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Life in Rural Africa —
Before Telecommunications
When I visited in 2004, Ago-Are had no land-based or cellular telephone service. At that time,
the closest telephone and Internet access were both in Saki, a larger town thirty minutes away by
car. Using public transport, one could expect a round trip for one hour of Internet surfing to take
more than three hours. However, the occasional interruption of electricity, Internet, or telephone
service would make the trip fruitless. The Internet service was so slow that in one hour, I could
barely manage to open ten emails to copy and paste them to diskette for later reading.
On one occasion we could not complete the sign up procedures for a Yahoo! email account within
thirty minutes. We were too frustrated to keep trying that day.
While Ago-Are is a typical town in south-western Nigeria, for its size, its computer-based
Information Centre is an unusual feature. In 2004, OCDN did not have Internet access, so their
computers were used for training (mostly in MS Office), information sharing via CD-ROMs
(sent by volunteers from the UK), and paid secretarial services. In 2004, one email exchange with
them could take one month, as they needed to travel to the nearby town of Saki to visit the Internet
café to download their emails, and they might return at a later date to respond to it if it asked
detailed questions.
Email access came at a significant expense for their travel and connection fees compared to the
Centre’s income ($1.40 Canadian for roundtrip taxi fare, and $2.20 per hour for Internet access),
but it provided a vast improvement over the previous means of communication - telephone calls with
an intermediary who had a phone, could understand English and Yoruba, and who could relay messages
through contacts to bring it from the city of Ibadan to the town of Ago-Are, and receive answers
back. This is the communication process that Pam McLean, an OCDN supporter from the UK, used to
communicate with them before email became available in Saki in 2003.
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