African Unity and Our Progress: Utilizing New Technology to get what we want

[RWalker]

African Unity and Our Progress: Utilizing New Technology to get what we want


Forty years ago, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah wrote these prophetic words:

"We have to prove that greatness is not to be measured in stockpiles of atom bombs. I believe strongly and sincerely that with the deep-rooted wisdom and dignity, the innate respect for human lives, the intense humanity that is our heritage, the African race, united under one federal government, will emerge not as just another world bloc to flaunt its wealth and strength, but as a Great Power whose greatness is indestructible because it is built not on fear, envy and suspicion, nor won at the expense of others, but founded on hope, trust, friendship and directed to the good of all mankind. " Kwame Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1961), pp. xi-xiv

The African Union has its problems, but it also has brought us a few steps closer to the world Nkrumah so precisely described. This is true because there are certain elements among the various states of Africa who are commited to the concept of a United States of Africa, so they are able to at least keep it on the discussion agenda. We must properly organize ourselves, if we are going to take that little opening to its logical conclusion

Africans in the Diaspora, are PARTICULARLY appreciative and conscious of this great process in African and general human culture, and greet it with great enthusiasm. Consequently many of our people and institutions have given serious consideration to understanding the role of information technology in the overall African integration process.

Access to information and know-how is the key to all our socio-economic development goals and objectives. In the run-up preparations for the UN Millennium Assembly, the Africa caucus emphasized the tremendous importance of IT in the global power equation:

"The fourth challenge is the search for a development cooperation approach and framework that works. While development cooperation has featured on Africa's agenda for many years, various efforts made so far to mobilize international resources for development have not resulted in any significant progress. Added to this shortcoming is the emergence of a development cooperation order dictated by the interest and concerns of the North, and the power of capital, information and technology. The decline in official development assistance to Africa and the rise in the debt burden illustrate the failure of international cooperation to build a new consensus for development in the new global context. The evident failure of international cooperation to respond favourably to the development needs of poorer countries has led to an increasing gap between the rich and poor countries. This trend sends worrying signals since the increase in the gap between rich and poor countries, along with a high incidence of poverty and deprivation, could pose new threats to world peace in the increasingly globalized world."

"Equally important in the coming millennium is for Africa to address its marginalization in the international arena. Africa should seize all opportunities to be part of the international agenda in the next millennium. It should organize itself to influence an international order that will be characterized by intense competition, highly globalized markets and information technology. African countries should work together and develop a common vision, on the basis of which Africa's concerns can be placed on the international agenda. The region should develop a mechanism for contributing to global consensus at the national, regional and global levels. In this respect, ECA has a role to play in providing the leadership for mobilizing regional consensus."

Note by the Secretary-General Fifty-fourth session, Agenda item 49 (b), United Nations reform: measures and proposals: The Millennium Assembly of the United Nations, Regional hearings in preparation for the Millennium Assembly of the United Nations, Addis Ababa on 24 and 25 June 1999


IT as the Solution
The following is an extract from Promoting Information & Communication Technology for Development - Harnessing Information Technology for Development: Implementing African Information Society Initiative

"The problem?"

"Information and communications have become ingredients of development but Africa lags behind in the area! Many of (the) gaps in development are caused simply by lack of information on what is possible, best practices and successful initiatives to replicate! Sustainable changes in quality of life cannot be achieved without human and institutional development, digital utilities can catalyze human development? What does this mean?

providing topical information
informal education
Two way communication
interactive learning
motivation
group decision
planning and design
data supply
monitoring
financial control"
http://www.uneca.org/eca_programmes/...ent/promoting_
information_&_comms_technology_for_development.htm

The UN's Economic Commission on Africa makes this observation about the importance of IT:

