Kenya rolls out Digital Villages project

NAIROBI/KENYA (04/02/2008) - Kenya on Tuesday kicked off an ambitious Digital Villages project designed to connect the whole country, from rural to urban areas, and accelerate growth of information communication technology (ICT).

The project is a government and private-sector initiative, mapped out using political districts. Every constituency represented in Parliament will get a minimum of eight workstations, either PCs or monitors hooked to PCs, grouped within a 15-kilometer radius.

The first Digital Villages are expected to go online by the end of June. The Ministry of Youth Affairs' Youth Enterprise Fund (YEF) is financing the project, rolling it out in 40 constituencies before moving to other areas. The experiences of the first constituencies will inform implementation in other areas.

Telecommunication costs and the need to develop local content and software applications will challenge the initiative, but officials have high hopes.

"Each Digital Village will have a VSAT base station and will be expected to form the basis for e-commerce in the country," said Bitange Ndemo, the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication.

Ndemo expects young entrepreneurs to borrow from the YEF. The Ministry of Youth Affairs is financing private microfinance institutions, and prospective businesspeople are expected to invest at least 100,000 Kenyan shillings (US$1,550) to set up a "digital village" with two PCs. The ministry says it will provide training in entrepreneurship, and the microfinance institutions have existing training programs.

The project will have far-reaching effects for online activities in agriculture, health, education and commerce, according to Ndemo. For example, instead of nurses and doctors from rural areas going to the city for education, the project can deliver the courses online.

Remote hospitals have not been attractive to doctors and nurses because opportunities for career development there are limited. With the online courses, the remote hospitals may be more attractive.

The major contribution to the health sector will be the ability to deliver health services to remote areas through online consultation. With the computer and Internet connectivity, a doctor can take a photo, scan it, and send it to a doctor in the referral hospital for expert opinion.

The plan has some critics. Joseph Kamau, a 22-year-old Nairobi businessman, does not think the project will benefit relatives who live in a village. He argues that most people walk long distances to the hospital and may not have the time to wait until a local doctor's e-mail is answered.

Ndemo argues that once people get used to Digital Village technology, they will design appropriate mechanisms to make it a success.

"There is the simple but horrible truth that most people in the U.S. and Europe never think about Africans," Ndemo said. "Digital villages open up international communications. The people cease to be invisible. Well-made items that seem exotic and come from a village are hot consumer items in upscale fashion stores in the U.S."

The Internet will be used to sell all sorts of items made by people in the village to supplement farming income, Ndemo added.

This argument was supported by David Owino from Kenya Data Networks (KDN), a private sector project partner, who argued that the project will spur competition and innovation between rural and urban areas in Kenya.

Mary Njoki, a resident of Murang’a (about 100kms from Nairobi) who uses a computer in her secretarial job, feels that the project will benefit mainly young people. "Does my mother have time to start learning about computers now? No, because most of her time is spent in the farm," Njoki said.

E-commerce projects will be spearheaded by the younger generation, who will replace the current middlemen, known to exploit farmers, Njoki said. She foresees the new generation of middlemen as being mainly online, and business being transacted over the phone compared to current practice, where people walk long distances to communicate in person.

The Digital Villages project is also meant to spur the business-process outsourcing (BPO) industry, and will encourage young people to target local businesses and local offices that could outsource noncore services.

BPO possibilities include schools (for end-of-term results tallying), hospitals (record entry and maintenance), local municipal authorities (customer care), supermarkets and shops (record keeping and data entry) and government offices (public support). Most people who come to Nairobi every morning from rural areas visit government offices for one reason or another. Some of them have simple queries that could be answered at the click of a button.

Software development in rural areas and maintenance of PCs used in the Digital Villages project, however, are sure to be a challenge.

Kenya has focused on hardware and infrastructure, but has neglected software development and local content, according to Barrack Otieno, a Nairobi-based technology expert.

"Unless we have proper strategies in place to govern software development issues, then the issues of local content might as well be a pipe dream. We need to encourage development of local solutions," Otieno said.

Industry insiders hope that innovative Kenyans will use local languages to develop content and make Internet navigation easier for people in the country. The government is in the process of digitizing all records from the chaotic Ministry of Lands to the Judiciary, according to Ndemo.

Digitizing public information and ways to access it easily is the first goal of the Digital Village project.

Up to now, there has been no concerted effort to convince Kenyans to develop and share content. Most sites visited by Kenyans are free e-mail sites. This means that, although cable infrastructure is being laid, the country will continue paying for international traffic.

The whole project has been pegged on the much-hyped fiber-optic cables that are currently being built. Though the project will first be implemented using VSAT, fiber connections will be used when available. The government hopes that the cable infrastructure will lower the cost of bandwidth and facilitate Internet connection.

Using VSAT technology, the cost of a Digital Villages setup would be about 325,000 shillings (US$5,000), and bandwidth for 128/256k bps would be 87,750 shillings (US$ 1350) per month. This would be a stiff price for many businesses. With the fiber-optic cables, immense competition is expected to deliver higher quality of service at a cheaper rate.

Kenya is currently expecting four cables to land in the coastal city of Mombasa in two years: TEAMs, a cable project between the government and the private sector; SEACOM, backed by the U.S.; EASSY, a pan-African cable; and Flag, an initiative from India.

The TEAMs fiber-optic cable is expected to be finished by January of next year, while the others have not set a definite timeline.