Africa’s Brain Gain

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“It made me feel like I was a part of something, part of the global village,” says Emmanuel M. Sandi, a student at a Sierra Visions program last spring. Sandi isn’t alone. Students of programs like Sierra Visions stress that the feeling of belonging to a larger whole is vital to the learning process. It provides them with a context, a support system, and instructors who understand local issues.

The virtual platform also gives those Sierra Leonean teachers who decamped during the war a way to help from afar. “There is no way the healing process is going to come from anyone but ourselves,” Sisay says. “Outsiders will help, but this is our best chance, and this is the most important time.”

If Sierra Visions’ programs are successful, they could have implications for Africa at large, including the potential to lay the technological groundwork for what Stanford Mukasa, an associate professor of journalism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, calls “cyberunification.” Improved technology, Mukasa says, has the potential to bridge gaps between families in ways that were impossible to conceive of just a few years ago. A little contact—even a fuzzy voice, a shaky, pixellated image—can go a long way.

Some argue, however, that web contact is a poor substitute for the widespread and very physical investment that poor countries so desperately need. “I don’t see enough lobbying for the basic stuff—electricity, the roads,” says Conrad Coyanda-Parkzes, CEO of a telecom company called AccessPoint, which is assisting the Sierra Visions team in Freetown.

That basic stuff allows the more complex stuff, like fiber-optic cable systems and cell towers, to be built. Right now, says Coyanda-Parkzes, who moved to the United States from Sierra Leone in 1986 and visits the capital regularly, access costs are prohibitive, and technological progress is slow going.

There are signs, though, that some leaders are coming around, encouraging more telecom investments from abroad and focusing on wired infrastructure. Senagalese president Abdoulaye Wade, for example, has pressed for “virtual campuses” in downtown Dakar.

“They’re realizing,” says Sidiki Traore, director of the African Virtual University’s West African regional office, “that ‘the Internet is the solution for my country. Let me open up.’ ”

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