“I think you [David South] and the designer [Solveig Rolfsdottir] do great work and I enjoy Southern Innovator very much!”
Ines Tofalo, Programme Specialist, United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation
Southern Innovator in Tianjin, China.Issue 5 of Southern Innovator at the Global South-South Development Expo (GSSD Expo) 2014 held in Washington, D.C.Volunteers in Nairobi, Kenya pose with Southern Innovator Issue 4 at the Global South-South Development Expo (GSSD Expo) in 2013.Southern Innovator Editor and Writer David South in Australia.Southern Innovator Graphic Designer and Illustrator Sólveig Rolfsdóttir in Iceland.
Some comments that have come in so far about SI’s first issue:
“What a tremendous magazine your team has produced! It’s a terrific tour de force of what is interesting, cutting edge and relevant in the global mobile/ICT space… Really looking forward to what you produce in issues #2 and #3. This is great, engaging, relevant and topical stuff.”, to “Looks great. Congratulations. It’s Brill’s Content for the 21st century!”
What they are saying about SI on Twitter: From @CapacityPlus Nice job RT @ActevisCGroup: RT @UNDP: Great looking informative@SouthSouth1 mag on South-South Innovation; @UNDP Great looking informative @SouthSouth1 mag on South-South Innovation; @JeannineLemaireGraphically beautiful & informative @UNDP Southern Innovator mag on South-South Innov.
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
With the so-called Arab Spring still unfolding across much of the Arabic-speaking world, it is easy to miss a rising new economic opportunity: The introduction of an Arabic domain name system for the Internet.
The explosion in mobile phones in the Arab world has dramatically increased the number of people who can now access the Internet. One Arabic financial website put the number of people who can now access the Internet in one way or another in the Arab world as 75 million (www.nuqudy.com). As highlighted in the 2003 Arab Human Development Report (AHDR), Arabic-speaking countries have been at a knowledge disadvantage for some time: more than 270 million citizens have access to fewer books than other languages, slower growth economies, and greater illiteracy than the faster-growing emerging economies. At the time, the AHDR found there were just 18 computers per 1,000 people compared to a global average of 78. And just 1.6 percent of Arabs had Internet access, one of the lowest ratios in the world (AHDR 2003).
Since the dawn of the Internet, Latin script has been used exclusively for top-level web domain names, the addresses that end .com, .org and so on. That has been a big obstacle for users of non-Latin script languages like Arabic. It is estimated just 10 percent of people in the Arab world speak English. Many of the resources on the Internet and its utility have been lost to these people. But by using Arabic domain names, there will be a consistency and no more guesswork.
A typical problem in Latin transliterations of Arabic is the conundrum as to either using El or Al as the prefix to a word. This problem is eliminated when Arabic is used.
The Arab world is also very mixed, including the resource-rich, cash-rich Gulf States – Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Bahrain – and states with high rates of poverty such as Egypt, Djibouti and Yemen.
The protests and uprisings this year in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere – with their Facebook pages and Twitter streams – have shown that a growing group of highly Internet-savvy young people is emerging in the Arab world. But for many without the education or the resources, access to knowledge still remains weak. But armed with Internet-capable mobile phones and Arabic language domain names, rapid change is now possible.
The number of books published in Arabic is notoriously relatively low, and print runs are small. Arabic language books make up just 1.1 percent of world production.
The AHDR reports have called this knowledge deficit a direct obstacle to human development in Arab countries.
But things are changing and the rise of Arabic domain names offers the potential for an explosion in Arabic language Internet content.
In May 2010 ICANN, the world’s Internet domain authority, decided to allow top-level domains in non-Latin script. For Arabic speakers, it started this program in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
As a sign of the importance of Arabic participation in future growth of the Internet, this year’s World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) held in Geneva, Switzerland in May 2011 was sponsored by the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
A catchy domain name has many advantages. For Arabic speakers, this means they can type in Arabic domain names for websites and even do it right to left, as they do in print.
In 2009, the first Arabic domain name was grabbed by Egypt. As the Internet naming authority, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) (www.icann.org), started to allow the registering of non-Latin script names. The domain was for the Arabic word for Egypt or “.masr”.
As an early adopter, Egypt sees it as an important part of bringing more Arabic speakers online. George Victor, from the Egyptian National Telecom Regulatory Authority, told the BBC: “We believe that this is a great step that will open new horizons for many e-services in Egypt, and it will have its direct impact, enlarging the number of online users.”
Victor believes using Arabic builds trust.
“Having a domain name in your own language is a point of having a local identity,” he said.