"The sub-programme on regional cooperation and integration aims at promoting policies, methods and strategies for increasing regional and subregional cooperation through implementation of sectoral integration, in particular the development of trade and movement of information and persons and for utilization of minerals and other natural resources in Africa as a basis for African integration and the establishment of the African Economic Community. This will be achieved through activities designed around three major themes: promoting cooperation and integration; facilitating policy decisions and dissemination results of experiences; and building critical capacities to support the integration process at national, subregional and regional level." Promoting Regional Cooperation and Integration"

http://www.uneca.org/eca_programmes/...tion/index.htm

Every single objective of the Pan-African Union depends primarily on the level of knowledge of the African peoples themselves. The continent's desire to create a viable fiat currency, a common customs system, free movement of peoples, security and peace, an end to endemic diseases such as malaria, ebola, water transmitted diseases, AIDs and tuberculosis, all these are functions of the level of knowledge possessed by our people. (The stated objectives of the Union, Adopted at the 36th Summit of the Organization of African Unity, Lome, Togo, on 12 July 2000, with my comments in parenthesis, are listed immediately following)

"(a) achieve greater unity and solidarity between the African countries and the peoples of Africa;"

(Unity and solidarity requires organization. Achieving this growth in unity and solidarity requires competent people led by a clear ideology (a cognitive supersystem) oriented towards the achievement of the organized united people and culture. Clearly this can't be done with an uninformed people.)

"(b) defend the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of its Member States;"

(There is nothing worse than trying to defend your people and land with a bunch of untrained, unprepared, incompetent soldiers, airmen, sailors, marines, citizen militia - in sum a ill-prepared population. Imagine the chaos…and the potential for military coups by unscrupulous and hostile internal and external elements increases in direct proportion to the degree of unconsciousness of the people involved. An intelligent population will properly understand the vital importance of the interdependence of the various African states in maintaining each individual states' particular sovereignty. An intelligent population would be best positioned to take an active role in defending and advancing the sovereign and territorial independence of Africa as a whole, and thereby better able to contribute to the protection of these interests as relates to the individual component states. Furthermore, the whole basis of the development of national technical means for security and defense purposes is built on the intelligence of the people. This is a particular economic and political concern for all Pan-Africanists. )

"(c) accelerate the political and socio-economic integration of the continent;"

(Once again, well-informed, well-prepared human factors are critical. We need conscious intelligent men and women to develop the needed social psychological perspective and political socialization processes to support the new African economy and build the African federal government. )

"(d) promote and defend African common positions on issues of interest to the continent and its peoples; "

(Now lets see, what force is best able to promote and defend Africa's positions - hmm. Oh I got it! The answer is an informed, prepared, and intellectually equipped population…from the halls of international diplomacy to the work places and farms of the African world, we need to prepare ourselves to advance our interest in the world.)

"(e) encourage international co-operation, taking due account of the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights;"

(People are key here - again the more informed the people are ... the better guardians of human rights they will be…and the greater our capacity to ally and partner with others around the globe. )

"(f) promote peace, security, and stability on the continent;"

( Peace, security and stability can only be defined, won and maintained by the people themselves, people who think and act as conscious agents of these goals and interests…this is obviously a multifaceted task involving critical cultural - especially economic, psychological, spiritual, social, and political; variables.)

"(g) promote democratic principles and institutions, popular participation and good governance;"

(The more informed the population, the fuller, the deeper, and more precise is the democracy and the people's participation in the democracy…this is an axiom that is universal.)

"(h) promote and protect human and peoples' rights in accordance with the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and other relevant human rights instruments;"

(We covered this in the comment on objective (e) above...suffice it to reiterate that the intelligence of the people is again the determinant factor.)

"(i) establish the necessary conditions which enable the continent to play its rightful role in the global economy and in international negotiations;"

(If the people are organized in a conscientious manner they will be able to do this and more…philosophical consciencism is a key here as in all other pursuits in this domain. Then we will see the emergence of the great African super-power envisioned by the champions of Pan-Africanism over history.)

"(j) promote sustainable development at the economic, social and cultural levels as well as the integration of African economies ;"

(Social, cultural, economic development and integration of the individual state's economies are undoubtedly the work of the people themselves…accordingly, the better informed the people are, the greater probability that the economic conditions; social - psychological structures; and philosophical / cultural superstructures and systems will be built in the interest of and the service of the people themselves.)

"(k) promote co-operation in all fields of human activity to raise the living standards of African peoples;"

(Human activity, I guess that's people again…the greater the knowledge the more efficient and effective the co-operation and the higher the achieved standard of living.)

