Document(s) 6 of 13

African policymakers face many economic, social, and political challenges as they seek to improve material living standards and quality of life in Africa and undertake their task of transforming the continent in a complex, rapidly changing, and uncertain environment. Having observed the positive impacts of science and technology (S&T) and in particular the revolution in information and communication technologies (ICTs) in wealthier nations, policymakers in Africa are turning their attention to this area of economic activity. Unfortunately, decision-makers have few directly comparable examples to assist them in developing ICT policies supportive of sustainable development. The challenge of harnessing ICTs for development is difficult and encompasses many issues.

The United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD) captured some of the issues of concern for developing countries seeking to secure the benefits of the so-called ICT revolution:
 

ICTs do not offer a panacea for social and economic development. There are risks of unemployment and social and economic dislocation, and these may lead policy makers to give lower priority to the need to create effective national ICT strategies. However, on the basis of the evidence, it is apparent that the risks of failing to participate in the ICT revolution are enormous. Failure to give priority to ICT strategies that enable developing countries and countries in transition both to develop their national infrastructures and to join the GII [global information infrastructure] will exacerbate the gap between rich and poor. There is a growing need to evaluate the social and economic impacts of ICTs and to create opportunities for capacity building that will ensure their beneficial use and absorption within national economies and civil society.

This chapter is concerned with strategies to secure the potential economic benefits of ICTs for all groups in society. As I will show, without a gender perspective the potential benefits of ICTs may bypass girls and women. The economic benefits for girls and women in terms of enhanced income-generation opportunities, employment, and improved quality of life are tremendous, but because technologies are not gender neutral, I will also be concerned with advocating ICT strategies to reduce and manage the potential for ICTs to create economic and social exclusion and reinforce existing social disparities. In other parts of the world this dual character of ICTs — their ability to simultaneously produce economic benefits and social dislocation — is coming under increasing scrutiny from academics and other critical thinkers, and their insights are beginning to influence the policy debate.

Ventura (1997) presented a very clear argument that wealthy countries must act, in partnership with the developing world, to prevent the global information society from causing social dislocations. The United Nations University Institute for New Technologies (UNU–INTECH) has a research program to investigate aspects of this problem. Mitter (1999) presented the findings from that research program. The European Commission mandated the High-level Expert Group (HLEG) to explore issues in using ICTs to foster social embeddedness (HLEG 1997). HLEG’s analyses have influenced policy-making at the European, national, and regional levels.

The central purpose of this chapter is to outline strategies to introduce a gender dimension into national ICT policies. This has been a missing element of ICT policy formulation and implementation to date. The analysis will show that, on efficiency and equity grounds, such gender considerations are vitally important. ICT policy-making is no different from other important areas of social and economic development, such as economic justice, human rights, and access to education. It also needs to be considered in its gender dimensions.

As many of the other chapters in this volume confirm, the vast majority of African women live in rural settings, endure dire levels of poverty, and face cultural and legal barriers to exercising and enjoying their human rights. Annex 1 of this chapter is from World Bank (1997). It provides a concise statement of the strategic objectives for gender and development in Africa. Although a small proportion of African women enjoy fairly high levels of income and have access to education, training, and other societal resources, the desired positive impact of ICTs will not be realized for women if access to the transformative role of these technologies is restricted to this small, privileged group. All of Africa’s women and men should have the opportunity to benefit from ICTs. Ensuring equitable treatment for men and women will require concerted effort and will exert considerable demands on the institutional capacity of Africa’s policymakers. The analysis and recommendations presented here are intended to assist policymakers who are willing and committed to reorienting ICT policy to take account of the needs, aspirations, and constraints of both men and women in African societies.

ICTs as a multilevel phenomenon

The ICT sector is a heterogeneous collection of industry and service activities, including information-technology equipment and services, telecommunications equipment and services, media and broadcast, Internet service providers (ISPs), libraries, commercial information providers, network-based information services, and related specialized professional services. Figure 1 shows the segments making up the composite ICT sector.

Figure 1. Segments of the ICT (industry and technology) system.
Source: Mansell and Wehn (1998).

As a direct consequence of the sprawling nature of ICTs or perhaps as a result of the difficulty one encounters in defining the ICT sector with any precision, policy-making in this sector is very diffuse. The main policy-making actors include government ministries — which are usually responsible for setting overall policy objectives and direction for other agencies — and independent regulatory bodies, which implement policy directives and are responsible for operational management of the regulatory system. (In wealthy countries, an array of technical and research organizations assist and advise these decision-making and implementation agencies.) In addition to organizations operating at the national level, many regional and international organizations are involved in ICT policy-making. International organizations, such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and other agencies within the United Nations system formulate policy recommendations and set standards for international best practice.

Policymakers are also influenced by private industry, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), trade associations, professional bodies, and the intellectual community. The regularity, format, and nature of the consultation between policymakers and these groups of stakeholders vary considerably across countries.

This chapter recommends an active interventionist vision for ICT policy-making in Africa. Achieving this objective will not be without problems, but without such a vision there is no hope of realizing the benefits of ICTs. Action is required at various levels of society to ensure that the potential benefits of these technologies are available to African women as well as men and that girls and women do not suffer dislocations as a result of this fundamental shift in organizational and production technologies. The analysis contained in this chapter and in its supporting annexes provides justification and possible direction for policy intervention.

The next section maps out the current state of national ICT policy-making in Africa and provides a brief historical review of the landmarks in this policy-making. It more closely examines the process of ICT policy-making in four countries — Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda — providing details of the policy-making apparatus, assessing the challenges facing policymakers, and reviewing their successes in each of these countries. This is particularly important for making an up-to-date assessment of African policymakers’ success in accounting for social variables and, in particular, gender considerations in their ICT policies and programs.

The third section discusses in detail how gender considerations can be taken into account in national ICT policies and sets out clear arguments in support of taking these actions. Finally, the concluding section summarizes the recommendations and actions required for various sets of actors involved in formulating and implementing ICT policies.

Understanding ICT policy

This section sets out a simple framework for understanding ICT policy, reviews the status of national policy formulation and implementation in the ICT sector in an international context, and, finally, presents some empirical findings on how African nations are formulating policy for the ICT sector. At the outset, it is important to note that only fairly recently have efforts been made to define the boundaries of the ICT sector, measure its contribution to national economic output, understand precisely the interaction between this sector and other social and economic activities, and design its policy instruments. Policy intervention in the ICT sector is very much a work in progress. Conceptual frameworks, systems of data collection, policy tools, indicator construction, and evaluation methodologies are all very rudimentary. As a result, in developed and developing countries alike, real change in the structure and functioning of the ICT sector outpaces policy intervention, and therefore the environment for long-term and day-to-day policy decisions is uncertain, rapidly changing, and ever more complex. Some of the basic concepts and terms used in the rest of the analysis are defined in the following subsection.
 

Definition of ICT policy

A national ICT policy is an integrated set of decisions, guidelines, laws, regulations, and other mechanisms geared to directing and shaping the production, acquisition, and use of ICTs. Because the ICT sector is heterogeneous, extending beyond traditional classifications of industrial or services sectors and because production and diffusion of ICTs are of equal importance, national policies in the ICT sector intersect with a number of other areas of policy-making — technology, media, industrial, and telecommunications policy. Figure 2 shows these areas of intersection among the various policy spheres. Individual countries design their ICT policies according to prevailing objectives, values, and cultural practice. Figure 3 presents a schematic of the various actors involved in ICT policy-making.

Figure 2. Relationship between ICT policy and other areas development policy.
Source: UNCSTD (1997).
 
 

Figure 3. Key agents in policy-making processes. Source: UNCSTD (1997).

Policy-making processes and institutions in the ICT sector

The key elements of policy-making in the ICT sector are the context, or the environmental factors, and policy objectives, tools, and outcomes. As discussed in the introductory section, the lead actors in this system are policy-makers, whose actions directly and indirectly influence other agents in the system — producers and users of ICTs. These elements, working together, constitute the system of policy intervention.
 

