A glimpse of the waterfall
In 2010 Baobab travelled to the northen part of Ethiopia. We met a bunch of wonderful, entrepenurial people and visited among other places the Simien montains, having our main base in Debark.
Now we are very happy to hear that Meles Yemata, one of our friends there, has created WalksEthiopia.com , a venture to impulse Reponsible Travel in the area, which boasts incredible beauty, both in Nature and in the People who live there.
Best of luck, Meles!!!
WalksEthiopia.com
After watching the swift take off of mobile telephony in Africa, some experts have been quick to predict that it would play a core role in solving the economic and social problems of the continent. The technology brings the possibility of getting people together in such a vast territory, but its positive effects both socially and economically have been exaggerated.
According to Alison Gillwald, director of ICT Africa! (RIA!) the continent’s mobile phone boom lags behind the rest of the planet in three key areas: Access, quality of the services and price.
The Access problem: Even though the mobile telephony growth rate is very strong, the numbers can be misleading as the initial user base is very small. The number of people without a cellphone remains bigger than those with access to one. Even if they have a mobile phone, some people cannot use some services like the SMS due to illiteracy or lack of skill.
The Quality of services: Voice services are widespread, but many Africans do not have access to more advanced features taken for granted elsewhere, such as those offered by the smartphones (Blackberry, iPhone …).
Douala, Camerun. Telephone ladies. You can buy airtime here. (RTS)
Prices: Everywhere in Africa, infrastructure deployment is expensive. The study of RIA! concludes that the prices charged to customers are considerably higher than the costs. Alas, the companies providing these services obtain incredible profits. This excessive prices are ‘the result of an excessive taxation on the equipment and the services, the weak price regulation by the government and the incapacity to limit the domination of the big Telecommunication Operators in the market’. These prohibitive prices prevent potential customers from using the services, specially people with a low income.
It is true that mobile phones can help overcome and shape social norms. Kazanka Confort and John Dada from African Women and TIC report that entrepreneurial women in the Muslim Nigeria use the telephone to bypass religious constraints and stop them from talking directly to men and obtain bank accounts. Mobile phones allow many women to consolidate their independence.
http://www.photos-afrique.fr/photos-visages-afrique/
However, gender inequality remains even in the usage of the mobile telephone, there is still a big inertia. Kathleen Dig has made a study on mobile phones and their relation to poverty reduction in Uganda. She states that ‘the most vulnerable members of the families don’t always benefit from the new technologies, which often remain under control of the household’s head‘. It’s not only that the head of the family is afraid of an excessive usage of the telephone’s airtime, but also that they want to protect an erosion of their authority.
Due to their own mobility, husbands hold a greater control over the cellphone communications: when they leave and take it with them, the wives don’t have access to it anymore.
For Kiss Brian Abraham, one of the authors of African women and TIC, this leads to a marked separation between a group of women who have access to cellphones and have enough income to use them and another group which doesn’t have access to it, where the poorer women are left behind.
Technology follows a different path in Africa as in the West, due to poverty. The mobile phone has become the most widely used tool of communication, with still-expensive computers lagging behind. According to a report published by the French Institute of Foreign Affairs (IFRI), there were 246 million mobile line users in 2008. (…) The growth rate of the mobile market and the Internet in Africa is two times bigger as the global average.
Mobile usage growth in Africa
The mobile phone technology is creatively used by health programmes, weather forecasts, to control the price of goods and to access banking services.
The AIDS epidemic in Africa is still dramatic, with many HIV-positive people not having access to any kind of treatment. Cell Life is an initiative developed together by the University of Cape Town and the Peninsula University of Technology with the aim of improving the lives of the people infected with the HIV, with the help of the mobile phone technology in South Africa.
The areas worst affected by the HIV suffer from a lack of qualified health professionals. Cell Life uses mobile telephones to put in contact professionals and patients so they can communicate information about the treatments. Each doctor or nurse can thus give advise remotely to about 20 patients. There are other diseases that can be equally fought off in this way: This system of health care through mobile communication has helped to impede the propagation of Typhoid epidemic in Uganda too.
Photo futureatlas (Flickr) sous licence CC by
The initiative ‘Weather forecasts for everyone’ was launched in June 2009. In Africa there is an important lack of weather stations and monitoring, so the weather forecast coverage is 8 times lower than the minimum recommended by the World Meteorological Organization. There is a sense of urgency in solving this problem: The climate change affects directly the daily life of farmers, who need accurate weather information in order to prepare themselves against potential problems. The project ‘Weather forecasts for everyone’ counts with the help of the World Humanitarian Forum, Ericsson, the World Meteorological Organization and the Telecom Zain. They will install more than 5000 meteorological autonomous stations and transmit the data collected with the help of mobile telephones. The initial deployment has already started and is concentrated in the areas of the South of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.
The cellphone allows farmers to know the prices of agricultural products firsthand and avoid middle men by selling directly to the consumer. Mobile phones help also increase revenues while reducing the final price for the consumers. In Kenya this service is provided in the cereals market by the DrumNet network.
