Development and Broadcasting in Sub-Saharan Africa
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humanITy Document
Date: 04/06/2004
Article
0. This document is the intellectual property of humanITy but it may be distributed in whole or in part on condition that this is not for profit and that it is fully attributed.
1. One of the major factors in Africa's poor development record is the almost total failure of its broadcasting systems to deliver timely, relevant and impartial information to its citizens. This has had obvious political effects in the shoring up of one-party regimes and the consequent mistrust by citizens of monopoly information supply; but that mistrust has spilled over into such areas as commodity information (where parastatal boards have often been mistrusted), market conditions and meteorology. This has, in turn, spilled over into mistrust of basic development and health information.
2. The response of the development community to this situation has been misplaced, putting its faith in PC-based technology as a way of widening access to information. There has been some deregulation of broadcasting and telecommunications but this has not been accompanied by the development of a dense and robust broadcasting and journalistic ecology, supported by universities and civil society, fed by diaspora and underpinned by liberal, consistent regulation.
3. Even if the PC technologies being offered are state-of-the-art, offering facilities which allow recipients to compete with 'Western' performance, they are likely to be marginal to most areas of fundamental development where the basic requirement is still for timely, appropriate and trustworthy information.
4. The dot.force proposals for the depositing of legacy PCs into developing countries is totally inappropriate, not simply because the cost of reconditioned legacy and new equipment is rapidly narrowing but because the PC has a very limited use in development. It is only appropriate in those circumstances where an individual or group of people wish or are required to PRODUCE or CREATE information. Even in 'developed' societies most people are massive net consumers of information; a majority of the population responds to questions (e.g. fills out forms, selects items) but very few create information. Even in the field of services, there has been a rapid decline in the need to generate classical prose for quasi-legal purposes; the lengthy, explicatory letter and/or memorandum has been replaced by cryptic instructions which refer to a corpus of data held elsewhere; the email and the text message are referential, requiring a good memory rather than the exercise of high literary skill. The result is that although good communication is necessary, classical literacy skills are less in demand.
5. The user interface requirement should be based on the user requirement; and in the overwhelming number of cases the user requirement is confined to the receipt of rather than the creation of information. Thus, a television is more appropriate than a computer and in most cases a radio or telephone will be adequate.
6. The strength of the internet lies in its ability to provide unmediated almost unlimited publishing opportunities and almost unlimited information reception opportunities for individual users. The unmediated aspect of this phenomenon is fundamentally attractive from a libertarian point of view but to resort to the internet in the face of over-regulated broadcasting, on a libertarian basis is defeatist and ill conceived. For the majority of people, even those with a formal education, defining internet searches which result in relevant reports is difficult; but, in any case, the unlimited searching which 'developed' societies enjoy is firmly based on a long habit of consuming mediated information provided by newspapers and broadcasting, books and magazines. Defining searches and self expression are functions of a densely literate culture.
7. On the basis of this analysis, PC-based hardware is not only of limited use, it answers the wrong question. The central questions in development are: how can we provide people with reliable information from a variety of sources which they can receive and which they trust?
8. Just as broadcasting regulation has been too tight in the second half of the 20th Century in Africa we would now not want it to go to the other extreme, providing an enormous advantage for global networks over local broadcasters and publishers. We can already see the damage to indigenous broadcasting from external networks in the Caribbean and even to local broadcasters in SADCC from a modest enterprise such as the South Africa Broadcasting Corporation. Regulation must encourage indigenous plurality alongside external competition.
9. Additionally, there will be increased information distribution over cellular telephone networks (email, SMS) but these should not be forced into being credible competitors to licensed broadcasting.
10. The key, core information system must be a strongly indigenous, pluralist, transparently regulated, multi-tier broadcasting system. Layers should include national (for coherence), regional/provincial and local/community channels.
11. Technological developments should allow qualified, diaspora populations to contribute to the plurality and credibility of broadcasting.
12. Convergence means that the distinction between broadcasting, publishing and individual communication will blur; it may, for example, be helpful for meteorological information to be published to mobile phones by SMS but this should be in parallel with the same information being broadcast nationally, regionally and locally.
13. Local/community radio has a vital role to play, particularly in countries with a variety of languages, climatic, agricultural and social conditions.
14. In arguing for parallel, conventional broadcasting and publishing through hand-held devices I am not arguing that the latter should not take place without the former but simply that parallel operation would be preferable. Illiberal, central government control of information was cited in the first paragraph of this document as a bar to development; it should not be allowed to persist. If governments do not liberalise licensed spectrum they will, in any case, have to face broadcasting/publishing channels which do not require spectrum.