ICT policy-making outside Africa

This subsection reviews the context for ICT policy formulation in the wealthiest countries and describes the policy tools they use. UNCSTD’s summary of the best-practice guidelines for formulating ICT policy in developing countries is then considered. The material in this section provides important background for the more detailed discussion of African ICT policy initiatives, not only because this provides a contrast but also because international approaches influence the definition and implementation of policies in Africa.
 

The context for ICT policy-making in the member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

The environment for policy decisions is changing dramatically. For example, in the last two decades, the economic structure of the world’s wealthiest countries has been significantly restructured. In the member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the services sectors have overtaken the industrial and agricultural sectors as the main source of national income. Major changes have also occurred at the firm level: organizational processes, values, and cultures have all changed fundamentally, which has significantly altered employment conditions, job requirements, management practices, and sources of competitive advantage. In addition to the changes within individual countries and companies, a restructuring has occurred in the international economic system. Some of the features of change in international economic relations include a significant increase in the level of international integration among countries, which has resulted in an ever increasing volume of trade in goods and services, increased internationalization of production processes and multinational ownership of major companies, and globalization of sources of investment capital.

A parallel process of fundamental technological change has accompanied these sectoral shifts, changes in firm organization, and increased internationalization. It is unimportant, for this discussion, to dwell on the direction of causality. It is far more important to emphasize that technological, organizational, structural, and institutional changes have contributed equally to a very complex evolution of the world economic system.

As the processes of economic restructuring, internationalization of production and capital flows, and changes in organizational systems have taken root in the world’s wealthiest countries, concomitant changes have occurred in the demand for information-technology-intensive equipment and services. Structural and organizational changes in wealthy economies have led to dramatic increases in the demand for powerful computational devices for office automation, transaction processing, control of production processes, and a host of other applications. Decentralized production systems and increases in internationalization of investment flows and funding sources have stimulated and fueled demand for advanced communication networks with the capacity to deliver vast quantities of information in a variety of formats in real time. The increased disintermediation and growing complexity of the services sectors have resulted in a plethora of information providers and value-added service providers. This, then, is the context for ICT policy decisions in wealthy countries. In this setting, it is assumed that supply constraints are surmountable, and the focus therefore shifts to shaping and directing the production and use of ICTs to maximize the potential benefits of these technologies. Policy intervention is increasingly directed to managing the social consequences of ICTs, in addition to maximizing their benefits, such as the production of wealth, job creation, increased productivity, and the facilitation of technological innovation (OECD 1992, 1996).
 

Development of policy tools in the OECD countries

Despite the difficulties, OECD countries have made some progress in developing ICT policy tools, and most OECD countries — as well as some exceptional developing countries, such as Singapore — have institutional frameworks, policy instruments, and policy-implementation processes for the ICT sector. In countries that have achieved progress in ICT policy-making, it is possible to identify several types of policy objectives — economic, technological, and sociopolitical. For example, in the economic sphere, OECD policymakers promote production, diffusion, and innovation in the ICT sector through a variety of instruments and processes, including the following:
 

• Competition policy, which aims to maintain or improve the competitiveness of the producers of ICT equipment and services and to promote competition in network and service provision, on the assumption that increased competition will stimulate increases in the range and quality of ICT goods and services and facilitate improvements in productivity while dampening price increases;

• Trade policy, which aims to increase the size of the accessible market by establishing free trade for ICT equipment and services in international markets; and

• Innovation and diffusion policies, which aim to increase the range of ICT services and to support rapid diffusion of ICT applications.

Similarly, in the technological sphere, OECD policymakers encourage advances in the foundation technologies that underpin the ICT sector. Therefore, they have designed policies to support and direct research and development (R&D) in core ICT technologies (computing, communications, and information management) and to ensure that theoretical and applied research lead to the design, planning, and execution of advanced communications infrastructure. The state’s policy-making role in technology has had both push and pull elements. The more traditional and long-standing aspect of state participation is to fund R&D and direct research. However, state agencies are also increasingly taking on the role of the facilitator, which requires systematic and accelerated learning. In this newer role, policymakers encourage the exchange of information between innovators, research producers, and ICT equipment and service providers; set standards for networking and definition of equipment and service; and, through regulatory intervention, encourage deployment of advanced technological solutions.

In the European OECD countries, policymakers have made major advances in articulating sociopolitical objectives for the ICT sector. An influential report of the HLEG recognized that ICTs can have undesirable social consequences and reinforce existing social inequities (HLEG 1997). In its analysis and recommendations, the report gave guidelines for ameliorating these negative effects.

OECD countries have invested financial and human resources to establish institutional machinery to achieve the economic, technological, and sociopolitical policy objectives discussed above. A national innovation system (NIS) is a system of institutions designed to foster innovation and manage technological change. An NIS can be specified at the country level, but it is also useful to identify subsystems within an NIS. The system for ICT policy formulation and implementation is one such subsystem. Using NIS terminology, one can then say that the system of innovation in the ICT sector consists of a web of institutions, processes, and mechanisms to produce, consume, and facilitate or direct the production and use of ICTs. To support these policy-making activities, OECD countries have developed institutional capabilities in research, analysis, collection of data, evaluation, and monitoring.
 

Best-practice guidelines for integrating ICTs and development

UNCSTD (1997) produced a comprehensive set of best-practice guidelines for ICT policy-making in developing countries. Topics covered are producing and using ICTs; developing human resources; managing ICTs for development; facilitating access to ICT networks; promoting and financing ICTs; creating and accessing S&T knowledge; monitoring and influencing the rules of the game in the global information society; and the role of the United Nations system. A full summary of these is provided in Mansell and When (1998).

UNCSTD concluded that developing countries need to intervene strategically if they are to successfully integrate ICTs and sustainable development. UNCSTD’s (1997) report outlined the scope of ICT policies as follows:
 

Effective national ICT strategies should support the introduction of the new regulatory frameworks, promote the selective production and use of ICTs and harness their diffusion so as to contribute to the development of organisational change in line with development goals. ICT strategies and policies linked to development objectives need to redefine sectoral policies, institutions and regulations, taking into account the need to be responsive to the convergence of telecommunication, audio-visual and computing technologies.

• Establish a task force or commission to develop a national ICT strategy that identifies priorities, mechanisms for continuous updating, and procedures for implementation.

• Involve as many stakeholders as possible in the formulation of a national ICT strategy, and encourage partnerships for implementing elements of the strategy. An important aspect of these partnerships would be to secure external financing from multinational companies, governments of the OECD countries, bilateral donors, and multilateral and regional financial institutions.

What the foregoing shows is that all policymakers, in wealthy and poor countries alike, make policy decisions for the ICT sector in a context of rapid and fundamental change and great uncertainty, and they each attempt to build institutions and mechanisms to assist them in this task. However, the differences in the settings facing the two sets of policymakers are also important. In wealthy nations, policymakers reasonably assume that supply constraints (levels of skills, knowledge, organizational capability, and financial resources) are surmountable and focus their policy interventions on the production and use of ICTs to maximize the benefits of these technologies. Increasingly, even in wealthy countries, policy intervention is also expanding to include management of the social consequences of ICTs, rather than restricting policy objectives to the economic benefits of ICTs. In poor countries, as will be shown for the African case, conditions differ markedly from those of rich countries. Although the international context influences policy-making in Africa, policymakers should take account of their local environments when setting objectives and undertaking interventions.
 

