By Ciaran Ryan
South Africa, Africas richest country, is really two nations. The gap
The electricity and telephone networks arrived here only in the last three years, festooning the landscape with cables and TV aerials in an incongruous marriage of technology and privation.
But the cables have yet to reach Manguzi, a village in northern KwaZulu Natal, one of South Africas nine provinces. Manguzi lies 15 kilometers south of the border between South Africa and Mozambique in one of the most unspoiled corners of Africa. Until recently, there was almost no local economy. The local population, numbering about 100,000, survives by subsistence farming.
ecology, making this one of the most popular eco-tourism destinations in South Africa. Its pristine coastline, with coral reefs, estuaries, lake systems, forests and mountains, has for centuries been sheltered from human intrusion by the tsetse fly and malaria. In recent years,
nearby Kosi Bay has become a particular attraction for tourists.
Tourism has started to change the economy of the region. Several projects have been launched to promote eco-tourism in the area, but the lack of telecommunications remains a major impediment to further growth.
The Information and Communications unit of the state-owned Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) came up with a novel plan to provide Internet access, e-mail and learning resources to this remote community using a unique combination of radio and satellite broadcast technologies. There is nothing new about using wireless technology to connect remote communities to the rest of the world, but what makes this project unique is choice of technologies and their low cost.
The first phase of the project, costing a little over $7,000, involved the creation of a telecenter comprising of a phone shop with five telephone booths and a fax machine. A second component of the telecenter is a local-area network linking eight PCs and a FreeBSD fileserver. It is connected to the Internet via a dial-up analog connection, which dials on demand when a network user requests Internet
access.
At a community workshop to train the locals in the use of the new facility, the headmaster at a local school requested that his school be connected to the telecenter to save his students the three-mile walk from the school to the center.
Because Manguzi is a sparsely populated rural community situated hundreds of miles from the nearest urban development, the choice of technologies was limited. Telephone, cellular telephone, VSAT satellite, ISDN, Leased Lines and other technologies were deemed inappropriate for the task. Another requirement was that the solution implemented should be cheap, robust and suitable for Web browsing and e-mail.
A second school was identified to participate in the project. Both schools were provided with computers, antenna, satellite receiver cards and digital satellite broadcast dishes -- at a cost of less than $1,500 per school. Given the fact that 1,400 schoolchildren now have access to this facility, the overall cost, about $10,000, is astonishingly low and holds out the promise of replicating the project in other remote parts of South Africa and beyond.
The telecenter serves as the network hub. When a user at one of the schools wants to access the Internet, a request is relayed to the telecenter via radio link where the FreeBSD fileserver dials on demand to execute the request. The requested information is then downloaded directly to the users PC at the school using satellite-broadcasting
technology. In other words, the information request is sent via the single telephone line allocated to the project, and is received via satellite. This method makes relatively modest use of the telephone line and allows multiple users to access the Internet simultaneously.
CSIRs partners in this project were Wireless Business Systems; Siyanda Satellite, which installs high-speed satellite Internet links across Africa; the KwaZulu Natal Education Department; SchoolNet, a private organization charged with introducing the Internet to South African schools; and the Manguzi Community Forum.
Most of the teachers in Manguzi had never seen a computer before being introduced to the Manguzi Wireless Internet project. Within a week they were surfing the Web like old hands, passing on their newly acquired skills to their younger charges. The children in the area can now do online research and communicate with others via e-mail. They are
exposed to the same career opportunities and learning resources available to their urban cousins.
Ronel Smith, connectivity manager for CSIRs Mikomtek unit, which is coordinating the project, says had there been a well-developed telecommunications infrastructure in Manguzi, the solution would have been simple: Install a modem and open an account with an Internet service provider. "Complicating the situation is the fact that there is very little English spoken -- Zulu is the main language -- and computer-literacy levels are low," Smith said.
The local community was consulted extensively before the project was initiated. Smith says this helped secure the success of the project. The telecenter is staffed by a full-time manager who was given comprehensive training in computers. He, in turn, is able to train local residents in the use of computers and the Internet. Many Manguzi residents now congregate daily at the telecenter to do word processing, desktop publishing, send and receive e-mail and surf the Web.
The Manguzi project is exposing the children of this region to a wider universe of learning. Though most of the Internet information is in English, more and more information will eventually become available in Zulu and other African languages. South Africas Department of
Communications is engaged in a project to bring Internet kiosks to all parts of the country. Part of this project involves putting roughly 3,000 government forms online and providing a host of content in all 13 official languages of South Africa.
One Manguzi teacher is using the telecenter as a research tool for a masters thesis through the University of South Africa, situated hundreds of miles away in Pretoria.
The tsetse fly, malaria and the absence of telecommunications may have kept Manguzi relatively free of human invasion for centuries. But that is changing. The Manguzi Wireless Internet project is helping to raise the quality of life for the people of the region. It is already
bringing new economic opportunities to the area, helping to realize its vast eco-tourism potential.
