Africa: After 25 Years of Internet, Continent Looks Up to Diaspora, Techies Again

On October 24 last year, Africa celebrated 25 years, or the silver jubilee, since the arrival of the internet on its soil — at 3am on the same date in 1994.

The main highlight was a webinar hosted by Kenya, presided over by the then-Broadcasting and Telecommunications Principal Secretary Esther Koimett.

Other dignitaries in attendance were the newly-appointed first woman chief executive of the London-based Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO), from the Caribbean, chief executive of the African Telecommunication Union, CEOs of the Communications Authority of Kenya and the ICT Authority of Kenya and private sector executives. Also present were the living dozen African internet pioneers, nicknamed, ‘Internauts’ by CTO in 2010.

Kenya was among the very first, if not the first, Sub-Saharan African country to land real-time internet through the African Regional Centre for Computing (ARCC) on Ngong Road, Nairobi, with the support of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and then-UK Overseas Development Agency (ODA).

A narrow-band ‘leased line’ then cost $16,000 (Sh1.6 million) per month, and only had a capacity of 9,600 bits per second. The current internet bandwidth coming into our homes or offices are at least 2 Mega-Bit/second, being thousands of times faster.

ODA, through Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, absorbed part of the leased line costs on a reducing scale for three years, but NSF provided the initial equipment, dispatching it to Nairobi-based world renowned US internet freak Randy Bush, of RainNet.

Before, all e-mails to and from Kenya came through a store-and-forward server in one of my bedrooms that would poll an internet service provider (ISP), GreenNet, in London, initially every Wednesday at midnight, which subsequently increased to once daily and, ultimately, hourly.

Subscribers would dial into our server(s) to download and pick up their mails as people do with a post office.

Kenya’s first website

Services added later included dispatching daily news summaries to Kenyans abroad, especially in North America and Europe, internet training for adults and children and simple websites for clients.

Notably, Kenya’s first website was designed and developed by someone without hands, Godfrey Ipalei, currently IT manager at Kenya Wildlife Service.

As the fourth (and fifth) industrial revolutions beckon with the digital economy the ‘new normal’ following the Covid-19 pandemic, the true import and value of the internet has never been as evident.

The global network has also been tested to its limits. The need for quality, fast and affordable internet has never been greater and more urgent.

Regrettably, 60 per cent of Africans still don’t have affordable, quality internet despite its being a necessity. The pioneers are working with other partners to close the gap with the mantra of the UN sustainable development goal of ‘leaving no one behind’. Governments, development partners, private corporations, professionals and the diaspora will be a major cog in the wheels of success.

It is the diaspora who brought the internet to Kenya (and Sub-Saharan Africa). They not only brought back the skills and technology, but also assembled and distributed modems and refurbished computers that helped thousands of schools, researchers, SMEs and NGOs to hook up.

By the time the Rural Schools Computer Project ended in mid 2000, more than 11,000 new and refurbished computers (mainly desktops but also laptops) had been donated to schools courtesy of Delta College, Michigan, Rift Valley Institute for Science and Technology and ARCC.

‘Full’ internet had come to Africa earlier, in 1991 — to apartheid South Africa (then under blockade) through Rhodes University, Grahamstown, and Tunisia. However, Sub-Sahara Africa is a different world altogether.

With newer, emerging demands and innovations like Internet of Things (IoT), digital currency and blockchain, the work is well cutout once more for the diaspora and techies.

The author is the global chairperson, Kenya Diaspora Alliance.