AS PROJECT names go, Cata-lysing Access to Information and Communications Technology in Africa (Catia), is quite a mouthful. But Claire Howard, a partner in Atos Consulting’s public services practice, says that the aims of the scheme were quite simple: it set out to have a measurable effect on the lives of poor people in several African countries.

“We wanted to ensure right from the start that reforms in technology were going to have an impact,” she says.

The three-year project, coordinated by Atos, came out of a 2001 White Paper published by the Department for International Development (DfID). One chapter of the paper examined how the poorest people could benefit from the impact of new technologies, such as the growth of the internet, and from this study Catia was born.

The scheme brought together an array of stakeholders, including individuals and small NGOs, to help to shape policy and drive down costs. “Ninety per cent of the people who worked on Catia projects were African,” Howard says.

David Woolnough, who at the time was DfID’s information and communications technology adviser, managed the Catia programme from its inception in 2002 until 2006. He says that collaboration was crucial to the programme’s success. “One of the lessons we learnt very clearly was that an articulate and coordinated set of voices from the private sector and civil society can genuinely influence policy – especially if you hit a window of opportunity at the right time.”

The project also set out to ensure that its initiaves could be self-sustaining. “We wanted to support the African networks that were already there and would continue after donor funding,” he says.

Catia set out to influence policy in ten African countries, with the biggest gains taking place in Kenya, Ethiopia, Senegal, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Howard points to “mixed success” in each country. A project of this size and scope, she says, could only be strategic. But DfID was clear that it wanted to be able to measure success.

“It wanted to see policy and regulatory change in at least one of the focus countries,” Howard says. But this proved to be no easy task. “Africa has a lot of government-owned telecommunications,” she says, pointing to the difficulties of opening these to the private sector. “One of the critical aspects of the project was how do you move that forward?”

But simple policy changes reaped dividends. When Kenya opened up a legal way to allow people to make cheap telephone calls over the internet, international calling prices fell by nearly 80 per cent.

Another major policy push helped African internet service providers to set up internet exchange points across the continent. Previously, e-mails and other data being sent anywhere else in the world – even, for example, just across the street – would be bounced from Africa through a point in Europe or America, at an extremely high cost.

Woolnough says these internet exchange points are having a real impact. For example, the tax-collecting Kenya Revenue Authority saw a 7 per cent rise in tax revenue the year it began using the Ken-yan internet exchange point last year.

“In all my years with DfID, Catia is probably the programme I’ve enjoyed managing the most,” he says. www.catia.ws

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