The Calculus Behind Obama’s Ghana Stopover

When President Obama visits Africa this summer, it promises to be a moment of enormous historic and symbolic resonance for his country and the continent of his father’s family. But it will not exactly be a homecoming, since his ancestral homeland was deemed too troubled to visit.

The White House passed over Kenya, where Mr. Obama’s late father was from, in favor of the small nation of Ghana as the site of his first presidential visit to sub-Saharan Africa. A year after Kenya exploded in political violence, it remains a tense and unsettled place. Ghana, by contrast, is an outpost of democracy and civil society in a volatile region.

“The president and Mrs. Obama look forward to strengthening the U.S. relationship with one of our most trusted partners in sub-Saharan Africa, and to highlighting the critical role that sound governance and civil society play in promoting lasting development,” the White House said in a written statement announcing the trip on Saturday.

Mr. Obama will travel to Accra, the capital of Ghana, on July 10 for an overnight stop at the end of a trip that will first take him to Moscow to meet with Russian leaders and then Sardinia for the annual summit of the Group of Eight powers. Not counting Egypt, where he will travel next month, it will be Mr. Obama’s first trip to Africa as the first African-American president. And while a quick one-night, one-stop visit might not produce the spectacle of a longer journey across the continent, it will surely generate global attention.

Among other things, Mr. Obama may visit Cape Coast Castle, the headquarters of the British slave trade on Africa’s Gold Coast. Captured Africans would pass through the castle’s “door of no return” as they were carted off to ships. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush visited African slave posts during their presidencies, but the imagery of an African American president visiting one promises to be far more profound.

News reports from the region quoted Ghana’s foreign ministry saying Mr. Obama would go see the notorious slave post, but the White House said Sunday that no schedule has been finalized.

White House aides said they might have preferred a longer trip to Africa, along the lines of the one Mr. Obama took in 2006 as a senator, but found themselves constrained by his schedule. A president has certain travel obligations each year because of summits and the like and his foreign policy advisers realized that if they waited for time for an Africa-only trip, it would be later in his tenure.

By the time Mr. Obama travels to Russia and Italy in July, he will have been to Europe three times as president and never to sub-Saharan Africa, Asia or Latin America beyond a quick trip to Mexico City. So his advisers agreed to tack the quick Ghana stop onto the end of his Russia-G-8 trip to at least get a marker down before too much time passed.

“We felt it was important to get to Africa early in the term,” said a senior official who insisted on anonymity to speak about internal deliberations.

As they surveyed the possibilities, Kenya was ruled out. Although Mr. Obama went there three years ago, it has since descended into political turmoil. After a disputed election last year, ethnic violence erupted, leaving more than 1,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands fleeing their homes.

A coalition government formed with the opposition stopped the upheaval but has not resolved the underlying tensions. A United Nations investigation recently reported that more than 500 people had been killed by police death squads.

In choosing Ghana instead, the Obama team picked a bipartisan American favorite. President George W. Bush visited Accra last year and Ghana named a major new highway after him. Mr. Bush reciprocated with a rare State Dinner at the White House for Ghana’s then-president, John Kufuor. John Atta Mill succeeded Mr. Kufuor this year in the second peaceful handover of power in a region where coups are more common.

As a model for governance, Mr. Obama’s advisers concluded that Ghana offered an opportunity to promote important values even in a short visit. “Because it is the first visit, it will allow us to highlight these issues more,” the senior official said. “We have limited time and we tried to figure out where we could get the most out of limited time.”

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Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/us/politics/18prexy.html?hp

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Study: Africans More Genetically Diverse Than Rest of World

Research Raises Questions About Accuracy of Ancestral Tracing for African Americans

Africans are more diverse genetically than the inhabitants of the rest of the world combined, according to a sweeping study that carried researchers into remote valleys and mountaintops to sample the bloodlines of more than 100 distinct populations.

The report, published today in the journal Science Express, suggests that, because of historical migrations and genetic mixing across the continent, it will be hard for African Americans to trace their ancestry in fine detail. African American genealogies are increasingly popular and commercialized, but the authors of the new study cast doubt on how precise such searches can be given the complexity of the genetic makeup of Africans.