Development of African ICT policy

Context and objectives

The vast majority of African nations mainly participate in the ICT industry as consumers of equipment and services. A notable exception to this “consumption-only” approach is found in the national telecommunications carriers, which, up until recently, were state-owned companies, with nationals responsible for operation and management of telecommunications networks. In addition, except for Nigeria, South Africa, and possibly some of the North African countries, African nations have had very little R&D capability in ICTs, in either basic or applied research. Furthermore, the level of deployment of ICT equipment and networks in Africa is several orders of magnitude below that of wealthy countries.¹

Because of these environmental factors and the macroeconomic and social variations between Africa and other countries, the task for policymakers in the ICT sector differs significantly from that of their counterparts in wealthy nations. ICTs are produced and used under very different supply and demand conditions in these two settings. Many African nations have very low levels of per capita income, and this reduces effective demand for ICT services. Africa has not experienced the shifts in economic structure that have elsewhere given rise to the predominance of information-intensive and geographically decentralized services sectors. Thus, the major sources of economic output in the majority of African countries are the agriculture and mineral-production sectors. These sectors are not as information intensive as the services sectors — banking, retail, distribution, tourism, and professional services — which account for a rising share of national output in OECD countries. In addition to gloomy demand conditions, supply responses in the African ICT sector are not automatic, and when they are manifest, they operate at a slower pace than in wealthy economies. Therefore, policymakers in these poor developing countries must take action to stimulate and facilitate supply responses and to support diffusion. These supply responses would include generating skills, knowledge, financial resources, and organizational capabilities. Furthermore, the policy setting is not very conducive, as many governments in Africa operate under fiscal restraint, have a lack of experience in managing technological innovation in ICTs, have limited access to technological and organizational capabilities required to produce ICTs, and have very limited institutional resources.

Although the context for policy-making in the African ICT sector differs dramatically from that in the rest of the world, three main sets of external agents greatly influence the objectives of the African ICT sector: multilateral agencies, large donors, and international suppliers of ICT equipment and services. This introduces another level of complexity. Although African ICT policymakers lack experience of this sector, they must have sufficient intelligence, integrity, and self-confidence to identify and protect their national interests when negotiating with external agencies.

The case studies presented in the third section of this chapter provide evidence of good practice in national policy-making for the ICT sector, in which efforts are made to identify ICT applications to assist other broad-based development objectives. The following historical review tracks Africa’s progress in setting up the institutional mechanisms to undertake these important tasks of formulating and implementing policy.
 

A historical review of African ICT policy-making

The African Information Society Initiative (AISI) sets out the most important set of policy guidelines for national information policy in the African context. Annex 2 presents a summary of the background and main aims of AISI, as well as reviewing some of the important landmarks in ICT policy-making in Africa.
 

Empirical findings

Early studies of policy-making in informatics in African countries — Within the ambit of AISI and its forerunners, a number of studies have provided important research and analysis of the readiness of African countries to undertake policy interventions in the ICT sector. One such study reviewed informatics policy in 10 African countries: Cameroon, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. The study defined national informatics policy as a “plan for the development and optimal utilisation of information technology” and reported that limited financial resources, poor institutional capability, and inadequate access to human resources and technological know-how plague Africa’s attempts to harness ICTs (Browne 1996).

Interestingly, the study also identified a broad difference between the two language groups. Whereas none of the anglophone countries studied — Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, or Zimbabwe — had elaborated informatics policies, most of the francophone countries had defined them. However, the level of implementation varied considerably across the five francophone countries: Cameroon, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Madagascar, and Senegal.

Recent evidence: four case studies of national ICT policy-making — The early studies indicate only very moderate success in formulating and implementing ICT policies. A better understanding of how African countries have progressed toward best practice is presented in the four case studies — of Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda — in Annex 3. In assessing this recent material, I emphasize the extent of gender consideration in the ICT policy efforts already under way.

Data in this section come mainly from four sets of studies commissioned by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to provide background and planning material for its Acacia Initiative (Kataman 1997; Mureithi 1997; Musisi 1997; Nyiira 1997) (see also Acacia 1997a, b; IDRC 1997). IDRC has been an important donor for African ICT efforts. As a result, consultants commissioned by IDRC usually have access to key decision-makers and policymakers. These studies therefore provide a rich source of data. The analysis of these studies was designed to answer six basic questions:

• What are the leading organizations involved in formulating and implementing national ICT policies, and what are the basic documents and instruments used in their policy exercises?

• What are the main policy objectives and priorities for ICT policies in the four countries?

• What progress has been made in the implementation of ICT policy?

• What gaps remain in policy formulation or implementation, or both, and what challenges are still to be met?

• Do the national ICT policy documents identify and treat social objectives, and is gender equity one of the objectives or underlying principles of national ICT policies in these countries?

• What are the recommendations of the Acacia Initiative for ICT policy-making efforts?

The evidence from Africa shows that most countries have made only very modest gains in setting up national ICT policy institutions and that the new ICT policy-making mechanisms still integrate very few social considerations, including very few gender perspectives. However, the pace of change has accelerated dramatically in the last 18 months, and, as the next two sections will show, governments and other key actors can take steps to realize the potential benefits.

Strategies to incorporate gender considerations into ICT policy-making

The best approach to incorporating gender considerations into ICT policy-making would be to undertake two related types of improvement in parallel. The first, discussed in the previous section, would be to make ICT policies more effective; the second would be to develop comprehensive mechanisms to treat gender issues in all ICT policies and programs.

African women’s participation in the global information society is hindered by many challenges and barriers, such as infrastructure deficiencies, policy misdiagnoses, and the structural and cultural features of African societies. The analysis in this chapter integrates an assessment of these barriers into a discussion of the positive steps already taken at both the policy level and the microlevel to overcome these barriers. The first step in bringing about the desired changes would be to define an agenda of interventions that African women and their allies can use to make a gender-balanced information society a reality in Africa. In previous work (Marcelle 1999), I presented an agenda for this transformation, organizing key actions as follows:
 

• Focus public-policy intervention;

• Allocate ICT development resources to women;

• Provide and improve telecommunications infrastructure;

• Build technological capability (the human-resource component);

• Facilitate and encourage the involvement of women in technological innovation;

• Create culturally resonant content;

• Design and deliver appropriate training mechanisms; and

• Increase effective demand for ICT products and services.

This section of the chapter draws extensively on the conceptual analysis done to define a framework for building an information society conducive to African women’s active participation (Marcelle 1999). This treatment extends and updates that earlier work by taking account of the data provided in the Acacia country-strategy reports and reviewing progress made in policy implementation.
 

Focus public-policy intervention

Empirical research has confirmed that policy-making in technological fields often ignores the needs, requirements, and aspirations of women, unless gender analysis is included. Even when gender is introduced at a conceptual level, policymakers often rely on very poor, outdated, incomplete, and inaccurate data. Furthermore, women from developing countries are poorly represented in the national and international decision-making bodies that determine S&T policy, and this underrepresentation can lead to ineffective and gender-blind policy-making. To argue that gender analysis and awareness are important principles in ICT policy-making, African policymakers can draw on the recommendations of international initiatives, such as the UNCSTD Gender Working Group; the WomenWatch Expert Group (WomenWatch 1996); the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization–Society for International Development’s Women on the Net project (WON 1997); the Beijing Platform for Action; and the Commission for the Status of Women. As AISI and the Acacia Initiative make further progress, important policy guidelines specific to the African context are likely to emerge.

One of the first tasks of policy intervention must be to launch an awareness-raising campaign and training to sensitize ICT policymakers to gender-equity issues. It would also be important to concurrently sensitize gender and development policymakers to ICT issues. Opportunities for learning can be found in both these fields, but few programs meet the needs of both groups of important actors. In fact, often the units for ICT and development planning and promotion and those for gender-related programs operate separately, even within a single bureaucracy, and have little or no coordination.

The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) has demonstrated its willingness to bridge these institutional boundaries within its own organization and may well emerge as a source of expertise for African countries seeking to introduce similar initiatives. For its 40th Anniversary Conference — African Women and Economic Development: Investing in Our Future — in April and May 1998, it brought together the region’s senior economic-development planners and decision-makers to consider ways to integrate gender issues into all its policies and programs, and this chapter was one of several papers commissioned for this important ECA conference.

To produce results from policy intervention, guidelines must be formulated to ensure the introduction and implementation of gender concerns at the project- or program-delivery level. Policies should also incorporate rigorous evaluation and monitoring procedures. Although many countries have ratified international treaties and conventions to secure gender equity, records on implementation have been poor. Further, as the international community has been unable to enforce these undertakings or impose sanctions or penalties on recalcitrant governments, civil-society organizations should play a critical monitoring role.

