Sophie Boukhari, UNESCO Courier journalist
Timbuktu’s telecentre has attracted more than 2,000 visitors since it was opened in May 1998.
Timbuktu’s telecentre sells a range of telecommunications and word processing services.
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A historic city on the
edge of the Sahara is banking on an Internet connection to revitalize its economic
life
“Internet! Internet!” A street urchin rushes
towards a journalist who has just arrived in Timbuktu (Mali). “Look what a French
reporter gave me,” he boasts in front of his chums, showing an e-mail address scrawled
on a little notepad. “I’m going to the MCT1 this afternoon to write to him.”
Since its MCT (Multipurpose Community Telecentre) opened in May 1998, Timbuktu (30,000
inhabitants) has felt less of a prisoner of the Sahara desert. Along with traditional
local hangouts, where the menfolk gather in the evenings to gossip, the MCT has become
the trendiest place in town.
Men in traditional dress, women and inquisitive youngsters regularly crowd in the
doorway of the temporary premises in an annex of the town hall. “They all come to
look,” says Birama Diallo, the centre’s energetic coordinator, with a laugh.
Electronic advice
Like most people in Timbuktu, the mayor, Ibrahim Mohamed,
sees the MCT first as a source of the kind of knowledge needed to revive the region’s
stagnant social and economic life. The most encouraging MCT-based projects are being
drawn up in the fields of medicine, teaching, the media, culture, agriculture and
tourism.
“A group of doctors has been trained to look for information on the Web,” says Canadian
France Henri, a Unesco consultant. “They’ve already found some terrific pages about
gynaecological problems. They printed them out, photocopied them and handed them
out at the hospital. They’d also like to be able to get ‘electronic advice’ from
their colleagues in Bamako [Mali’s capital] and elsewhere.”
“The most urgent thing for us is to find out about other people’s experiences,” adds
a teacher. “Some countries have the same problems as we do, for example, in getting
girls enrolled in school.2 We’d like to know what solutions they’ve found.” He suggests material
from the Internet could be used to produce some good school textbooks, which are
few and far between.
The Net could also be useful to the four local radio stations, says Diallo. “For
example, they could use it to find out how to make best use of the new varieties
of floating rice that were recently introduced into the region and put that information
out in their farming programmes.”
The regional director for cultural affairs wants to commission the MCT to create
some web pages about the history and heritage of Timbuktu. The tourist sector, still
in its infancy, wants to do the same kind of thing to attract visitors. Through its
website, not yet complete, the MCT presents an attractive view of “the town of 333
saints.”
The townspeople do not want to be just consumers of ideas and pictures, says Diallo.
“They’re also very keen to make themselves known.” He recalls that in the Middle
Ages, “Holy Timbuktu” was a beacon throughout West Africa and the Islamic world.
It had 180 madrasahs (Koranic schools) and the renowned Sankore University, which
was attended by up to 25,000 students. The mosques and tens of thousands of ancient
manuscripts, preserved by families and by the Ahmed Baba cultural centre, are evidence
of this intense intellectual activity.
But beyond this material heritage, Timbuktu is banking on its intangible attraction
as a place to escape from the world, on the aura of the unknown and the inaccessible
that it conjures up in Western minds. “Our asset is our name,” says Mayor Mohamed.
“The word Timbuktu says something to everybody, even people who don’t know where
Mali is,” adds Culture and Tourism Minister Aminata Traoré. “These days, people
in the West have a great urge to get away from it all. Timbuktu hasn’t got much to
sell, but it can sell dreams.”
The way the MCT works is simple. To raise money for community development projects,
it sells a range of services, such as telecommunications (public phones, fax, e-mail
and Internet access), the production of databases and web pages, digitizing text
and word-processing. It charges less than a dollar (U.S.) to send an e-mail and $2.50
to surf the Web for an hour.
The centre also runs courses, including an introduction to the Internet and new technologies,
how to find information online, and library science. “Students and other people come
to us because universities in Mali don’t offer proper computer training,” says Diallo.
“If they want to get a job in Bamako, they have to know something about computers.”
In a country with fewer than 2,000 people connected to the Internet among a population
of more than 10 million, the MCT is the only “decentralized” server and the only
one that is publicly owned. The five others are private and based in Bamako. For
the moment, MCT’s capacity only allows 20 subscribers (so far, 17 have signed up,
at a monthly fee of $28).
“The quality of the phone line to the Internet connection node in Bamako is also
poor,” says Diallo. “If 30 people go online at the same time then the line is saturated,”
admits Zourkoufili Maïga, the regional director of the state telecommunications
company, Sotelma. “And since the telephone arrived in rural areas in 1999, this has
often happened.”
Diallo is waiting impatiently for the arrival of a VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal),
promised by the International Telecommunication Union, to improve the situation.
The VSAT, a small satellite antenna, will mean the MCT will no longer need to use
terrestrial phone lines.
The centre cost about $850,000 to set up, half of which was provided by international
funding agencies.3
It employs six people and has 11 computers, but will get several dozen more machines
when it moves into permanent premises, which are near completion and being paid for
by the townspeople. To raise the $50,000 start-up costs, the town authorities have
staged a number of events, including a gala of the Timbuktu Residents and Friends
Association and a cultural week, and also appealed to local people to contribute.
In 1999, an airport tax for tourists was introduced, with all the proceeds going
to help pay for the building work.
Despite technical problems, the MCT seems to have impressed the townspeople. “Since
it opened, people have started buying computers,” says Diallo. So far, about 2,000
have visited the centre, and members of professional organizations and NGOs, tourists,
guides, librarians, secretaries, students and others have come looking for information
or to buy one of the services on offer.
But the future is not yet secure. If the centre is to survive, it will have to be
self-financing by 2001, when outside funding ends. Financial independence is especially
important because the main national body behind the project, Sotelma, is being privatized.
“We can make it if we have 200 Internet subscribers,” says Diallo. This is a lot
for the northern region of the country, which has only 570 telephone subscribers
(400 in Timbuktu and 170 in rural areas) and an illiteracy rate of over 80 per cent.
But Diallo is counting on better quality service, especially when the VSAT arrives,
to win customers outside the region.
From the Sahara to cyberspace
“The private Internet providers are complaining about unfair
competition,” he admits, “but what are they doing to develop their own services and
to set up cybercafés outside the capital?” He says only a public service can
take the first steps to allow people in the countryside access to cyberspace. It
costs five to 10 times more to install a phone in a rural area than in a town.
“To safeguard the future of the MCT, it’s not enough to ensure its commercial success,”
says Henri, the UNESCO
consultant. “The money earned must keep on funding community development projects.”
For these people on the sidelines of the global village, the centre is not just a
fancy telecommunications shop. It gives hope of a new world. “The Internet isn’t
a luxury of the rich,” says Mohamed. “On the contrary, it’s really for the poor,
who have very little access to information.” On the edge of the Sahara, books are
few and expensive, and half the population has never seen television.
1. The French term, which is actually used in Timbuktu, is TCP = Télécentre Communautaire Polyvalent.
2. The proportion of girls attending school in Mali is very low (41 per cent) and particularly low in the Timbuktu area (23.7 per cent).
3. Mainly the International Development Research Centre, the International Telecommunication Union, UNESCO, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization.