e-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries

There is a shortage of e-Government research from a citizen-centric perspective within the African continent. Focus has been on how governments can improve service delivery by being efficient and effective. Arguably, the focus of e-Government research appears inspired by the New Public Management theory that aims to import private sector operations into the public sector. While benefits can be drawn from this approach, governments appear to fail to completely play their role of generating public value among citizens. The focus on government’s view on e-Government often short charge the citizens who are expected to adopt and use e-Government. This paper adds to the body of knowledge by proposing a model for citizen centric e-Government that is suitable for Namibia.

In the absence of a single entity that develops all systems for government, there is need to support a common understanding of the development environments such that new products can easily be integrated within existing services. Owing to the size of governments, different departments tend to conceive and develop services independently and yet they serve the same citizens. These services should be consistent regardless of which entity is providing the service. This paper proposes a National Enterprise Architecture (NEA) to support the implementation of an e-government interoperability framework (e-GIF). The architecture is driven by a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model and uses ontologies to provide semantic interoperability.

As a result of the growing reliance by public sector organisations on technological resources for capturing and processing information, protection of information in the public sector has become an issue of national concern. While considering the South African national strategy for protecting this state asset (‘information’) this paper contrasts existing local, provincial or national e-Government information security policies against the adopted national guidelines. The paper postulates that with sound policies and guidelines in place ‘interpretation and application’ remain as two barriers that pose a threat to state information. The main question addressed in this paper is whether e-Government information security policies adequately address prescribed key security components. To achieve a comprehensive understanding of the pillars underpinning the protection of national information security in South Africa, the authors followed systematic procedures for reviewing and evaluating existing e-Government information security policies. The objective of this paper is to investigate whether existing government information security policies are aligned to national policy or guidelines. This paper will contribute empirical evidence which supports the notion observed by the South African Auditor General that (Auditor-General 2012) security weaknesses in government departments and state entities are attributed to the lack of formally designed and implemented information security policies and standards. The results of this preliminary investigation indicate that although information security policies exist in the majority of state entities, there is no consistency in the application of the ‘security controls’, as outlined in the national guidelines.

Wireless broadband networks are emerging as reliable internet access alternatives for delivery of high speed multimedia services. WiMAX is one of such networks, designed to provide quality of service (QoS) support for different service classes with varying QoS requirements. Scheduling algorithms are required to provide such support. The existing scheduling algorithm uses dynamic weight to allocate resources based on traffic loads. However, it increases delay of real time traffics due to failure of the weight to prioritize traffics. This paper proposes a priority load aware scheduling (PLAS) algorithm to reduce delay in real time traffics. The PLAS algorithm introduces a priority value to prioritize real time traffics over non-real time traffics. The algorithm was evaluated using extensive simulations. The results show that the PLAS outperforms the existing algorithm in terms of delay.

Cloud Computing represents a paradigm shift in computing. It advocates the use of computing resources as a service rather than as a product. The numerous advantages which the Cloud offers has led to many users adopting it at a phenomenal rate. Providing service to this ever growing number of users in a fast and effective manner is a major challenge. Numerous researchers have proposed various approaches to scheduling user workloads, notable among which are the First-Come-First-Serve and Weight Round Robin (WRR), and have obtained varied levels of successes. Unfairness and excess allocation delay are some of the shortcomings of these approach. There is also the assumption that all Cloud users’ workloads belong to a single class of requirement. This work proposes an efficient and fair Cloud workload scheduling algorithm called Adaptive Carry-On Weighted Round Robin (ACWRR), and also takes into consideration multiple workloads classes. Experimental simulations were conducted with ACWRR benchmarked against WRR. Results show that ACWRR performs better than WRR by at least 13% in terms of system latency and 38% for makespan.

This work analyses the performance of a Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) network with secondary nodes to provide Internet services, and studies the impact of malicious nodes and cooperative secondary nodes on the performance of the network and spectrum utilization. The work mathematically models the throughput, latency, and spectrum utilization with varying numbers of malicious nodes, secondary nodes, miss probabilities, and false alarm probabilities, and studies their effect on performance of the network. The results point to rapid spectrum starvation as the number of malicious nodes increase, as well as the negative impact of too many secondary nodes crowding out available spectrum with resultant degradation of throughput and latency.