("l) co-ordinate and harmonise the policies between the existing and future Regional Economic Communities for the gradual attainment of the objectives of the Union;"

(Only the people led by perceptive regional groups such as COMESSA can realize all the other objectives of the Union as defined in the Abuja Treaty. Only the people organized can create a democratic, effective, modern, prosperous African political economic union. The "gradual" attainment of these objectives must allow for the expeditious achievement of these goals and not be used to impede the integration process. Again the people informed are the best agents for this reality.)

"(m) advance the development of the continent by promoting research in all fields, in particular in science and technology;"

(There is no scientific method without people; there is no technical breakthroughs without people…people are at the very heart of this and everything else we want to do…so let us as the cybernetician Stafford Beer says give science to the people.)

"(n) work with relevant international partners in the eradication of preventable diseases and the promotion of good health on the continent."

(International partners, domestic stakeholders, and are all of humanity willing to assist us in our fight to improve our collective health should be encouraged and find their efforts facilitated by our people…this will only happen when the people are informed as to the parties involved, the goals they seek to meet and so forth.


Telematics
Africa knows what telematics can do in the human training and education sphere. Let us take a look at a few comments from the 1995 African Regional Symposium on Telematics for Development meeting in Ethiopia.

"The accelerating advancement of telematics - the marriage of telecommunications with informatics and audiovisual technologies - is spawning a multiplicity of new applications such as multimedia products and services, "intelligent" interfaces, high definition television, and ubiquitous computer networks seen as evolving rapidly towards "information superhighways". This transformation, although up until now evident mainly in the industrialized countries, will steadily improve access to rich and nearly instantaneous supplies of information worldwide, independent of distance, and lead to major changes in all societies - in the economy, in government, in life-styles, in cultural patterns and in education systems."

"In particular, telematics will enable the creation of cooperative networks in Africa and, in a longer perspective, offer new opportunities for distance education, health care and other development-related activity." Background - Telematics for Development, African Regional Symposium on Telematics for Development, Ethiopia- 3-7 April 1995

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Stu...elematics.html

A presenter at that 95 meeting made the following observation:

"Computer environments used up till now in education and training contexts are most often reduced to a closed configuration, where all software and information is grouped as a whole locally and where the contribution of computer science becomes of secondary importance. However, hardware and software technologies today are well suited to experimentations and innovative utilization within the various approaches in education. The client-server and network approaches in particular, as well as other new software environments, revolutionize the educational process, by opening a whole new dimension in methods of support for courses, a new relationship between instructor and student, new instructional methods, and a first step towards virtual classrooms. In this article, we propose a client-server architecture for an experimental computer environment, as an approach to a virtual classroom. The outcome seems to be that the evolution and the improvement of this architecture remains intimately linked to technological advances anticipated in the areas of hardware platforms, interface software integration, data transfer rates, and the methods used for producing teaching supports."

Proposal For A Pedagogical Information Environment" Jacques Guidon UNESCO-UNO, African Regional Symposium on Telematics for Development, Ethiopia- 3-7 April '95 http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Stu...cs_Guidon.html


Telematics Example
Example of a telematics application in an Africa-related context:

"The Africa Telehealth Project Conference: April 10-14, 2001"

"The Africa Telehealth Conference Uganda Branch in cooperation with UNICEF Uganda is pleased to announce that the Second Africa Telehealth Conference entitled "The Role of Low-Cost Technology for Improved Access to Public Health Care Programs Throughout Africa" will be held in Kampala Uganda in April 10 - 14, 2001."

"Introduction"

"Over 80% of health care problems in Africa are caused by a handful of communicable diseases, and issues which remain untreated due to a lack of adequate health care coverage across all regions. The barriers of geography and technology, which combine to deny effective health care delivery in Africa, can be effectively addressed through an effort undertaken by the Africa Telehealth Project, which aims to develop local Telehealth services throughout the continent. The key issues in this initiative will form the basis of the second Conference on African Telehealth to be held in Kampala Uganda in April 2001."

"The conference is the result of an initiative underway through the "Africa Telehealth Project", a body of research specialists and technology practitioners which is charged with guiding the work of Africa Telemedicine Project."