“It may be very challenging to trace back ancestry to particular tribes or ethnic groups,” said Sarah Tishkoff, a University of Pennsylvania geneticist who led the international research team.

The first anatomically modern human beings originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and all human beings today are their direct descendants. The study points to an area along the Namibian-South African border, the homeland of the San people, as the starting point for a southwest-to-northeast migratory route through Africa and exiting the continent at about the midpoint of the Red Sea.

By offering a richer data-base than had previously been available for African genetic diversity, the new findings will help doctors and medical researchers tailor drug treatments for different groups of Africans rather than treating them as a homogenous population.

“I think this is an absolute landmark. It’s incredible,” said Alison Brooks, a professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University, who read the report and then plowed through more than 100 pages of supplemental material. “It’s the most comprehensive document ever published describing the very complex issue of African genetic variation.”

She added, “There’s been so much genetic analysis that’s been so Eurocentric.”

The report culminates nearly a decade of research by scientists in the United States, Europe and Africa, led by Tishkoff, who until last year was a professor at the University of Maryland. Tishkoff’s paper acknowledges the cooperation of indigenous people in Africa, many in remote places reachable only with long journeys through rugged terrain in 4-wheel drive vehicles.

“Some people had never seen a fair skinned person before,” Tishkoff said. “Many of these groups have been studied by linguists and anthropologists, and we’ve known nothing about their genetic history. Until now.”

She had to haul centrifuges, for processing blood samples, into villages without electricity, often running her devices by connecting them to her car battery. The biggest risk, she said, was automobile accidents (at one point her ’85 Land Rover collided on a mountain road with a descending bus, but no one was hurt).

One of her collaborators, Muntaser Ibrahim of the University of Khartoum, said that indigenous people were eager to help the research. “They would like to know about their past as much as everybody else,” he said. “The notion that people in remote areas are not interested in genetics is not true.”

Although the study’s main focus was on Africa, it also provides a glimpse of the complex heritage of African Americans. Tishkoff and her colleagues looked at 98 African Americans from four locations — North Carolina, Baltimore, Chicago and Pittsburgh. The researchers determined that, on average, they showed a 71 percent genetic background in the linguistic group Niger-Kordofanian, 13 percent European ancestry, 8 percent from other African regions and a smattering of genetic markers from around the globe.

But the percentages vary widely from individual to individual. In a conference call with reporters, Tishkoff said the 13 percent figure for European genetic markers may be a slight underestimate; other studies have found numbers closer to 20 percent.

Her findings provide a kind of caveat to the increasingly popular, and commercialized search for the ancestry of African Americans. A specific genetic marker might be found among disparate ethnic groups, hinting of many ancient migrations, invasions and ethnic mixing. And where one ethnic group lives today may not be where it lived thousands of years ago.

The situation is made rather more confusing, however, by the different techniques used for tracing ancestry. Tishkoff studied very short snippets of nuclear DNA; some commercial research companies use mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA. These latter techniques offer a kind of thread into the past to a single ancestor, rather than the broader contingent of ancestors.

“There is no relevance to what we do at African Ancestry,” said African Ancestry’s scientific director, Rick Kittles. “We do not use nuclear markers like Sarah did in this study. In fact we found out years ago that these types of markers will not be that informative for tracing ancestry of African Americans given their mixed African ancestry.”

Brooks said the report will help resolve academic debates among archeologists and linguists, while giving new texture to African history. The research makes all the more vivid the differences among the continent’s many ethnic groups, which include the Hadzu, the San, the Dinka, the Mbuti, the Nuer, the Fulani, the Beja, the Tuareg, and hundreds of other populations. The Tishkoff team looked at a total of 121 African population groups from about 2,000 such groups on the continent.

Said Brooks, “The study shows that single sources of data, whether from archaeology, oral history, genetics, or linguistic similarity are not sufficient to understand the complex history of an African region — one can be transmitted without the others, and each has a different story to tell about the past.”