A large portion of the South African population is still not connected in a productive manner to the Internet, despite the existence of a government plan for public broadband, ‘SA Connect’. One reason for this could be the lack of an appropriate model, through which connectivity can be diffused in a meaningful way through all areas of South Africa. This paper presents the model developed over more than a decade of experimentation in real life settings in the Siyakhula Living Lab, a joint venture between the universities of Rhodes and Fort Hare, South Africa. The model proposes the ‘Broadband Island’ as basic e-infrastructure unit, which clusters nearby points-of-presence hosted in schools. In each Broadband Island is located an applications integration platform, TeleWeaver, which monetizes channels of access to the local community, to support the e-infrastructure while providing useful services to the population and the Government.

The introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in a society is known to influence its gross domestic product and human development index. Still, access to ICT is not universal, with the problem being further aggravated in developing countries. In order to fill in this digital divide gap, we present our Sustainable Villages for Development (SV4D) architecture, which is a collection of hardware and software conceived to promote digital inclusion and consequently improve the quality of life of citizens of these underserved communities. We also present a set of preliminary performance evaluation tests carried out in the SV4D testbed deployed in Porto, Portugal, that shows the potential of our proposed architecture for deployment in developing countries.

This paper presents the design and the implementation of a smart meter for prepaid electricity using an Arduino microcontroller, a global system for mobile communication (GSM) module, and a liquid crystal display (LCD). The smart meter allows users to remotely recharge their meter after purchasing prepaid electricity using a mobile phone. It also allows the meter owner to receive notifications about the level of prepaid credit available in the meter, the meter status, and a threshold for recharge notifications. This paper also discusses the advantages of the proposed system to customers, and the utility company, as well as some of the challenges encountered, and provides recommendations to various stakeholders.

Technology for changing attitude and behaviour, known as persuasive technology, has been applied to solve many challenges, ranging from personal health and finance, to environmental sustainability. In this paper, an application to persuade electricity consumers in Kampala, Uganda, to partner with the electricity utility company in fighting electricity theft is proposed. The persuasive application will implement a number of persuasive techniques including tailoring, reduction, notifications and suggestion. These techniques, along with the choice of technology, were derived basing on Fogg’s process of persuasive systems development.

The question whether culture of a society needs to be considered when designing cybersecurity training and awareness programs has recently risen in literature. While some programs may be effective in the west, they may not apply in the Middle East or Africa. Since cybersecurity has overtaken terrorism as the leading security concern globally, criticality of user training and awareness programmes cannot be overemphasized. This paper demonstrates that a cybersecurity training or awareness program that considers cultures of the people is more effective than generic one. Staff in a midsized organization were randomly divided into two groups. Group one consisting of Indians was treated to a culturally sensitive training programme in Hindi while group two consisting of Ugandans, Nepalese, Pakistanis and the Philippines undertook a generic one in English. A survey was conducted subsequent to the treatments. Results revealed that group one demonstrated better understanding of cybersecurity issues after one month.

In recent years, the banking industry across the nation have been undergoing swift economic revolution due to the surge created by the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) restructuring and policies on Commercial Banks Capitalization. As a result of more competitive environments and struggling economies, these banks are trying to survive the economic recession and depression in the marketplace through mergers and acquisitions to improve capital bases. This mergers/acquisitions come with the challenge of streamlining technical information between/among staff members who have come together from different bank cultures and backgrounds. Thus, this paper aimed at the development of a Knowledge Sharing System for Customer Service Officers (CSOs) which exploits knowledge resident in them for competitive advantage after such mergers and acquisitions to ensure a seamless and quick integration process. Online SMS, chat rooms are collaboration techniques used in the system. Resolutions are stored for reuse in the Knowledge Repository.

With the increasing interest in knowledge graph over the years, several approaches have been proposed for building knowledge graphs. Most of the recent approaches involve using semi-structured sources such as Wikipedia or information crawled from the web using a combination of extraction methods and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. In most cases, these approaches tend to make a compromise between accuracy and completeness. In our ongoing work, we examine a technique for building a knowledge graph over the increasing volume of open data published on the web. The rationale for this is two-fold. First, we intend to provide a foundation for making existing open datasets searchable through keywords similar to how information is sought on the web. The second reason is to generate logically consistent facts from usually inaccurate and inconsistent open datasets. Our approach to knowledge graph development will compute the confidence score of every relationship elicited from underpinning open data in the knowledge graph. Our method will also provide a scheme for extending coverage of a knowledge graph by predicting new relationships that are not in the knowledge graph. In our opinion, our work has major implications for truly opening up access to the hitherto untapped value in open datasets not directly accessible on the World Wide Web today.

