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The Challenge With fewer than 4.8 telephones for every 1 000 people, it can take a long time — sometimes a full day's travel — to reach a public pay phone or to logon to the Internet in sub-Saharan Africa. In Canada, meanwhile, cell phones are tucked into purses and back pockets, and people impatient for faster connections to the Internet complain that telephone dial-up links are too slow. There is a significant gap between the North and the world's poorest continent in access to information and communication technologies (ICTs). Excluding South Africa, only one person out of 9 000 has access to the Internet in Africa, compared with a world average of one in 38. These disparities are creating a further division between societies that are information rich and those that are information poor. As ICTs become ever more important tools in the hands of government, business, organizations, and individuals in the North, the developing world risks being left further behind. Having missed the industrial revolution, Africa cannot afford to miss the information revolution and its implications for social and economic development. The Response The Acacia Initiative, named after a tree that grows throughout sub- Saharan Africa, is a complex and ambitious program to help disadvantaged communities and social groups on that continent assert control over their own development through access to, and effective use of, ICTs. Just as ICTs have transformed life in industrialized countries, Acacia believes they can have a similar revolutionary impact in Africa. To test this hypothesis, Acacia has launched an integrated program of demonstration projects and research in sub-Saharan Africa. It concentrates most of its efforts in four pilot countries: Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda. Activities focus on the areas of policy, infrastructure, technologies, human-resource development, capacity building, and applications. On the policy front, for example, Acacia is helping to harmonize ICT policies among the eight member countries of the West African Economic and Monetary Union. Established in 1997, Acacia is an exercise in experimentation and learning. Each country represents a different laboratory in which to assess models of community access to ICTs and the larger issue of the role of ICTs in development. While there is general agreement that information is essential for development, there is less consensus on how it can best be shared. Many feel that ICTs are luxuries that detract from investment in such basic needs as the provision of safe water, primary health care, and education. Acacia represents an opportunity to demonstrate how ICTs can complement and advance these same development goals. A monitoring program — the Evaluation and Learning Systems for Acacia (ELSA) — will identify successes and failures, which in turn will guide Acacia's current activities and future investment in ICTs and development. IDRC's focus on ICTs is not limited to Africa. It also funds communications infrastructure and ICT research projects in Latin America and Asia through the Pan Networking (PAN) Program Initiative. Acacia and PAN allow for the cross-fertilization of ideas, results, and experiences across projects, countries, and continents. The Objectives To discover and demonstrate how disadvantaged sub-Saharan African communities, including their women and youth, can use information and communication in solving local development problems. To learn from Acacia's research and experience and to disseminate this knowledge widely. To foster international interest and involvement in using ICTs to support rural and disadvantaged community development, thereby increasing community access to information and communication technologies. The Results Telecentres, which have been described as the Internet version of public phone booths, are one of Acacia's main vehicles for testing different approaches to providing community access to ICTs in Africa. IDRC also supports telecentre projects through PAN. (Featured project) For each of the four pilot countries, Acacia has developed a national strategy based on research studies and extensive consultation with key actors and decision-makers The national strategies are the blueprints by which projects are identified, information is shared, and results are translated into policy and action. As part of each strategy, Acacia has helped set up national advisory committees to provide input on local ICT development and projects. Senegal is undergoing a complex process of decentralization that gives local public authorities a greater role in decision making and provision of services. Acacia is helping to introduce information tools, such as software for budget management, to prepare local officials for their new responsibilities. Acacia has played an important role in promoting school networking and the development of online educational material in South Africa and Mozambique. These initiatives are of particular benefit to the many schools in these countries that geographically isolated and lacking in resources. Acacia is leading an initiative to establish African centres for excellence on universal access and rural connectivity in Dakar, (Senegal) and Nairobi,(Kenya) in partnership with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Nortel Networks, the Telecommunications Executive Management Institute of Canada and the Canadian government.

	Two IDRC program initiatives — Acacia and Pan Networking — are using telecentres to hook up poor communities to the Internet as well as giving them better access to phones, fax lines, and computers. The telecentres also form part of an extensive research effort to evaluate the impact of information and communication technologies on development.