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Full article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/30/AR2009043002485.html?hpid=topnews

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Why foreign aid is hurting Africa

Kibera, the largest slum in Africa, is home to more than one million Kenyans.

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Money from rich countries has trapped many African nations in a cycle of corruption, slower economic growth and poverty. Cutting off the flow would be far more beneficial.

A month ago I visited Kibera, the largest slum in Africa. This suburb of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, is home to more than one million people, who eke out a living in an area of about one square mile — roughly 75% the size of New York’s Central Park. It is a sea of aluminum and cardboard shacks that forgotten families call home. The idea of a slum conjures up an image of children playing amidst piles of garbage, with no running water and the rank, rife stench of sewage. Kibera does not disappoint.

What is incredibly disappointing is the fact that just a few yards from Kibera stands the headquarters of the United Nations’ agency for human settlements which, with an annual budget of millions of dollars, is mandated to “promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all.” Kibera festers in Kenya, a country that has one of the highest ratios of development workers per capita. This is also the country where in 2004, British envoy Sir Edward Clay apologized for underestimating the scale of government corruption and failing to speak out earlier.

Giving alms to Africa remains one of the biggest ideas of our time — millions march for it, governments are judged by it, celebrities proselytize the need for it. Calls for more aid to Africa are growing louder, with advocates pushing for doubling the roughly $50 billion of international assistance that already goes to Africa each year.

Yet evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower. The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment. It’s increased the risk of civil conflict and unrest (the fact that over 60% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population is under the age of 24 with few economic prospects is a cause for worry). Aid is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.

Few will deny that there is a clear moral imperative for humanitarian and charity-based aid to step in when necessary, such as during the 2004 tsunami in Asia. Nevertheless, it’s worth reminding ourselves what emergency and charity-based aid can and cannot do. Aid-supported scholarships have certainly helped send African girls to school (never mind that they won’t be able to find a job in their own countries once they have graduated). This kind of aid can provide band-aid solutions to alleviate immediate suffering, but by its very nature cannot be the platform for long-term sustainable growth.

Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, such charity-based aid is relatively small beer when compared to the sea of money that floods Africa each year in government-to-government aid or aid from large development institutions such as the World Bank.

Over the past 60 years at least $1 trillion of development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Yet real per-capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population — over 350 million people — live on less than a dollar a day, a figure that has nearly doubled in two decades.

Even after the very aggressive debt-relief campaigns in the 1990s, African countries still pay close to $20 billion in debt repayments per annum, a stark reminder that aid is not free. In order to keep the system going, debt is repaid at the expense of African education and health care. Well-meaning calls to cancel debt mean little when the cancellation is met with the fresh infusion of aid, and the vicious cycle starts up once again.

In Zambia, former President Frederick Chiluba (with wife Regina in November 2008) has been charged with theft of state funds.

In 2005, just weeks ahead of a G8 conference that had Africa at the top of its agenda, the International Monetary Fund published a report entitled “Aid Will Not Lift Growth in Africa.” The report cautioned that governments, donors and campaigners should be more modest in their claims that increased aid will solve Africa’s problems. Despite such comments, no serious efforts have been made to wean Africa off this debilitating drug.

The most obvious criticism of aid is its links to rampant corruption. Aid flows destined to help the average African end up supporting bloated bureaucracies in the form of the poor-country governments and donor-funded non-governmental organizations. In a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in May 2004, Jeffrey Winters, a professor at Northwestern University, argued that the World Bank had participated in the corruption of roughly $100 billion of its loan funds intended for development.

As recently as 2002, the African Union, an organization of African nations, estimated that corruption was costing the continent $150 billion a year, as international donors were apparently turning a blind eye to the simple fact that aid money was inadvertently fueling graft. With few or no strings attached, it has been all too easy for the funds to be used for anything, save the developmental purpose for which they were intended.