In Africa, planning efforts have little integration between ICT policy and national social, economic, or S&T development. Each of these mandates is undertaken with little coordination. Governments and other stakeholders should make a concerted effort to improve integration across the various policy-making organizations, as separation and poor coordination produce many significant negative results — duplication of effort, reduced opportunities for organizational learning, limited cross-fertilization of ideas, and fragmentation.

These more general improvements in ICT policy-making would improve the climate for successful integration of gender considerations, as an integrated policy-formulation process is more likely than one split along disciplinary boundaries to be alive to the importance of social considerations. An interdisciplinary approach to ICT policy-making is more likely to be capable of handling complex societal issues, such as those encountered in introducing Western technologies in Africa, and make the process beneficial to African women.

Recent developments in national S&T policy-making emphasize the importance of accounting for social and cultural conditions in strategies for technological development. Gender imbalances and gendered access to employment, income, training, property rights, control over the use of time, etc., are important features of social organization that have the potential to retard the rate of technological development. By acknowledging that gender is a critical element in social systems and by addressing gender inequality early in the formulation of ICT policies, African leaders would improve their countries’ chances of entering the information age on beneficial terms.

Even with a greater level of coordination in national and sectoral policy-making, integration of gender considerations will have to be pursued at many levels. As shown in the national case studies in Annex 3, various policy-making agents operate in the ICT field, itself already comprising very diverse elements (infrastructure, applications, tools, and technologies). This is not unique to ICT policy-making. Feminist scholars and advocates working in diverse aspects of women’s empowerment have studied and mastered the art of designing and implementing policy interventions in complex arenas. The international feminist movement has fine-tuned its ability to intervene in policy-making arenas by undertaking multiple points of entry and increasing the focus of advocacy efforts. These strategies proved themselves during previous United Nations world conferences — in Beijing, Cairo, Copenhagen, and Istanbul — but have yet to be extended to the debates on building the information society. Women’s efforts in health, education, and human rights are in many ways similar. The priorities are to reduce the increasing disparity in access and control, improve women’s access to decision-making, and improve education and training systems. The lessons from these successes need to be brought to bear, with increased intensity, on the procedures involved in planning and shaping of the so-called information society.

Many African nations are presently restructuring their telecommunications sectors, using technical analysis, advice, and support from agencies such as the World Bank, ITU, and other multilateral agencies. The state of the art in telecommunications policy and information-society planning recognizes and actively promotes deregulation, institutional reform, consideration of rural-development objectives, redefinition of universal service, tariff reform, and convergence of policies for basic telecommunications and other telematics services. Policymakers are increasingly aware of the need to consider the different requirements of various segments: rural versus urban, residential versus business, small business versus large companies, etc.

Until very recently, no consideration was given to the gender-differentiated impacts in this policy formulation. The landscape has changed: because of an intervention led by UNU–INTECH and the United Nations Development Fund for Women, ITU considered gender issues at the World Telecommunications Development Conference in March 1998. Because of this policy advocacy, ITU also established a Task Force on Gender Issues, mainstreaming gender in ITU’s work. The program of work commits ITU to assisting member states with the implementation of gender analysis in their national telecommunications-policy planning, introduction of gender disaggregation into its statistical series, and integration of gender considerations into programs, such as the Universal Right to Communicate, telemedicine, tele-education, and telecommunications and the environment. (For information on the ITU Task Force on Gender Issues, see ITU [1998, 1999].) African governments have shown a keen interest, but they reiterate a critical need for technical assistance to achieve these ambitious objectives.

Clearly, some African countries share the goals of the Task Force on Gender Issues. For example, South Africa’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 sets goals for the extension of a modern information and telecommunications infrastructure to disadvantaged groups, including women. However, in practice very little governmental action or clear thinking on how this policy will be implemented has emerged. The answers are unlikely to emerge from within the mainstream telecom policy and regulatory bodies. Broader consultation is required.

Many important initiatives have come from the NGO community, such as South Africa’s Women’sNet, a project jointly managed by the South African Commission for Gender Equality (CGE) and SANGONeT (an ISP specializing in NGO networking). Women’sNet has the potential to provide a focus for a coordinated and specialized intervention in the policy process in South Africa and thus provide a model for other countries. It will be important to evaluate the success of tha attempt by Women’sNet to combine advocacy at the highest levels with service delivery and training. The South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has also supported the formation of a pan-African gender working group to undertake high-level policy advocacy backed up by research and policy analysis. This organization, the African Information Society Gender Working Group, is now operational as a registered NGO in South Africa.

In August 1998 the Gender Unit of the South African Department of Communications convened a national workshop to identify strategies to introduce gender considerations into national communications policy. The regional body of regulators (the Telecommunication Regulators Association of Southern Africa) adopted a resolution at its annual general meeting in November 1998 to include gender issues in its work. What these examples show is that (at least at the level of rhetoric) policymakers in Africa are prepared to address gender issues and that the NGO sector is moving further into policy advocacy.
 

Allocate ICT development resources to women

Projects and programs for women’s empowerment in Africa often suffer from inadequate resources and uncertainty in project funding. The vulnerability of ICT projects related to gender equity is largely due to the fact that they are, in the main, NGO-led projects. One certainly hopes that the many connectivity projects springing up in Africa will include requirements to target a fair share of financial and other technical resources specifically to the task of reducing gender inequality in electronic-communications networking. The many Multiple Purpose Community Centres (pilot schemes) may provide a vehicle for this targeting. Although many of these community-level programs included no gender considerations when they were conceived, this is beginning to change. The development of a strategic gender framework that applies to all existing and pipeline projects in the Acacia framework may provide good insights on ways to achieve gender-equity objectives at the project level. Because the Acacia Initiative includes a monitoring and evaluation component, it should be expected to yield very valuable data on the problems that such initiatives are facing and the methods needed to solve them.

As part of the effort to ensure that resources are directed to women, a set of gender-disaggregated statistics on the proposed beneficiaries of some of the major connectivity projects in Africa may be useful. Some very valuable work has already been done to catalogue ICT initiatives currently under way or planned in Africa, but the data are not disaggregated by gender of proposed beneficiaries.
 

Provide and improve telecommunications infrastructure

Telecommunications networks, which provide the backbone for ICT services and applications, are poorly developed in Africa. Although Africa has 12% of the world’s population, it has only 2% of its telephone lines, and more than half of these are in the largest cities. Sub-Saharan Africa provides only 1 line per 235 people. The costs of installing and maintaining lines is higher in Africa than in other countries, even other developing countries, and the service is quite unreliable. Despite this limited access and poor quality, the demand for telecommunications service is remarkably high, according to the standard measures (numbers on waiting lists, etc.). What is more, when African men and women have access to telecommunications facilities, the levels of use are much higher than in other developing countries, as measured in minutes of outgoing traffic. Network configuration in Africa still largely mirrors colonial patterns of trade and communication flows. International telecommunications traffic is routed via Europe, and traffic between former colonizers and African nations still accounts for the lion’s share of total volume. For many countries in Africa, interregional traffic is only a small percentage of the total volume of outgoing and incoming traffic.

Data on computer use and availability in Africa are not as widely available. But the available fragmentary evidence is sufficient to suggest that, except for South Africa, the region is plagued with many problems in this field. Personal computers are not manufactured within Africa, so they attract high duties and import tariffs. This, according to TitahMboh (1994), can multiply the cost of basic computer equipment and consumables in Africa by as much as 10 times over that in the country of manufacture. Africa also has limited access to training, technical information, computer spare parts, and repair services; unreliable supplies of electricity; and increasingly obsolete technology. The importation of computer equipment adds to the foreign-exchange debt burden of many African nations.

Although many initiatives in Africa aim to ameliorate the problems of inadequate infrastructure, few if any specifically address women’s unique needs and requirements. Gender-specific issues related to the development of Africa’s telecommunications and ICT infrastructure arise because the vast majority of African women are poor and live in rural settings. Network modernization and development must take these two characteristics of African women into account to provide them with an affordable communications infrastructure.

