Internet and information provision:
the promises and challenges in African university libraries
Presented on the 10th April
to the NetLab and Friends of Conference 10th to 12th
April 2002-04-15 Lund, Sweden
By
Vitalicy Chifwepa
University of Zambia
A lot of African university libraries have had to deal with constantly reducing budgets in economies where a lot of necessities are being relegated to “luxuries”. A lot of African countries have adopted various forms of structural adjustment programmes in a bid to meet the ever-increasing demands for sustainable growth and needs of the citizenry. In the process, a lot of social services have suffered budget cuts. Among the services that have suffered is education in general and higher education in particular. The Zambian Government, for example, has engaged in a programme called the Basic Education Sector Support Investment Programme (BESSIP) aiming at developing the Basic education comprising the first 9 grades. The rationale was that Basic Education would benefit more people who would contribute to national development where as higher education benefited individuals who would get higher and white-collar jobs. As such investment into higher education has seen a statistical reduction.
As
investment into higher education has continued to suffer and in a bid to
rationalise, university libraries have suffered serious setbacks in funding.
Due to this poor funding the libraries’ ability to acquire new books and to
subscribe to journals have been badly affected. In Zambia, Simui and Kanyengo
(2000) indicate an inability by the two Zambian university libraries to meet
their needs. Both Were (2002) and Martey (2002) confirm the inability of Kenya
and Ghana, respectively, to subscribe to all the journals that they would have
wanted to subscribe to due to poor funding. This is a common story in a lot of
African universities. The libraries are increasingly being unable to meet the
information needs of their users.
In
addition to inability to acquire new books and subscribe to journals local
information from local research has been met with inadequate resources to
enable the researchers to disseminate their findings widely due to poor
publishing infrastructure. This makes information from the African countries difficult
to access. Libraries are also finding it difficulty to disseminate their
holdings to people who may not able to physically go to the libraries.
Most
of the African universities have not been left out of the worldwide internet
connectivity. The period between 1994 and 1999 saw a lot of Universities in
Africa having full internet connectivity. As Jensen (2002) puts it: “Internet
continues to grow rapidly in Africa, and local Internet access is available in
all 54 countries and territories. The number of dialup Internet subscribers now
stands at over 1.3 million, up from about 1 million at the end of 2000. The
total international incoming Internet bandwidth is now well over 1 gigabyte per
second, while outgoing traffic is estimated at about 800Mbps.” Two universities
(Mozambique and Zambia) are Internet Service Providers as well. With the full
internet, Africa joined the rest of the world in possibilities to access a lot
of information that is available on the net. The possibilities for African
researchers and scholars to publish widely have also become real.
A
number of projects have mushroomed aiming at enabling university libraries to
acquire technologies and train personnel to manage and utilize the ICTs. With
this in place, it is hoped that the African university libraries will join the
rest of the academic world in providing the much needed and dynamic information
services.
There
are challenges, however.
In
order to enjoy the full benefits of the internet, however, there are a number
of challenges and constraints that African university libraries have to deal
with. These include infrastructure and equipment, human resources and funding.
a.
Infrastructure
and equipment: This includes
the technology required in order for internet to be operational such as the
computers, telecommunication systems and the local internet services. A lot of
libraries in Africa are marred with poor connectivity arising from very low
bandwith among other problems. “Due to high international tariffs and lack of
circuit capacity, obtaining sufficient international bandwidth for delivering
web pages over the internet is still a major problem in most countries. Until
recently few of the countries outside of South Africa had international
Internet links larger than 64Kbps, but today 23 countries have links carrying
2Mbps or more, and 10 countries have outgoing links of 5Mbps or more -
Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa,
Tunisia and Zimbabwe. Excluding South Africa, the total international outgoing
Internet bandwidth installed in Africa is about 250Mbps.”(Jensen, 2002) Such
problems make accessing internet very painfully slow. It might be the reason
for low usage of the internet by a lot of academics.
Another aspect of poor equipment is the server systems. In cases like Zambia the server is down too frequently for the confidence of users. This is attributed to both lack of funds to keep updating the equipment and inadequacies in the personnel in terms of quantity and skill.
b.
Human resources: This includes the skill in the libraries to
search and manage internet based services. A lot of librarians may not have the
required skill and resources to train in order to be in touch with the ever
changing internet resources and services. As the DESIRE brochure puts it “ If
you tried to read every document on the web, then for each day’s effort you
would be a year further behind in your goal.” There is need for services in the
libraries that would make it easier and faster for users to access the
information they need. This requires a lot of skill. Such skill may not be
readily available in a lot of libraries.
The Human resource and skill is required in the making
information available on the net. This skill could be lacking in both the
libraries and the publishing sector.
c.
Government
policies: In Zambia for example
there is no Information or ICT policy. As such importation of equipment is very
high. For the rest of Africa, most tax regimes still treat ICTs as luxury
items, which makes these almost exclusively imported commodities all the more
expensive, and thus unobtainable by the majority (Jensen, 2002). This might
affect different African countries differently as some may provide tax or duty
free on such equipment and school requisites to universities.
d.
Cost of
accessing some Resources: A
number of resources that would be of interest to academics are not free. This
takes us back to the same issue of poor funding that affects subscription to
journals.
Conclusion
As
African countries become connected, issues of accessing and disseminating
worldwide information resources have been improving. To address some of the
challenges and constraints above there has been a number of projects and
programmes such as the International Network for the Availability of Scientific
Publications (INASP)’s Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information
(PERI) which aim at, among others components, facilitating access to scholarly
internet based full text journals and training in publishing; The Continuing
Education for Libraries and the Internet (CELI) co-coordinated by Lund and
University of Namibia, to mention but a few. These will, however, need to be
backed by solid provisions for sustainability by the African Universities.
References
Jensen, Mike “The African internet: a status report (http://www3.sn.apc.org/africa/index.html)
Martey, Alfred “PERI in Ghana” in INASP Newsletter no. 19, February 2002
Simui, Muyoyeta and Kanyengo, Christine “Investigation into the Funding University Libraries in Zambia” funded by the Association of African Universities, 2000 (unpublished).
Were, Jacinta “The Programme for
Enhancement of Research Information (PERI) Expected impact in Africa” in INASP
Newsletter no. 19, February 2002