the pace of development recently, it is all but out of the running for being first to market. It currently plans to start laying cable in September. At best, it will launch by mid-2010 - a full year after Seacom.
Regardless of which cable rival gets there first, the ultimate winner will be African consumers. This sudden injection of competition will cause prices to fall steeply over the next few years, and the quality of connectivity will be radically improved as soon as the fibre is lit. Entrepreneurs such as Cassar will relocate their servers back home; consumers will watch video online and not need to check the size of email attachments; new companies will launch without their competitiveness being stifled by the frightening figures in the "internet access" column of their business plans. Right now, they're keeping close tabs on the cables' progress.
Deep below the waves somewhere off the coast of Africa, a bright-yellow six tonne box-shaped object, about the size of a small military tank and bristling with wires, lights and gadgetry, is trying to take hold of a submarine cable lying on the seabed.
This is the Tyco Resolute's remote operated vehicle, or ROV - and one of the coolest toys imaginable. It has rubberised tracks to drive about on the ocean floor as well as thrusters on its sides, enabling it to fly like an undersea helicopter. On its front, two metallic arms are reaching out, with claws on the end of them scrabbling to grab hold of the cable. The action is being watched through two circular cameras mounted on the ROV's snout, which make it distinctly resemble Wall·E.
Suddenly, a shark drifts into view and glides across the screen of the ROV-cam, towards the cable. Without warning, its jaws yawn open lazily to take a casual bite into the line. Paco Rego, the ship's engineer in charge watching from within the container- shaped ROV control room up on the deck, is powerless to do anything but watch in amusement. What's in it for the shark? One theory is that they are attracted by the electric current running through the cable.
But in reality no one really knows. Sharks are just one of the many natural enemies of the modern sub-sea cable. Other common predators include rocks, ship anchors, fishing nets and just about anything else that can drag along the seabed and snag it. In January 2008, a cable break in the Mediterranean that disrupted internet connections across the Middle East and India was blamed in part on a six-tonne abandoned anchor cutting into the line.
To guard against these threats, submarine cables become increasingly thick as they get nearer to shore, wrapped up in polycarbonate-and-steel armour plate to protect them. From about 1,000m deep and all the way up to shore, they're buried in a trench anything from one to three metres deep. Primarily this is done with an enormous 35-tonne plough which is literally dragged behind the boat from a huge winch. It has skids on either side to stabilize it, with an "umbilical" cord running back to the ship and into the plough's control room, giving the operator a live view of what's happening half a mile down via manoeuvrable seacams. As the plough cuts into the seabed, it drops the submarine cable into the trench and leaves the current to fill in the trench afterwards.
Race or not, laying a submarine internet cable is an exercise in great precision. Every metre of the journey, every branch coming off and every repeater along the way is planned in advance. One of the key calculations is the precise length of the cable itself.
This is trickier than it may sound: a detailed marine survey has to be conducted before the first metre of cable is assembled, which maps exactly what kind of surface the cable will rest on - from ridges jutting out to cracks and crevices dropping away. The cable has to be laid on a route that avoids sudden changes in gradient, to prevent it bending too far and damaging the fibres inside it. Tectonic plates are also avoided. Once all this is calculated, the ship will have a total margin of error of less than 50 metres over the course of thousands of miles of cable.
In turn, this raises the question of slack. Out to sea, the cable has to be reeled out a mile or so from the ship, before it even touches the sea floor. Ocean currents need to be taken into account before determining exactly where the ship should be positioned so the cable lands where it should.
The Resolute is no clumsy tanker when it comes to control: it works with a dynamic positioning system, controlling two propellers and two thrusters (it has no rudder - three of the four propellers and thrusters can be rotated 360° to control its direction of movement). The vessel can be held to a precise GPS-coordinated position, to an accuracy of less than one metre. "Well, that's the theory anyway," says Nieto. "In the real world, it depends on the wind, ocean currents and the quality of the satellite signal." Out at sea, the Tyco Resolute's connectivity with the rest of the world is actually identical to that of Kenya's today: totally reliant on satellite. This means it is slow, expensive, sets limits on the email sizes that crew can send and receive - and doesn't always work.
The dirt road out to one of Kenya's main satellite data transmission hubs is chaotic. Huge craters dot the road, around which cars, trucks and cyclists swerve madly. Our car jerks and jolts along, and brief stretches of tar, few and far between, come like power-ups in a video game, offering a brief respite from the bumping and dust. We're only about six miles east of Nairobi, but the journey feels as if it is 30 miles long. The traffic is awful; we stop entirely at some parts and switch off the engine. It makes for an inauspicious route into the hub through which a significant percentage of all of Kenya's internet traffic passes, beamed out to invisible satellites whizzing by in the bright blue skies above.