Acquiring data within the health domain is generally intractable due to privacy or confidentiality concerns. Given the spatial nature of health information, and coupled with the accompanying large and unstructured dataset, research in this area is yet to flourish. Further, obtaining spatial information from unstructured data is very challenging and requires spatial reasoning. Hence, this paper proposes a secure Preposition-enabled Natural Language Parser (PeNLP), sufficient for mining unstructured data to extract suitable spatial reference with geographic locations. The proposed PeNLP is a subcomponent of a larger framework: the Preposition-enabled Spatial ONTology (PeSONT) – an ongoing project. The short term impact of PeNLP is its availability as a reliable information extractor for spatial data analysis of health records. In the long run, PeSONT shall aid quality decision making and drive robust policy enactment that will greatly impact the health sector and the populace.

Band-limited channels face a serious challenge in modern communication due to the need to increase transmission rate while bandwidth remains the same. Mobile communications including mobile satellite, wireless mobile and indoor wireless communication all need to transmit at a higher rate. Trellis-coded Modulation (TCM) is a modulation and error control scheme that allow band-limited and/or power limited channels to attain an efficient data rate without an increase in bandwidth. It is an advanced mode of convolutional coding that combines digital modulation and error correction coding in a single stage. This project sought to investigate the performance of TCM in Additive White Gaussian Noise, modelling a mobile wireless channel. To do this, trellis codes are digitally modulated with M-ary PSK and M-ary QAM using computer simulation (MATLAB) and the performance is evaluated when the modulated signals propagates through additive white Gaussian Noise. Experiments were also carried out on hardware equipment using Telecommunication Instructional Modeling System (TIMS). The plot of bit error rate against $$ E_{b} /N_{0} $$ showed that there is a significant coding gain at no extra cost of bandwidth expansion.

Wireless spectrum is a scarce resource and with the market boom of wireless technology over the years, unlicensed spectrum has become over-crowded with different wireless standards. In this paper, we proposed and demonstrated a proof of concept solution using FFT spectral scan with two methodologies: MaxHold-RMS approach and percentage ratio count approach. Both approaches could be used to detect a free/best channel from different scanned channel on the spectrum. The subsequent contributions were made to knowledge: an FFT based visual spectrum analyzer tool, an algorithm to classify different frequency channel on a spectrum, an algorithm which calculate frequency channel scores using weighted sum model, and channel ranking model. After different experimental evaluations coupled with the FFT spectral sampling timing, operation, a one(1) second scan duration is enough to detect signal transmission from a permanent device on the frequency spectrum since management and control frame signals are always transmitted periodically, while there is little chance for detecting a sporadic signal transmission from the non-permanent user since the FFT spectral scan is performed in passive mode. But to guarantee detection of such sporadic signals then scanning longer at different time segment of the day on the spectrum will increase the probability of detecting such some sporadic signals. Also, the FFT spectral scan capability has shown a high degree of probability for detecting non-WiFi signal on the shared spectrum using Qualcomm/Atheros chipset.

Device-to-device (D2D) communication has been a hot topic recently because of its potential advantages such as high data rates, spectrum-efficient, and energy-efficient. D2D communication has the advantage of maximum spectral usage, provides higher throughput. The idea in this paper is to design an algorithm for resource efficient D2D communications in adjacent and Co-channel cell of LTE networks. One of the methods used is cell splitting to make different adjacent and Co-channel cell, hence increasing cell capacity and offloading the base station. In this research work, we evaluate how to improve the Quality of service for the User Equipment by designing an algorithm of resource efficient for D2D communication within adjacent and Co-channel cells. As a result, different cells can reuse the same frequency resources in the LTE cellular network. The simulated results show that the proposed algorithm can largely improve the system capacity compared with other existing algorithm.