In Zaire — known today as the Democratic Republic of Congo — Irwin Blumenthal (whom the IMF had appointed to a post in the country’s central bank) warned in 1978 that the system was so corrupt that there was “no (repeat, no) prospect for Zaire’s creditors to get their money back.” Still, the IMF soon gave the country the largest loan it had ever given an African nation. According to corruption watchdog agency Transparency International, Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s president from 1965 to 1997, is reputed to have stolen at least $5 billion from the country.

It’s scarcely better today. A month ago, Malawi’s former President Bakili Muluzi was charged with embezzling aid money worth $12 million. Zambia’s former President Frederick Chiluba (a development darling during his 1991 to 2001 tenure) remains embroiled in a court case that has revealed millions of dollars frittered away from health, education and infrastructure toward his personal cash dispenser. Yet the aid keeps on coming.

A nascent economy needs a transparent and accountable government and an efficient civil service to help meet social needs. Its people need jobs and a belief in their country’s future. A surfeit of aid has been shown to be unable to help achieve these goals.

A woman waits at a medical center in Kuyera, Ethiopia.

A constant stream of “free” money is a perfect way to keep an inefficient or simply bad government in power. As aid flows in, there is nothing more for the government to do — it doesn’t need to raise taxes, and as long as it pays the army, it doesn’t have to take account of its disgruntled citizens. No matter that its citizens are disenfranchised (as with no taxation there can be no representation). All the government really needs to do is to court and cater to its foreign donors to stay in power.

Stuck in an aid world of no incentives, there is no reason for governments to seek other, better, more transparent ways of raising development finance (such as accessing the bond market, despite how hard that might be). The aid system encourages poor-country governments to pick up the phone and ask the donor agencies for next capital infusion. It is no wonder that across Africa, over 70% of the public purse comes from foreign aid.

In Ethiopia, where aid constitutes more than 90% of the government budget, a mere 2% of the country’s population has access to mobile phones. (The African country average is around 30%.) Might it not be preferable for the government to earn money by selling its mobile phone license, thereby generating much-needed development income and also providing its citizens with telephone service that could, in turn, spur economic activity?

Look what has happened in Ghana, a country where after decades of military rule brought about by a coup, a pro-market government has yielded encouraging developments. Farmers and fishermen now use mobile phones to communicate with their agents and customers across the country to find out where prices are most competitive. This translates into numerous opportunities for self-sustainability and income generation — which, with encouragement, could be easily replicated across the continent.

To advance a country’s economic prospects, governments need efficient civil service. But civil service is naturally prone to bureaucracy, and there is always the incipient danger of self-serving cronyism and the desire to bind citizens in endless, time-consuming red tape. What aid does is to make that danger a grim reality. This helps to explain why doing business across much of Africa is a nightmare. In Cameroon, it takes a potential investor around 426 days to perform 15 procedures to gain a business license. What entrepreneur wants to spend 119 days filling out forms to start a business in Angola? He’s much more likely to consider the U.S. (40 days and 19 procedures) or South Korea (17 days and 10 procedures).

Even what may appear as a benign intervention on the surface can have damning consequences. Say there is a mosquito-net maker in small-town Africa. Say he employs 10 people who together manufacture 500 nets a week. Typically, these 10 employees support upward of 15 relatives each. A Western government-inspired program generously supplies the affected region with 100,000 free mosquito nets. This promptly puts the mosquito net manufacturer out of business, and now his 10 employees can no longer support their 150 dependents. In a couple of years, most of the donated nets will be torn and useless, but now there is no mosquito net maker to go to. They’ll have to get more aid. And African governments once again get to abdicate their responsibilities.

In a similar vein has been the approach to food aid, which historically has done little to support African farmers. Under the auspices of the U.S. Food for Peace program, each year millions of dollars are used to buy American-grown food that has to then be shipped across oceans. One wonders how a system of flooding foreign markets with American food, which puts local farmers out of business, actually helps better Africa. A better strategy would be to use aid money to buy food from farmers within the country, and then distribute that food to the local citizens in need.

