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Narrowing a Continental Divide
Julius Njui has a plan to help bridge the digital divide between Africa and America. He says the answer is to start with kids. “People in Africa never get enough of hearing about America. If I went to Kenya and said that I was going to have a forum on America, there wouldn't be a room big enough to hold all the people,” he says.
Njui, a resident of Sacramento, has tried to use education to better the students of surrounding schools with information to bridge the gap or help to change the misinformation about Africa. So he takes his program entitled, “A Day in Africa,” to elementary and junior high school kids. “Kids here don't know about Africa, or where it is. They have these false ideas that are terrible. In our program we show the proper images — that there are cities, cars, roads. It's beautiful,” he says. Ironically, Africa has less than one percent of the world's Internet users, even though it has more than 10% of the world's population. Ghana was the first West African nation to be connected to the Internet in 1994. African Internet users are still not that prevalent, even though it is six years later. While hardly any families have Internet connection in the country of Congo, more than a million residents have access in South Africa. This is also true when comparing Africa to other continents. There are 2.5 million users in Africa, while there are 136 million in North America, 679 million in Asia, and 83 million in Europe. Several nonprofit organizations are trying to change those figures however. On a large scale, the World Bank, and the International Monetary fund along with executives from high tech companies have combined to promote development of new ways to exchange information. On a smaller scale, many small business owners like Njui, have found that their plans for business will help bridge some of the gap. Njui, of Sacramento, along with his wife for the past five years have done presentations, and speeches for elementary age students on what children at their age do in Africa, by allowing kids to dress up, dance and experience what a day in Africa would be like. Although they tailor the program to fit each school depending if they have previously been there or not, this year the theme of their presentations are "African cultural symbols from Ghana."
Njui believes that work will be much easier once he and his wife film their work here and put it on their website to show streaming video to children in Africa, in towns like Cape Town and Johannesburg. “The Internet will make our work much easier in the future. Before we were relying on mailings to get information out about what we do. The internet will allow us to cut that time in half, as well as do twice as much work.” Jomo Bellard believes the same thing. Bellard, 25, of Santa Rosa, is the CEO of “Strategic Alliances” a computer animation comic strip he started with a team of approximately 10 other friends that based on an intellectual black superhero. “The internet is the whole focus of what I'm doing because I am focusing on a large international audience,” he says. “This is especially important in relation to funding. In our company we allow investors to buy into the comic strip, so they can actually be a part of the series.” Both Njui and Bellard also say that one of the greatest aspects of the Internet is the opportunity to incorporate multiculturalism on the information highway. “By being able to see firsthand, rather than totally relying on oral tradition, the kids can see their similarities and differences. A lot of time people don't realize how unique their classmates really are. We do a lot of exercises that emphasize that,” says Njui. Bellard agrees with the importance of stressing positivity. He says that he cannot even totally anticipate all of the changes that the Internet will make in his business over the next 10 years. “It's what my whole comic strip is about. It's the underlying theme,” he says. “We want to promote the black community and our issues and spread the message of empowerment. The character is a representation to spread happiness.”
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