The array of 12 dishes is situated within a business park, which is primarily occupied by a tyre manufacturer - equipping Kenyans for an altogether different kind of highway. Security is relatively light, although a fence surrounds the park and we have to sign in at one of the gates. The dishes themselves sit on a patch of rocky soil, surrounded by a waist-high wire fence and a solitary guard.
As soon as the sub-sea cable lands, this will become the past, a reminder of how Kenya used to get online. Of course, it won't be decommissioned, but will remain as a back-up connection.
This hub is the property of KDN, the network firm that has been rolling out fibre links across Kenya. It is run by Kai Wulff, a hyperactive 40-year-old German expatriate who looks younger than his age. He settled with his family in the country more than ten years ago after "retiring" in his late 20s from an internet company he owned in Germany. That itself came after a stint in the German Special Forces, the equivalent of the British SAS, which did covert ops in Russia during the perestroika period. "Even the German military did that stuff, during the good years of the Cold War, when you still had the good guys and bad guys," he grins. Still an action man, he often pilots a plane down to his beach home in Mombasa to go shark diving. His hyperactivity extends to his plans for KDN. He speaks at high speed about wiring up not only Kenya, but also several surrounding countries, with a fibre-optic cable ring. He's also the first large-scale customer of Seacom in Kenya, having secured a 15-year 10Gbps slot on the cable for a cool $100 million. "This will give us a raw price of..." He umms momentarily as he does a mental calculation. "...about $68 per Mbps per month, or thereabouts." KDN will retail this for about $600 initially.
This sounds an enormous mark-up, but the company's $100 million investment is banking on a major expansion in local demand. "Right now the complete retail market is 1GB in size. I have to sell 6GBs to break even. So I'm taking a huge risk." He believes the retail price will halve within two years, before falling steadily further over time.
As it happens, Wulff has been an early buyer in to every company that promises to deliver a cable link into the country. He invested $100,000 into Eassy years back and owns a ten per cent stake in Teams. He even came close to convincing Flag Telecom (now Reliance Globalcom) to build a link, which he says could have been live by late 2007, before they changed their minds and backed out.
Ultimately, he doesn't care who delivers the bandwidth, as long as it comes. He's the guy who will be responsible for creating the link between the end of the sub-sea cable landing at Mombasa and farmers like Gerald Maruhi hundreds of miles inland. "My business is to make sure there is a pipe with good water, to go into my water-distribution system," he says.
While the submarine cables are being laid, KDN is wasting no time: rolling out fibre links to Kampala in Uganda, building redundant rings around Kenya, linking into Tanzania, Rwanda and other countries. Wulff eventually aims to go all the way to the west coast of Africa. Along the way, he sets up WiMAX transmitters, which in turn help connect cyber cafés such as Wa- Nicks to the network. "I pay for my cable because I drop it off at every stupid mast that I find on the way to make small, small money here and there. We charge less than what you charge in Europe, but if I can pick up 100 of those masts on a 1,200km stretch, it's a nice cost contribution," he says, broad grin still on his face.
But providing a WiMAX link alone in Africa doesn't fully solve the last-mile problem. Wulff's team has to deal with countless other issues before people can go online. "I am a security supplier somewhere, a power supplier somewhere, a water supplier somewhere.
I can't put a digital village there if people can't drink," he says. "My CTO does more energy solutions then he does network links." This leads his team to explore all kinds of approaches, such as a bicycle with PCs mounted on it under an umbrella, with a battery and a solar panel hooked on. His mission is to enable thousands of budding entrepreneurs to pick up his wireless signal and then act as a tiny hub for others, just as the Wa-Nicks cyber café does for the community around Nyeri. "Our vision is to have within two years, within walking distance of every Kenyan, a service provider that allows you to access relevant content," explains Wulff.
Not only that, but he plans to provide basic low-level wireless connectivity for free, via KDN's Butterfly-branded wireless mesh network. Anyone who logs on to the Butterfly portal today can access a range of local services, hosted by KDN. It feels broadly similar to how we used to surf the net in the mid-90s, accessing web portals, rather than search engines. But Wulff is determined to provide an accessible home for local partners to provide services - anything from weather and local malaria information to digitised birth certificates, given the country's lack of a centralised register. "If you imagine the impact you are having by providing a relatively basic system, then you can understand why I am so positive that people will come," he argues. A basic layer of localised services like this is needed first for the poorest consumers, he believes, and the rest of the net can come afterwards: "It is more relevant than seeing youporn.com," he grins. "That comes later."
A few miles around the coast from the harbour in Mombasa, the sea narrows into a thin channel, with apartment blocks and other buildings dotted on either side. Amid this, the imposing but heavily faded walls of Fort Jesus rise. Built by the Portuguese in the 16th century, it was intended to guard Mombasa's old port.
