Leaders to Achieve MDGs Earlier

from All Africa

Highway Africa News Agency (Grahamstown)

By David Kezio-Musoke

With fewer than eight years left, African leaders who attended the 'Connect Africa' summit in Kigali, Rwanda worry that the continent is at a serious risk of not achieving the UN designated Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) by the targeted deadline of 2015.

Leaders meeting in Kigali including host President Paul Kagame, Bingu wa Mutharika of Malawi, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso, Ismail Omar Guelleh of Djibouti, Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi and the Swazi Deputy Prime Minister Constance Simelane, said the target of achieving the UN's MDGs should be pulled closer from 2015 to 2012 as a way of catalyzing the process of achieving them.

Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza presented the state of ICTs in his country, saying there are only 50,000 computers connected to the internet in Burundi. He appealed for massive investments.

Dr Hamadoun Touré, Secretary-General of the UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said that if the MDG dream should be achieved African leaders should seek investment than aid. He said the summit projected a tune of US $300 billion to be invested in ICT projects in Africa by 2012.

Governments along with industry, development banks and international organizations gathered in Kigali to mobilize the human, financial and technical resources required to expand development of ICT infrastructure and ensure it is used effectively in pursuit of the UN development goals for Africa.

The 'Connect Africa' summit was organized by ITU and hosted under the patronage of President Kagame, as a multi-stakeholder initiative with an intention to accelerate the implementation of the MDGs.

The eight MDGs - which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 - form a blueprint and were agreed upon by all UN's 192 member states and all the world's leading development institutions.

Touré said that since 33 percent of Africans are employed in the ICT world, the summit had a goal of pushing sub-Saharan Africa to interconnect all African capitals with ICT broadband infrastructure and strengthen connectivity to the rest of the world by 2012 as well as interconnect major African cities by 2015.

"The summit adopted key regulatory measures to have e-strategies including cyber-security using accessible technologies in each country in Africa by 2012," Touré said.

This prompted the ITU to sign a Memorandum of understanding with the African Development Bank (AfDB) to collaborate on interconnecting of all African capitals with broadband Internet by 2012.

The World Bank Group in a parallel event announced a double in its commitment to ICTs in Africa to US$ 2 billion by the proposed year of 2012 from its current investment program of US $1 billion over the past five years.

Henny Rahardja of the World Bank in Washington DC, told the East African that, "this money will continue to promote private sector participation, while supporting public private partnerships to address market gaps, with an emphasis on affordable high speed Internet."

At the summit ITU and Microsoft launched an online platform to track ICT development.

Leaders heard from experts that in order to achieve the Millennium Declaration, African nations have to develop business models tailored to meet the needs of emerging market consumers.

Tarek Kamel, Egypt's Minister of Communications and Information Technology said that the African mobile market should account for its share of the mobile telephone growth.

"This growth is from 198 million in 2006 and it is projected to reach 278 million subscribers by the end of 2007," he said.

Rural connectivity in Africa continues to be weak. Given that an estimated two-thirds of Africans live in rural areas, the World Bank estimates show that some 57 percent of the total population in 24 sub-Saharan African countries will be covered by a mobile signal in 2007.

The ITU also estimates that less than 3 percent of sub-Saharan African villages had fixed line services, while under 0.5 percent of them had a public Internet facility.

ITU says that today Africa accounts for less than 0.4 percent of the world's total broadband subscribers and only 3.9 percent of the world?s Internet users. In contrast mobile subscribers outnumber fixed line subscribers by more than six to one and over a fifth, 21 percent of Africans now subscribe to mobile service.
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