Gender justice must be included in the criteria used to make network architecture and equipment choices to ensure that equipment and service providers offer cost-effective and appropriate solutions. Unless decision-making processes change dramatically, Africa’s ICT networks and services will remain accessible to only a small minority. ECA has recognized that it can play the role of the honest broker in supporting African governments as they choose network equipment. Thus, ECA will be sponsoring a conference with the aim of evaluating technological options for connectivity in Africa. Some of the Acacia country strategies also tackle this issue by identifying the need to carefully evaluate cost-effective technologies for expanding ICT networks, such as wireless in the local loop (WLL) solutions (Musisi 1997).

Choosing the most appropriate technological solution for the transmission network is of course only one element of the network-planning process. It is equally important to select customer-premises equipment that is rugged, has low maintenance costs, and will survive the vagaries of the African power supply. Network-management software, routing, and controlling devices are also important elements of the overall network solution. One must also select these with care and attention to the local conditions (Boakye 1995).

To motivate (or mandate) private companies to provide network infrastructure affordable to poor rural women unable to pay commercial rates, policymakers will have to use creative regulatory instruments. Universal-service principles define conditions for telecommunications network providers to ensure that basic services are affordable to the majority of the national population. In Africa, it is recognized to some extent that these principles must take account of the realities of the region and borrow regulatory mechanisms from industrialized countries only if they make sense in the local environment. The major difficulty with making universal access a reality in Africa is the prohibitive cost of network expansion, particularly with private investment. Private-sector entities cannot be coerced into financing network expansion in rural Africa, but regulatory policy can ensure that universal-access obligations accompany access to profitable markets in urban centres. For example, the South African Telecommunications Regulatory Authority is investigating ways to use the Universal Service Fund to contribute to meeting the universal-service targets of the Telecommunications Act and the Telkom licence. Although this chapter cannot treat this matter in detail, suffice it to say that the policymakers and new regulators in Africa will require nerves of steel and considerable skill to achieve their legitimate public-policy objectives when negotiating with international private investors, who for the most part define their interests very narrowly.

An alliance is needed between organizations involved in gender and development and the civil-society organizations and government bodies that promote rural development. Such an alliance can strengthen the voice of the disadvantaged groups that in Africa have tended to be marginalized from policy debates.
 

Build technological capability

Africa needs to build a technological capability in ICTs, with an explicit human skills and know-how component. Technological capability is unfortunately also in short supply in Africa. The number of graduates in S&T fields, at both secondary and tertiary levels, is woefully inadequate. This is not surprising, given the high rate of illiteracy, but it is made even worse by the brain drain, which is leading many of Africa’s highly skilled professionals to leave the region. This overall skills shortage is much greater in the case of female technologists.

The World Science Report (UNESCO 1996) provides valuable information on the level of scientific human resources in Africa; it also provides gender-disaggregated data for a selection of countries. Given the acute shortage of S&T specialists, African governments should be encouraged to establish programs to develop the relevant skilled personnel in ICT-related disciplines. However, such programs will require financial resources that many cash-strapped African governments do not have. The local and international private sectors can each play an important role in filling this gap. If funding is available, a first step in building human skills and knowledge in ICTs would be to undertake national audits of ICT expertise, ensuring that all such studies collect gender-disaggregated data. Accompanying the audits should be strategic programs to encourage and support the entry of a greater number of women and men into these fields. This will require a concerted effort.

Lydia Makubu, President of the Third World Organisation of Women in Science, summarized the current status of women’s involvement in science in Africa as follows:

At the present time, women are grossly under represented in science at all levels of the educational system and in particular at university level. The reasons for this are many and complex and include socio-cultural attitudes towards girls enrolled in scientific disciplines and the attitudes of girls and women themselves towards the study of science, which is generally regarded as a male domain.

Women can also collectively make the S&T world a more tolerable environment for themselves through networking and other development programs. Women are helped to enter and remain in these professions through the work of the OFAN consortium (a collaboration of organizations concerned with women in S&T, set up to coordinate activities for the Beijing World Conference on Women); national women-in-science organizations; and other professional bodies, such as the Third World Organization of Women in Science. Many organizations have developed mentoring and other outreach programs. These organizations deserve the support of the national and international community. Some NGOs already active in ICT projects recognize the need to include internal training and support for female technologists. Two good examples are Abantu for Development train-the-trainers workshops and SANGONeT’s technical training within the ambit of the South African Women’sNet.
 

Facilitate and encourage the involvement of women in technological innovation

The three main sites of production of ICT products and services are private-sector companies, academic institutions and public-sector research bodies, and not-for-profit organizations. All these must be targeted for policy intervention if Africa’s women are to be brought more fully into the process of designing, testing, producing, and improving technological tools and applications. The private-sector companies selling equipment and services in Africa should be encouraged to fund more R&D on technological adaptation. University–private-sector collaboration should be improved, and the NGO sector’s technological capability should be strengthened.

One of the most important areas of technological investigation for Africa’s women is research on human-computer interaction to improve human manipulation of ICT devices using speech, visual icons, and non-keyboard devices. Some effort has been made in this direction at CSIR in South Africa. These projects should be expanded and strengthened to enable Africa to produce basic and applied research on non-English-language computer processing and control systems and applications. Such research might be of immense benefit to African women, the majority of whom are nonliterate and do not have English as their mother tongue.

A second factor to be taken into account in designing ICT equipment for African women’s use is that the physical settings in which these devices will be used are very different from those in industrialized countries. African settings differ not only in natural conditions, such as humidity and dust, but also in the fact that the women are more likely to be caring for a child or children and managing income generation and other domestic responsibilities while using a computer. Health and safety features that accommodate this multitasking would be beneficial to Africa’s women.
 

Create culturally resonant content

One of the most significant barriers to the use of ICT products and services in Africa is the predominant use of English in the information products of electronic-communication technologies. Africa has several thousand languages and dialects, and very few ICT products contain material in these languages.

Another important factor is that little of the information found on ICT networks is produced in Africa. Although African women are likely to benefit from, and to be interested in using, ICT networks to access international information, their enthusiasm will be much greater if they can use these networks for a two-way flow of information. Support for African women’s content-creation and networking efforts therefore must be a priority of any national ICT strategy with gender-equality objectives. The many projects aiming to support African women as information providers include the Gender in Africa Information Network; Women’sNet (South Africa); the ECA African Centre for Women (the organizers of the 40th anniversary conference); and Environment, Development, Action. These initiatives should be well integrated with efforts to set up telecentres and library extension programs, as they may have potential for cross-sharing of technical and human resources.

Also important is ensuring that women have their say in determining which applications and information products are made available in their communities. The relevance of any information product may vary according to the preferences, lived realities, and aspirations of its consumers. The Gender Working Group of the Acacia Initiative emphasized that women should participate in assessing applications and tools and went on to suggest that the assessment methodology should take into account the general and specific needs of diverse groups of women (GWG–Acacia 1997). A needs assessment may reduce the chances of a community’s receiving ICT applications that are irrelevant to the women’s values and priorities. Unless women’s participation in technology selection is made a prerequisite, they are likely to continue seeing ICTs as distant and meaningless. With women’s full participation, ICTs are more likely to serve their interests.

Inadequate information management also diminishes the cultural relevance of ICTs. Growing evidence points to significant gender differences in the use of ICT devices and services. Women are likely to be more interested in tools that enable them to find relevant information in databases and web pages quickly. However, as browsing and search tools on the Internet are not particularly efficient, searching is very time-consuming; for women, whose time is in short supply, this is a serious disadvantage.
 

Design and deliver appropriate training programs

Women should have access to well-designed training programs that develop hands-on skills and provide motivational training materials, user-friendly manuals, and local user support. Under these conditions, the overall learning experience of African women encountering ICTs will be more rewarding.

Training for women should include technical training, trouble-shooting, and problem-solving skills. The design of the programs should take into account the experiences of academics and NGO trainers. Self-education and other open-learning methodologies are useful pedagogic methods for introducing women to ICTs and can be used to stimulate debate on ICT-related social and political issues. As noted earlier, the training programs for women include SANGONeT-run training through Women’sNet and training from Abantu for Development. These training programs should have a closer linkage to Acacia pipeline projects (Mozambique and South Africa) to maximize their impact.