Then there is the issue of “Dutch disease,” a term that describes how large inflows of money can kill off a country’s export sector, by driving up home prices and thus making their goods too expensive for export. Aid has the same effect. Large dollar-denominated aid windfalls that envelop fragile developing economies cause the domestic currency to strengthen against foreign currencies. This is catastrophic for jobs in the poor country where people’s livelihoods depend on being relatively competitive in the global market.

One watchdog group estimates that former Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko, above in 1995, took billions from the country.

To fight aid-induced inflation, countries have to issue bonds to soak up the subsequent glut of money swamping the economy. In 2005, for example, Uganda was forced to issue such bonds to mop up excess liquidity to the tune of $700 million. The interest payments alone on this were a staggering $110 million, to be paid annually.

The stigma associated with countries relying on aid should also not be underestimated or ignored. It is the rare investor that wants to risk money in a country that is unable to stand on its own feet and manage its own affairs in a sustainable way.

Africa remains the most unstable continent in the world, beset by civil strife and war. Since 1996, 11 countries have been embroiled in civil wars. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in the 1990s, Africa had more wars than the rest of the world combined. Although my country, Zambia, has not had the unfortunate experience of an outright civil war, growing up I experienced first-hand the discomfort of living under curfew (where everyone had to be in their homes between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., which meant racing from work and school) and faced the fear of the uncertain outcomes of an attempted coup in 1991 — sadly, experiences not uncommon to many Africans.

Civil clashes are often motivated by the knowledge that by seizing the seat of power, the victor gains virtually unfettered access to the package of aid that comes with it. In the last few months alone, there have been at least three political upheavals across the continent, in Mauritania, Guinea and Guinea Bissau (each of which remains reliant on foreign aid). Madagascar’s government was just overthrown in a coup this past week. The ongoing political volatility across the continent serves as a reminder that aid-financed efforts to force-feed democracy to economies facing ever-growing poverty and difficult economic prospects remain, at best, precariously vulnerable. Long-term political success can only be achieved once a solid economic trajectory has been established.

Proponents of aid are quick to argue that the $13 billion ($100 billion in today’s terms) aid of the post-World War II Marshall Plan helped pull back a broken Europe from the brink of an economic abyss, and that aid could work, and would work, if Africa had a good policy environment.

The aid advocates skirt over the point that the Marshall Plan interventions were short, sharp and finite, unlike the open-ended commitments which imbue governments with a sense of entitlement rather than encouraging innovation. And aid supporters spend little time addressing the mystery of why a country in good working order would seek aid rather than other, better forms of financing. No country has ever achieved economic success by depending on aid to the degree that many African countries do.

The good news is we know what works; what delivers growth and reduces poverty. We know that economies that rely on open-ended commitments of aid almost universally fail, and those that do not depend on aid succeed. The latter is true for economically successful countries such as China and India, and even closer to home, in South Africa and Botswana. Their strategy of development finance emphasizes the important role of entrepreneurship and markets over a staid aid-system of development that preaches hand-outs.

Ghana has recently seen encouraging developments, including the spread of mobile phones.

African countries could start by issuing bonds to raise cash. To be sure, the traditional capital markets of the U.S. and Europe remain challenging. However, African countries could explore opportunities to raise capital in more non-traditional markets such as the Middle East and China (whose foreign exchange reserves are more than $4 trillion). Moreover, the current market malaise provides an opening for African countries to focus on acquiring credit ratings (a prerequisite to accessing the bond markets), and preparing themselves for the time when the capital markets return to some semblance of normalcy.

Governments need to attract more foreign direct investment by creating attractive tax structures and reducing the red tape and complex regulations for businesses. African nations should also focus on increasing trade; China is one promising partner. And Western countries can help by cutting off the cycle of giving something for nothing. It’s time for a change.

Dambisa Moyo, a former economist at Goldman Sachs, is the author of “Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa.”

Corrections & Amplifications

In the African nations of Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Somalia, Mali, Chad, Mauritania and Sierra Leone from 1970 to 2002, over 70% of total government spending came from foreign aid, according to figures from the World Bank. This essay on foreign aid to Africa incorrectly said that 70% of government spending throughout Africa comes from foreign aid.