People using their cellphones in Soweto, South Africa —JON HRUSA/EPA/SIPA
In the rural regions of Africa, access to traditional banking is heavily limited. This means that a big number of people can only use cash as a method of payment, which not only is less convenient but also limits their business opportunities. Mobile phones help change this reality by offering the users a way to access banking services through mobile networks.
Gimme that code
More specifically, mobile banking allows the users to make bill payments, transfers, deposits and withdrawals. These orders are done by SMS, with PIN codes to authenticate the transaction authors.
In the cases of Congo and Zambia, customers can use their cellphones to pay their bills. The customer opens an account with Celpay and then can make payments by sending SMS to Celpay, which in turn transfers the money to the merchant’s account.
Certain people among environmentalist groups and scientist question the project of the Great Green Wall in Africa (we talk about it here: The Great Green Wall project: 11 African countries against the advance of the Sahara)
‘Nothing but a daydream to misuse money’
The FFEM (French Global Environment Facility) has promised 119 million dollars (97 million euros) to finance the project.
Haidar El Ali, leader of the Environmentalists Federation in Senegal declared in RFI -Radio France International- the 17th of June 2010 that this project wasn’t convincing enough: ‘I just come from the countryside and everywhere I hear the same complaints. The farmers don’t have enough seeds, and sometimes none at all. For me the Great Green Wall is a Utopia, daydreaming to misuse money‘.
In the creation of the Great Green Wall there are economic and political interests at play, so for Haidar El Ali ‘this wall is show biz. Name a single Senegalese project that has succeeded. People have other things to do and don’t trust this anti-democratic government that presents itself as green but over exploits the forests and doesn’t even consider the solar energy‘.
The desert approaches
For Marc Bied-Charreton, president of the French Scientific committee for desertification in an interview in www.terre-eco.com, this initiative is going to inevitably fail: ‘It’s incorrect to say that the desert is advancing and that we need to stop it. What is progressing is the deforestation of soils. Therefore what we need to do is protect the soils and not build barriers like these‘.
Martin Benistor, lecturer in the Institue of Environmental Sciences in the University of Geneve questions the efficacity of the project: ‘A green cover to interact with the atmosphere and increase the rains. But with a width of about 15 km, this seems insufficient. The wall could modify the atmospheric conditions and counteract the expansion of the desert in certain semi-arid zones, but never along its whole length‘.
This is the answer of one of the people promoting the project, professor Abdoulaye Dia, of the University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar: ‘Around one hundred scientists, American, Israelis, Japanese and African met in February 2009 to study the viability of the project. They identified the species of trees, the soils and the rain rates better adapted to the conditions of reforestation. In Senegal for example, we plant above all acacias ‘.
Marc Bied-Charreton proposes a solution based on two main axis: Sustainable agriculture and Decentralization.
Sustainable agriculture
Related posts: The Great Green Wall project: 11 African countries against the advance of the Sahara
Eleven African countries met in a summit in N’Djamena (Chad) on June the 17th 2010 expressed their compromise for the development of the Great Green Wall that should eventually stop the Sahara’s desert advance. This massive green strip will be 7100 km long and 15km wide, tracing a path between Dakar and Djibouti through these countries: Burkina Faso, Djiboute, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Chad.
The infertility of the soil is the responsible of a massive food crisis along the Sahel strip, the worse such crisis in 30 years according to some observers. The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) estimates that 2 million hectares of green zones disappear every year.
The President of Nigeria proposed to the other countries in the Sahel area (CEN-SAD) the creation of this green strip in order to fight off the desertification and its consequences. At the beginning of 2007 the conference of heads of state and the governments of the African Union adopted this project, giving it the name of ‘The Great Green Wall’.
This vegetation belt will be made of species with resistance to high temperatures and dry conditions, but also will be useful for the local population and be economically profitable. Acacia, jujube, date palm, mango tree … there will be trees but also bushes and plants will cover the soil. This green belt should include the forests that already exist across the line of the project, and these areas will become natural reserves of fauna and flora. The idea is to foster also agriculture societies through this diversity.
Along the green wall there are questions about the relocation of villages when it crosses inhabited areas. The non inhabited areas will be managed by the public services of the respective countries or by private organizations. There are also plans for building water reservoirs, about 80 per country, so the vegetation can survive the dry season.
The international community is following closely the project and the FFEM (French Global Environment Facility) has promised economic help for each of the countries that will have to manage the Great Green Wall. The amount varies according to the countries, between 6,6 million dollars (5,3 million euros) to 23 million dollars (18,7 million euros). The total amount provided by the FFEM will be around 119 million dollars (97 million euros).
During the next 10 years there will be a need of 600 million dollars for the completion of the project. Today, 3 years after the confirmation of the project, only 10.500 hectares have been planted in Senegal plus several hundred in the other countries. This is only a few kilometers …
Related post: The Great Green wall under heavy criticism
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