Increase effective demand for ICT products and services

Poverty continues to be very real problem in Africa and presents an effective barrier to the diffusion of ICTs. However, to make progress, the region need not adopt the Western model of one or more ICT device per household. There are alternative models that would take into account the relative paucity of effective demand and in so doing lead to an alternative model of ICT–society interaction that would better integrate ICTs into the fabric of African societies.

Many recommendations have been made for improving access to ICTs for women in poor countries. For example, the WomenWatch expert-group meeting suggested that women be given access to existing United Nations resources, for example, through the network of national United Nations documentation centres and the Sustainable Development Networking Programme. In addition, it is important to facilitate distribution of equipment to developing countries through subsidized bulk procurement and distribution programs.

Several NGOs are already undertaking pilot projects to establish telecentres. As this approach focuses on providing community-level access, it is by definition more in line with Africa’s level of effective demand. Ernberg (1997) argued that telecentres can change the business model for delivery of telecom services. His analysis demonstrated how telecentres can generate traffic (and revenues) for common carrier providers, which strengthens the business case for rapid deployment of telecentres to form a rural transmission and switching network.

Conclusions

From the above analysis and arguments, it should be clear that the inclusion of a gender perspective in national ICT policy-making in Africa would be both feasible and desirable. The second section provided background information on the status of national ICT policy formulation. The third presented an eight-point agenda for organizing such interventions. It is critically important that the interventions undertaken to integrate gender perspectives into ICT policy-making proceed from a well-informed and thorough understanding of the African system of ICT policy and planning.

This chapter has argued that the outcomes of any policy decision are determined by the institutional and social contexts, by the objectives, and by the processes and tools used for implementation. The recommendations that follow take these issues seriously and recognize that the existing character of national ICT policy-making systems determines the points at which gender issues can be inserted into the policy debate. These recommendations pertain to general-level improvements in ICT policy-making, as well as strategies to have gender perspectives included. This concluding section is organized as a set of recommendations for the key actors involved in the process of policy formulation and implementation and includes some remarks on how countries may operationalize such a gender strategy. The recommendations are supported by empirical and conceptual analysis, and, wherever possible, references are made to the sources of supporting evidence.

Recommendations for key actors in ICT policy formulation and implementation

The key actors in ICT policy formulation and implementation are national governments, multilateral agencies (including bodies in the United Nations system), donor agencies, and private-sector and civil-society organizations.

National governments

Integrating gender considerations into national ICT policy formulation and implementation will require strong, effective leadership from the state. African governments should play a leadership role in articulating a clear vision and strategy for ICT development. This should take account of local contexts and legitimate demands for gender justice. Relevant organizations in the public sector, such as line ministries and regulatory bodies, should develop the vision, design the strategy, and undertake the tasks, working in partnership with other key agents. It is very important that the state be proactive in ensuring that the development of the ICT sector and the application of ICTs proceed in the national interest. Improving the socioeconomic environment for girls and women to enable them to harness these technologies is an important and pressing challenge. The process is not automatic, and the state must therefore play a crucial role in setting the direction for production and use of ICTs.

African governments should take five key steps:
 

1. Define and specify measurable goals and objectives for the ICT sector and applications. These goals should include improving the contribution of ICTs to poverty alleviation, health care, food security, environmental security, technological advance, and human-resource development. The potential beneficiaries of these policies should be clearly identified and should include “girls and women” as an explicitly defined category. Governments should also recognize that this category is not homogeneous and ensure that policies are in place to benefit girls and women of diverse social backgrounds, levels of education, ethnic origin, and racial background. In Africa, it is particularly important to take into account rural women as potential beneficiaries of ICTs and their needs.
• The evidence considered in this chapter has shown that African governments have made inadequate progress in defining clear goals and objectives for ICTs and development. Although some countries have expressed interest in ensuring that ICTs are used for social development and that they are made accessible to rural communities, measurable goals and strategies are needed to further develop this vision.
• The relative lack of progress can be partially explained by the fact that leadership for developing ICTs has been in the hands of the line ministries (most often transport and communications or telecommunications), which define their mandates very narrowly. Success in using ICTs for development requires an impetus larger than sectoral concerns. Countries where more than one ministry sets and implements the agenda make faster progress. Senegal is one such African country. In addition, as UNCSTD’s guidelines and the experience of OECD countries show, a multidisciplinary approach that cuts across traditional departmental boundaries is needed to formulate strategies to ensure women’s entry and survival in the emerging information society.
2. Create the necessary institutional structure to develop and steer a vision of ICTs and development and to achieve the goals set out in that vision. A variety of organizations are needed to undertake the analysis; define the goals; negotiate with other stakeholders; plan, evaluate, and monitor the project; and manage all the elements of the national ICT strategy. These organizations need the right staff teams and adequate resources, empowering authority, and decision-making structures. As stated earlier, the internal dynamic of ICTs imposes a pressing need to strengthen the technology sensing and assessment capability of African ICT policy-making bodies. Accessing this technological expertise does not mean that the line ministries need to employ these individuals in permanent positions, which is not often done even in OECD countries. But it does mean improving the mechanisms for policymakers to support and interface with experts in other locations, such as academia, research organizations, and the private sector. The task facing African ICT policymakers is to create a system of organizational capabilities, rather than a single institution.


The UNCSTD guidelines and the AISI framework suggest that national commissions are suitable for playing this leadership role. Each African government would need to establish a commission with the most appropriate bodies and individuals. The third section presented the detailed arguments for including representatives of women’s organizations and experts in gender and development issues in those policy-formulation processes. Although no African country has so far done this systematically, this is also true in many other parts of the world. This is mainly due to the fact that the primary agents in ICT policy-making do not have the in-house expertise to undertake these tasks, as will be discussed later.

3. Secure advice and strengthen technical expertise in ICT-related fields. Policymakers should use research findings and insights drawn from rigorous analysis to develop policy tools that will help them realize their policy objectives. For example, African ICT policymakers need to develop new tools to enable them to incorporate socioeconomic objectives in their decisions concerning network modernization, industry structure, tariff policy, licencing decisions, incentives for R&D and innovation, and systems for training and learning.
• ITU’s Telecommunications Development Bureau has provided technical assistance to African countries seeking to reform their telecommunications sectors and has restructured its work program to provide timely, effective assistance. ITU recognizes that capability-building is an essential requirement in Africa. Although it has worked most closely with telecommunications companies, ITU is finding ways to improve its relations with other important stakeholders. For the technical analysis and development of policy tools, it remains an important source of expertise. ITU has made progress in taking account of the telecom-development needs of rural communities and in analyzing the impacts that changes in industry structure have had on developing countries. ITU is committed to ensuring that its technical-assistance mandate extends to helping policymakers incorporate gender considerations into their telecom development. The AISI framework includes a gender component, and recent efforts have been made to apply a gender framework in the Acacia Initiative. As these programs produce deliverables they will also provide actual data on attempts to integrate gender into ICT policies and plans in Africa.
4. Develop consultative mechanisms to ensure that the process of policy formulation, implementation, and review involves all key actors. National governments and some key actors, such as multilateral development agencies and ITU, have well-developed, regular communications, although, as noted previously, their communications tend to occur along traditional lines. For example, in many countries, the ministry of communications interacts regularly with ITU, but not with the World Bank or UNCTAD. In addition, there are few organizational structures at the national level that permit negotiation or debate among various line ministries.


The AISI framework and the Acacia Initiative are particularly strong in arguing for and demonstrating the potential benefits of this approach to ICT policy planning and implementation. Evidence from South Africa, Senegal, and Uganda clearly shows that the greater participation of a wide range of interest groups improves the policy-making process. It is still too early to assess the impact on particular groups of intended beneficiaries, but the approach of the Acacia Initiative clearly provides an entry point for marginalized and disadvantaged groups. Given the influence of the AISI framework, it is important for the action program to call for an open, participatory policy process.