The 5th generation of cellular technology (5G), also known as IMT-2020, is seen as a game changer in mobile communication. One key characteristic of 5G is its consumer oriented emphasis, where the mobile user or user equipment is given utmost priority compared to previous generations. Its ongoing standardization is a result of the rapid growth of connected devices worldwide, an increased design complexity. Moreover, 5G has the vocation of providing wireless communication with almost no limitation, hence enhanced mobile broadband, but it also aims at enabling other applications such as IoT for which narrowband is used. This paper aims at investigating the challenges of accommodating both 5G broadband and 5G narrowband services in the same network.

Clustering in ad-hoc networks is a widely used approach to ease implementation of various problems such as routing and resource management. Ad-hoc wireless networks perform the difficult task of multi-hop communication in environment without a dedicated infrastructure, with mobile nodes and changing network topology. In this article, after determining the cluster members and cluster head, distance and energy for each node are carried out per cluster head and cluster; data gathered from cluster members are relayed to the main server. The results showed that the proposed algorithm is scalable, has less number of dropped packets, uses high energy during the path discovery, and handles fault tolerance problem during the packets transmission. A new algorithm for clustering which merges network nodes to form higher level clusters by increasing their levels, their energy and their density is proposed. Its operations are provided in simulation environment of network simulation tool 2 (ns-2).

The present situation of public transportation system in sub-Saharan Africa especially in Nigeria reveals to a large extent, a low level of effectiveness and safety. The need to provide safe transportation services to users in developing countries cannot be overemphasized. Hence, this paper provides a decision making model that helps users of public transport systems avoid unsafe transportation services (vehicles) by providing them with a community-aggregated information about vehicles and their personnel.

Design and implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and systems face the need of these systems to be self-powered. This is due to a number of characteristic and fundamental factors such as responsiveness, system mobility, portability, energy supply source adaptability. IoT covers a wide range of devices and systems, and an important subset of these involves real-time monitoring and control, particularly for both home and industrial applications. Other than just powering fixed sensor systems, the integration of such systems to mobile or transportation systems is a very important attributed characteristic but becomes a bit of a challenge to both designers and users in choosing the right option of power supply to the IoT systems. This paper illustrates some of such challenges and some of the efforts implemented to counter them in the design and implementation of a temperature monitoring system for transportation systems of dairy products in Malawi.

Social ties are of a great importance in African societies. Obviously, they are the major provider of entries in the mobile phone contact list. However, the contact lists of mobile devices, as they are designed until now, do not efficiently take into account the social connections between contacts. They do not allow to efficiently retrieve/remember a contact who is forgotten or concerned by homonymy. Inspired by African social and cultural practices, this paper is about a new vision of the contact list design by integrating social ties. Preliminary results of the implementation of this vision clearly show that the proposed contact list is a convenient instrument of contacts reminder and homonymy resolver.

Transparency of methods is a measure of accountability in governance. Availability of public data is a measure of transparency. However, confidentiality and integrity are mandatory requirements for the security of public data, which consequently enhances accountability. Maintaining public data availability, while optimal degree of their integrity and confidentiality are ensured, is a paramount preoccupation of any good government. Among such data are the public bank accounts. Treasury Single Account (TSA) is a measure towards the security of public funds; but it constitutes liquidity challenge to the banking sector of the economy. This paper presents a leakage-blocking public finance management (PFM) mechanism; a secured multiplatform for receipts and payments system, which is liquidity-friendly to the commercial banking industry. A web (Internet) platform is required for all transactions. Software intelligent agents are employed in monitoring receipt and payment processes made by the clients of the revenue-generating Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) of the government. The mechanism ensures that the centralized bank account’s transactions are logged; and appropriate heads and subheads are updated accordingly after every successful transaction. Thus the inflow of revenue would be tracked, and illegal bank accounts reported promptly. Therefore, public accounts would be under intensive surveillances, guaranteeing the accountability of every kobo generated.

Cloud adoption for Internet of Things is gaining attention among researchers and organizations. The decision to choose a Cloud vendor is complicated and dynamic in nature. The majority of the existing Decision support systems designed to support migration to the Cloud have limitations. They mostly provide information to support evaluation and selection of vendors with cost being the main factor while some fundamental issues had been left unsupported. This work proposes a robust User-Centric Cloud of Things Decision Analytic Model using Ellipsoidal Fuzzy Inference System. The proposed model supports real time decision making process for the adoption of Cloud computing in Internet of Things by comparing User-defined Application demand and Cloud Decision attributes. The results of this work are expected to contribute to the acceptance of Cloud of Things services.