“When talking about Arabic domain names, we are talking about having users which are not online now. People with languages disabilities – people who are having language as a barrier to connect online.”
From now on Internet address names will be able to end with almost any word in any language, offering organizations around the world the opportunity to market their brand, products, community or cause in new and innovative ways.
The advantages of registering an Arabic domain name are numerous. They include clear improvements to business and trade: an ability to protect a trademark, better communication with Arabic customers, better Arabic-language advertising opportunities, better memorability for Arabic domain names because they will be in the Arabic language, and greater access to Arabic customers.
But there are also significant improvements to how the Internet functions in the Arabic world. Search results on Arabic search engines will be more precise with Arabic domain names; catchy, memorable domain names will be a spur to the advertising and marketing industries; and a more Arab-friendly Internet will draw in more Arabic-speaking Internet users, helping them to enjoy the fruits of this great technological advance just as speakers of other languages have.
In March 2011, the Gulf state of Qatar enthusiastically started to offer Arabic domain names.
“The launch of Qatar’s Arabic top-level domain names is a major milestone as we work to build a more digitally inclusive society,” said Dr. Hessa Al Jaber, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Information and Communication Technology, which will manage Qatar’s Internet domain names through the Qatar Domains Registry.
“As more organizations and individuals begin adopting Arabic domain names, the Internet will literally be opened up to broad new audiences. The Arab world represents a region with enormous potential for growth both in terms of usage and the creation of new digital content, especially Arabic content.”
ICANN’s President and Chief Executive, Rod Beckstrom, sees this as a new phase for the Internet: “ICANN has opened the Internet’s naming system to unleash the global human imagination. Today’s decision respects the rights of groups to create new Top Level Domains in any language or script. We hope this allows the domain system to better serve all of mankind.”
Published: July 2011
Resources
1) Watch the ICANN educational video “Get Ready for the Next Big Thing”, explaining how domain names work and what the changes mean. Website:http://www.icann.org
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
Africa is in the midst of an Internet revolution that is set only to accelerate. The continent is one of the last places to experience the information technology revolution that has swept the world in the past two decades.
Africa has been at a disadvantage for several reasons, the most basic of which has been the lack of bandwidth capacity available from the undersea cables that connect other continents to the Internet. A map showing the world’s undersea cable links says it all: the majority of traffic goes between Europe and the United States (http://www.telegeography.com/telecom-resources/telegeography-infographics/submarine-cable-map/).
But this is changing: a glance at recent developments with the launching of the Seacom, EASSy, MainOne and other cables shows a continent getting better connected by the year (http://manypossibilities.net/african-undersea-cables/).
With seven out of the 10 fastest-growing economies in the world between 2011 and 2015 projected to be in sub-Saharan Africa, the conditions are ripe to grow African Internet businesses. For example, Ghana, with its booming information technology sector, boasted 13 percent economic growth last year, among the fastest in the world.
In eight of the past 10 years, sub-Saharan Africa has grown faster than Asia (The Globe and Mail).
While Africa has come late to the Internet party, the continent can benefit from two decades of experience elsewhere to avoid making the mistakes others have. Africa can upload tried and tested Internet platforms and can also create new, Africa-specific platforms that tackle the continent’s own needs and challenges.
One of the ways to make the most of the opportunities presented by the Internet is to have an Africa-specific Internet domain name. A domain name (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name) is the suffix placed after the period in Internet URL (uniform resource locator) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_locator) addresses. Common ones familiar to most people who use the Internet include .com (for commercial websites), .org (for non-profit websites and organizations), .co.uk (for British businesses) or .ca (for Canadian organizations).
The dot Africa (.africa) domain name will be available in the next 15 months according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) (http://www.icann.org/). It is currently reviewing 500 African organizations that have expressed interest in managing the domain name registrations, and will choose one at the beginning of 2013.
Countries such as Kenya and South Africa – two places in Africa with booming information technology sectors – are hoping to make the most of the new dot Africa domain name.
The idea is to use the dot Africa domain name to build a stronger brand for the continent’s Internet that will be bigger than the individual country domain names. Sophia Bekele, executive director of DotConnectAfrica, told CNN the suffixes for individual African countries had proven unpopular during the decade since their introduction.
Her organization found that 80 per cent of African domain name registrants had opted for “.com” or “.org” suffixes, which were price competitive, reliable to register and had wide recognition.
The country-level domain names suffered from being “usually owned by governments, and governments are typically not very good at marketing,” she told CNN.
Bekele’s research found young developers involved in creating local content felt a stronger affinity with the “.africa” suffix than to the “.com” domains. And the new suffix will let companies unify their presence across the continent under a single online brand.