These consultative processes must have the participation of women’s organizations and gender and development specialists. It would not be an intractable undertaking to identify the women and men with the skills and experience needed to represent the interests of girls and women in these forums and to develop the necessary policy instruments. More creative approaches to identifying these resources are needed; there are women with experience in ICTs in universities and the private sector, and there are female gender and development experts who can be trained in ICT policy issues. This challenge for human-resource development must be squarely faced. South Africa and Uganda are making great strides in incorporating gender considerations into a variety of social-development programs, and the lessons learned from the South African CGE and the Ugandan Ministry of Gender can be brought to bear on the issue of incorporating gender considerations into ICT policy in Africa.

5. Develop improved capacities to review policy objectives, monitor and evaluate programs, and respond to changes in the technological and socioeconomic environment. ICTs are a fast-changing set of technologies. The impacts of the production and use of ICTs change very rapidly and take unexpected forms in local environments. ICT policy needs to be adaptive and responsive if it is to be effective. As noted in the early sections of this chapter, this is a challenge to policymakers in both developed and developing countries. Individual African countries are unlikely to be well-placed to establish all the elements of a complete institutional system for ICTs. Subregional cooperation is therefore needed to develop systems (and institutions) to formulate ICT policy and manage the sector. Subregional institutions can assist national governments by providing technology-evaluation and technology-monitoring capabilities and by strengthening national technology-assessment capabilities. A reform of the system of technical cooperation with bilateral donors and multilateral bodies is also needed. Unequal partnerships with external agents lead national governments to neglect their responsibilities to set and review objectives and to develop adaptive capabilities. Reform of technical cooperation such that the roles of national governments and lenders are mutually recognized and respected would improve the likelihood of African governments’ taking charge of national ICT policies and strategies.

Multilateral donors and agencies

The review of ICT policy-making in the second section established that all the major multilateral development-finance agencies, some specialized agencies in the United Nations system, and large donor agencies have a presence in Africa. The AISI framework coordinates many of these efforts and is becoming the preferred point of entry for external actors supporting development of ICTs in Africa.

One of the problems facing Africa is that some countries have become very popular sites for pilot studies and policy experimentation by donors and multilateral agencies, but other countries are left out. This pattern of duplication of effort in a few countries is counterproductive and should be reduced.

The previous subsection raised another important issue concerning multilateral agencies and donors: the reform of technical cooperation to require external agents’ acceptance of a leading role for African governments in articulating and implementing national ICT strategies. Owing particularly to the underdevelopment of institutional systems for ICT policies in Africa, the balance of power in these relationships does not always reflect this more appropriate division of labour between national governments and external agents. The evidence presented in the earlier sections confirms that multilateral agencies, United Nations bodies, and donors have made very valuable contributions to the development and implementation of ICT policies in Africa, and it is hoped that as national governments make more progress, the balance of power will shift between these two sets of key actors.

The AISI framework, spearheaded by the ECA, identifies gender issues as important elements of national ICT strategy, and this framework is compatible with the recommendation that national governments take the lead in developing and implementing ICT policies, with external agents providing support. Multilateral bodies, including the United Nations system and its specialized agencies, should assist national governments with a variety of supporting resources, including, but not limited to, technical expertise for design of policy tools, financial support, and other assistance with institutional capability-building. Africa has thoroughly identified and well-documented requirements and needs in the ICT sector. External agents should continue to support the AISI as a mechanism for coordinating their efforts in Africa.

Private-sector organizations

International suppliers of ICT equipment and services, as well as domestic firms in the ICT sector, have important roles to play in integrating ICTs and development goals. The private sector is an important and powerful interest group, whose demands exert considerable influence on the direction of ICT policy in Africa. Unfortunately, both local and foreign private-sector companies have tended to emphasize short-term profitability in their strategies for entering and competing in the African ICT sector. This short-term orientation explains the woefully inadequate levels of reinvested profit, R&D, training and human-resource expenditure in the African ICT sector. As the private-sector lobby is very powerful and often has more experience with ICTs than central-government agencies, short-term commercial objectives have considerable weight in the overall definition of ICT policy objectives.

Undue emphasis is placed on profitability because companies operating in the African telecommunications market have been highly profitable. However, the levels of network coverage have been among the lowest in the world. The challenge for the international and domestic private sectors will be to expand the ICT sector in Africa while maintaining its profitability. A number of models of market expansion in other developing countries can be adapted to the African context. Fast growth of ICT networks, an increasing range of services, and the development of applications suitable for the local context are possible futures for the African ICT sector. Encouraging signs are already apparent in the growth rate of mobile networks in Africa and the expansion of WLL-infrastructure systems.

The major challenge for private-sector organizations in Africa will be to develop enough confidence and long-term orientation to invest in market development. In the African context, this would require technological investment in applications and tools that are better suited to the local environment. Africa has large underserved potential markets for ICT equipment and services. The strategies used to expand markets in wealthy countries will not succeed in Africa. In Africa, private-sector companies should lend their support and resources to the efforts to develop and expand networks through telecentres and other community-owned facilities. Firms operating in the continent should also invest more in R&D geared to producing tools and applications to meet the needs of potential local consumers.

The third section outlined the specific requirements of Africa’s women as a group of potential consumers of ICTs. Private-sector organizations should make an effort to respond more effectively to these requirements. Companies that succeed at doing this will achieve their commercial objectives and make a contribution to Africa’s development.

To play an active role in integrating gender concerns into ICT development, private-sector organizations can also adopt proactive employment policies that encourage and facilitate the participation of women in a wide spectrum of fields related to ICTs. Private-sector organizations in the African ICT sector include large companies, such as the national telecommunications carriers and the branches of international suppliers of ICT equipment and services; and smaller companies, such as ISPs, computer-service companies, and community-owned telecentres. Women should have job opportunities with various levels of responsibility in any of these settings. Given the serious shortage of female technologists, private-sector organizations should also demonstrate their commitment to achieving the goals of gender equity in the ICT sector by providing and supporting training programs specifically designed for girls and women.

Civil-society organizations

A number of civil-society organizations are involved in the production and use of ICTs in Africa. The companion papers on the Acacia national strategy, agriculture, education, universal access, democratization, and health (Chapters 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, respectively, of this volume) provide up-to-date information on the importance of civil-society organizations in promoting the production and use of ICTs. Marcelle (1999) claimed that civil-society organizations, particularly women’s organizations, have been at the forefront in advocating the integration of ICTs and sustainable-development goals and programs. The electronic-communication programs for women have emphasized that ICTs can be of tremendous service in human-rights campaigns, environmental management, and improved information exchange between Africa and the rest of the world.

Women’s ICT programs in Africa face many problems, including inadequate funding. Very recent evidence has shown that civil-society projects are cooperating more effectively with governmental bodies, and these partnerships may reduce some of this financial uncertainty. However, civil-society organizations should be making efforts to improve the income-generating capacities of their projects to enable them to maintain some independence from other key agents in the ICT policy process. This is particularly important because civil-society organizations often play a critical monitoring role and force governments to be more accountable to a wider range of constituencies. If you are not financially independent, it is unlikely you will be effective as a critic for very long.

Whenever possible, civil-society organizations should participate fully in consultative processes involved with ICT policy-making. Women’s ICT programs in Africa have tended to focus on service delivery, rather than on policy-making and advocacy. However, this is changing slowly, and projects such as Abantu for Development, Women’sNet, the African Gender Institute’s Communications Links, and the African Information Society’s Gender Working Group are all good examples of this trend. It should be encouraged and supported. Multilateral agencies, national governments, and the private sector can support this trend by including civil-society organizations in their capability-building exercises. For example, if ITU or other United Nations agencies start training programs to improve the capacity of national governments to take gender into account in ICT policy-making, civil-society organizations should be given the opportunity to participate in these programs. Achieving this will require special attention, as the lines of communication between multilateral agencies and civil-society organizations in ICTs are not always open.

