African Voices is a weekly show that highlights Africa's most engaging personalities,
exploring the lives and passions of people who rarely open themselves up
to the camera.
If you're reading this somewhere in Africa, then perhaps you should thank Nii Quaynor.
The Ghanaian professor is
known as "Africa's father of the internet," a web pioneer who helped
establish some of the continent's first online connections.
For some 20 years now,
soft-spoken Quaynor has been at the forefront of web development across
Africa. He is the first African to be elected to the board of ICANN, the internet corporation for assigned names and numbers. He's also played an important part in launching the African Network Operators Group and AfriNIC, the African internet numbers registry.
As a result, Quaynor was recently inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, lauded as an instrumental figure "in the early design and development of the internet." He is today chairman of Ghana's information technology agency and a professor at the country's Cape Coast University.
CNN's African Voices
spoke to Quaynor about the role of the internet in Africa's development
and his dreams for the continent's digital future. An edited version of
the interview follows.
CNN: How did you get the title of father of the internet in Africa?
Nii Quaynor:
Actually I don't know, but perhaps I made a lot of effort to get my
colleagues to understand and to participate and to begin to contribute
to the internet. And I have been fortunate with a very good educational
background and so I also wanted to impart the knowledge and I was a
major contributor in building some of the important technical
institutions that make up the internet ecosystem in Africa. In the
process of doing that a lot of people perhaps felt that my leadership
was good for them, and you might say, gave me that kind of description.
CNN: What is the state of the internet in the continent?
NQ: The
health of the internet in Africa is good; we have good connectivity, at
least to major capital cities; we also have good wireless through the
mobile companies and other forms of connectivity, so connectivity is
becoming less of a barrier, except that we are still working on the
affordability side of that connectivity.
The part that we are yet
to, in some sense, make headway is both in the use as well as in we
being part of the production side of services for the internet.
We don't have many businesses developing content or hosting content
or doing e-commerce -- we have some banks trying to do internet
banking, meaning we having companies beginning to adopt it, but we
really haven't taken hold of it. Some of it may be because of inadequate
policies, because our policies historically have been about the
transmission side of things and so we need to take another look at how a
country thinks about developing its internet.
So we have a big
challenge -- actually, we see it as an opportunity. Connectivity is not
the problem, now it's shifting to the industry and we need to really
build strong industries that will serve the needs of the one billion
people in Africa.
CNN: Do African governments understand the need for connectivity?
NQ: I
think governments now do understand; for most governments it's
important. They may not know what they want to do with it, but they
understand it's very important. That sometimes explains why government
actions are seen as not coordinated or erratic, because they think it's
very important but they yet don't have a full, sufficient understanding
to know exactly how they want to interact with it or manage it or grow
it. But certainly they recognize it is very important and many in
governments are engaging with the internet technical community and other
multi-stakeholder organizations to support them to evolve.
We do understand that
usually policy lags behind technology, so some of these sorts of
conflicts would occur, but I think we have weathered the storm -- Africa
is going beyond those days and now recognizes the importance of it.
They are battling with controlling it, and soon we'll convince everyone
that there is no need and that the right thing to do is to discipline it
and begin to adopt it and make it do the right things for us and help
define what Africa wants from the internet, which is not very obvious
yet.
CNN: What is your hope for Africa in the future?
NQ: My
hope for Africa in the future is that Africa will own its portion of the
internet. Africa should strive to participate on its own terms on the
internet, not leave it to chance to be determined.
Africa can indeed
determine how it wants to play in the internet and Africa should ensure
that it is able to create the right policy environment for the internet
to grow.
CNN
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