African ICT summit opens in Ghana

Dr Edmund Katiti, Resident Policy and Regulatory Advisor of the NEPAD E-Africa Commission has reiterated that the private sector continued to view broadband infrastructure as a public good and were therefore reluctant to invest in its development.

Speaking at the 7th ICT Africa summit held in Accra, Dr Katiti said efforts to ensure that the African continent had its own connectivity had registered some progress but "sadly, the principles of basic broadband infrastructure is being viewed as a public good and so investors in infrastructure do not look to its huge benefits."

Dr Katiti explained that the public good principle when applied in roads is such that even when the private companies built the roads, the toll charges are regulated so that the cost of the good in that infrastructure is not prohibitive to users.

He said the other option to develop ICT broadband infrastructure was the public private partnership principle recommended by a team of experts to the NEPAD e-Africa Commission but observed that what was left was for a protocol to be signed by the countries of origin to underpin such cooperation if that option is chosen.

Currently the sub marine cable is located at the western coast of Africa. The Commission is spearheading the construction of the cable along the Eastern and Southern African corridors. The objective is to link the western to the eastern and southern coasts.

When the two networks are completed, then Africa would have its own long awaited network connectivity.

Opening the summit, Communications Minister designate, Dr Benjamin Aggrey Ntim said, the leaders of the continent had the mandate to develop adequate, sufficient and efficient distribution of frequencies and spectrum in the region.

He said Africa did not need any conviction to realise that it was through ICTs that the continent could develop.

"The important thing is what we have managed to bring on board the leadership of the continent to help devise means of reaching our gaols."

The Minister said during the just ended AU summit held from the 1st of July 2007, the heads of state were informed about ICT developments and briefed on the fact that the area of ICT was one of the priority areas. The summit therefore adopted ICTs as a landing path for moving on in the coming years.

"We also note we missed the industrial revolution but this time round we are going to get on board and use this to leap to join the best of other continents to develop our continent for the benefit of our people."

During the AU summit, Ghana and South Africa committed resources to an infrastructure development fund aimed to fund projects including ICTs and road networks to promote trade in the African region.

Dr Aggrey Ntim said Ghana had recently began to implement its ICT policy but noted that as with many other programmes, the nation encountered the first bottleneck which has to do with broadband.

"As soon as you begin to get the involvement of the population at large, you realise that if you don?t have adequate bandwidth, you cannot have internet as a stepping stone for dissemination of information between government and its citizens and also with the private sector."

The fact is that one cannot have adequate bandwidth for developing the various sectors particularly, education and health sectors, the Minister added.

He therefore welcomed the idea of the annual ICT African summit which he said was useful for discussing the topic on finding out how to build up bandwidth in each country and more importantly how to move on to developing trade regionally and internationally.

The summit was organised by Kemilink International, an ICT consultancy firm based in the United Kingdom.

This year's summit was on the theme: "Strategies for low cost broadband access in Africa."

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