Broadband for African Universities

Calestous Juma

Calestous Juma and Elisabeth Moyer have an editorial in the June 6th edition of Science. They call for an effort to establish adequate broadband Internet networks serving African universities. They write:

Imagine a major research university with tens of thousands of students trying to access the Internet through a single U.S. household connection. That is the present situation in most African universities. Students there theoretically have access to Science through several journal archives for the developing world. In practice, most could never download it.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the most digitally isolated region in the world, with a bandwidth per capita that is only 1% of the world average and 0.2% of that in the United States. Not surprisingly, sub-Saharan Africa also has among the highest connectivity costs in the world. Its universities pay some 50 times more for bandwidth than do similar institutions in the United States, and connectivity cost per gross domestic product is almost 2000 times higher than in the United States. The resulting isolation of Africa's students from the remainder of the world is a serious impediment to both education and economic development.