"The goal of the conference is to characterize how telecommunication resources, computer-based information systems and appropriate health information infrastructures can be utilized to advance the general health conditions of African society, through improvements to quality, access, and management of health systems on the continent."

"The conference will draw upon the collective knowledge of international experts in the areas of health systems organization and management, information technology, information systems and information systems management, clinical care, epidemiology, telemedicine, health promotion, and health services policy."

"The conference will discuss current problems and trends in the utilization of computer-based telecommunications technologies in the health sector. The Africa Telehealth Project, which has been involved in the organization and design of this project for over 24 months, will act on the findings from this conference to develop and design a Telemedicine Centre of Excellence in Kampala Uganda."


What Should We Do Now?
The pedagogical answers for Africa are obvious. We need a quick and effective way to inculcate masses of previously uninformed peoples about the proper role of scientific methods in their day-to-day lives and in the life of the evolving African nation.

Accordingly, one of the first group of purchases the African Union should make is: Internet2 technology, and Internet2's powerful advanced applications: Tele-immersion, Virtual Laboratory, Digital Library, and LearningWare.

If Africa did this, she could customize the tele-immersion environment to emphasize the critical aspects of the legacy/history of the process of African integration and the development of African culture generally, using highly effective virtual simulations. The Virtual Laboratory provides direct access to the work of the networks of world-class scientific research centers that are at the cutting edge of scientific and technological techniques. This would give us a remote, but sufficiently effective, view of many of the major innovations in this area. LearningWare is an object oriented development environment dedicated exclusively to the construction of virtual educational institutions. It will give Africa the capacity to custom design and deploy a cradle to grave virtual instruction system geared to the exigencies of the African personality and culture. The Digital Library is a powerful system based on incredible transmission speed and prodigious data storage/handling capacity. The Digital Library utility is primarily used for multimedia content and combined with contemporary wireless technology can be designed to deliver cost-effective high-speed transmission of voice, text and video content anywhere in the African world. Its many uses are obvious.

These purchases would increase dramatically Africa's ability to propagate and promote its positions, brands, vision, mores, values, ethics, ethos and cultural aesthetics around the globe. All we have to remember is that our content has to reflect our reality…note OUR reality, not a non-African, alien vision or perspective of our reality.

The Value of Tele-immersion, Virtual Laboratory, Digital Library, LearningWare

The powers of the Internet2 advance applications are obvious. Here are short excerpts describing aspects of each of these applications.

A. Tele-immersion

"What is tele-immersion? "

"Tele-immersion enables users at geographically distributed sites to collaborate in real time in a shared, simulated, hybrid environment as if they were in the same physical room. "

"It is the ultimate synthesis of media technologies:

3D environment scanning
projective and display technologies
tracking technologies
audio technologies
robotics and haptics
http://www.internet2.edu/html/tele-immersion.html

B. Virtual Laboratory

"What is a virtual laboratory?"

"A Virtual Laboratory is a heterogeneous, distributed problem solving environment that enables a group of researchers located around the world to work together on a common set of projects. As with any other laboratory, the tools and techniques are specific to the domain of the research, but the basic infrastructure requirements are shared across disciplines. Although related to some of the applications of tele-immersion, the virtual laboratory does not assume a priori the need for a shared immersive environment."

"The components of a virtual laboratory include:"

"Computer servers capable of handling very large scale simulations and data reductions. (Examples include the NSF and regional supercomputer centers, the vast network of large capacity, high performance computer systems on university campuses and in corporate and government R&D labs.) "

"Data bases that contain application specific information such as simulation initial and boundary condition, experimental observations, customer requirements, manufacturing constraints, as well as distributed, application specific resources such as the human genome repositories. (These data bases are both dynamic and distributed. They can also be very large.)

