http://allafrica.com/stories/201304291976.html
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Kampala, Uganda — Africa is making notable steps in adopting Information Technology (IT), but the continent is consuming far more content than it is creating.

This means that as a consumer of over 99% of IT content, Africa continues to incur high costs when buying broadband. This also means missing out on the benefits that come from the IT sector.

Brahima Sanou, the Director of Telecommunication Development Bureau at the Geneva- based International Telecommunications Union (ITU) was recently giving the keynote speech at the regional ICT conference in Kampala.

He said that the continent needs to create more content so as to benefit from the IT infrastructure it was developing.

"The challenge for Africa is to create content that would add value to the population. If Africa is to benefit from broadband penetration, it should promote innovation as well as create content," he said.

He added that the services that are currently manually given to the citizens would be more effective and easily accessible if automated.

"No woman should pass away when giving life, because information is all around us. No epidemic should get out of hand because information was not properly disseminated yet we have over 50% mobile coverage," Sanou said, before adding, "Today ICT is not about hardware, software or GBs. It's about the people... rural persons, senior citizens. Let's give a human face to ICT."

Michuki Mwangi the Regional Development Manager - Africa at the Internet Society says that East Africa needs to adopt a collective approach towards reducing the cost of broadband access.

He said that the governments should take the lead and automate all services which would make it easier and cheaper for citizens. Eventually this would reduce the overall cost of broadband.

"The reason we have slowed down in growing internet usage and internet penetration is because of the relevance of the content available to us. Right now the only significant benefit from the internet is social," he said.

Mwangi said Africa currently has an 'Internet Transit Deficit' because the amount of content produced is lower than the amount of content it gets from outside. This makes the cost of broadband access high, because of the mismatch unless more local content is created. He told the East African Business Week on the sidelines of the conference that the solution to that bridging that deficit lies with the governments automating all services to their citizens.

"The biggest content provider in Africa who is untapped is the government. Currently a lot of transactions that people carry out are with government. Between 40-60% of the activities that most businesses engage in are with government.

"If all government services were therefore online, there would be a significant push on. When governments for instance make it easier for businessmen to file their returns, the compliance levels would be high and more revenue would be created," Mwangi stated.

He pointed out that with mobile payments already in place, governments would benefit if they created some synergy between the two platforms.

"It will be very transparent, less corruption and more revenue will be collected. So there is a clear business principal there and for the end users there would be the convenience aspect." He however says that the region should ensure that barriers to operators are eliminated to ensure that the costs remain low.

According to Mwangi, the bureaucratic processes involved end up hiking the cost of putting fibre on the ground. As a result, the fibre becomes expensive when it becomes active.

"In a region where the labour costs are very low, why is the cost of putting fibre on the ground very high? The regulations and policies in place make it difficult for the operators to access right of way and it becomes even tougher to put it across borders.

You find that by the time somebody has the rights of way they have spent more than 50% of the cost of putting the fibre on the ground."