A major benefit of the “.africa” domain will be that proceeds from African domain registrations remain on the continent, rather than flowing offshore. DotConnectAfrica says it plans to reinvest surpluses into developing the African Internet sector.
The African Union Commission (http://www.au.int/en/commission) is also looking to register the .afrique (French language websites) and .afriqia (Arabic language websites).
The AUC’s head of information society, Moctar Yedaly, told CNN the commission’s vision for the .africa domain is not just commercial.
“It may well be a very good business in terms of money generating. If it may generate some revenue we can use for the development of ICT in Africa, then that is all very good, but that’s not my primary goal,” he told CNN. “My primary goal is to ensure the identity of Africa, the image, the culture are well-maintained.”
2) ICANN: To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer — a name or a number. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Website:http://www.icann.org/
3) DotConnectAfrica, a non-profit organization registered in Mauritius, is one of the is trying win the right to manage the dot africa name space for businesses and individuals across the continent. Website:http://www.dotconnectafrica.org/
4) Dot.Africa: Dot.Africa is specialised in realising internet access for international organisations with sites in Africa. Website:http://www.dotafrica.com/about/index.html
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
A low-cost Venezuelan mobile phone aimed at the South’s poor is proving that South-South technological cooperation works. Packed with features and costing no more than US $15 – making it one of the cheapest mobile handsets in the world – the phone is aimed at the fast-growing mobile market across the global South.
The South is a dynamic market and has seen quick acceptance of mobile phones. The number of mobile phone users in the world passed 4 billion in 2008, and the fastest growth was in the South (ITU). The development of inexpensive handsets means the phones will be able to reach even more poor people. And packing these phones with the latest in multimedia capability means the poor will be able to make a technological leap.
The Venezuelan phone is being championed as the world’s cheapest mobile phone. It is a bold effort to create an affordable mobile phone packed with features: a camera, WAP internet access (wireless application protocol), FM radio, and MP3 and MP4 players for music and videos.
The phone uses inexpensive parts from China and is assembled in Venezuela. A quarter of the cost of manufacturing the phone is subsidized by the government. Venezuela often uses the profits from its oil industry to subsidize social goals.
The phone was launched on Mother’s Day by Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez with a call to his mother. Chavez boasted to the Guardian newspaper: “This telephone will be the biggest seller not only in Venezuela but the world.”
With his usual bravado, he said that “whoever doesn’t have Vergatario is nothing” – a statement that has become the marketing slogan for the phone on its website.
The phone already has a waiting list of 10,000 people. The phones are assembled in western Venezuela by Vetelca, a joint state (85 percent) and Chinese (15 percent) company. Vetelca hope to make 600,000 phones in 2009, and to sell more than 2 million in 2011. Exports will first target the Caribbean and then the world.
The desire to spark technological innovation at home is also alive in the Southern African country of Mozambique, which is making the bold move to start manufacturing computers for schools in the country. Like other African countries, Mozambique is connecting schools with computers and the internet. By manufacturing the laptop computers within the country, Mozambiquans are increasing the program’s economic benefit to the country, and building advanced technical skills.
Most Southern African countries rely on importing computers, and Rwanda, South Africa and Ethiopia are getting their school computers from the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) (www.laptop.org) initiative from the United States.
The Mozambique laptops are call Magalhael (www.portatilmagalhaes.com) and are made in partnership with the Mozambican Ministry of Science and Technology (www.mct.gov.mz/portal/page?_pageid=615,1&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL) and Portugal Telecom (www.telecom.pt/InternetResource/PTSite/PT). They come with a 60 gigabyte (GB) hard drive and 2 GB of RAM (memory) and are entirely built in Mozambique.
Read these stories on ICT4D from Development Challenges, South-South Solutions:
Google Android: Android is a software for mobile phones that allows people to create useful applications (apps) for the phones. Website:http://code.google.com/android/and www.android.com
Kabissa: Space for Change in Africa: An online African web community promoting and supporting the transition to Web 2.0 services in Africa. Offers lots of opportunities to meet people throughout Africa and learn more.Website: www.kabissa.org
Business Fights Poverty: Business Fights Poverty is the free-to-join, fast-growing, international network for professionals passionate about fighting world poverty through good business.Website:http://businessfightspoverty.ning.com/
BOP Source is a platform for companies and individuals at the BOP to directly communicate, ultimately fostering close working relationships, and for NGOs and companies to dialogue and form mutually valuable public-private partnerships that serve the BOP. Website:http://bopsource.ning.com/
Like this story? Please check out our first issue of Southern Innovator on mobile phones and information technology.
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
David South Consulting 
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