Scientific instruments that are connected to the network. (For example, satellite data, ground motion and air quality sensors, astronomical instruments such as the distributed radio astronomy facilities run by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.)
Collaboration tools, sometimes including tele-immersion (as described above).
Software assets. (Each virtual laboratory is based around specialized software for simulation, data analysis, discovery and reduction, and visualization. Most of this software was originally designed for "stand-alone" use on a single machine. We are now beginning the task of understanding how these tools can be composed into active, heterogeneous networks of programs that can be scaled to solve the problems of tomorrow.)
Tightly coupled, multi-disciplinary computations place great stress on network bandwidth. Low latency is critical and computer system resource scheduling must be coupled with bandwidth reservation services. Multicast protocols and technology are critical to the collaborative nature of an experiment in a virtual laboratory where people, resources, and computations are widely distributed. Information streams in these experiments might combine voice, video, real-time data streams from instruments, and large bursts of data from simulations and visualization sources. "
http://www.internet2.edu/html/virtual_laboratory.html

C. Digital Library

"Digital Libraries and Information Access and Distribution"

"Current research efforts have already demonstrated that the existing commodity Internet can be an effective environment for developing digital library systems. These efforts include the ARPA/NASA/NSF-sponsored Digital Library Programs, as well as the wide range of operational institutional library systems offering access to online catalogs, abstracting and indexing databases, and primary content, such as journals in electronic formats. While today's operational systems suffer from reliability and performance problems as a result of shortcomings in the existing Internet, they do not call for substantially higher application-dedicated bandwidth or bandwidth reservation. They require only that the existing Internet function smoothly and reliably within its current design parameters. Moreover, many of the hardest problems -- intellectual property rights and rights management, and viable economic models for scholarly publishing in the 21st century far beyond the scope of any networking infrastructure program."

"But the new services and capabilities envisioned for Internet2 offer important opportunities to move the Digital Libraries program into new areas. Very high bandwidth and bandwidth reservation will allow currently exotic materials such as continuous digital video and audio to move from research use (such as in the Carnegie-Mellon University Digital Library Project) to much broader use. Images, audio and video can, at least from a delivery point of view, move into the mainstream currently occupied almost exclusively by textual materials. This will also facilitate more extensive research in the difficult problems of organizing, indexing, and providing intellectual access to these classes of materials." http://www.internet2.edu/html/digital_libraries.html

D. LearningWare

"Building blocks for learningware"

"Component technologies -- building blocks -- can encourage a "1,000 flowers to bloom." The foundations for such building blocks are now emerging from the information technology industry in the form of object-oriented development tools and distributed object architectures -- DSOM, Java, Active-X, OpenDoc, to name a few. These generic tools and "standards" will not provide all of the building blocks necessary to create a distributed environment for instruction and research even though they likely will solve many problems -- authentication, authorization, and security, for example. The new component tools and models, however, can be extended to include the required functionalities. Creating networked content materials for learning, for example, will be much easier if generic, cross-platform building blocks and protocols are available to developers. For example, the developer of an application designed to allow students to collect and analyze data from a scientific instrument on the Internet should have access worked data sampling tool which recognizes various data protocols, an intelligent plotting window with a variety of display and scaling features, and a tool for passing sampled data to the plotting window. With such tools, the developer could concentrate on developing a networked learning environment incorporating interactive data collection and analysis. More generally, the interoperable building blocks required by content developers would include 2- and 3-dimensional graphing templates, mathematical modeling templates, symbolic computation and manipulation engines, a mathematical scripting language, molecular modeling templates, intelligent periodic tables and atomic bonding tools, other science-specific generic functionalities, templates for developing case studies around video clips, tools for glossing texts, tools for synchronizing temporal data (such as music) with related text and images (such as musical scores), bilingual lexical databases and search tools for developing second-language acquisition applications, and many other generic functionalities."

http://www.internet2.edu/html/learningware.html



Additional Considerations
Universities and Colleges in the USA

Africa should consider sending select students to study abroad in institutions that are strong in specific related subject areas. Institutions that come to mind right away are: U of C - Berkeley (they have an excellent Cognitive Science program), U of Chicago (their Graham School offers a state of the art e-commerce and web development IT program), and U of Pennsylvania (their African Studies program is the leader in studying telematics in African development.) Equally important are the traditionally "black - oriented" universities such as Chicago State University, Howard University, Fisk and so on. Leading African software engineers and developers should be teamed with linguistics experts to translate the scientific and technological and related cultural information into the various African languages (at least the larger ones); and from those languages to the dominant global languages: Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, German, the main Chinese dialects, Japanese and so forth.