From NASA to the schools of Rwanda - Information technology
The new boss of Microsoft Africa, Cheikh Diarra, is not to be confused with those “lazy intellectuals” who were attacked by the lamented President of Burkina-Faso, Thomas Sankara.
Cheikh Diarra, the new boss of Microsoft Africa.
© Microsoft
During, and in the wings of the ‘business forum’ organised at the European Development Days, this former director of NASA's Mars Exploration Programme, said he believed in the development potential of new information technologies; the situation of the most remote villages of his native Mali in mind.
Afrosceptics may argue that such faith would hardly be surprising from the ‘African Ambassador’ of Bill Gates’ multinational company. That does not change the fact that Cheikh Diarra, also President of the Virtual University for Africa, has a vision. He gives Rwanda as an example. Who would have thought that in the aftermath of the Tutsi genocide, this devastated country would become Microsoft’s laboratory in Africa? Nonetheless, Rwanda is today one of the countries on the continent where ‘e-government’ is at its most advanced, all the members of Parliament having their own laptops. At the same time, the government is working tirelessly to achieve its objective of linking over 300 schools in 2007. The Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), already has a graduate training scheme numbering 4,000 students.
Satellites, unexplored potential
But how can this be replicated in Mali where vast areas are far away from fixed telephone networks and electricity?
There are solutions, argues Diarra, who recommends a hybrid system combining a service for coastal areas via bandwidths permitted by optic fibres and the installation of autonomous systems such as VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminals) in internal areas: small antennae of between 1.5 and 2.5 metres in diameter, connected to satellites, whose price of approximately US$12,000 is relatively affordable. UNESCO estimates that, in fact, 30% of the capacity of geostationary satellites above Africa is unused.
But access to new technologies is also hampered by the high price of computers and programme licences sold by Microsoft in particular. Diarra doesn’t deny this.
But he says his company sells licences to African schools “for the paltry sum of five US dollars each”.
This is how Microsoft came to create centres in Namibia and in Kenya which repair and recondition computers that are barely two years old and are no longer wanted by banks or large companies in the North. These machines are then distributed to schools.
‘Office’ in Zulu
It is now possible to download interfaces offering the ‘Windows’ operating system and the ‘Office’ package in Swahili, Zulu and Afrikaans free of charge.
The Igbo, Hausa, Woloff, Bambara and Peul versions will follow. But you have to go further than that, Diarra emphasises.
Graphics and voices must also be used so that anyone who cannot read is able, by placing the curser of the mouse over a word, to listen to the computer pronounce it in their language.
It is through this kind of interactivity that people can gradually benefit from this potential to improve their living conditions. The possibilities are tremendous.