The Nakaseke Multipurpose Community Telecentre serves villages north of Kampala, Uganda. It replaces telecommunications infrastructure lost during the civil strife from 1971 to 1986.	A 1993 study in Uganda showed that local government officials made a total of 40 000 trips a year to handle administrative matters that could have been dispatched with a phone call or letter, if these services had been reliable. Meanwhile, a continent away in Pondicherry, India, a recent survey of 19 villages found that there were only 12 public telephones to serve 22 000 people — and 3 of them were out of order. Shared problems lead to similar solutions. IDRC, through its Acacia and Pan Networking (PAN) program initiatives, is supporting telecentre projects in both countries to provide public access to information and communications technologies (ICTs). Telecentres, which can range from simple phone shops to full-service facilities, enable rural villagers to retrieve helpful information and to exchange ideas with people as close as the next village or as far away as the other side of the world. In Uganda, a telecentre located in a library in Nakaseke offers several ICT services designed to advance rural development in an area that was devastated by two decades of civil strife. In an "information shop" in Pondicherry region, women are making phone calls and downloading health information from the Internet, using equipment set up in a village temple. The World Bank has called telecentres "a powerful engine of rural development and a preferred instrument in the fight against poverty." Others take a more critical view, arguing that money is better spent on traditional forms of development assistance. To contribute to this debate, IDRC is experimenting with several models of telecentres in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to explore a host of difficult research questions. Do ICTs improve the quality of life? What kind of applications are of greatest benefit to poor communities? What can rural areas with high levels of illiteracy gain from the World Wide Web? How can Internet access, usually driven by commercial interests, be financially sustained in marginalized areas?
Nakaseke's library complements the telecentre with which it shares premises.	By introducing a variety of telecentres in different locations, IDRC is able to examine these issues under a range of conditions. Among the many telecentre projects supported by Acacia and PAN are the following: An effort to help indigenous peoples protect their culture and their lands in Equador through better access to ICTs. Telecentres equipped with computersand radio modems have been installed in three isolated communities in the Amazon rainforest. An initiative by the South African government to provide universal access to ICTs over the next decade by having a phone within five kilometres — an hour's walk — of every home. To meet this goal, telecentres are being established in disadvantaged and underserviced communities. Sites include a rural women's association, a community radio station, a post office, and a small business cooperative. A multipurpose telecentre in Timbuktu, Mali, developed in partnership with UNESCO and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). This "high technology" telecentre will include resources for distance education and telemedicine as well as business support services.
"Information is the fuel of medicine. Here we have none. Year by year, we are falling behind." — Physician in Timbuktu, Mali	Evaluation and assessment are important features of all the telecentre projects. Acacia has designed the Evaluation and Learning System of Acacia (ELSA) which will continually monitor telecentres for lessons in success or failure that can be applied to ongoing and future activities. Although IDRC's telecentre projects are still in their early stages, some promising signs are emerging. In Timbuktu, doctors are sending emails to colleagues overseas and reading articles from medical journals on the Internet. In Pondicherry, a group of 40 women, all labourers with few assets, were able to get insurance policies for accidental loss of life or limb after using data obtained from their information shop. Another labourer found out about a government-sponsored credit and training program for manufacturing incense. She enrolled in the program and today supplies incense sticks to a local shop. For people who may have never dialed a telephone in their lives, telecentres represent a chance to leap frog over old technologies. Acacia and PAN hope to prove that ICTs can also vault the poor over several stages of development to reap the social and economic benefits of the Information Age. Future Directions
Uma Rani and Sundari, volunteers who operate the Embalam Information Centre in Pondicherry, India, are learning how to work with sound files.	The telecentres are very much a work in progress. Several more are due to open, including Acacia-supported sites in Mali, Mozambique, Uganda, South Africa, and PAN sites in Mexico, Pakistan, and the Philippines. The ambitious mission of the Acacia Initiative also continues to evolve with the program being extended to other countries in Africa with the collaboration of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. An international advisory council will be established to help guide and manage Acacia's activities. Acacia is also entering into new partnerships with the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, UNESCO, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the African Development Bank, the European Union, other national donor agencies, and African telecommunications operators and providers. Acacia will continue its work with the Information Technology Association of Canada to support the development of the African ICT private sector and to encourage Canada/Africa private sector partnerships. Further Reading Acacia Initiative website International Telecommunications Union Uganda Acacia National Strategy website Acacia Studies and Reports Pan Networking Initiative website Pan Asia Networking website Reports webzine, "Improving Access to Telecommunications in South Africa" Reports webzine, "Latin American Telecentres: The Community Networking Pilot Project"