p2pnet - rss feed: File sharing in West Africa
In West Africa, they call it Cooperative Networking. Here, we call it p2p - peer-to-peer - file sharing. And it’s working to help people in West Africa, as people attending the World Summit on the Information Society, due to open in Geneva tomorrow, will learn.
Conference attendees will find out how staff and pupils in Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mali, Benin, Burkina-Faso and Niger, and to a lesser degree in Togo, Guinea and Mauritania, are using the Net as what amounts to a digital campus where resources are shared online.
Students and teachers at Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar in Dakar, Senegal, use the Net to follow courses, download text books which would cost too much to buy and enjoy access to a wealth of Internet data, says an Agence France Press report here.
"Abdou Faye, a master’s student of human resources in Dakar, says the digital campus facilities here give local students access to books they would otherwise never be able to afford," says AFP, quoting Faye as saying some works cost $120 (65,000 CFA francs -100 euros) and, "I couldn’t buy them."
The campus has 100 computers online and was set up through the Francophone University Agency (Agence universitaire de la francophonie - AUF), a worldwide network of more than 450 French-speaking higher education and research establishments.
"By putting lecture courses and research papers on the Internet, the campus has demonstrated that Africa is not a scientific desert and that it can compare with the northern hemisphere countries," Bonaventure Mve-Ondo, head of the AUF’s west African bureau says in the AFP report.
The digital campus first went into operation in October 2000 and now between 400 and 500 mainly students use its facilities daily at a cost of only $4.6 (2,500 CFA francs - 3.8 euros) a month.
"Last year young graduates set up a service company here," Thomas Noel, regional technical coordinator, is quoted as saying. "There were six to begin with. Now they’re out of the incubator and there are 30 of them."
But students aren’t the only ones using p2p.
"Without the the Internet, I would have to go to Europe to buy books," says Linguistics professor Moussa Daff. "Now I can give my students web-bibliographies." But above all, says AFP, he considers the Internet a fantastic means of communication, enabling him to talk to other academics and get his own research papers more widely known via his on-line review Sudlangue.
Five other west African cities, Abidjan in Ivory Coast, Bamako in Mali, Cotonou in Benin, Ouagadougou in Burkina-Faso and Niamey in Niger, have followed Dakar’s example and set up digital campuses equipped with between 25 and 70 terminals, says AFP, going on:
"Four other more modest information centres with 10 to 15 terminals have been set up at Lome in Togo, Conakry in Guinea and Nouakchott in Mauritania, and in a further Senegalese town, Saint-Louis.
Cooperative networking takes places between the various centres.
"Thanks to an online advertisement recently, researchers in five countries of the region realised they were working on the same project and and set up contacts with each other," adds Noel.