Today it is a museum and tourist attraction. But on the outer stretches of the land it occupies, past where the tourists would look, a brand new but similarly historic building is being constructed. It's the landing station for Seacom's cable, the first of its kind in Kenya. Peter Ouko, a 30-year-old Kenyan and one of the station's technical staff, is obviously proud of what is being done here. "People are really waiting for this," he says. "In Africa we've never seen anything like this. It's the first of its kind."
In principle, the basic elements of landing a submarine cable are simple. Step one is to find a nice beach, with a coral-free shoreline that slopes gently out to sea, ideally in an area devoid of cargo ships, fishing boats or anything with long metal extrusions. In reality, this is quite tricky. The best spots often lie on protected environmental areas. Just off the coast of Tanzania, for example, is a huge coral reef, which has to be entirely avoided, adding many miles to the journey.
Once the landing station has been set up, it's on to step two: building the pre-laid shore end. This is the final section of the cable that is dragged out to sea manually, usually in waters that are too shallow for the main cable-laying ship to operate in. The cable is bedecked with buoys to help it float, while a crew of highly skilled divers run it out to sea. Operating from a customised barge, the crew wields a range of interesting weapons, including a kind of high-pressure water gun that will be used to blast a trench for the cable. Once the trench is ready, the divers cut the line from the buoys and guide the cable into its final resting place before blasting sand over it.
Back on shore, step three involves terminating the cable within the beach manhole. This is much as it sounds: you open up a steel manhole cover to find a small room with concrete walls and floor.
The cable itself is clamped into a reinforced wall. Its precious hair-thin fibre strands and the copper line that powers it are now finally separated, exposed and then wired into the racks of server equipment within the station. Here, finally, the journey of a single 8,400-mile line of high-capacity, high bandwidth fibre-optic cable comes to an end. Other cables will now pick up the journey, heading inland to other destinations - providing hope and new opportunities.
Korogocho is one of the poorest and most under-resourced slums in Nairobi, if not the world. It lies on the east side of the city, with just a thin, shallow stream separating it from a vast dumping ground. Ragged men, women and children pick through the vast mounds of rotting junk, trying to retrieve plastic bags, which they wash in a stream before selling to recycling centres. Two bags fetch one shilling (less than a penny); it can take most of the day under blazing sun to fetch and wash enough bags for a meal. It could be a scene straight out of Slumdog Millionaire, just without the Bollywood soundtrack. Over 150,000 people call this place home, most of them unemployed. It's the last place you would expect to find a thriving internet centre.
About a quarter of a mile back from the stream, weaving through rows of shacks and tiny stalls, all held together by nails, wood, metal sheets and prayers, you come across a shabby but solid-looking brick building. This is the Korogocho Satellite Centre, run by a community organisation that works to try to uplift the local area. The building hosts a small school, a tiny library and a "digital centre", a room with about ten PCs. This is another of Kenya's digital villages. The focus here isn't on casual web browsing: even at a rate of less than one shilling per minute, it's all but unaffordable for most. Instead, this aims to be a skills-development centre, with a focus on jump-starting the entrepreneurial spirit that abounds here. Volunteers guide local youths through courses to develop ICT and business skills, and would-be students make whatever contributions they can.
Livingstone Mwangi is one of the students. A shy 23-yearold, he grew up making a tough living from the trash. He focused on selling scrap metal, carefully saving the proceeds to open a new business: a stall selling cosmetic goods, such as soap and hairbrushes. This income is helping to pay for his studies in graphic design. "My prayer is that when my business is well established, I can take a guy from Korogocho and put him there, so I can continue with my graphics," he explains. "You see, I want to be a graphic designer."
The prospect of being a designer is something that was unimaginable in Korogocho a short time ago. And Mwangi is just one of 105 young people who have undergone training so far. Forty-five have gone on to create some kind of business, says Abdi Mohammed, a volunteer who helps run the centre. "The intention is to train young people in how to enhance their livelihoods and improve their lives," he says from his desk. "They come in here to use the machines and the internet, so that they can make a better living."
Places like Korogocho and the coffeengrowing area of Nyeri aren't the most likely sources for traffic whizzing through the sub-sea cable being laid by Captain Alejandro Fernández and the crew of the Tyco Resolute. But people like Livingstone Mwangi, the youthful graphic designer, and Gerald Maruhi, the ageing coffee farmer, provide a vibrant example of the creative potential that exists within Africa. They're waiting for this line to be thrown across the digital divide, making internet access to the continent easier, cheaper and more reliable. To them, it doesn't matter which cable company wins the race - it only matters that they get there.
James Watson is a managing editor with the Economist Intelligence Unit in London.
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