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Full article and photos: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123758895999200083.html

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Africa’s spectacular colors

Acacia sunset in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania

Flamingos taking off, Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania

 A leopard running down a tree in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania

Sparring elephants in the Tarangire National park, Tanzania

Deadvlei in the Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia

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Full article and photos: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/africas-spectacular-colours-1606871.html

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Africa, once thought immune, succumbs to global crisis

A worker mines gold outside Johannesburg. The steep decline in commodity prices will hurt Africa.

When the global financial crisis erupted last fall, Africa was one of the few regions of the world that hoped to survive unscathed.

After all, Africa’s banks had little exposure to the toxic debts of the Western financial system. Focused on their domestic markets, and relatively well regulated, Africa’s banks were able to escape the worst of the global storm.

There was even a hope that Africa could “decouple” from the worldwide recession by boosting its commodity exports to China, where the demand for African oil and minerals has dramatically expanded in recent years.

But as the crisis deepens, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Africa’s economies will suffer serious damage. Optimistic forecasts are being furiously scaled back, with African leaders now acknowledging that the impact was severely underestimated.

“There’s no evidence of ‘decoupling’ from the world economy,” Hannah Edinger, head of research at Frontier Advisory, a research company in South Africa, said at a conference in Johannesburg this week.

The crisis spells the end of an unprecedented tide of growth for the world’s poorest continent – six years of annual growth of 5 per cent or more.

And it means more years of hardship for millions of impoverished Africans who had pinned their hopes on the recent boom.

Until recently, the International Monetary Fund had praised the African economies as “surprisingly resilient” in the face of the global crisis. But this week, the IMF warned that all of Africa’s gains of the past five years are “at risk” from the “tremendous challenges” of the financial crisis.

Growth forecasts for Africa are closely mirroring those for the world, with Africa’s performance being revised downward with each drop in the global forecast over the past three months.

“The downturn in the advanced economies has been stronger than expected, commodity prices have dropped more sharply than anticipated, generalized external funding pressures have surfaced, and the risk appetite among foreign investors in Africa has deteriorated,” Takatoshi Kato, the IMF’s deputy managing director, said in a statement.

With some African countries heavily dependent on commodity exports for 50 percent to 90 percent of their economic output, the steep decline in commodity prices and the weakness of export markets will cause major damage to Africa this year. The recession in Western economies will also hurt Africa by cutting the level of foreign aid and the amount of remittances from workers in overseas jobs.

“Global trade and aid won’t be in Africa’s favor,” said Stanley Subramoney, deputy chief executive officer of the Southern Africa office of PricewaterhouseCoopers. “You’re going to see more protectionism and tribalism and nationalism in global thinking. Africa is on its own.”
Even the hopes of a Chinese rescue have failed to materialize. Dozens of Chinese mining companies have pulled out of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the past three months.

“Africa’s growth is tied very closely to commodity demand from China, and Chinese growth could be as low as 3 or 4 percent this quarter,” said Julian Wentzel, head of research at Macquarie First South Securities in South Africa.

Almost all of the benefits of Africa’s recent growth “could be compromised” as a result of the global situation, African Development Bank president Donald Kaberuka said last month.

In its latest forecast, the IMF suggests that the growth rate in sub-Saharan Africa will be just 3.5 percent this year — scarcely enough to keep up with the population growth.

The continent’s biggest economy, South Africa, is likely to grow by less than 1 per cent this year, after estimated growth of 3 per cent last year, according to independent analysts in Johannesburg.

All of this is a jolt for a continent that seemed to have a bright outlook. A year ago, many analysts were convinced Africa had finally left behind decades of stagnation. Poverty was being reduced, if only marginally in some countries. Those improvements are now in jeopardy.

“The deceleration of income growth will undermine the modest gains in poverty reduction that many countries have recorded,” said a recent report by the African Development Bank.

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Full article and photo: http://business.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090205.wibafrica05/BNStory/Business/home

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Bringing the Internet to Remote African Villages

In Entasopia, Kenya, Julius Kasifu uses the Web to raise awareness of handicapped children.

