Off the hard shoulder

It sounds unlikely: a 24-hour electronic one-stop shop for news from all over Africa. But in a modest way Africa News Online is helping to get Africa off the global hard shoulder and on to the information superhighway. The idea is simple. African newspapers are invited to post a selection from their pages on the Africa News website, allowing worldwide electronic access to items that were formerly available only to local newspaper readers in Ghana, Kenya and elsewhere.

The newspaper publishers receive a share of earnings calculated according to the number of their stories transmitted as daily news feeds to various organisations, as well as a share of revenue from advertising and royalties on the electronic pages.

It is a small step towards the third world's electronic coming-of-age, but there is a long way to go. "Let's not get carried away," says James Dean, director of programmes at the information institute Panos, "the internet is exciting for those who have the capacity to get information out [of the internet] themselves. Africa is not going to become a wired society for a very long time. Telephone penetration is the key. Public access to the internet [in Africa] is probably a generation away - if not more. "

In theory, Africa could use satellites and wireless communications to leapfrog the industrial revolution. The obstacles are not technical but financial. "Resources are the problem," says Mr Dean. Improved telephony that will allow the growth of regional intranets (ie. connections between a country's or several countries' academic, civic and professional communities) is a more realistic option. Such growth will take decades.

In the meantime, initiatives like Africa News Online may provide a makeshift. Africa News Service - a non-profit news agency which aims to be self-supporting - was set up to provide accurate information about Africa through print and broadcast media. The news agency began operating on the web in 1995 and has grown steadily.

The news service's regularly updated pan-African bulletins have become an important source for executives, journalists, and academics. It is used by high-profile online databases, including Financial Times Information, Lexis/Nexis, Reuters Briefings, Bloomberg, Pro Quest, Dow Jones, and many others. Traffic more than doubled last year and is still growing. About 65,000 pages per day are delivered to viewers. All Africa News stories have links to the websites, if any, of the featured publications.

Tamela Hultman, Africa News executive editor, does not expect aggressive competition soon. "Africa News Online has drawn on a network built up during 25 years. It would be extremely difficult for anyone to come in and duplicate that history. The longevity of Africa News is significant: the web site has the traffic it has for that reason."

Reliable data about internet adoption in Africa are hard to come by, but the important fact for services like Africa News Online is that nearly all African capitals have internet access. Although in many locations the attempt is still bedevilled by poor infrastructure and by power cuts, most publications are able to transmit stories.

Nor is per capita computer ownership these days necessarily a reliable index of computer literacy among Africans: in Ghana, for example, it is estimated that five times as many people have e-mail addresses as own PCs. Cyber cafes and fried plantain sellers are found side-by-side in downtown Accra.

Ms Hultman is undismayed even by those who argue that, in a single-superpower world, Africa is a strategically unimportant continent where disease and disaster are perceived as endemic and which has only 3 per cent of world trade, with little prospect of improvement.

"In three decades of travelling to Africa, I am aware of an energy just now that has not been seen for a long time," she says. "Except in places mired in conflict, democratic reforms and business reforms are picking up speed. The long-term results are unpredictable but there is definitely a new optimism."