Fortune and fantasy on Africa's oil frontier
Barcamp Cameroon: working to overcome the digital divide. Photo by Christiane Badgley
An excellent blog post today from Cameroonian writer Dibussi Tande: The Digital Disconnect and Misconceptions about “Revolution 2.0”.
Tande has already written several articles exploring the political and institutional differences between North and Sub-Saharan Africa and how they impact the potential for any popular uprising. With this post, he looks at the real problem of limited connectivity. Despite the fact that mobile and internet penetration are growing by leaps and bounds across the continent, Sub-Saharan Africa is still woefully “disconnected”:
In any case, understanding the strength and limitations of social media and incorporating these into any strategy is the easy part. The real challenge to digital activists in Cameroon and most of sub-Saharan Africa with low Internet penetration rates is what I describe as the “digital disconnect”, i.e., the fact that the digital civil society in Africa is operating in a largely unwired continent, and that the bulk of Africa’s digital activists live out of Africa and do not share the same geographical space as the people they are representing or trying to influence.
Check out Tande’s piece for some great insights.
Christiane Badgley has been producing and editing documentary films for the past twenty years, with much of her work focused on the U.S. criminal justice system and post-colonial African politics and history.