Although providing Internet access is outside the normal business realm of Google, with this project it is looking at how obstacles might be overcome in Kenya and other parts of Africa.

The dish at Entasopia was intended to operate for months with little maintenance under harsh conditions. This station, along with two others in villages almost as remote, is part of a larger push by Google into small, marginal communities, providing them with new tools to access information, work with distant colleagues, and communicate with friends and family.

Google paid for the final design of the stations and is covering the monthly fees for satellite bandwidth. The company has also invested in O3b, a start-up that hopes to deploy a constellation of satellites over Africa by the end of next year.

“Building infrastructure is not necessarily Google’s objective, but if you look at all the areas that Google has gone into, in many cases it has been to fill a gap,” said Joseph Mucheru, who heads Google’s East Africa office. “The market should see the opportunity.”

Just how much opportunity there is remains unclear. Google is uncertain whether such satellite stations can pay for themselves in rural areas, given the cost of equipment and bandwidth. Communities may well benefit from the connection, but they do not all have the means to afford it.

Bandwidth fees for stations like the one in Entasopia could cost as much as $700 a month, though slower ones cost less, said Wayan Vota, a senior director at Inveneo, a nonprofit that works to disseminate Internet technology throughout Africa and the developing world. As these connections are introduced more widely, which is O3b’s goal, the price could fall, Mr. Vota said.

When Internet connections arrive in small towns like Entasopia, they put new tools into the hands of people hungry to use them, and for some there, that has had wide repercussions.

James Mathu has worked for the Kenyan agriculture ministry in Entasopia for five years, advising farmers on the environment, crop husbandry and soil conservation. The stable Internet link allows him to send information to district headquarters in Kajiado, instead of spending days traveling there and back to deliver monthly reports, which are too lengthy for him to send via cellphone.

“It is a five-day affair,” he said, estimating that the Internet saved him 12,000 shillings a year, or $152, in a country where the gross domestic product per person is $1,700.

Julius Kasifu, 40, is using the Internet to try to help others. His family runs a farm, but because his legs were crippled by polio as a child, he was limited in the farm work he could do.

In Masai society, he said, disabilities like his were seen as bad omens. Traditionally, disabled newborns were abandoned and their mothers were put through a ritual cleansing to banish the evil spirits that were said to have caused the disability, while the place where the birth took place was burned. Even now, such children are often kept hidden away in the family manyatta, a wattle-and-daub hut.

Mr. Kasifu is leading a campaign to raise awareness and to build a shelter, called Tuko, for such children. With the Internet connection, he has been able to upload a short video about their plight.

“The mothers come to me and say: ‘Have you got a place to take our children?’ ” he said. “It hurts, but what can I do? Out of that hurt came this project.”

But there are significant limits to how many Kenyans the Internet can reach. Even if it is available free, not everyone can take full advantage of it, one obstacle being computer literacy.

Teddy Chenya, who for the past eight months has helped staff the community center for the Arid Lands Information Network, the Kenyan nongovernmental organization running the satellite ground stations, said that younger people were more likely to visit him than older ones, because they had time to spend and were willing to sit down, three to a computer, and learn by trial and error.

“Most people looking for information, they need help,” he said. “They still don’t know where to look or what a Web address is. I played for them streaming video, and they said: ‘Is it a radio? Is it a TV?’ ”

Another obstacle is literacy itself: many of the adults in Entasopia, especially women, cannot read.

Nthenya Mule, East Africa manager for Acumen Fund, a nonprofit organization, directs investments in regional businesses that have a social-development aspect. Ms. Mule said there were many challenges facing poor, rural communities, and progress was often held back by larger problems like lack of infrastructure, health care or loan availability, rather than the scarcity of Internet access.

“Is VSAT what’s most important?” she asked, referring to very small aperture terminal, the satellite technology being used in the project.

Still, Ms. Mule said, “there are so many issues, sometimes you just begin acting where you can.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/technology/internet/02kenya.html

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