The digital divide is set to lessen with a multi-billion dollar investment in connecting East Africa to the global internet super highway.

An article in The Guardian describes the current inequality:

East Africa remains the only large, inhabited coastline cut off from the global fibre-optic network. Reliant entirely on expensive satellite connections, people on the world’s poorest continent pay some of the highest rates for logging on or phoning. Local universities are charged up to 50 times more for bandwidth than a typical American college, making online research slow or impossible.

“Imagine you had all the students at Oxford trying to access the web through a single UK household connection,” said Calestous Juma, a Kenyan professor who heads the Science, Technology and Globalisation Project at Harvard University. “That’s what it’s like for most students in Africa.”

It’s interesting to think what this development will mean in connecting young people in the UK to those in Africa and being able to share richer content over the internet. It bodes well for a constructive and mutually beneficial youth dialogue.