In recent years, with the increase in the usage of internet-enabled electronic devices and information systems, the upsurge and availability of volumes of high dimensional data have become one of the sources of high business value. The need for businesses to make informed decisions by leveraging on the patterns from the multi-dimensional data have become paramount. However, the major issue is whether or not the patterns can optimize business decision making process to increase profit. Hence, there is need for actionable knowledge discovery (AKD). Therefore, this paper proposed an hybridized interval type-2 fuzzy Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) model for evaluating patterns based on three subjective interestingness measure which are unexpectedness, actionability and novelty. The interval type-2 Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was employed to weigh the patterns and Compensatory AND approach was utilized for ranking the patterns using the three subjective interestingness measures. The proposed model depicts its applicability in identifying and ranking the patterns which are more relevant for enhancing business decision making.

Sentiment analysis is an active research area which deals with information extraction and knowledge discovery from text using Natural Language Processing and Data Mining techniques. Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, plays a major role in detection of customer’s attitude, response and opinion towards a product or service. The aim of this paper is to perform sentiment analysis on a particular service to discover how users perceive the service automatically. Data is extracted from twitter, pre-processed and classified according to the sentiment expressed in them: positive, negative or neutral using five supervised learning classifiers-The Naïve Bayes, Multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB), Bernoulli Naïve Bayes (BNB), Linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Decision Tree classifiers. Finally, the performance of all the classifiers is compared with respect to their accuracy. In addition, the results from the classifiers show that supervised learning classifiers perform excellently in sentiment classification.

With the ever-increasing internet penetration in Ghana, e-commerce development seems to be on the ascendency. However, users are reluctant to patronize these online sites due to the lack of trust. While literature is inundated with numerous B2B and B2C e-commerce studies, little is known about C2C e-commerce. Thus, our study contributes to the e-commerce literature, seeking to extend knowledge by integrating the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model with the Initial Trust Model (ITM) to explore user adoption of C2C e-commerce in an emerging market. Data was collected from 193 university students who have had some experience with some Ghanaian C2C websites and analyzed using the Partial Least Squares approach to Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). Results from the model showed that Performance Expectancy had the most significant effect on Behavioral Intention, followed by Trust. Behavioral Intention was also found to significantly predict Actual Usage. In all, our model accounted for about 51% of the variability in Actual Use. The proposed model is useful in understanding trust in the C2C context. Results from this work could inform strategies to be taken by these C2C websites to attract visitors to such websites.

The implementation of electronic business (e-business) in organisations has led to a major improvement in business performance in both developed and developing countries. This improvement as well as market forces have put pressure on Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) to adopt e-business. However, the e-business models adopted by SMEs are often abstruse and poorly represented, which leads to time consumption and miscommunication between the stakeholders involved, the business operations and Information Technology (IT) functions. These unclear e-business models make it difficult to evaluate its value. In Botswana, SMEs are the major drivers of the economy. This research examines the elements necessary for this e-business value creation and draws from different disciplines and theories to create a comprehensive model for e-business evaluation in SMEs. This model can help (1) stakeholders investigate, communicate and make appropriate decisions and (2) aid SMEs to successfully integrate e-business in their business processes and practices.

There is currently a big rush in the research and practice communities to investigate the blockchain technology towards leveraging its security, immutability and transparency features to create new services or improve existing ones. In developing countries, which are seen as a fertile ground for field testing disruptive technologies, blockchain is viewed as the “trust machine” that is necessary for accelerating development. Unfortunately, the internal working of blockchain as well as its constraints are often overlooked in the design of services. This, in conjunction with a poor regulatory framework, slows down any concrete attempt to build upon the technology. In this paper, we contribute towards accelerating the concrete adoption of blockchain by making explicit the constraints that affect their practical use in the context of developing countries such as African sub-saharan countries. Overall we recommend that the technology should be adjusted to the real-world constraints, in particular those that we currently witness on network latency, computation power as well as cultural gaps.

