Life in Rural Africa — One Portrait

In 2004, I visited a grassroots community information centre started by the local Nigerian non-profit organization, Oke-Ogun Community Development Network (OCDN). Such centres are frequently called telecentres. A telecentre may provide a variety of services, such as computer training and access, Internet access, browsing of CD-ROMs about topics of interest (often published by development agencies), or printing and photocopying. A telecentre differs from a cyber café because of its mandate to serve the community, and usually offers more assistance and training to clients. Fees for these services are often required to keep such centres financially sustainable.

In visiting this Nigerian telecentre, I experienced firsthand the frustrations, limitations, and benefits of digital ICTs in rural Nigeria. OCDN operates an Information Centre that provides the only computer access available to the 10,000 residents of Ago-Are, Oyo State, Nigeria. On my second visit in 2005, four computers were working, two of which now offered low-speed Internet connections.

Ago-Are is three hours’ drive north of the major city of Ibadan in southwest Nigeria. Red brick homes made from local clay are set closely together within the town. In the surrounding fields virtually every family has a farm to grow cassava, yam, maize, or other produce. There are four schools, and approximately thirty churches and thirty mosques of varying sizes. The major language is Yoruba, and English, the national language of Nigeria, is prevalent.

The town has three paved roads linking it to the larger surrounding towns, and dirt roads servicing other areas. Restaurants and clapboard shops line the main road. Bread and a few staples are available daily, but the major food and cattle markets occur every five days. Taxis congregate at the motor park to take passengers to nearby towns and cities. Motorcycle taxis serve passengers needing rides within town. My research has led me to believe that their situation is representative of many parts of rural Nigeria, and other African countries as well.

Life 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.

Life After Telecommunications

Communication was made significantly easier for OCDN when they installed a satellite Internet connection in October 2004. The fact that staff must pay for Internet access ($1.20 Canadian per hour), and that customers are frequently using the computers, mean that Internet access is still intermittent for them. But this is a vast improvement since an email exchange now takes days, not weeks. And occasionally we find ourselves online at the same time and can "chat" live.

Not only do the telecentre staff find Internet and email access to be valuable resources for project collaborations with friends and partners in the UK, Canada, and elsewhere, it is also very important for the community. Family can arrange visits from members overseas much more easily now. Children can access online teaching resources that are not available in schools. Parents can keep in touch with their children who are students in universities in other Nigerian cities. Students can download Nigerian school application forms from the Internet — a great convenience, saving travel time and funds. Farmers can contact the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan, which supports farmer training and projects in Ago-Are. This all makes life easier.

In 2005, the Centre was expanded with satellite television and a video system that enables community members to enjoy education and entertainment together (such as ever-popular football games!). They were partners in the local video production training we did for a solar cooking project.