Operationalizing the gender strategy

The recommendations made here are based on a number of simplifying assumptions about the political and institutional contexts. Theoretical and empirical evidence, such as that presented in Goetz (1997), cautions against naive optimism. The authors in that book argued that despite improvements in the rhetoric, the outcomes of many programs in gender and development have failed to “alter the asymmetrical distribution of resources and social values which contribute to the social construction of gender inequality and differences.” Goetz suggested that “the project for gender-sensitive institutional change is therefore to routinize gender-equitable forms of social interaction and to challenge the legitimacy of forms of social organisation which discriminate against women.” She also argued that such a project must go beyond the type of gender training used in development programs that have emphasized attitudinal change as the key change agent. Gender-redistributive policies, such as those recommended in this chapter, tend to create opposition and resistance because they challenge existing norms, values, and cultural practices and promote the reallocation of material resources. However, such policies are needed to successfully operationalize a gender strategy.

A successful gender strategy for ICTs in Africa must also recognize that the definitions of gender and gender equity vary according to local context; it would be simpler from a purely technical standpoint if there were a universal definition and accepted understanding of the desirable outcomes of a gender strategy for ICTs, but this is not the reality. Strategies for ICTs in Africa must therefore define goals and objectives in dialogue with all the key actors and potential beneficiaries. Change agents must make realistic assumptions about the required resources and must assess the venues of likely resistance. When opportunities for transformation appear, strong leadership is needed to bring about the desired outcomes. Individually and collectively, the key actors operate in gendered social and political environments, in which the social value and interests of men and women are continuously negotiated. This makes the project of bringing gender justice into the ICT sphere more complicated because there is no unifying understanding of this project, its desired outcomes, or the consequences of achieving these outcomes.

Despite these very valid and important qualifications, developing strategies to include a gender perspective in ICT policy is a valuable development project. This analysis has shown that it can improve the material conditions and quality of life in Africa. Taking no action is not an option, and this chapter has outlined a way to design and sustain a program of action.

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Annex 1: Key issues

The World Bank has increasingly recognized that development in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) requires the full participation of both men and women and has articulated four interconnected priority issues and related strategic objectives:

Key issue 1: Women’s central economic role, especially in agriculture and the informal sector

Women are a key economic resource in Africa, comprising about 60% of the informal sector and providing about 70% of total agricultural labor. Women’s central position in economic production in SSA contrasts with the systematic discrimination they face in accessing the basic technologies and resources needed for their economic role. This gender-based discrimination limits economic growth. It markedly affects macro-economic policy and performance (supply response), and has important repercussions for economic efficiency and equity.
 

Key issue 2: Gender bias in access to education, health, and other basic social services

Gender differentials persist at all levels of education and the gap widens at the higher levels. Low levels of education and training, poor health and nutritional status, and limited access to resources depress women’s quality of life and hinder economic efficiency and growth. Female education is the investment with the highest social returns. It is the catalyst that increases the impact of other investments in health, nutrition, family planning, agriculture, industry, and infrastructure. Design of health interventions must take into account women’s specific health needs, with a particular focus on reproductive health, AIDS, and gender violence, [women’s] multiple responsibilities, and the demands on their time.
 

Key issue 3: Time poverty — a critical gender dimension of poverty in Africa

Poverty in Africa is pervasive and growing. Regional analysis recognizes that growth is necessary but that the pattern of growth is crucial for sustainable poverty reduction. Poverty in Africa has an important, if difficult to quantify, gender dimension. A key component of female poverty in Africa is “time poverty,” as there are significant time allocation differentials between men and women. Women work longer hours than men … and their workload, derived from simultaneously carrying out multiple roles, imposes severe time burdens and harsh trade-offs, with important economic and welfare costs. Balancing competing time uses in a framework of almost total inelasticity of time allocation presents a particular challenge to reducing poverty in Africa.

Poverty in Africa is compounded by the complexity of household structures and relations in Africa. Evidence suggests great diversity in the structure and composition of households, where men and women have largely separate sources and uses of income and resources. This often leads to marked inequality in intra-household resource allocation.
 

Key issue 4: Raising women’s participation

Women in Africa are systematically under-represented in institutions at the local and national level and have very little say in decision-making … . Gender barriers limit women’s participation and reinforce power gaps. As civil society emerges, women’s organizations constitute an important social capital resource for strengthening the social institutions necessary for a market economy. Women constitute an important source of opinion (and opposition) on the subject of economic adjustment in Africa, and hearing their voices and listening to their needs is essential for endorsement of successful economic reform in Africa.
 

Synergy and complementarity among strategic gender objectives

Each of these strategic objectives has an important contribution to make to achieving the goal of sustainable poverty reduction. There are important interconnections and trade-offs among economic production, child bearing and rearing, and household/community management responsibilities that assume particular importance given the simultaneous competing claims on women’s labor time. From a gender perspective, inter-sectoral linkages, as between girls’ education and domestic tasks (especially water provision), rural development and transport, and the population/ agriculture/environment “nexus”, are critical. The contribution of these strategic objectives to development and poverty reduction in Africa can be greatly amplified through concurrent actions in each of these areas, so that multiple and mutually reinforcing benefits can be achieved.

World Bank (1997, executive summary)

Annex 2: The African Information Society Initiative²

Background

In May 1995, the 21st meeting of the ECA Conference of Ministers, comprising the 53 African ministers responsible for economic and social development and planning, adopted Resolution 795, “Building Africa’s Information Highway.” In response to this resolution, ECA appointed its HLEG on Information and Communications Technologies in Africa to draft an action framework to use ICTs to accelerate the socioeconomic development of Africa and its people. The HLEG comprised 11 experts on information technology in Africa. They met in Addis Ababa, Cairo, and Dakar and communicated further by e-mail. The result of their work was the document The African Information Society Initiative (AISI): A Framework to Build Africa’s Information and Communication Infrastructure (ECA 1996). The document was submitted to the 22nd meeting of the ECA Conference of Ministers in May 1996 and adopted through Resolution 812, “Implementation of the African Information Society Initiative.”
 

Linking information technology and development

The action framework calls for, among other things, the elaboration and implementation of plans for a national information and communication infrastructure, involving development of institutional frameworks and human, information, and technological resources in all African countries and the pursuit of priority strategies, programs, and projects to assist in the sustainable buildup of an information society in African countries.

AISI aims to ensure that building Africa’s information society will help Africa accelerate its development plans; stimulate growth; and provide new opportunities in education, trade, health care, job creation, and food security. It should also help African countries to leapfrog stages of development and raise their standards of living.
 

Partnership

AISI was put in place through the collaborative actions of a network of partners sharing the aim of promoting connectivity and information-technology development in Africa. Included among the original list of ECA partners were ITU, UNESCO, IDRC, and the Bellanet International Secretariat. After the 1995 meeting of the ECA Conference of Ministers, the World Bank joined these organizations, and the Global Information Infrastructure Commission has supported the initiative on behalf of the private sector. With the launch, in March 1996, of the Special Initiative on Africa, with, among others, the program Harnessing Information Technology for Development (HITD), the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and UNCTAD have joined the group of collaborating agencies, sharing objectives on ICTs for development and working together for their implementation. In the area of training, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research has also associated itself closely with these activities.

AISI is a guiding framework for ICT policy in Africa. Resolution 812 of the May 1996 ECA Conference of Ministers called on the partners in the HITD initiative to use AISI as a guiding framework. AISI was also endorsed at ITU’s African Regional Telecommunication Development Conference in Abidjan, in May 1996, and the Organization of African Unity’s July 1996 summit in Yaounde. AISI has had the participation of other organizations, such as the Agence universitaire pour la Francophonie (university office for francophone people), Commonwealth Network of Information Technology for Development, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Telecommunications Foundation of Africa, UNDP, and the World Health Organization.

¹ In a comprehensive treatment of sector restructuring in the African telecommunications sector, ITU’s Telecommunications Development Bureau concluded that the accelerated pace of change in the African telecom sector is fueled by international investment, liberalization, establishment of regulatory bodies, and, for a few countries, participation in WTO negotiations (ITU-TDB 1998). Its analysis set an optimistic note for the development of networks and the improvement of the quality and range of services in Africa. The African Green Paper and the Communiqué of the African Regional Telecommunications Development Conference (ITU-TDB 1996) represent the best statements of government policy objectives in the telecom sector in Africa. Return

² This annex is adapted from ECA (1996). Return

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