Mandera, Kenya, March 12 (AP): An expectant hush follows a ripple of whispers as excited schoolgirls wait for Hussein Abukar to press a button on a radio. He does, and a clear voice booms out an English lesson. The girls, dressed in green robes and Muslim headscarves, bend diligently over their exercise books.
The tin-roofed school in this remote northeastern town has no electricity, no television, no computers and few books. But it does boast a World Space radio that broadcasts educational programs seven days a week from a satellite floating 22,300 miles (36,000 kilometers) above the Earth.
If their teacher had hit a different button, the girls could be listening to National Public Radio, the British Broadcasting Corp., jazz or a South African pop station. For those with the means to subscribe, World Space radiobroadcasts a rich array of news and music to Africa's remotest reaches.
Strap the small WorldSpace antenna to the roof of a car, and you can drive across a desert, through government-less Somalia or around Kenya's Masai Mara game reserve listening to CNN news, Arab pop on the French-Moroccan Medi 1 station, or classical music on the MAESTRO station.
The scene in Mandera where there is neither terrestrial television service nor FM radio is part of one man's dream. After learning that AIDS would kill millions in Africa, Noah Samara set up WorldSpace in 1990 "to spread knowledge for the good of mankind."
"If you look at what killed Africans in the 1990s, it was a lack of information," Samara said in a telephone interview from his headquarters in Washington, D.C. "As a result of lack of information, myths were being developed." More than a decade later, Samara, an Ethiopian who immigrated to the United States in 1974, is beginning to realize his vision.
In one of the few cases of technology being unrolled for consumers in Africa before the United States, Africans were able to receive satellite radio in 1999. American listeners got their first taste in September 2001, when XM Satellite Radio went live. Before Samara launched his first satellite dubbed AfriStar he struggled for eight years to find business partners and win U.S. regulatory approval.
He also had to persuade 127 countries to allow WorldSpace space in their radio spectrums. WorldSpace has since launched Asia Star over Asia and has plans for a Latin American satellite later this year. Each satellite has three transmission beams that can deliver more than 40 digital music and news channels over 5.4 million square miles (14 million square kilometers).
So far, U.S., Japanese and Saudi investors have sunk US$ 1.3 billion into the company. It will be two to three years before WorldSpace breaks even through advertising and subscription services, Samara said. So far, WorldSpace has sold only around 250,000 of the radios. The cost is still too high for most Africans.
In Kenya, where more than half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, the cheapest radio costs US$60. There are subscription fees for a few services with niche audiences, like NPR. "Every company has its difficult times," said Samara, 46. "Are we where we want to be? Absolutely not. Am I happy with what we have done? No, because my expectations are bigger."
Compared to the sets sold by U.S. satellite radio carriers XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio, which cost from US$150 to US$300 apiece, the WorldSpace hardware is a bargain. XM and Sirius also charge US$10 to US$13 per month to receive their broadcasts, offering no free programming.
As awareness about satellite radio spreads, WorldSpace is gaining ground. Pop into a restaurant in Kigali, the capital of tiny Rwanda, and the music comes from a WorldSpace radio. In Burundi, beset by a nine-year civil war, South African peacekeepers keep up to date by listening to Afrikaans and English-language stations broadcast from their country via WorldSpace.
"It's a real morale booster. It's like a long-term investment," said South African army Col. Michael De Goede. The school in Mandera got its radio thanks to a joint project between WorldSpace and the Kenyan government. WorldSpace is supposed to provide 19,000 radios and the government another 11,000 to place at least one in every Kenyan school.
The opposition government that took office in December has made good on an election promise and introduced free primary education in the East African nation. Now it's unclear whether schools will be able to pay the 800-shilling (US$10) monthly WorldSpace subscription fee arranged by the previous government.
Another problem is powering the radios. Good batteries are scarce in Mandera, which is closer to Somalia and Ethiopia than to the nearest Kenyan town. WorldSpace is developing windup, solar-powered and kerosene-fuelled radios to surmount such issues.
WorldSpace also has a fee-based service in which data including news, sports and entertainment can be downloaded from a set that is connected to a computer.
The problem for the Mandera teacher Abukar, who earns 12,000 shillings (US$154) a month, and millions of other Africans in the world's poorest continent, is the cost. "I would like to have one, but I have the necessities of life to pay for," he said.
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