An E-Procurement system allows organizations to automate and streamline the internal procurement processes and also allow them to integrate and share information with their suppliers and customers for better business results. Despite these and other benefits promised by E-Procurement systems, their adoption remains a challenge in most organizations in developing countries, and in Africa in particular. This could be partly because of the fact that the phenomenon has not received sufficient attention in Africa, and as a consequence, adoption is enacted in a manner that is exclusive of contextual challenges the organizations face. It is also not clear whether E-Procurement benefits in literature do translate into actual benefits by African public organizations. The purpose of this study is therefore to identify the perceived benefits and contextual challenges posed during the implementation of an E-Procurement system in the Lesotho electricity sector. Following an interpritivist approach, grounded in the study context; the study identified two key perceived benefits of efficiency and transparency. The challenges faced includes the organizational lack of adequate training, system failure, employee resistance and lack of project management skills by top management. There were consistent reports of a lack of expertise from the external market to address implementation issues and that perceived knowledgeable agents such as consultants were not able to deliver what was tasked of them.

The study examines smart phone usage by millennial based on different criteria of operating system, Wi-Fi, text messaging, internet surfing and social media. The study used quantitative methodology and data were gathered with online questionnaires with 391 young smartphone users in Finland. The Millennial were clustered into five levels. The results reveal the prominent status of profiling in a developed market and how marketers in emerging markets can apply segmentation and targeting strategies using instant messaging, text messages, email, mobile app, gamification and social media based on the profile of each segment. Nigerian policy makers should adopt a framework to make smartphone affordable for people as it constitutes a goldmine for marketing professionals on their segmentation and targeting strategies.

With the current IPv4 scarcity problem, deploying IPv6 is becoming increasingly important. This paper provides a first look at the state of IPv6 deployment in Africa. Using BGP routing data, we assess various aspects of IPv6 adoption. We find that, although most African countries suffer a deficit in IPv4 addresses, only 20% of African autonomous systems advertise IPv6 prefixes. IPv6 adoption is strong in Southern and Eastern Africa and weak elsewhere.

BGP is a dynamic protocol used by Autonomous Systems (AS) constituting the Internet to exchange information in order to set up or remove links between AS. It takes into account the status of existing links and the internal policy of the AS. New links can be either legitimate or malicious. Having an objective way to detect route-leaks and/or route-hijacks could be a good starting point for deciding to accept or reject newly advertised links. In this work, an algorithm has been developed to evaluate link reputation on the basis of metrics. The work proceeded in three steps: first, BGPStream is used to overcome difficulties related to the collection of BGP record files from various collectors and projects. In the analysis phase (second phase), the algorithm is applied on collected data. The final phase is to visualize the results with a modified version of BGPlayJs to display the links reputation by coloring them from green to red. This algorithm could be used for baseline leak/hijack detection.

KENET operates the national research and education network (NREN) of Kenya and has deployed Internet Measurement tools that are used for network performance monitoring. This paper focuses on the deployment of perfSONAR and how it has been utilized for end-to-end network performance measurements by researchers in Kenya who need to collaborate with researchers in other parts of the world. perfSONAR is a widely-deployed test and measurement infrastructure that is used by science networks around the world to monitor and ensure network performance. The paper introduces some of the measurement metrics that can be queried from the openly accessible data archive provided by the infrastructure based on real measurements done from within the KENET network. End-to-end measurement metrics provided by the deployed infrastructure is important for researchers, policy makers and regulators especially in Africa where such measurement metrics are not openly available or collated.

Internet pervasiveness in Africa has been slowly but steadily increasing since the beginning of this millennium. Thanks to several organisations which donated time and resources, it is nowadays possible to claim that the AS ecosystems of several countries in Africa are now experiencing an early stage of the peering era. In this paper, we investigate the capability of the BGP route collectors publicly available to reveal the newborn peering connectivity in African countries. By analysing BGP data available with existing techniques we found that a lot of this connectivity is missing from the dataset, mainly due to the lack of data sources in the region. In most countries, this could theoretically be solved by introducing no more than ten new ASes sharing their full routing information to route collectors.

Measuring the Internet topology in West Africa is a challenge that can be overcome. We propose in this paper to perform ego-centered view measurement of the topology. We show that the obtained graph is relevant qualitatively to represent the topology. The lack of Internet Exchange points between Internet service providers in West Africa leads to high diameter in the topology, which is the result of a poor collaboration among such providers in this geographical area of the Internet. The appearance of “bogon” ip addresses in our measurements reveals a weak administration policy in this part of the Internet.