Technology and Hope at the Cisco Networking Academy Africa
Forum
November 14, 2002
By Fred Baker, News@Cisco
At the Africa Forum, the Cisco Networking Academy conference we put on in South Africa, we were among friends. Many of them, of course, I had not met yet; now I have. The conference happened through the combined efforts of people and funds from United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and Cisco in the United States, Singapore, the United Kingdom, France, and South Africa, plus a conference planner. The content of the conference was what one would expect: I spoke on Enterprise Routing and on Quality of Service technologies, Erin Walsh, manager for marketing and communications for the Networking Academies, spoke on the role of women. Christine Hemrick, vice president for strategic technology policy, spoke on security technology and procedures and gave a keynote; and other people spoke on various topics important to the business of running a non-profit academy.
The real story is the people we came to meet. Most came from countries that the UN has classified as among the Least Developed Countries of the world. Cisco has targeted these countries for Cisco's own brand of foreign aid. It gives preferential treatment and a variety of benefits to any Networking Academy, but to these it gives more, in the belief that doing so will help jump-start their economies and work to close the digital divide. What is incredible in these countries and academies is how little they have and how much they accomplish using it. In using my home as a sample network, which I often do, I was keenly aware that I have more bandwidth in my home than many of them have in their country, and as many switches and routers supporting my family and home office as they have in their academy. Besides bandwidth issues, loss, and delay are issues in their networks. Many connect to the world by Geosynchronous VSATs, which are subject to severe power fade in bad weather, and introduce a 280 millisecond delay each way. Wireless networks, themselves subject to delay and loss issues, are common remedies for the absence of physical infrastructure. Let me mention a few of these very special people.
Peter Jack is a consultant to the Nigerian government, and an instructor at Nigeria's regional academy. In his consulting role, he designs and deploys networks for various purposes. Long term, Nigeria plans to network its universities and government agencies using fiber, but this is on a roadmap. So he is looking at nearer term solutions using VSAT and wireless technology. He is also looking at a VSAT-based mobile network; this would use VSATs to trucks, which travel from place to place, and might use mobile router technology.
Sandrine Agbokpe is a CCNA instructor in Togo, and conducts HIV/AIDS education. She also has the distinction of being Miss Togo 2001. Beauty queens are chosen for their talent, intelligence, personality, and dreams, besides their physical appearance; in her, Togo made a capital choice, and we were honored to be in her presence. Among other projects, she is looking into a VSAT-based mobile router for her truck, to provide Internet-based support for her itinerant educational work.
The University of Rwanda sent Albert Nsengiyumva. He consults with the government, teaches students, and manages their network. While there, he showed me a design for his next generation networks; one connecting and supporting the three main campuses of the University, and one for a proposed Internet Exchange Point within the country. Call it "Mae-Rwanda" if you like. His questions related to routing and security infrastructure - how to defend his servers and to reliably offer services to the university students and faculty, and what routing policy to impose to ensure that Internet traffic to points within Rwanda stayed within Rwanda. The kinds of technologies he is looking at span the spectrum - Ethernet switching on Gigabit Ethernet and 10/100 Ethernet, firewall services, dial-in, and VSAT. The University's link to the outside world is a satellite link to the University of Norway.
What I was impressed by, as much as anything, was how much these people see Internet technology as bringing them education and communication they desperately need, both within and without their countries. An instructor from Cameroon asked me what my research interests were, as she is on a track to complete her doctorate shortly and would like to collaborate with me. I look forward to the collaboration, and expect that the problems she investigates will be ones directly at issue in Cameroon, and will push the state of Internet Technology forward, as befits a doctoral contribution. Each looked with bright eyes on the opportunities the technology brings. One of the big issues in Cameroon is the interaction between Anglophone and Francophone communities; one wonders whether advances in user interface technology might help bridge this gap, and might in turn be of value in other parts of the world. The Quality of Service issues of long narrow satellite and sub-oceanic links can also stand review; this has been researched, but there is room for direct contribution from someone directly affected by the issues.
In 1994, when South Africa was undergoing a political sea change, I had a rather long email exchange with an engineer in a diamond mine. She looked at the world around her, and needed to hear that there was a world beyond her's that offered hope. How she got my email address, I don't know, but for several weeks we talked about her world and mine, life, things that went bump in the night, and what was important. For her, the Internet was truly a lifeline. Eight years later, I can tell you that many of her peers are finding hope, finding value, and finding each other. They are finding them, moreover, in Africa. For them, this is hope, and very important.
Fred Baker is a Cisco Fellow and the Chairman of the Board of the Internet Society. This online journal entry is from his trip last month to South Africa and Uganda.
