Wireless Internet in Africa
Taps the World's Libraries

July 9, 1998

The Internet and wireless technology were successfully used this month to send a first ever message between a research library in West Africa and scientists at a rural agricultural research station in East Africa. While now commonplace in such areas as North America, this exchange across the continent of Africa required innovative applications of technology and months of preparation.

In the absence of the Internet, the information exchange would likely not have even been attempted. Consider for example that an ordinary airmail letter travelling the same distance might have taken months. There is no telephone at the East African research station, but a fax from a nearby city in the region might have cost as much as $100. Without the Internet, obtaining a copy of a journal article would have been effectively impossible.

The research scientists are at the National Agriculture and Animal Production Research Institute (NAARI) in Namulonge (pronounced NAH-moo-LONG-gay), Uganda. The research library that they consulted is at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria. The two institutes were introduced to each other by a US Agency for International Development (USAID) program called AfricaLink.

The scientists in Uganda sent an E-mail message to Nigeria requesting specific text and charts from a technical journal that they required for their farming research. Since no telephone line was available, their message first travelled via a high frequency (HF) radio link to Uganda's commercial center, Kampala. A private firm called Bushnet provided the radio connection. USAID's AfricaLink financed the radio equipment purchase.

Bushnet's Malcolm Brew tests email from a laptop linked to the Internet via high frequency radio. The transceiver is in the shadows just behind the laptop, and is powered by the vehicle's battery. At the time of this photograph, Mr. Brew was employed by the World Food Program, which implemented the radio email system in support of refugee camps in such places as Eastern Congo (then Zaire), Rwanda, and northern Uganda.

From Bushnet, the NAARI E-mail message then passed over the copper wires, fiber optic cables and satellites of a variety of companies before reaching its destination in Nigeria. The diversity of the companies involved in carrying the message demonstrates the complexity of the world's new interconnectedness via the Internet: the national telephone company and an Internet services firm called Infocom in Uganda, UUNET and GTE in the USA, and eventually CGNET in California, which in turn bounced the message back to Africa off of a satellite to the Nigerian telephone company and to IITA in Ibadan. Satellite space may have been leased along the way from a company like PanAmSat or perhaps INTELSAT. Transit time for the entire journey was several seconds.

The message was received by staff of the IITA library, which holds one of the strongest agricultural research collections in sub-Saharan Africa. A search was immediately conducted of their library database, and the required publications were located. The pages requested were photocopied and scanned into computer files for sending by E-mail. The text was converted to small files using an optical character reader. Charts and graphs, however, posed a more complicated problem.

IITA's Multimedia Consultant Paul Philpot (center) holds the first journal article whose text and graphics were sent over the Internet to Uganda's National Agriculture and Animal Production Research Institute. Head of Library Yakubu Adedigba (left) directed the search for the publication requests. Designer Adeleke Taiwo (right) optically scanned and formatted the pages.

E-Mail by HF radio is expensive, mainly because an expensive radio must be dedicated to sending a message at very slow speeds. It might require anywhere from two to five minutes to transmit a single small image, such as a chart in a journal article. In contrast, a computer communicating over a telephone line can ordinarily receive the same image in only four to ten seconds.

A technical team at the IITA library studied the problem, and worked on ways to reduce the sizes of images so as not to bankrupt their Ugandan colleagues. The original file was reduced from more than 200 kilobytes to a mere 18. The final data transmission charge by Bushnet to NAARI to receive the journal article was only $5, a savings of $55 thanks to the file compression work of the IITA technical team. During this experimental period, Bushnet is actually donating its services, so in this particular case NAARI paid nothing for the file.

Scientists in many parts of Africa have long struggled to bring new seed varieties and solutions to pest problems to poor farmers. Many such scientists have studied agriculture in the halls of some of the world's leading research libraries, and yet upon returning home have been effectively cut off, forced to rely on back issues of journals that are sometimes decades old. The Internet is changing the nature of agricultural research and extension, making the world a smaller place, and improving the prospects for poor farmers across the globe.

Contact Dr. Jack Reeves, Director IITA Information Services Program
E-mail: j.reeves@cgiar.org

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